If you're picking up 70% oil, being able to dump the 30% water back into the ocean isn't going to make a big difference. All you need is a slightly larger tanker to hold the mix. And I'm pretty sure the tanker capacity of the oil industry isn't the limiting factor...

I think you meant the ORE (oil recovery efficiency), not the ORR (oil recovery rate). An ORE of 70% doesn't seem bad to me, that means that 30% of your tank capacity is wasted because you can't dump the water back into the ocean. You have to take it to a shore treatment center (where you would have to take the oil anyway). I would imagine that tank capacity isn't the limiting factor, oil companies have lots of tankers. I'd agree with the competition organizers that ORR is much more important.

Design a system where you pour water into a personal container, and have a system of pipes from that container which distributes the water over the entire surface of the skin and evaporatively cools the person.

Oh, wait, evolution already did.

That article talks about energy payback, not $ payback. That is, how long it takes for the panel to produce the energy required to manufacture it. Typically the energy payback time is much shorter than the $ payback time.

Old news. I already know how to build an A-bomb. I watched "The Manhattan Project" in 1986.

Yes, they are liable, but liable for what? What damages case can you make for files that aren't actually used?

Or maybe he drove the ethanol leg uphill. Or upwind. Or on a day with a different ambient temperature. So many error bars to add to his numbers, I'm not convinced what he saw on a single trial would hold up in a proper controlled experiment.

Yes, ethanol doesn't have the same energy density as gasoline. But miles per gallon is not the correct comparison. Miles per dollar is what really matters. Or maybe miles per pound of CO2 released. Miles per gallon is a useless measure to compare disparate fuels (unless you really are range limited).

But large isn't the factor that matters - you can always change a secondary mirror to make the image as large or as small as you want. If by "fantastic light buckets" you mean they are very sensitive, that could be a reason.

Why are they using 600x600 CCDs? That's only 0.36 megapixels. Surely there are more advanced CCDs than that.

Half of a dialogue should be a monologue, not a halfalogue. Or, to avoid the conflict with the usual definition of monologue, maybe a unilogue?

Or, perhaps, "Hey Kool-aid!"

Looking at the map, it appears the rift would indeed connect the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden via a second pathway, making (very approximately) an island out of half of Eritrea and all of Djbouti.

People are working on such things, like tapping the gulf stream: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16713781 Usable ocean currents are a lot scarcer than usable wind, unfortunately.