Articles by Jerome Woody

I guess engineers don’t like land-based turbines anymore

Recently, I posted about a Canadian group that created a helium-filled floating wind turbine. On the opposite side of sea level, a Virgina-based team has installed several underwater turbines in New York's East River. Posted today on MIT's Technology Review (a good technology publication btw).

Is the information age killing off honeybees?

For a while now, scientist have been scratching their heads over the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder, a phenomenon in which bees away from their hives never return after going out to collect pollen.

But according to a recent report filed by The Independent, scientists are now considering the possibility that the cause of CCD may be electromagnetic interference from mobile phone networks. From the article:

An interesting approach to bird safe wind power

Ottawa, Canada-based company Magenn has developed a "floating wind turbine" for personal and infrastructure power generation. The helium-filled device floats up to 1,000 feet into the air, using high altitude wind gusts to generate power up to a kilowatt. The power is transfered down via two "tethers" attached to the turbine.

Magenn states that its compact design and flexibility eliminates the risk of birds getting chopped up near it, a problem associated with standard fan-based turbines. It looks a bit weird, but most out-the-box ideas usually do.

British-built server up for big award

We here at Grist love computers, even if sometimes they don't love us back. Every once in a while, a piece of technology comes out that you can't help but get excited about (and I'm not talking about the iPhone).