The AP‘s Alicia Chang gets well outside the corral of press releases and news events today. She declares that a certain run of news has been left uncovered by other media and then adds that it has an aspect that “begs the question.” That’s a two fisted whip saw dose of original news reporting. The news, which she gathers from here and there, is that some researchers are planting test plots of trees in regions far outside their native territories and climates. The begged question: “Should humans lend nature a helping hand?” as global warming makes old habitats difficult for the natives. There are good reasons, her sources say.

Grist for the Mill: Not closely related to this but it came up in the search for something that is. It is the source of the pic. In the UK is experimental Harwood Forest loaded with Sitka spruce (shown), lodgepole pine, and other non-natives growing in the interest of climate change science.

-CP

To science journalists and general assignment reporters, commenters (what is a commentator anyway – one who commentates?), essayists, cultural history scriveners and others who have been roped into writing on Apollo 11′s 40th anniversary and who are not on the cusp of a new job or retirement: condolences. In just ten years it will be the big five-oh (gad, what a trite phrasing – more on tritemess is one post topic down). And in said ten years there will be an even bigger outpouring on the first steps on the moon in media including whatever is left of or has replaced in ascendant triumph the newspaper as we know it. What will you all have left in the tank?

The Tracker is looking forward to the 50th. For 2019 there are three high possibilities for giving extra meaning to the anniversary. One is that NASA’s current, precarious mission to get people back to the moon will have gone forward more or less as sketched by the last administration and, presumably, be close to planting a fresh flag. Two is that the program gets scuttled and there is little prospect for any such thing within the lifetimes of the original dozen Apollo moon walkers (imagine the second landing sharing in common with the first that it will do something no other living person did) A variant on scenario #2 is that Moon II is out but a robust Mars expedition is on the burner. Three is that the US is out as solo lunar expeditionist, but a program from China or India or maybe Russia or Japan or Europe-ESA is about to get there, maybe in an international mash up and land rush with or without us. Any such scenario will provide more punctuation and vivid contrast than does the 40th today, an anniversary with limbo as its context.

This is this site’s third post on the 40th – one for last Tuesday’s Science Times, one on Thursday for the launch’s anniversary, and the ensuing torrent for the landing. Not all these stories ran yesterday or today. In a far from comprehensive liste here are some that strike the eye as unusual in approach, or in heft. With apologies to the networks and other broadcast reporters, time limits the post mainly to print coverage. I’ll try to update this with any good pieces for which readers send me links via the suggest story function at this site’s top. And so, broken roughly into categories and with apologies for not having time to assemble some from television outlets, here we go…

Big Wrap-Up Stories and large packages:

• First up is AP‘s Seth Borenstein with a load of pieces (the illus is from one of AP’s many multimedia links to the text stories). Borenstein filed over a period of days. Many were held by outlets for the weekend or today. His experience shows in this line-up, with stories reported and handled with balance and considerable original reporting. It includes, notably, a caution from astronauts of Apollo 11′s crew: Moon less interesting than Mars; an examination of Apollo’s enormity in 40 years later, moon still giant leap for mankind ; A reminder this really is history in Where were you when Apollo 11 landed? Not born yet. ; NASA lost moon footage, but Hollywood restores it;  and Famous lost word: the ‘a’ in ‘one small step’ line ;
• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger: 40 years after Apollo 11 / Those who were there relive the worry and the glory ; With extensive linked multimedia.
• USA Today – Traci Watson: 40 years after Apollo 11: What’s our next step? ;
• NPR/Talk of the Nation – Ira Flatow: Marking 40 Years Since Apollo ;
• ABC Australia The Science Show – Robyn Williams: Forty Years since Apollo 11 – first manned mission to the moon ;  A double history lesson: The mission 40 years ago as it was seen in a press conference 20 years ago – one interesting as much for the questions the press asked, as the answers.
• Wash. Post – Nelson Hernandez: When Will the Next ‘Giant Leap’ Happen? ; celebration mixed with melancholy marks the day. And today, “On Anniversary of Moonwalk, Apollo Astronauts Debate Financial Restraints” ; These link to a hefty WaPost Package: Apollo 11′s 40th Anniversary . In features meaty offerings from such writers as Howard McCurdy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Griffin, Marcia Bartusiak, Jennifer Ouellette, and more.
• Bild (Germany): Apollo 11 landed 40 years ago today! (with links to other looks back) ;

