Tidal power will get its biggest test this summer ... The world's largest turbine--a 130-ton, metal shaft with twin rotating blades--is making its way on a barge from Invergordon, Scotland to the European Marine Energy Centre test site off the coast of Orkney. Installers will then battle 50-foot waves and an average temperature of 11 degrees to install the turbine and connect it to the electrical grid ... The scale and timing are significant ... For one thing, it's the biggest installation ever
You may have slept, but innovation was raging against the dying of the light ... 1. Let's go back to the Gulf. Yesterday was the first day of the shrimping season, and life carried on as normal. However, although there have been no official tests put in place, buyers are refusing to pay the fishermen until they have tested the catch themselves. Post-Deepwater, it looks like offshore deep drilling permits will be subject to further environmental review ... 2. Oh God, it's Abu Ghraib all over
BPA, a toxic compound found in everything from store receipts to water bottles, has been a hot topic as of late. That's because most industries have been slow to adopt alternatives to the petroleum-based estrogenic compound, which is used in the plastic manufacturing process, among other things. Enter isosorbide, a corn-based industrial ingredient that the Archer Daniels Midland Company is touting as a safe, renewable alternative to BPA ... Archer Daniels explains: ... Isosorbide is a versatile
Apple's iPad is selling about as fast as they can make the things, and it's not even completed its international roll-out yet. It stands to reason, then, that Apple's probably upped its efforts to develop the iPad's successor (given how long it takes for a design to go from concept to reality). This iPad 2 we would notionally have expected to be announced in January 2011, a year after the first device hit, and we still expect this to be the case. But now there's an increasingly real-sounding
Bad news for BlackBerry fans (and, I suppose, BlackBerry's parent company, RIM): Sales of the company's newest, best, and most optimistic phone are so lousy that RIM has been forced to slash the price only a week after launch ... RIM may have the biggest smartphone market share in North America, but the Canadian company hasn't had a bonafide hit in some time--and that becomes a real problem when you consider the legions of huge-selling competitors, including the iPhone 4, HTC Evo 4G, HTC Droid
Verizon announced yesterday that during a trial, one of its customers was able to hit vey near to a gigabit in speed on the FiOS network. The customer, a business subscriber in Taunton (unrelated to Star Wars, I'm pretty sure), Massachusetts, remains unnamed, and the trial is certainly not indicative of any kind of nationwide ability on Verizon's part. But this outlier is far more important than just a bigger number that nobody but a nerd would care about ... Let's dial back a little bit.
Microsoft may be late to the new world of smartphones begun by the Apple iPhone back in 2007, but the company has some interesting advantages over competitors like Apple and Google. Chief among those is that Microsoft is, lest we forget, a gaming powerhouse ... Far from the half-hearted (albeit underrated) efforts of Zune, Microsoft's Xbox experiment is innovative, critically acclaimed, and, most importantly, incredibly successful. Xbox Live, when it launched way back in 2002, was a ballsy move
Tata Motors is a lot of things--India's largest car manufacturer, producer of the $2,000 car (the Nano), and designer of the world's cheapest high-rise apartments. Now it appears that Tata can add another title to its ever-growing list: mainstream manufacturer of electric vehicles. Edmunds reports that Tata is planning to launch two electric vehicles in Europe by March of 2011 ... The vehicles, set to launch first in the U.K. and Scandinavia, will reportedly include a variation of the Indica
In his 30-year career, Kevin Pollak has appeared in more than 60 films and created indelible roles in such modern classics as A Few Good Men and The Usual Suspects. His Internet awakening occurred in 2009, when he started his Streamy Award winning weekly talk show Kevin Pollak Chat Show backed by Jason Calacanis (Mahalo). He ventured into the world of Web video with his acclaimed original Web series Vamped Out (it was his directorial debut and he wrote and starred in it as well). Vamped Out
First smartphones were redefined as powerful social media/Net devices and then: Boom! The advertising industry grabbed on in search of new sources of cash income. But the new ad business are finding everything a bit new and scary, and are still finding their feet ... Apple's iAd Slow Off the Starting Block ... There's been a bit of buzz about Apple's innovative rich-content iAd system recently. Firstly it was reported to be a success, with developers and ad partners finding the whole system