"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."Aldous Huxley
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How To Get Up-to-Date Weather Info Via RSS Feeds If you haven't heard about RSS or Atom feeds don't feel bad. I just started usingthem about 4 months ago myself. Still, you can take a step right now to take your websurfing to the next level.Perhaps you have heard of Blogs or Weblogs as they are properly ...
How to make a time-lapse video with your digital video camera Getting the most out of your digital video camera can mean being able to create some really cool stuff. You just have to step outside the manual a bit and find the cool things you can do with your digital video camera and your editing software.We have all ...
Personal impact - Making the Impact You Choose Lots of people say first impressions matter. Indeed, the academics and psychologists who study this kind of stuff, say that people take about a nano-second to make up their minds on meeting someone new. You may call it a snap judgement; we think it's more ...
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Solar energy directly from the source? Clean, non-polluting, nearly limitless, and renewable energy - sound too good to be true?
In the coming decades, this pipedream may just become a reality.
solar panels on Earth are a clean and moderately efficient means of collecting solar power. But atmospheric turbulence, combined with localized weather and climatic factors, make earth-based solar powers only efficent to a degree. A space-based solar station would function at optimal capacity nearly all of the time, and would simply have to beam the energy to earth via radio waves to harvest clean, renewable energy at efficiency ratings previously unheard of.
Several challenges must first be addressed, however.
First, it's appearant that the cost of launching and assembling the materials in space is going to be an issue for the profitability for the company that undertakes this momentous task. Advances in launch technology combined with the impending privitization of the space-faring industry should reduce launch costs per kilogram by as much as a factor of 5 in the coming century, and a large-scale solar power plant in space could become a reality.
The second major consideration is the cost of assembling such a structure in space, but this can be addressed by advancements in robotics and teleoperation, which could make a the large-scale construction of a kilometer-sized object in space a much more economically feasible undertaking.
Time will tell if such a project ever gets off the ground, but we can only hope that as our oil resources dwindle and technology advances, this option will become more affordable and the world can benefit from a clean, steady stream of energy directly from the sun.
About the Author David Saharkhiz is a contributor to various website publications related to solar panels.
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The nations weatherAtlanta Journal ConstitutionBy WEATHER UNDERGROUND AP A strong ridge of high pressure will dig southward across the Central US Wednesday, while both coasts will be battling with low pressure systems. Out West, the low pressure system that brought wet and cool weather to ...The nation's weatherWashington Postall 43 news articles » |
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Global Warming: Like 'Weather on Steroids'ABC NewsOr more appropriately, what impact is climate change having on our weather? To help answer those questions, a group of researchers has just released a new online guide for understanding the links between more extreme weather and a warming planet.and more » |
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