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New developments in renewable energy seem unlimited in variety.

The SKWID system, which harnesses power from both the wind and the tide, is scheduled to be tested in Japan



There are already a wide variety of renewable energy systems that harness the power of the wind, along with some that generate power via the flow of ocean currents. According to Japanese engineering firm MODEC (Mitsui Ocean Development & Engineering Co.), however, its soon-to-be-tested SKWID system will be the first one to do both.

SKWID stands for Savonius Keel and Wind Turbine Darrieus. This is appropriate, as it’s an anchored floating platform that contains both a Savonius tidal turbine below the waterline, and a Darrieus vertical-axis wind turbine up in the air. The two are connected by a central gearbox/generator, allowing the SKWID to generate power from the currents, the wind, or both. Additionally, the rotation of the tidal turbine can be used to help get the wind turbine spinning, when breezes are light and it needs a bit of extra inertia.



The design of the Darrieus turbine is such that it can spin to the left or to the right, so it works regardless of the wind direction. The tidal turbine spins in just one direction, but it does so irrespective of the direction of the current. It is reportedly able to harness even the weakest of currents, and is not affected by marine growth on its half-cyclinder-shaped buckets/blades. Additionally, because it spins no faster than the current, it is claimed to be safe for marine life.

The SKWID shouldn’t be too likely to tip over in rough seas, as the deck-level-mounted generator and below-deck-mounted tidal turbine help keep its center of gravity low. Additionally, the ring-shaped deck (which is the source of flotation) is joined to the central structure via flexible rubber mounts, allowing it to rock back and forth with the waves while the turbines and associated machinery remain stable and upright.

According to a report on Japan’s NHK News (relayed by America’s CBS News), one of the SKWIDs is due to be installed and tested off the coast of Japan, sometime this fall (Northern Hemisphere). The wind turbine should sit 47 meters (154 feet) above sea level, with the tidal turbine having a diameter of 15 meters (49 feet). Together, they may be able to generate enough power to provide for approximately 300 households.

Everyone is entertained by a scandal. There are papers that invent scandals to entertain us when things get too normal.
The Globe, The National Enquirer.

Now Republicans are in the scandal business and given close examination, their scandals have less credibility than those found in the National Enquirer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/16/the-scandals-are-falling-apart/

"On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough. Let’s go through them."

1) The Internal Revenue Service: The IRS mess was, well, a mess. But it’s not a mess that implicates the White House, or even senior IRS leadership. If we believe the agency inspector general’s report, a group of employees in a division called the “Determinations Unit” — sounds sinister, doesn’t it? — started giving tea party groups extra scrutiny, were told by agency leadership to knock it off, started doing it again, and then were reined in a second time and told that any further changes to the screening criteria needed to be approved at the highest levels of the agency.

The White House fired the acting director of the agency on the theory that somebody had to be fired and he was about the only guy they had the power to fire.

The Republicans said they didn't get the answers they were looking for. The problem for the Republicans is they weren't looking for the truth. They were looking for figments of their imagination.


2) Benghazi: We’re long past the point where it’s obvious what the Benghazi scandal is supposed to be about. The inquiry has moved on from the events in Benghazi proper, tragic as they were, to the talking points about the events in Benghazi. And the release Wednesday night of 100 pages of internal e-mails on those talking points seems to show what my colleague Glenn Kessler suspected: This was a bureaucratic knife fight between the State Department and the CIA.

As for the White House’s role, well, the e-mails suggest there wasn’t much of one.

The alteration of the email quotes by Republicans suggests the Republicans again didn't find the answers they were LOOKING for.


3) AP/Justice Department:. This is the weirdest of the three. There’s no evidence that the DoJ did anything illegal. Most people, in fact, think it was well within its rights to seize the phone records of Associated Press reporters. And if the Obama administration has been overzealous in prosecuting leakers, well, the GOP has been arguing that the White House hasn’t taken national security leaks seriously enough.

Insofar as there’s a “scandal” here, it’s more about what is legal than what isn’t. The DoJ simply has extraordinary power, under existing law, to spy on ordinary citizens — members of the media included.

The third supposed embarrassment for the administration is the way of the future. You should get used to it. I have.

Don't expect that any electronic communication is private. It is not. The Patriot act makes even large and powerful corporations open to investigation just like impoverished heavy duty laborers. It does not require a subpoena. In fact, anything you do or say in public or private is open to review.

