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...senior lecturer Steven Spear, a lean-manufacturing specialist who has worked on production lines at both a Detroit Three and a Toyota plant, says the problem worsened over the years as products and manufacturing inevitably got more sophisticated. Merely upgrading a Toyota, he says, requires 300 man-years of engineering. No single manager can ever understand it. "Figuring out products, markets, customers, designs, systems - what's inherent about anything complex is that it becomes impossible. You can't design it perfectly," he says. What matters, he argues, is swarming problems from every direction to create high-speed, low-cost discovery...
...geothermal power station, Krafla. Soon after the inaugural borehole was drilled here 34 years ago, the first in a series of volcanic eruptions rocked the area. The eruptions, nine in all, went on for nearly a decade, sending engineers scrambling to keep up with the shifting earth. Fanndal, the plant's manager, stops his truck in front of a crater where, without warning, one early drill hole imploded into a cauldron of boiling water that took half a year to settle down. "There were a lot of people who said we should leave this place," Fanndal recalls...
...Mission Over the years, Icelandic engineers have learned which temperature enables underground liquids to power a turbine, how to manage a boiling cavern's chemistry, and how to keep power plants sustainable by "resting" boreholes to give the source time to replenish its heat. While the ongoing costs of a geothermal power plant are low - Krafla, for example, has only 15 full-time employees - the start-up technology needed to extract heat from a few miles beneath the earth's surface and convert it to electricity is not cheap. By some estimates, conducting the necessary geologic surveys and exploratory drilling...
...company is focusing its early investments on East Africa, an area with vast amounts of underground heat and little means to tap it. The company plans to start exploratory drilling next year to build a geothermal plant in Djibouti. In July, the government of the Philippines awarded a Filipino-Icelandic consortium exploration rights to half of Biliran Island in the country's south. Twenty years ago, three boreholes were drilled on Biliran and then abandoned when the underground liquid at the other end of the drill was found to be too acidic. Since then, the industry has learned...
...tropical forests and the pace of climate change - if we can get it right. An estimated 50,000 sq. mi. (129,500 sq km) of forest are lost to the logger's ax or to fire every year, and that hurts the planet in two very important ways. Rare plants and animals, many still undiscovered, depend on the forests - especially the rich rain forests that encircle the earth either side of the equator. When the forests disappear, all that wildlife disappears as well. But trees also contain carbon, and while they live, they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, compensating...