Oil Billionaire T. Boone Pickens Turns To Wind

Image from brooklyn

For those of you not fortunate enough to know who T. Boone Pickens is, let me give you a brief rundown: he’s an egomaniac, oilman, and owns a hedge fund named BP Capital Management. He’s worth 3 billion dollars, and has given 230 million-plus to the athletic department of Oklahoma State University since 2005. He also gave 3 million dollars to “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” the stars of the 2004 presidential campaign. Suffice to say, I think he’s a bad, bad, man. And yet, even he knows that oil isn’t going to hold on forever: he just spent 2 billion dollars to start a wind farm in Texas.

Scientists Discover Youngest Supernova Ever

NASA Photo via National Geographic

In the life of the Milky Way, our galactic home, and the place where we can best study the makeup of the universe, we have only ever been able to observe a supernova that occurred in the late 17th century– just over 300 years old.

The Sky Serpent: Twenty-Five Turbines in One

Image via popular science

Attempting to continue our wind power theme, we were doing some digging and what we found was something truly spectacular. A California man has constructed a design that features twenty-five small turbines in lieu of the massive blades on a modern wind power plan. One day this may approach the production capacity of the behemoths.

The Subterranean Iron Snow of Mercury

Image from edhiker

Mercury, which has the most unusual magnetic field that you can imagine, has been baffling astronomers ever since they first took note of it. Something is odd about the small, terribly hot planet, and that something gives it a magnetic field, the only terrestrial planet other than earth to have one. That oddity, as it turns out, is iron snow.

The Indestructibe Hard Drive: Survives 1200 Degrees C & Mach 25

Image from D’Amico Rodrigo

In maybe the most impressive data-recovery task of all time, Jon Edwards has extracted the contents of a hard drive that was on-board the doomed Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, meaning that it survived the disintegration of the shuttle while it was 39 miles above the surface of the earth and traveling 12,000 miles an hour.

The Most Incredible CO2 Sensor in the World

Image from lady_lbrty

Detecting carbon dioxide emissions has always been a little hit and miss when it comes to larger areas: the sensor technology we currently have isn’t well-suited to large areas, and it’s extremely expensive.

Canada To Save Earth From Asteroids

Because this probably hurt. Image from kevinzim

Ah, Canada: Home of hockey night, tim bits, and the best hope our planet has of locating and killing asteroids before they can blot out life as we know it.

Physicists Create Universe Smaller Than a Marble

Image from Pingnews

At Lancaster University, they’re unraveling the secrets of how to build a universe. In fact, they have already formed one, or something very much like it. This scientific breakthrough lies in the bottom of a chamber no larger than your pinky finger, filled with helium and cooled to 0.0003 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero.

Unmanned Robot Drone Spying on California Smog

Not the actual plane, but similar. Image from Jasmic

We all know that smog is a problem in Southern California. Los Angeles is one of the worst places on earth for it. However, the problems posed by smog and the myriad of other bits of junk that we propel into the atmosphere aren’t diagnosed if we don’t know exactly what the toxins are and where they’re coming from. That’s where the Scripps Institute and their robot drones come in.

Berkeley Sumpercomputer Predicts Your Doom

Image from Blatch

The University of California at Berkeley is rolling out a new breed of supercomputer, specially designed to predict the challenges presented by climate change, ultimately leading humanity to our doom and the computers to their rightful place as the masters of our earthly domain.

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