Local, offbeat, or finely focussed:

• Telegraph (UK) Heidi Blake: Apollo 11 moon landing: the fun side of space travel  ;
• Wall St. Journal – Stephanie Simon : One Small Step for Man, One Giant Mess in the Spacecraft / NASA Plans Another Lunar Landing, but Oh! That Nasty Moon Dust ; Each particle is really jagged. A moon colony thus, she writes, would require dusting as a high art ; And the dust is so special that it is exceedingly hard to make it here on Earth, even for practicing how to deal with it on the Moon.
• PC Advisor (UK)  Keith Shaw : The 10 best technologies from Apollo 11 ; Actually, from the space program overall ;
• AP – Jim Heintz: Russia still blue over moon landing 40 years later ;
• AP – Marcia Dunn: Apollo 11 crew: Aldrin likes spotlight, 2 shun it ;
• Miami Herald: As NASA marks 40th anniversary of moon landing, it looks toward Mars ; Reason to post this is that it is from “staff and wire services.” Sign of the times that a dominant Florida paper doesn’t do it entirely in house.
• Orlando Sentinel – Kevin Spear: Apollo 11 anniversary: To the moon and beyond;
• Weekly Standard – Stuart Koehl: From the Moon to Hanoi ; Definitely offbeat and a mere blog. But fascinating to learn of Apollo and the POWs who knew of it, sort of.
• Toledo Blade – Tom Walton: America soared when the Eagle landed ; A column on, in part, a local boy made good (Wapakoneta’s Neil Armstrong) and a reminder of times when news travel budgets and staffs were different. At the time, he writes, his paper covered the mission from launch to splashdown and “The Blade’s science editor… the nationally respected Ray Bruner, was assigned to the launch at Cape Canaveral…”. A different time, it was.
• Al Jazeera: Q&A: Was the moon landing worth it? ; Some pointed, very broad questions handled by the senior curator at the Air & Space Museum.

OP EDs:

• The Australian: US program loses its way 40 years after triumph ;

Apollo Miscellany:

•  Wash. Post – Joel Achenbach: Apollo 11′s Bright Glare . Rocket Men ; A book review is the hook, but Achenbach riffs wider than the book.

Grist for the Mill:

• NASA Apollo 40th Anniversary ;
• NASA Press Release: Lunar Resonnaisance Orbiter Sees Apollo Landing Sites ;
• NASA Press Release: NASA Mourns the Death of Walter Cronkite ;

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Not only is the US enthusiastically celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. The Spanish Language Knight Tracker hasn’t found a single newspaper that doesn’t have at least one story about it. And nearly all the important outlets contain specials remembering the story of the mission, providing images, videos, graphics, testimonies…  and describing the future plans to send humans back to the satellite. Some reporters wonder if it’s a good idea, or offer a critical view about the costs vs benefits… and bet which country is closer to beating the US in today’s, second space race.

In general, one finds very good coverage of the issue with lots of resources and analysis that should stimulate more science stories in the region’s press.

El rastreador científico no ha encontrado un solo periódico que no dedique alguna nota al 40 aniversario de la llegada del Apollo 11 a la Luna.
Algunos simplemente han repasado la efeméride, otros le han dedicado secciones especiales, galerías fotográficas, videos… unos pocos han aprovechado para revisar morbosamente las teorías conspirativas de que todo fue un montaje, y un buen grupo se ha dedicado a analizar de manera crítica los planes futuros para regresar a este satélite situado a escasos 3 días de viaje.

