Scotland Aims to Be the “Saudi Arabia of Marine Energy” With Tide and Wave Power | 80beats

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wave-Scotland

Scotland is getting ready to capitalize on something the country has plenty of: fierce, stormy waves.

About 750,000 Scottish homes expect to be powered by ocean technology by 2020, as the Scottish Government announced that 10 wave and tide power schemes capable of generating up to 1.2GW in total would be built around the Orkney islands and on the Pentland Firth on the northern coast of the Scottish mainland [Guardian]. The 10 projects will comprise the world’s first commercial-scale wave and tidal power scheme. With this project, Scotland plans to produce the same amount of clean energy as a small nuclear power station, and hopes to start on a path to becoming the “Saudi Arabia of marine energy.”

Some of the strongest tidal currents in the world race around UK shores and there’s some of the highest energy in the waves that roll in from the Atlantic. And while wave power is, to an extent, dependent on the weather, tidal power has the tremendous advantage of being totally predictable [Channel 4].

It will cost about $7.6 billion in total to install and maintain the structures used to generate power from the strong waves and tides, and to transmit the energy back to land. The bulk of the work will be done by three major power firms: E.ON, Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) Renewables, which already operates the UK’s largest hydro schemes, and Scottish Power Renewables, a heavy investor in windfarms, in joint ventures with four of the UK’s leading marine energy firms [Guardian].

Click through the photo gallery to see the wave and tidal devices that will soon get their try-outs in the cold, turbulent waters off the Scottish coast.

Image: flickr / jack_spellingbacon


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Twitter’s New @anywhere Aims to Make the Web One Big, Tweeting Coop | 80beats

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twitterwebThere is no escape.

If you thought you spent a lot of time tweeting and reading tweets before, that number could get even higher thanks to “@anywhere,” the site’s new feature announced at Austin’s South by Southwest festival (SXSW) this week. The platform is intended to allow third-party sites to integrate Twitter more deeply and smoothly than they currently can. The idea is to offer a more seamless experience to Twitter users navigating third party sites like the Huffington Post and the New York Times, giving them Twitter content without forcing them to jump off the page they’re currently viewing [TechCrunch].

Twitter CEO Evan Williams went fairly light on the specifics of the new system, and gave no release date, during his keynote Q&A at SXSW, but some details have come out. The way Twitter has described it, @anywhere will allow readers of articles at The New York Times and other sites to click and follow writers directly from their bylines, and—judging by what Evan Williams told Anil Dash on Twitter—will also let them click and see information about popular Twitter users who are mentioned on a participating site [BusinessWeek]. By expanding the microblogging site’s reach, @anywhere appears to be Twitter’s answer to Facebook Connect, but BusinessWeek complains that the feature—at least based on what people know about it right now—isn’t much to write home about.

We love Twitter at DISCOVER (follow us here), but it’s easy to see why not everyone would be so excited about allowing the Wild West cavalcade of information that is the Twitterverse to encroach onto their digital turf. According to ComputerWorld, branded Web sites that aren’t accustomed to reader feedback probably won’t be so keen to allow a sudden burst of it, especially if they’d seen a blast of negative publicity (like, say, Toyota).

Lastly, there’s was one particular group that wasn’t too taken with the Twitter CEO’s talk: Twitter users. Maya Baratz, a product manager at MTV, wrote: “There are hundreds of people in the room. Someone. Anyone. Kanye this keynote and ask Evan a good question.” Another Twitter user posted this report: “The guy behind us is snoring. Literally” [The New York Times]. Back on his home field, however, Williams tweeted that people could ask him tougher questions there.

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Image: Twitter


Former Libertarian Party of Indiana State Chairman Mark Rutherford to run for Libertarian National Committee Vice Chair

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Mark Rutherford, LPIN state chairman for 7 years, has announced that he is seeking the Vice Chair position on the national level. Rutherford has partnered with Wayne Allyn Root, who is seeking the Chair position at May's national convention.

"It is an exciting time politically for the libertarian message," said Rutherford. "There is a huge opportunity to capture a large part of the libertarian leaning public. But the Libertarian Party must get its house in order. It must reach out to major media and it must grow an organization worthy to be called a national party."

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It’s a Dusty Universe Out There | Cosmic Variance

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The primary goal of the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite is to provide a map of the cosmic microwave background with unprecedented precision. But along the way, you have to take into account that there is stuff in between us and the farthest edges of the universe — in particular, there’s all sorts of dust here in our home galaxy. You can even become famous just studying dust; one of the most highly cited papers in all of astrophysics is a 1997 map of galactic dust.

Dust isn’t only an annoyance — it’s also pretty. Planck hasn’t released any data about the CMB yet, but they just released a map of the cold dust in our local vicinity, looking for all the world like an abstract expressionist painting. (I want to suggest a particular artist, but my mind is blanking.) Click to embiggen.

planckdustsmall

It’s a false-color image, of course; the dust is very cold (tens of degrees above absolute zero), and the image is constructed from microwaves, not from visible light. You can see the plane of the galaxy, and the filamentary structures arising from all the churning of the interstellar medium from supernovae, star formation, magnetic fields, and so on.

Okay, pretty time is over. Let’s see the CMB.


GSM Modem – RCIF Flag

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sir im try to implement a system with GSM MODEM which is integrated in such away that pic microcontroller as heart gsm based device control

i used serial receiving part as interrupt once any message comes its goes to interrupt routine but it is not exiting from interrupt service routine

Astrology = not quite a dead horse | Bad Astronomy

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Astrology doesn’t work.

Shocker, I know. I’ve written on this topic extensively, but of course astrologers send me email — seriously — saying how their flavor of magic works, or that I wasn’t fair, or that if only I faced the right way and triantrilated my fibbertygibbet, astrology would be correct, despite my article very carefully showing that no matter how you slice it, astrology doesn’t work.

Obviously, astrology’s horse isn’t quite dead yet, so beating it isn’t such a bad idea. My friend Moriel Schottlender wrote up a nice dissection of astrology walking through the steps showing (despite many astrologers’ claims) that gravity clearly is not the force behind astrology. She even includes math.

Of course, those of us in the reality-based Universe knew this, since when tested properly astrology fails tests devised even by astrologers themselves (see my article linked above). So there is no force behind astrology, except that of the human mind to fool itself. Because of that, we’ll always be debunking bunk like this. I guess that’s one thing astronomers and astrologers really do have in common: there will always be work for us.


Sizes for Level Control Flanged Valves

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Dear all

Can anyone give me information about the available sizes (any vendor) of Level control flanged valves(not threaded or socket weld). I am not sure about the small sizes i.e whether 1/2" or 1" flanged valves exists or not.

so far we have used threaded level control valves...