Word: solarity
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This raises two questions. First of all, why should we care? This one's easy: the Milky Way is a lump, as is our solar system, as are all of us. No lumps, no you. The second question is, Where did all the lumpiness come from, given that the universe shortly after the Big Bang was a pretty uniform sea of particles? This is a puzzle that's had a complicated history, but it may be a little closer to getting solved, thanks to an anomalous spot in a photo recently taken by a space-observing satellite...
...built by 2020. If we start pumping out new wind turbines with the same industrial urgency the U.S. produced tanks and bombers in World War II, Brown writes, we could generate 3 million megawatts of wind power by 2020, enough to meet 40% of the world's energy needs. Solar thermal, plug-in hybrid and geothermal technology are all part of Plan B. (Did you know that the geothermal energy contained in the upper six miles of the Earth's crust is 50,000 times more powerful than all of our oil and natural gas? Brown does...
...event itself, however, will have plenty of precedent. The craters that pock the surface of Mars, the Moon, Mercury and other Solar System bodies come from about four billion years' worth of this sort of thing. Earth has had plenty of collisions too; it's just that erosion, continental drift and vegetation have erased or hidden most of them. Not all, though: Meteor Crater, in Arizona, was blasted out some 50,000 years ago by an asteroid about the same size as 2007 WD5. A much bigger object, a few miles across, is thought by many scientists...
...different from green building, that other environmental trend that's never far from the news. For better or worse, environmental design has come to be defined by the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Design (LEED) ratings. A point system, LEED rewards technological fixes like rooftop solar panels or energy-efficient insulation. That's great, and there are enormous energy savings that can be achieved with basic improvements in building design, but the LEED system doesn't take into account the context of a building - where it is. A design could win a Platinum LEED rating...
...Republican Party satraps, who can be best described these days as dispirited, confused and just plain tired. Their presidential nominating race has less clarity today than it did a year ago, less even than it did three months ago. Polls point to the political equivalent of a total solar eclipse, with three different Republicans leading in three of the initial primary and caucus states: Mike Huckabee in Iowa, Mitt Romney in New Hampshire and Rudy Giuliani in Michigan. None of these men, at present, would beat Hillary Clinton in a general-election matchup, and each would fare little better against...