| Energy farms are increasingly dotting Kansas' landscape
LINCOLN — Ironworker Ernest Small secured the last of 270 wrist-sized bolts steadying the three blades of a modern-day sentinel of the plains. Operators of an enormous crane had already created a turbine tower at the Smoky Hills Wind Farm by stacking four hollow steel tubes, each smaller than the latter, onto a 50-foot square concrete foundation tucked underground. The crane operator then placed the nacelle — a fancy name for the Greyhound bus-sized unit containing a gear box, low- and high-speed shaft, generator, controller and brake — atop the tower 250 feet above a beautiful slice of prairie landscape. .
Undernews Alert: Obama
Sometimes an NPR show can upend your expectations and convince you that ordinary Americans can be brilliant observers and even entertainers. StoryCorps is not that show, I think. Every story I've heard on it has been lame. When do the grants run out? ... 2:51 A.M. ___________________________ Giuliani, the New Ideas Candidate? Sara Mosle recently reminded everyone of a key, overlooked moment in Giuliani's career: after his prostate cancer diagnosis, he decided to employ New York City's trademark Comp Stat policing technique to "aggressively recruit greater numbers of uninsured children for coverage under two existing government-run programs: Medicaid and Child Health Plus." Mosle--and later Sara Kershaw of the NYT--used this incident to paint Giuliani as a hypocritical candidate.
New nanotechnology fabrication techniques
A recent American Chemical Society's Weekly PressPac briefly describes an important advance toward industrial-scale production of nanodevices (scroll down to item #4). With this new technique, 'zinc oxide nanowires are grown in the exact positions where nanodevices later will be fabricated, in a way that involves a minimum number of fabrication steps and is suitable for industrial-scale applications.' In fact, this technique only needs only three photolithographic steps. It could soon be used for mass fabrication of nanowire-based transistors and sensors. You can see on the left a schematic of the photolithography process used for this new scalable fabrication of nanowire devices. "(a) Gold pads and fiducial marks are deposited on the surface. (b) Nanowires (NWs) are grown selectively from the two sides of the gold pads.
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