Forrestal, Ivanpah, Bacteria, Brain Goodbye Forrestal. The once-mighty, first U.S. super-carrier, the USS Forrestal, went on its final voyage to a Texas scrapyard. Issued in 1954, it was the pride of the Navy but has been out of service for 20 years. So what did the scrap yard pay for this mass of metal? Nothing! The Navy had to pay a penny to get rid of it! Surely, the Navy might have got something for the Forrestal if they had used CraigsList. Meet Ivanpah. Ivanpah, located in the Mohave Desert of California, is the largest solar energy facility in the world. This solar furnace uses 347,000 mirrors to focus the sun’s energy on generating units atop three towers. The field of mirrors covers 5.5 square miles. The U.S. has installed more solar power in the last 18 months than in the previous 30 years. Swell Bacteria. To survive a water shortage, many bacteria can dry up and shrink into spores; when they are exposed to water they can rehydrate and swell back to their normal size. Researchers have calculated that one pound of soil-bacteria spores can generate enough swelling force to lift a car more than 3 feet off the ground. This raises the possibility of producing mechanical energy from the cyclical process of drying and dehydrating bacteria genetically optimized for that purpose. The Amazing Brain. Scientists have managed to re-create digital version of a piece of a mouse’s brain about the size of a grain of salt. They find that the data for this tiny volume, with all its interconnections, total a hundred terabytes, the amount of data in about 25,000 high-definition movies!
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 15:51:03 +0000
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