matterhacker

US halts solar energy projects over environment fears. Telegraph article here

The US government is putting a hold on new solar energy projects on public land for two years so it can study the environmental impact of sun-driven plants.

House Democrats Introduce National Feed-in Tariff for Renewable Energy Projects.  Article here.

U.S. Representatives Jay Inslee (D-WA), Bill Delahunt (D-MA), Jim McDermott (D-WA), and Mike Honda (D-CA) introduced landmark legislation [PDF] on Thursday that will provide security for investments in the renewable-energy sector by guaranteeing rates for renewable-energy generation.

Electric air vehicles. Story here.

The idea of personal planes may conjure up dark visions of “Blade Runner,” but the first batch of two-seater aircraft to fly on electricity rather than fossil fuels could reach more than a dozen buyers by year’s end...

Wired has a story on the BIL conference. It’s like the TED conference, but you don’t have to be invited to come and see the speakers. It’s also free. Wish I could go, but unfortunately there’s the APS March Meeting conference for which I need to prepare for. Perhaps next year. Haha… Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure just came to mind… I’ve spent too much time in the lab lately hehe.

Cool paper in nature today from the research group of Prof. Z.L. Wang at Georgia Tech. They’ve made arrays of nanowire fibre’s from which they can generate (obviously small amounts of) electricity. Pretty neat nevertheless. Reminds me of this cool research that came out of Cornell a few years ago that used trace amounts of radioactive material near a micron-scale cantilever as a battery.

Hey cool! These guys in Japan made a cool jig to give feedback when walking in a virtual environment. Gives resistance to your feet via strings to simulate the virtual environment that is being walked through. The coolest thing is it supports walking in any direction and does so by rotating with the user… anyways… the video speaks for itself.

The internet a series of tubes?? Haha, no! However, a lot of the wiring infrastructure that makes up the internet backbone is found underwater. There have been a couple instances recently where major parts of the world have had their internet knocked out due to one of these cables being cut. Here’s a map (from The Guardian) of the undersea cables:

Pretty cool. Also WIRED recently had an article with another cool picture of the exact point where the high speed trans-Atlantic fiber cables come up out of the ocean and onto US shores.