En general se percibe un gran esfuerzo, con muy positivos resultados, que valdría la pena mantener en el tratamiento de las noticias de ciencia. Repasemos algunas de las notas que han ofrecido una perspectiva digna de ser comentada:

El Universal (Mex) ha preparado un muy completo especial, en el que entre otros extras se pueden revisar las portadas y titulares de esa época. También incluye una nota titulada “Volver a la Luna cuesta caro”, en la que siembra dudas sobre la financiación insuficiente de la Administración Obama para cumplir los planes de llegar de nuevo con humanos al 2020.

Del especial de La Nación (Costa Rica) cabría destacar el artículo de Alejandra Vargas comparando las iniciativas Estadounidense, China, India, Japonesa, Rusa y de empresas privadas para ser los vencedores de la “2ª carrera espacial”. Alejandra explica que la comunidd científica reconoce que los rusos son los más avanzados, y que el alunizaje tripulado “es sólo cosa de tiempo”.

En El Nacional (Venezuela) Carolina Conde abre su nota asegurando que por séptima vez el hombre pisará la superficie lunar, y que John Olson, director de la División de Exploración Espacial de la Nasa, mantiene que el hombre, sin duda, regresará a la Luna en 2020. No hemos visto tal contundencia en otras notas…

La sección Futuro del Argentino Página 12 presenta una muy cuidada historia de Mariano Ribas sobre la aventura del 1969, y un original texto de Claudio Sánchez describiendo los viajes imaginarios a la Luna de Verne, Poe, Wells, y Tintín.

En Colombia, una nota de El Colombiano recurre al engañoso “si no abandonamos el planeta nos quemamos” como justificación del costosísimo viaje, sin valorar si este motivo nos debería empezar a preocupar ahora o dentro de unos cuantos siglos o milenios…y El Espectador presenta una pieza de Santiago la Rotta en la que buscó las opiniones de 3 científicos colombianos de la NASA. Una buena manera de “glocalizar” la noticia científica.

En España, El Mundo presenta un muy buen especial del que cabe destacar el texto de Carlos Fresneda sobre los planes para el regreso a la Luna. En él expresa algo que pocos dicen abiertamente pero parece obvio: Obama no parece tremendamente interesado en la Luna. Carlos también describe cuál es la situación real de los vehículos con que la NASA está trabajando, y refleja las dudas existentes sobre si vale la pena seguir con el programa que planteó George Bush. Otro artículo interesante es el de Aritz Parra desde Shangai en el que cuenta los planes del programa Chino para enviar sondas primero, construir una estación espacial propia en 2020, y enviar después a un humano en lo que califica de (re)conquista de la Luna.

Público prefiere el lado morboso del asunto y destaca como principal un artículo de Víctor Charneco centrado en desmontar los bulos sobre la teoría de la conspiración según la cual el Apollo 11 en realidad no llegó a la Luna en julio del 1969.

De El Pais (Esp), es recomendable la entrevista de Toni García a Buzz Aldrin en la que deja clara su opinión de que deberíamos centrarnos directamente en Marte y no vale la pena ir a la Luna (“gastar mucho dinero en proyectos inservibles”), y critica algunos aspectos de la gestión de la NASA (“La transición del ‘shuttle’ a la estación espacial se está haciendo muy mal y el tiempo que estamos perdiendo es vital”). Muy bueno también el trabajo de Alicia Rivera analizando los costes y viabilidad del programa de la NASA para enviar humanos de nuevo a la Luna: construir el nuevo cohete Ares 1, llevar astronautas a la ISS con una nueva cápsula llamada Orión, construir un cohete Ares 5 más potente, y enviarlo sin tripulación a la ISS para que se uniera a la cápsula y los astronautas viajaran a la Luna. Costaría 100.000 millones de dólares según la NASA y 230.000 según otras estimaciones publicadas en Nature. Demasiado para el presupuesto ordinario de la agencia estadounidense.