In the case of media's loss of innocence, a divulging of a top secret anti-terrorist operation in Yemen, should never have happened and those who passed it on, are not qualified to be journalists or their managers. They are qualified to work at heavy duty labor in a private prison.

Gold is expected to decline in value over the year to $1100 an ounce. The European economy is expected to start recovering and inflation will not accelerate.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-16/gold-seen-falling-to-1-100-an-ounce-in-a-year-by-credit-suisse.html

Gold will trade at $1,100 an ounce in a year and below $1,000 in five years, according to Ric Deverell, head of commodities research at the bank. Lower prices are unlikely to lure more central-bank buying, said Deverell, who worked at the Reserve Bank of Australia for 10 years before joining Credit Suisse in 2010.

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“Gold is going to get crushed,” Deverell told reporters in London today. “The need to buy gold for wealth preservation fell down and the probability of inflation on a one- to three-year horizon is significantly diminished.”

Investors are losing faith in the world’s traditional store of value even as central banks continue to print money on an unprecedented scale. Bullion slumped into the bear market last month after a 12-year bull market that saw prices rise as much as sevenfold. Gold is a “wounded bull,” Credit Suisse said in a Jan. 3 report.

Bullion for immediate delivery traded at $1,389.15 by 6:40 p.m. in London. Gold prices reached a record $1,921.15 an ounce in 2011.

Gold may slip to $1,350 in the next couple weeks, Deverell said. The metal is still too expensive relative to other “real assets” such as base metals, according to Credit Suisse. The bank said bullion may peak in 2013 in a December report.

A team of international scientists report today that they have sequenced and annotated the genome of the sacred lotus (Nelumbo nucifera), which is thought to have a powerful genetic system. The team, which includes researchers from the US, China, Australia and Japan, have sequenced nearly 90 percent of the plant’s 27,000 genes.

The sacred lotus, which is a symbol of spiritual purity and longevity, has the ability to repair genetic defects, and may hold a key to the secrets of aging; the seeds of the lotus can survive up to 1,300 years. The petals and leaves of the plant also repel dirt and water and the flower can generate its own heat to attract pollinators.

Through sequencing, the researchers have found that the lotus bears the closest resemblance to the ancestor of all eudicots, than of any other plant that has been successfully sequenced to date. Eudicots are a group of flowering plants that include apple, coffee, peanut, soybean, tobacco, tomato, and countless others.

Publishing the paper in the journal Genome Biology, the team noted that the results of the sequencing offer insight into the heart of many of the plant’s mysteries.

The research was co-led by Ray Ming, a plant biology professor at University of Illinois’ Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB); Jane Shen-Miller, a plant biology professor at UCLA; and Shaohua Li, director of the Wuhan Botanical Garden (WBG) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“The lotus genome is an ancient one, and we now know its ABCs,” said Shen-Miller, who works out of the UCLA’s Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. “Molecular biologists can now more easily study how its genes are turned on and off during times of stress and why this plant’s seeds can live for 1,300 years. This is a step toward learning what anti-aging secrets the sacred lotus plant may offer.”

Shen-Miller said the plant’s genetic repair mechanisms could be very useful if researchers could find a way to transfer them to crops that have seeds that generally only have life spans of a few years. They could even prove significant if transferable to human health.

“If our genes could repair disease as well as the lotus’ genes, we would have healthier aging. We need to learn about its repair mechanisms, and about its biochemical, physiological and molecular properties, but the lotus genome is now open to everybody,” she said.

Study co-author Crysten Blaby-Haas, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in chemistry and biochemistry, explained that understanding how the lotus repair mechanism works is a three-step process.

“Knowing the genome sequence was step one. Step two would be identifying which of these genes contributes to longevity and repairing genetic damage. Step three would be potential applications for human health, if we find and characterize those genes. The genome sequence will aid in future analysis,” she said.

“The next question is what are these genes doing, and the biggest question is how they contribute to the longevity of the lotus plant and its other interesting attributes,” Blaby-Haas said. “Before this, when scientists studied the lotus, it’s almost as if they were blind; now they can see. Once you know the repertoire of genes, you have a foundation to study their functions.”

The lineage that includes the sacred lotus forms a separate branch of the eudicot family tree and lacks a signature triplication of the genome that is seen in most members of this particular family, Ming explained.

