Google Looks to Reinvent Solar Power

Google's Custom Solar Technology Will Reduce Costs by 60% : TreeHugger

"Just like everybody else, Google's disappointed by the industry's lack of innovation so they've decided just to do it themselves."

Want to learn more? Google it, and help pay for it.

Space...the Ultimate Correction

Here's a timely gem, given the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. It comes courtesy of my friend Ray (@raylehmann on Twitter).

From The New York Times:

On Jan. 13, 1920, “Topics of The Times,” an editorial page feature of the New York Times, dismissed the notion that a rocket could function in a vacuum and commented on the ideas of Robert H. Goddard, the rocket pioneer, as follows:

"That Professor Goddard, with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react -- to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.''

Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.

-- JULY 17, 1969

Of the original Times editorial, Goddard supposedly replied:

"Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace."

A Silver Lining on Climate Change?

The BBC is one of the most renown news sources in the world. If they say climate change is good for boobs, I believe them!

Great tits cope well with warming

What do you mean they're not talking about those tits?



Oh. Well, they're still a pretty pair.

Antioxidant Ale? White Blood Cell Wheat? Still-Alive Stout?

Researchers at Rice University have brewed a beer with even more life-sustaining qualities than a West Coast microbrew.

As detailed here and here, the newly dubbed BioBeer contains yeast that has been engineered to produce resveratrol -- a chemical in red wine that has been has been attributed with powers to stem diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's and other conditions.

Soon, maybe Guinness won't be the only brew on the shelves linked to both healthy living and urinating on Washington, D.C. concertgoers.

Difference Engine: Alive and Levering

More than the title of a prototypical steampunk novel, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine remains a marvel. Designed by Babbage in the mid-1800s but never built in his lifetime, the engine was the world's first computing machine. This mammoth and ingenious undertaking -- first built in 2002, more than 150 years after being designed -- is 11 feet long, five tons and 8,000 parts of steam-era computing power.

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. will exhibit the piece through May 2009. More details including a jaw-dropping video can be found here.

More detailed and interesting coverage can be found from the folks at io9 here and here.

Here's another video: