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Saturday, August 20, 2011

Genius 13-Year-Old Has a Solar Power Breakthrough [EcoModo]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5832557/genius-13+year+old-has-a-solar-power-breakthrough

When I was 13 I was smoking cigarettes I'd found on the ground and playing Super Nintendo like it was my life's work. This kid discovered a way to draw 20-50% more power from solar cells. He is way cooler.

7th grader Aidan Dwyer was walking in the woods during the winter, and looking up, he noticed something about the bare branches above him. They didn't appear to be growing randomly. So he took some measurements of the angles of the branches, crunched some numbers, and wouldn't you know it, he found that the ubiquitous Fibonacci Sequence was behind it all. He suspected there was a reason behind this. That trees were using this pattern to gather more light.

So he did an experiment. Using the same number of solar cells, he built two working models. One was a traditional, flat array will all of the panels on a single plane. The other used the Fibonacci Sequence to create the same spiraled pattern he observed in the trees. The results? The little man himself reports:

The tree design made 20% more electricity and collected 2 1/2 more hours of sunlight during the day. But the most interesting results were in December, when the Sun was at its lowest point in the sky. The tree design made 50% more electricity, and the collection time of sunlight was up to 50% longer!"

Genius 13-Year-Old Has a Solar Power Breakthrough Did you hear that? All of the smart-guys in the country who spent their time trying to make solar power more efficient were just outsmarted by a thirteen-year-old and a tree. You can read Aiden's extremely well-written full-report here. Aiden just won the Young Naturalist Award from the American Museum of Natural History. It's kids like this that make me think that just maaaaaybe this country isn't so screwed after all. [American Museum of Natural History via Inhabitat]

You can keep up with Brent Rose, the author of this post, on Google+ or Twitter.

New York from Day to Night in One Picture [Image Cache]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5832672/new-york-from-day-to-night-in-one-picture

Photographer Stephen Wilkes captured New York, in day and night, in a single photograph. Well, it's actually multiple photographs taken over a 15-hour period but still, the resulting image captures all sides of this glorious city.

This particular picture is the famous Flatiron building and as you can see, the left side is daytime: people out to lunch, tourists walking around and cabs driving by. The right side is nighttime: people getting ready to go out, tourists going back to their hotels...and cabs driving by. It's absolutely lovely to see the two worlds, each with their own energy, co-exist next to each other.

What Wilkes did was impressive. In his words:

I imagined changing time in a single photograph. Using this new technology, I've been able to express this fascination through a new series of photographs: "Day to Night". I photograph from a fixed camera angle continuously for up to 15 hours, throughout the "Day to Night". A select group of images are then digitally blended into one photograph, capturing the changing of time in a single frame.

Wilkes will host a gallery at New York City's Clamp Art Gallery from September 8th to October 29th. You can see more of these amazing images from his "Day to Night" set here (under the 'Fine Art' section). [Stephen Wilkes via Flavor Wire, Image Credit: Copyright Stephen Wilkes]

Friday, August 19, 2011

BlackBerry sucks at making fan videos

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/19/blackberry-sucks-at-making-fan-videos/

Wow! BlackBerry just released, and subsequently pulled, an awesome new video (which can be seen in full after the break) showing off its new Torch running BB 7 OS and sporting... an Android home button?! Man, that new Torch looks so awesome, particularly 15 and 27 seconds in, it hardly even looks like a BlackBerry at all.

Continue reading BlackBerry sucks at making fan videos

BlackBerry sucks at making fan videos originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Aug 2011 00:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Corsair adds 90GB SSDs to Force 3 / GT lines

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/19/corsair-adds-90gb-ssds-to-force-3-gt-lines/

Been thinking Corsair's Force SSD lineup was too small at 60GB, but too darn capacious at 120GB? Well Goldilocks, we've got good news, as the company's unveiled two middling models that might be just right. We begin with the 90GB Force 3, which wields 550MB/s reads and 500MB/s writes at a $149 price point. For an additional $40, you can bump speeds up by 5MB/s on both counts with the identically sized Force GT. Just like their smaller and larger brethren, the two additions tote SandForce SF-228x controllers as they haul bits over SATA 6Gbps. They're supposedly available "immediately," but, like AnandTech, we couldn't find either in stock. If middle of the road is your thing, then Godspeed, but we'll stick with the big one.

Continue reading Corsair adds 90GB SSDs to Force 3 / GT lines

Corsair adds 90GB SSDs to Force 3 / GT lines originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Aug 2011 08:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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