Archive for April, 2015
ZQI Ammunition Factory Tour
April 14th, 2015Curious about what a modern ammo factory looks like? I was. Via: Military Arms Channel:
Plonk Reactor: Age Liquor 20 Years in 6 Days?
April 13th, 2015Via: Wired: The whiskey renaissance has the world clamoring for well-aged hooch, but the so-called brown spirits—whiskey, brandy, rum—have one widely-publicized problem. It takes time, and lots of it, to make them. Or at least to make them taste good. The booze industry has been looking for shortcuts to the aging process virtually since its […]
Peak Oil? Peak Oil Demand
April 13th, 2015
Via: Bloomberg: Naimi and other Saudi leaders have worried for years that climate change and high crude prices will boost energy efficiency, encourage renewables, and accelerate a switch to alternative fuels such as natural gas, especially in the emerging markets that they count on for growth. They see how demand for the commodity that’s created […]
The Economics of Grid Defection
April 13th, 2015Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand. — I am Jack’s smirking revenge. Via: Rocky Mountain Institute: Distributed electricity generation, especially solar PV, is rapidly spreading and getting much cheaper. Distributed electricity storage is doing the same, thanks largely to mass production of batteries for electric vehicles. Solar power is already starting to […]
Google Gets Into Battery Arms Race
April 12th, 2015Via: Wall Street Journal: Google Inc. has joined the search for better batteries to power its expansion into consumer electronics and other hardware. In late 2012, a team led by former Apple Inc. battery expert Dr. Ramesh Bhardwaj began testing batteries developed by others for use in Google devices. About a year later, the group […]
Amazon Gets Green Light from U.S. Regulators for New Drone Tests
April 11th, 2015Via: Reuters: Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) has won approval from U.S. federal regulators to test a delivery drone outdoors, less than a month after the e-commerce powerhouse blasted regulators for being slow to approve commercial drone testing. The Federal Aviation Administration had earlier given the green light to an Amazon prototype drone in March, but the […]
Facebook Claims ‘A Bug’ Made it Track Nonusers
April 11th, 2015Mmm hmm. Via: The Hill: Facebook researchers have found “a bug” that caused it to track people, even if they had never visited its website, the social media giant acknowledged this week. The bug caused the company to place cookies — a common way to track people’s browsing habits on the Web — on “some” […]
Baltimore Police Used Stingray Systems to Track Cellphones in Thousands of Cases
April 9th, 2015Via: Baltimore Sun: The Baltimore Police Department has used an invasive and controversial cellphone tracking device thousands of times in recent years while following instructions from the FBI to withhold information about it from prosecutors and judges, a detective revealed in court testimony Wednesday. The testimony shows for the first time how frequently city police […]
Indian Police to Use Pepper-Spraying Drones on Unruly Protesters
April 9th, 2015Via: AFP: Police in a northern Indian city said Tuesday they have a new weapon for controlling unruly protesters in the world’s largest democracy: pepper-spraying drones. Yashasvi Yadav, police chief of Lucknow, said his officers have successfully test-flown the newly purchased drones with a view to better crowd control. “The results were brilliant. We have […]
Battery Prices Dropping Faster Than Predicted
April 9th, 2015Via: Bloomberg: The most important piece of news on the energy front isn’t the plunge in oil prices, but the progress that is being made in battery technology. A new study in Nature Climate Change, by Bjorn Nykvist and Mans Nilsson of the Stockholm Environment Institute, shows that electric vehicle batteries have been getting cheaper […]