Estas son algunas de las muchas notas aparecidas en los últimos días. Estaremos alerta de destacar las nuevas que aparezcan o las viejas que hayan podido pasar por alto. En todo caso, un buen trabajo global de periodismo científico. Que no nos pase como a la NASA tras su programa Apollo… no nos detengamos y perdamos el expertise… sigamos!

- PE

The Tracker, having groused amiably at this site for several years now about the bottomless cup (ah, another cliché already!) of Holy Grails in science and in just about every other kind of writing, prefers to believe that I had a tiny part in boosting it as a usage piñata of the first water (woops, labored and mixed metaphors there). A quick look finds it appears in more than three dozen ksjtracker posts – and not in admiration.

All this to bring attention, at Wired, to Betsy Mason‘s fine commentary on the state of style in science journalism: 5 Atrocious Science Clichés to Throw Down a Black Hole. She writes of the sacred chalice reference, “To me, this is the mother of all bad science clichés , the worst offender.” We even learn that the journal Nature has banned it from appearance in the papers it publishes. Which just goes to show that it’s not just science journalists, but scientists too, with too great a love for Arthurianism. Which of course leaves those in our trade, and who are trying to kick the golden goblet habit, with a dilemma – what if one’s source uses in a near-inextractable way the offending term in his or her very best quote?  Answer: that’s why we’re paid the big bucks (Yikes – yet another tired construction) – to write around things like that whenever possible.

#2 on Mason’s list is Silver Bullet. One thinks it’s a relative of #1. You’ll have to read her full piece to see the rest for yourself – and don’t skip the comments. Her readers have quite a few to offer, too.

Pic – source ;

-CP

One can feel the exasperation oozing from a column today in the Wall St. Journal by Robert Lee Hotz. Columnists of course are not usually like most reporters – they tend to sit at a desk and columnize – but Hotz was a working reporter for a long time. Recently he got loose and visited NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. There he kibbutzed and asked questions with engineers with the saga-like Mars Rover program. They were trying to figure how to get the beat-up old machine named Spirit out of some deep silt. She is up to her axles in Red Planet. In a nice touch that reveals the spirit still thriving in the hearts of the machine’s human masters, those trying to get the machine loose had “Free Spirit” emblazoned on their lab coats.

The  story is as fine-grained as the powder in which Spirit is spinning her remaining good wheels. One gets the sense of a space program with vast reserves of determination. Employees of the nation’s space program tend to be good at what they do. And yet … the budget is flat, no actual resumed human exploration program is in sight, the shuttle is about to retire, the space station has no clear future or purpose – and may be ditched entirely in 2016 – vital robotic science programs have been scuttled or delayed, and panels of experts are mulling the agency’s strategic purposes.

But at least, Hotz writes, a chance wind gust recently blew the dust off Spirit’s solar panels. So there she sits. Full power, going nowhere, stuck next to a rock called Home Plate.

-CP

In the bustle Wednesday to gather examples of the marking of 40 years since Apollo 11 the Tracker missed a good one that went up at Space.com. Its longtime space writer Leonard David reports that NASA’s new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is doing more than to scout for future moon landing sites. The second round of landings, as we are reading lately, may take a long, long time coming. Maybe in ten years, sure, but more likely in far longer than that. A few wonder if it will happen in the lifetimes of any of those who have been there already. In the meantime, part of the new orbiter’s time, David tells us, will be spent snapping images of the Apollo 11 landing site and those of a few others among the missions that put a dozen men on the Moon. It ought to see the descent stage and other equipment left behind.

David’s yarn makes the quest seem entirely worthwhile. One mystery may be cleared up. If the orbiter’s sharp-eyed cameras can pick up the footprints left by Apollo explorers, they might include those of Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell as they tried to drag a tool cart over to what they were assured was nearby: Cone Crater. Time was short, they didn’t make it. A good photo from above, pending the day that someone drives up to the site in an air conditioned moon RV, may show whether they were close when they flicked it in and went back.

