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Japan hung 2 megawatts of solar panels 12.5 feet over a rice paddy and then spent the whole growing season turning them edge-on so they would stop shading the crop, and the back of the glass lives off the light bouncing up from the water
2+ hour, 35+ min ago (977+ words) Solar panels have exactly one job. Catch as much light as they can, for as long as the sun is up, and turn it into electricity. The entire industry is arranged around that single idea. So it takes a moment…...
A British company laid three fiberglass pipes 200 feet long up a Devon hillside, filled them with 343,000 gallons of a fluid dense enough to float concrete and dropped it back through a turbine it had to build from scratch, because water turbines cannot handle it
7+ hour, 5+ min ago (887+ words) Every pumped hydro plant on Earth runs on the same three-term equation it started with in Switzerland in 1907: energy equals mass times gravity times height. Gravity is not taking anyone’s calls, and height means finding a mountain, which is why…...
A three-ton American drone submarine survives 19,700 feet by letting the sea straight through it, stays down ten days at a time, and its whole outer shell prints in under two days, which is why a factory can turn out 200 of them a year
10+ hour, 5+ min ago (556+ words) The published numbers are compact. The Dive-LD measures 5.8 meters long, about 19 feet, with a 1.2-meter diameter, roughly 4 feet, and a dry weight of 2,720 kilograms. Call it a three-ton cylinder about the size of a small delivery van, minus the wheels…...
A 9,260-pound American drone swims out on its own battery, grips with 1,000 pounds of force and swaps its own tools out of a compartment in its nose, and nobody drives the arms because radio does not work down there
1+ day, 5+ hour ago (1162+ words) Underwater robots have always come in two flavors. The swimmers cover long distances on battery power and take pictures, and the workers hang off a thick cable beneath a crewed ship and actually turn wrenches. You picked one, because no…...
America filled a 1,020-ton reactor with concrete foam, wrapped it in blue plastic and pushed it 270 miles up the Columbia to a pit in the desert, and 27 years later the fuel it ran on is still sitting on the riverbank in 34 casks
1+ day, 8+ hour ago (729+ words) Getting rid of big things is never as easy as buying them. Anyone who has tried to offload a dead refrigerator, an upright piano, or a boat that seemed like a good idea a few summers ago knows the routine:…...
An 88,000-pound steel door came out of a Missouri River dam weighing 113,000, and the extra 25,000 pounds was a zebra mussel that tops out at 1.9 inches, had a generator offline twice a month by 2019, and can ride to the next reservoir on a single boat
1+ day, 7+ hour ago (1014+ words) An intake gate has one of the least glamorous jobs on a dam. It is a big steel door that slides up and down to control the water feeding the powerhouse, and at Gavins Point Dam on the Missouri River…...
A nuclear plant south of Miami cut 168 miles of ditches into the marl to get rid of its waste heat, and the dirt it piled up between them is now the densest American crocodile nursery in the country, with 606 hatchlings counted last season
3+ day, 2+ hour ago (1514+ words) Every thermal power plant has the same problem at the back end. You boil water, spin a turbine, and then you are left holding a huge amount of heat that has to go somewhere. Most plants hand it to a…...
Europe has picked a 90.7-kilometer ring for the machine that follows the Large Hadron Collider, and the last country that tried building something that size sank 17 shafts under Texas, bored 14 miles of tunnel and then let the groundwater have it
3+ day, 8+ hour ago (1329+ words) Canceling a big construction job normally means paying to put the ground back the way you found it. It is a real line item with its own budget, and on federal work it gets audited like everything else. Then there…...
A 3.6-ton mirror three inches thick sits on a Maui volcano collecting sunlight, and keeping it from cooking itself takes seven miles of coolant pipe, thirteen separate temperatures and about a swimming pool of ice made fresh every night
3+ day, 7+ hour ago (1506+ words) Every kid who has ever owned a magnifying glass learns the same lesson in about four seconds. Point it at the sun, hold it over a dry leaf, and the leaf starts smoking. Nobody has to explain the physics. Now…...
A 35-foot steel tube with bunk beds, a shower and a hole in the floor is sitting 56 feet under the Florida Keys, and Florida researchers have until Friday to commit in writing to living in it, before anyone has been cleared to sleep in it at all
3+ day, 13+ hour ago (1472+ words) Scuba diving comes with a clock attached. Drop to 60 feet on a single tank and you get maybe an hour of useful bottom time before nitrogen loading forces you back to the surface, and a good chunk of that hour…...