“Whole-genome duplications — the doubling or tripling of an organism’s entire genetic endowment — are important events in plant evolution,” Ming said in a statement. “Some of the duplicated genes retain their original structure and function, and others gradually adapt and take on new functions. If those changes are beneficial, the genes persist; if they’re harmful, they disappear from the genome.”

Study coauthor Robert VanBuren, a graduate student in Ming’s lab, said that many crops, such as watermelon, sugar cane, and wheat, benefit from genome duplication. The genome of most other eudicots triplicated 100 million years ago, but the lotus experienced a separate, whole-genome duplication about 65 million years ago.

Researchers who study aging and stress could be eager to learn more about the genetics of the lotus, said Shen-Miller.

“The lotus can age for 1,000 years, and even survives freezing weather,” she noted. “Its genetic makeup can combat stress. Most crops don’t have a very long shelf life. But starches and proteins in lotus seeds remain palatable and actively promote seed germination, even after centuries of aging.”

The unusual genetics of the lotus give the plant a unique set of survival skills. Not only does the plant produce its own heat to attract pollinators, but the fruit of the lotus is covered with antibiotics and wax that ensure the viability of the seed inside.

The sacred lotus is known from the geologic record as early as 135 million years ago, noted Shen-Miller. The plant has been grown in China for at least the last 4,000 years, and has long been used there for food and medicine.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112844692/sacred-lotus-genome-insight-secrets-of-aging-051313/

Ex-President George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, criticized Republicans still pursuing imaginary wrongdoing on the part of the President and his administration.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57584087/gates-some-benghazi-critics-have-cartoonish-view-of-military-capability/

CBS has a video of the interview.

"Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were," said Gates, now the chancellor of the College of William and Mary.

"We don't have a ready force standing by in the Middle East, and so getting somebody there in a timely way would have been very difficult, if not impossible." he explained.

Suggestions that we could have flown a fighter jet over the attackers to "scare them with the noise or something," Gates said, ignored the "number of surface to air missiles that have disappeared from [former Libyan leader] Qaddafi's arsenals."

"I would not have approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft, over Benghazi under those circumstances," he said.


Another suggestion posed by some critics of the administration, to, as Gates said, "send some small number of special forces or other troops in without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on on the ground, would have been very dangerous."

"It's sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces," he said. "The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm's way, and there just wasn't time to do that."

Gates said he could not speak to allegations that the State Department refused requests for additional security in the months prior to the attack. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been increasingly targeted for criticism by Republicans for her handling of the crisis and the government's response, with some even raising the possibility that the State Department engineered a coverup to protect her political future.

But when Gates was asked whether he thought that might be a possibility, he replied flatly, "No."

Scientists have found materials that are basic to our planet and other rocky planets in our solar system in the atmospheres of two white dwarf stars, using Hubble.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1112842213/earth-like-planets-in-dead-star-atmospheres-050913/

The Hubble Space Telescope has helped astronomers spot signs of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place.

Astronomers say they found the planets sitting in the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster. The white dwarf stars are being polluted by debris from asteroid-like objects falling onto them, and the researchers say this discovery suggests that rocky planet assembly may be common in such clusters.

Hubble’s observations helped identify silicon in the atmospheres of two white dwarfs, which is a major ingredient in the rocky material that makes up a large part of Earth. This silicon could have come from asteroids that were torn apart by the white dwarfs’ gravity, and asteroids are often the building blocks of rocky planets. The rocky debris likely formed a ring around the dead stars, which eventually funneled the material inwards. The scientists say the debris detected around the white dwarfs suggests that terrestrial planets formed when these stars were born.

“We have identified chemical evidence for the building blocks of rocky planets,” says Jay Farihi of the University of Cambridge, who led the study. “When these stars were born, they built planets, and there’s a good chance that they currently retain some of them. The signs of rocky debris we are seeing are evidence of this – it is at least as rocky as the most primitive terrestrial bodies in our Solar System.”

The space telescope also detected low levels of carbon in the Hyades stars’ atmospheres, offering yet another sign of a rocky planet.

“The one thing the white dwarf pollution technique gives us that we won’t get with any other planet detection technique is the chemistry of solid planets,” Farihi says. “Based on the silicon-to-carbon ratio in our study, for example, we can actually say that this material is basically Earth-like.”