Getting spacey

A Year of Spectacular Comets
Two spectacular comets graced Earth's skies during 2007. Both comets became bright enough to be seen by the unaided eye of the casual sky enthusiast. Early in 2007, Comet McNaught grew brighter than any comet in 40 years, displaying a beautiful dust tail that flowed across the sky. Comet McNaught (c/2006 P1) became known as the Great Comet of 2007, sported unusual striations in its expansive dust tail, and showed unexpectedly complex chemistry in its ion tail. Toward the year's end, normally docile and faint Comet Holmes brightened suddenly and unexpectedly to naked eye visibility. Remarkably, Comet 17P/Holmes stayed bright for weeks even though it lies beyond the orbit of Mars. No distant comet in recent history has remained so bright for so long. In this view, a white Comet Holmes was photographed in early December posing with the Heart and Soul Nebulas.

Idle Curiosity

Take a peek at some of these images. I really like the aircraft carrier.

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And more good news

What are you going to do with all that cheap solar power from Nanosolar panels? How about replacing the internal combustion vehicle.

200MPG For Reals! Aptera Unveiled at TED

We've been hearing about the Aptera, the ultrahighmileage supervehicle from Accelerated Composites (aka Aptera Motors) for more than a year now. Steve Fambro and his merry band of geniuses over at AC let the math do the talking when it came to the design so that the car would be as aerodynamic as possible. Pair that with a super-efficient diesel hybrid engine, and the result is 200mpg. It's only fair to note that they originally predicted 330mpg, but we're cool with 200. It's also supposed to be pretty affordable (around $20,000), thanks to some magical carbon fiber fabrication process that AC won't really talk about. The actual prototype was unveiled at TED this past weekend in Monterey, and it looks like Batman's girlfriend's car. We just hope this thing actually goes into production instead of winding up in some museum. More pictures after the jump.
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From the company:
The Aptera was designed from the ground up as an electric vehicle, and later as an extended range electric vehicle. After building the proof-of-concept Mk-0, we hired the automotive design firm, 'eleven', to help us further develop the concept vehicle. The 'eleven' team, led by Jason Hill and Nathan Armstrong, made great strides in the development of the Aptera's body styling, interior design, and structural engineering. Meanwhile, we refined the Aptera's shape to maximize efficiency using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics), developed and built advanced suspension and drivetrain components, and integrated a strong yet lightweight composite shell. Our entire process has been developed in-house exclusively by Aptera for the Aptera Typ-1. Our structural elements have undergone countless revisions of FEA (Finite Element Analysis) to be lightweight, robust, and manufacturable.
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Good News

This is the breakthrough anyone who wears even a tinge of 'Green' welcomes. I will now watch to see how the interests of what I call MegaCorp work to control and constrain the obvious benefits.

Solar energy 'revolution' brings green power closer
Panels start solar power 'revolution'

The holy grail of renewable energy came a step closer yesterday as thousands of mass-produced wafer-thin solar cells printed on aluminium film rolled off a production line in California, heralding what British scientists called "a revolution" in generating electricity.

The solar panels produced by a Silicon Valley start-up company, Nanosolar, are radically different from the kind that European consumers are increasingly buying to generate power from their own roofs. Printed like a newspaper directly on to aluminium foil, they are flexible, light and, if you believe the company, expected to make it as cheap to produce electricity from sunlight as from coal.

Yesterday Nanosolar said its order books were full until mid-2009 and that a second factory would soon open in Germany where demand for solar power has rocketed. Britain was unlikely to benefit from the technology for some years because other countries paid better money for renewable electricity, it added.

"Our first solar panels will be used in a solar power station in Germany," said Erik Oldekop, Nanosolar's manager in Switzerland. "We aim to produce the panels for 99 cents [50p] a watt, which is comparable to the price of electricity generated from coal. We cannot disclose our exact figures yet as we are a private company but we can bring it down to that level. That is the vision we are aiming at."

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A Quick Test

Could You Pass 8th Grade Science?

Think you know a thing or two about science? Take our short quiz to determine if you'd pass an 8th grade science test.

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Plaything

This is a handy little site that allows you to create voice files saying anything you want.

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For example: http://vozme.com/speech/en/a0dc71cc0bf733e23aa5e022a9699e88.mp3

Memories

This started out as a conversation with friend Tim in which I was trying to establish his experiences relative to my own. The discourse descended into 'Do you remember...' and one of the objects in question was Kukla, Fran and Ollie.

The resulting Google turned up a very delightful webby and I highly recommend streaming the Mikado bit.

There was a glimmer of a neuron firing in my childhood viewing which told me those characters were actually speaking of matters beyond my comprehension. It seems that in at least this one instance those twinges of perception were right.

While many remember Kukla, Fran and Ollie as hosts of the CBS Children's Film Festival, their original series (1947 - 57), was actually watched by more adults than children. This first show counted Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Tallulah Bankhead and Adlai Stevenson among its many adult fans, and had sponsors like Life magazine and Ford Motor Co., who surely weren't trying to reach children. How did this happen? Click here to find out!
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