As staff at LiveScience say of David’s story (both LiveScience and space.com are in the Imaginova stable of on line news outlets), another question could be answered: Is the Apollo 11 Moon Landing Flag Still Standing? Notice, by the way, that they didn’t say waving. That would just stir up the fantasists who believe the moon landings were faked and declare as part of their argument that the flag waved – impossible if in a vacuum! – as it was placed. Wonder how they’ll explain away photos of the landing hardware still sitting there. No wait, I know. It’ll be…”The conspiracy grows!”

-CP

The first tiny wave of stories stemming from a paper in today’s Science magazine may illustrate that a tough problem faced reporters: how to write a dramatic story on a project that is big, important, but complicated, only half done, and still ambiguous? Despite a flurry of press releases, most outlets took a pass, for now.

The report is on a large-scale modeling effort to recreate inside computers the Earth’s climate for the last 21,000 years and to extend it forward another 200 years. Researchers at Colorado’s Nat’l Ctr for Atmospheric Research or NCAR and the Univ of Wisconsin are its main authors. They are using two Cray supercomputers at Oak Ridge Nat’l Laboratory. So far the machines, racing along at some unfathomable number of operations per second, have  calculated how their model thinks things went on up to around 10,000 years ago. In two years or so, they say, they’ll have reached the present and slightly beyond. Savvy reporters will make a note to keep an eye on it.

The news is So Far So Good. It has already mimicked and may well explain a mysterious interval called the Bolling-Allerod warming that occurred as the Earth last’s major glaciation see-sawed toward its present, shrunken state. It untangled the influences of such factors as freshwater flowing into the Arctic and North Atlantic, the stoppage of major ocean currents from tropical to polar regions, and the resulting buildup in heat in the equatorial oceans as the currents stalled. The result is to reproduce the temperature swings from cold to warm and back and forth as the planet shook off the last ice age.

This suggests that the effort may, in the next two or three years, continue to recreate what has really happened right through the present – and a bit into the future. That’s suspense, drama – and the potential for a new era of trust in modeling. Or, if the thing veers off entirely from the planet’s actual climate history, for a reminder that making good models of climate is exceedingly difficult. With the iconic anti-modeling mantra that reverberates in the greenhouse denialist wing, such a big modeling study as this merits a  close look. But it IS complicated.

Stories:

• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon : New Model Aims to Predict Quick Climate Changes ; Nice job of getting into this as an unfolding narrative.
• Oak Ridger – by SUBMITTED : O.R. computers used to study climate’s past, future ; ?. What does submitted mean? BollinWhat it means, sigh, is that the  local newspaper used a press release from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Grist for the Mill:

Univ. Madison-Wisconsin Press Release ; ORNL Press Release ; NCAR Press Release ;  Univ. Oregon Press Release ;

-CP

On Tuesday, the Anchorage Daily News‘s Don Hunter showed his ability to craft a short, blunt, and eery lede: Something big and strange is floating through the Chukchi Sea between Wainwright and Barrow. That’s well north of the Bering Strait, near the US’s northernmost point. Hunters from Wainwright – presumably sealers or pursuers of other marine life – noticed it last week, he writes. “It’s thick and dark and ‘gooey’ and is drifting for miles,” a prominent borough official in Barrow told him. The Coast Guard was sent to investigate.

By yesterday, a few wires and other services were sending the news around the world of this mystery blob in the high Arctic. But the Daily News by that time had the results of lab tests to report. Staffer Kyle Hopkins reported results from a talk with the state’s Dept. of Environmental Conservation in Fairbanks. Its diagnosis, published in the paper today: “It was marine algae.” There remain, Hopkins adds, a few questions such as why do people up there say they’ve never seen anything like it before. The region is dominated by Inupiat eskimos whose whalers and hunters are famed for their vast, accumulated practical lore on weather and animals. One speculation is that the filamentous algae was flushed from shore by a river’s melt outflow. But the stuff is pretty much black. Usually algae blooms are green or reddish. The unavoidable question: Global warming? Pure speculation, they say – for one thing the local waters are colder than usual right now.  BA da da DUMmmm.

