Designing a Large Small House

This video is not very long but is a great look at what can be done creatively with architecture.  This is from National Geographic and worth a quick look.

First Vid of Dean Kamen’s miracle water distiller on Colbert

Segway Inventor Dean Kamen presented his Vapor Compression Distiller on last night’s Colbert Report. Kamen has reportedly worked on the Water Purification Machine for five years and with enough world wide adoption, Kamen says we could “wipe out 50% of human disease.”

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Earth’s Limited Resources

This is a great visual showing how much of our world is water and air, compared with the size of the planet itself. This does bring home the truth about the limited resources we have to protect. Nice visual depiction of a real issue.  The story explains a little more about what you’re looking at.
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World’s Largest Wind Turbine Now 7+ Megawatts

The world’s largest wind turbine is now the Enercon E-126. This turbine has a rotor blade width of 126 meters (413 feet). The E-126 is a more sophisticated version of the E-112, formerly the world’s largest wind turbine and rated at 6 megawatts.
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Using Kites to Pull Cargo Ships Across the Seas

This makes so much sense! The MS Beluga is a 140 meter long cargo ship. It uses a 160 square meter sky-sail which is set to fly at a height between 100 and 300 meters above the ocean. Nice stuff.
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A Very Cool Solar-Collecting Building

Sanyo in Japan has constructed an amazing solar-collecting building that embodies both clean-energy ideals and awesome architectural design strategies. The so-called Solar Ark has over 5,000 active solar panels generating over 500,000 KWh of environmentally friendly energy.
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Welcome to the Solar Century

This is an encouraging article to read. I want cheaper photovoltaic cells!!! Anyway, until a few years ago the suggestion that solar power might provide the answer to the intertwined problems of long term energy security and climate change would have been dismissed as a pipedream. We’re getting closer.
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Dramatic Advance in Solar Energy

A Silicon Valley start-up called Nanosolar just shipped its first solar panels — priced at $1 a watt. That’s the price at which solar energy gets cheaper than coal and alternative energy gets really interesting.
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Mechanical Planetary Models

These are not kits you can build! Here are pictures of some of the most beautiful mechanisms ever produced. A gallery of old and new mechanical movements of planets and their moons, the entire solar system and tides and eclipses. Orreries, Planetaria and Telluria, respectively. I wish I could say I knew those words before [...]

An Amazing Lighthouse Story

At the Pidgeon Point Lighthouse they switch back to the old kerosene lamps once a year to test everything out. They then leave it in non-rotation so photographers can capture pictures like this one. Very nice! Read more about it.
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