What’s sputtering, bedraggled, disorganized, and confused? My computer, me and a lot of other people, the economy, the world, and today’s weird and very late news. Regarding the latter, you’ll just have to make do, because if I try to load even one more webpage, I’ll end up throwing this disfunctional machine out the window.
- Volkswagen’s new teardrop-shaped car, called the One-Litre, is made of carbon fibre composites, has a single cylinder engine, and boasts 282 miles per gallon.
- How to Run a Car on Water. Oh, yes, it can be done – but there’s a very big catch.
- Concentrated Solar Array: MIT reveals cutting-edge technology that promises a tenfold increase in the amount of power converted by solar cells.
- Dyes turn windows into powerful solar panels – a tenfold increase in power output compared to use of the PV cell alone.
- T Boone Pickens has a plan to wean us off our oil addiction.
- Breakthroughs in Green Gasoline Production.
- Breaking the Catalytic Barrier to Biofuels.
- The Answer to Oil Prices? XXXTreme Energy!
- The Energy Superbugs.
- Asking the less comfortable questions about our energy future.
- Rush for fuel, food and wood will result in a global land grab that will leave millions of forest people impoverished and homeless.
- When ends won’t meet: Soaring gas prices mean financial hardship, major cutbacks for low- and middle-income households.
- Record numbers of homeowners are asking for help to avoid foreclosure, but lenders aren’t listening
- Study: The impact of the housing crash on family wealth.
- High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families.
- Bankers, CEOs, are using secret clinics to beat depression, breakdowns.
- Faustian Economics: Hell hath no limits.
- Update: The US banking conspiracies behind the sub-prime lending fiasco. (One of the many articles I lost earlier.)
- Oil Gone Wild: At these prices we are sending more than $1 million every minute of every day to oil rich countries.
- Wilkins Ice Shelf hanging by its last thread. (With satellite images.)
- Rare ‘star-making machine’ found in distant universe.
- Astronauts avoid blowing off their hands during risky operation.
- Anthony Watts blogs about Livingston and Penn’s paper, Sunspots may vanish by 2015, and the ASA’s paper Does a Spin-Orbit Coupling Between the Sun and the Jovian Planets Govern the Solar Cycle. Both followed by lively discussions.
- Stop the presses! Scientists say the sun is behaving normally.
- Secret chamber may solve Mexican pyramid mystery.
- English Civil War ‘ghost’ captured on film by paranormal enthusiasts.
- How dinosaurs sped over the land to Skye.
- Breakthrough gives scientists the ability to reconstruct the color of dinosaur feathers, and the fur of other extinct animals.
- What does Alzheimer’s look like in your brain? A 3-D rendering of an amyloid-beta peptide fibril – a clear marker of the disease – and what these proteins have to do with the ability to retain, form new, and lose unimportant memories.
- Nicotine improves concentration and quickens responses more than other popular stimulants like caffeine, leading researchers to think it could help Alzheimer’s sufferers.
- Radar data confirms Stephenville UFO – with no transponder, and bigger and faster than any known aircraft – was headed directly toward the president’s ranch in Crawford.
- MUFON investigators: The extensive radar data indicated an extremely high level of activity – and unusual activity at that – in the Stephenville and Crawford area that night, including what they concluded could only have been an AWACS craft which swept the area continuously for four hours.
- Researchers link obesity epidemic with lack of sunlight.
- Scientists say a good night’s sleep really does improve the way our brains work the next day. I wouldn’t know.
Thanks, Rick.
Quote of the Day:
The credit crunch is starting to become a really big issue — especially for the moneyed classes. Once you can’t ‘act out’ with money you start fighting.
It’s like drinking, or gambling, or sexing your way out of feelings, but with a fabulous family vacation or great clothes or wonderful meals — money can become an addiction that masks the reality. When that goes, reality has to be faced and accusations start flying.
From Credit crunch raises divorce rate for America’s superwealthy, The Times, July 11, 2008.
Don’t like that one? Fine – here’s another:
Predictions are hard, especially when they’re about the future.
Yogi Berra