Other stories:

• Register (UK)  – Austin Modine: Mysterious organic blobs found in Alaskan waters; Everyone out of the pool ; But disappointingly, “not a creature from outer space…” ;
• NY Daily News – Kate Nocera :Mystery ‘goo’ moving through sea in Alaska ; Lots of creepy icky  terms here – “scene straight out of The Blog … slime .. dark and thick .. mystery gunk … goo … distinct odor.” And tucked in at the end “…most likely a giant algae bloom.”
• And most enthusiastic headline award to Thaindian News : Alaska Blob: Oceanic “UFO” (Unfathomable Floating Object) ;

As a kid on superhot days on Southern California beaches with no go-aheads on feet, The Tracker learned one could shuffle along – laboriously – without pain by keeping tootsies in the cooler sand just under the surface. Now Georgia Tech researchers report, in a cute account in Science, that the Saharan sandfish has raised that subsurface travel concept to a high art. It dives entirely under the sand – nothing new there, it is how the animal got its name. More important to animal kinesiology fans, infrared, sand-penetrating imagery shows that it propels itself without using its legs much, if at all. Rather, it swims, undulating a bit like a snake. Its head waves back and forth and a big “traveling wave” sinuates at near-fixed amplitude down its whole, smoothly-scaled length.

It’s only four inches long but not exactly a cute li’l critter – long pointy nose, countersunk jaw, flat sides – but weird animal stories are hard to resist, too. Nobody writes it very long – there really isn’t much more to say than wow get a load of this. Most stories use the possibly-practical application of such work to robotic versions of the lizards.

At Physics World, with a readership that might want to know a lot more, editor Hamish Johnston wrote it up lickey split on line, and with a nifty hed: Physicists spy on skink swimming through sand. Just enough alliteration, not too strained (one could have overdone it, smuggling in subterranean, slinking, slithering, or serpentine), and good to know this lizard is a skink.  We also learn that earlier, MRI studies implied they do use their legs.

Other Stories:

• USA Today – Dan Vergano : Lizards swim through sand ;  He says it swims “just like fish through water,” and it does look a lot like a fish. But hmmm – the study reports that the closest resemblance is to eels, but eels expand the amplitude of the traveling wave as it goes nose to tail. So maybe it’s not just like a fish.
• LiveScience : Through sand, desert lizard swims like a snake;
• NYTimes – Henry Fountain: Saharan Lizard Swims Through Sand ; Fountain does a good job explaining why it goes just as fast in dense, compacted sand as in fluffier stuff. It has to do with a constant drag and thrust ratio (it’s probably working harder in the dense material but that’s for further study to say).
• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon: A lizard that swims through sand ; Supershort – more of a fat caption linked to the video.
• ANI (via New Kerala, India): Sandfish tucks legs and swims like  a snake through desert sand ;

Grist for the Mill: Ga. Tech. Press Release ; Video ;

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Jane Kay provides an engaging and specific instance of what “wildlife corridor” means, and not in the abstract. It is a refreshing, informative change from her usual beat – chemical spills and other pollution as potential or real calamities. The news is that in Coyote Valley just south of urban San Jose in a region pierced by highways and freeways, a community college team has documented the tremendous variety of wildlife. Much of it depends on the valley to get between two mountainous and largely wild terranes. It might be the only corridor maintaining genetic and reproductive vitality for many.  The 171 bird and 24 mammal species seen moving through include, she writes, tule elk, gray fox, burrowing owl, and eagle. One suspects the eagles and perhaps the owls can get from one big wilderness to the next whether or not the intervening valley gets developed. But not elk or fox.

And, she writes, some agencies have big plans to develop the area. This is a timely and useful story.

Other wildlife corridor stories :

• Thousand Oaks Acorn – Nancy Needham: Donation of small parcel of land helps city complete ring of open space around T.O. ; (‘can’t ignore a story on wildlife in a paper called the Thousand Oaks Acorn).
• Calgary Herald – Jamie Komarnicki: Historic $1.6M ranch donated to protect wildlife corridor ;
• Camden Advertiser (Australia) Alicia Bowie: The prospect of a safe wildlife corridor ; The safety in this case is that of wallaroos and the like.
• CanWest News Service – Tiffany Crawford: Cougar Turf ; But in this case, the safety concern is for people. In Canada, mountain lion attacks as development encroaches on wildlands are in the news.

The Tracker seems to recall some northern plains state politician saying his constituents could make lots of green money off windpower even without new electric lines to take the it to where there are cities. The solution: make hydrogen with the juice and put the H2 in trains or pipes for delivery. But I haven’t heard of that idea since.

Now a variant is on the AP wire from Susan Montoya Bryan.  A startup in New Mexico called Jetstream Wind Inc. says it has raised $219 million to capture wind and perhaps solar energy to generate as much as ten megawatts of electricity, use that to liberate hydrogen and oxygen from water via hydrolysis, and then burn the stored hydrogen and get considerably less electricity than what was already there part way through. The advantage is that one could keep a big enough buffer tank of hydrogen so that the electricity does not depend on when the sun shines or the wind blows. The disadvantage of course is that the process has a lot of efficiency-robbing steps.

Seems worth a try but also worth a harder look. To be sure, it’s a business story, not an investigation of the business model. One does not expect a treatise on energetics. The company presumably has the money (although form where, it does not say), it intends to build a facility and hire people, and that’s justifiably enough to make the wire. Montoya in fact goes beyond what some biz writers might do – she gets some outside opinion (albeit fairly friendly) on the project’s plausibility. One wants, nonetheless, more info before thinking this is among the better choices. Is it better than thermal solar power in which molten salt, briefly stored in tanks, allows steam generators to keep turbines and generators spinning around the clock? How about the full-up efficiency of this idea compared to biofuels from crops? – vegetation after all grows on solar power.

*UPDATE – Just noticed that at Yale’s environment360 site science writer Jon R. Luoma has an extended look at just the problem this start-up claims to be able to dent: how to store solar and wind energy efficiently and thus smooth out the delivery rate. He seeks to debunk the idea that this is an insoluble barrier, and says a “furious” research effort is underway to get past it. I’ll pardon him the Holy Grail metaphor. It’s a well-founded roundup, starting with the soon-possible, such as compressed air storage and perhaps lithium ion batteries in parked cars, to those that are farther out there. The ultra-capacitors sound sweet. Idle question: what ever happened to flywheels for energy storage?

Finally, as seen immediately before, the company announced its plans in April. It is not clear why it is news now. One guesses it may be that the company has now selected the location.

Grist for the Mill:  Jetstream Wind Press Release ;

-CP

For LiveScience prolific writer Charles Q. Choi calls them cybugs for short: insects that might be modified with electronic implants that make them slaves of human controllers. Thus might be avoided all the bother of inventing itty bitty flying machines to carry cameras or other instruments to places not easily reached – at least, not easily reached with stealth. Why invent what nature already has evolved in exquisite detail, vast variety, and that operates with impressive efficiency and robustness? His account of these things, also sometimes called Hybrid Insect MEMS by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency,  lists roaches, horned beetles, and moths among insects that various teams are trying to transform into radio-controlled scouts.

LiveScience has tackled the topic before. In February last year it carried this, by Bill Christensen: Implants Create Insect Cyborgs.  And a small story on the program ran more than three years ago in The Register, by Lester Haines. Choi’s piece advances the ball a bit, listing groups that are trying to satisfy DARPA’s aims.

Grist for the Mill: DARPA Hybrid Insect MEMS ;

Pic source  ;

-CP