wcrowe - Slashdot User

+ - What Tech Journalists Were Writing About in 1876-> 0

Submitted by

wcrowe

on Thursday March 08, 2012 @10:54AM

wcrowe writes ""On this day in 1876, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Alexander Graham Bell a patent for his "improvement in telegraphy," or, as we now know it, the telephone (above). This anniversary seems like as good a day as any — well, perhaps even a bit better than the other 365 days this year (leap year!) — to dip into the media frenzy that surrounded its arrival, a 19th century tech event evocative of today's Apple circus. Just kidding. It was nothing like that at all — the telephone, and the reaction to it, rolled out over the course of years, not minutes.""
Link to Original Source

+ - USGS Updates Magnitude of Japan Earthquake to 9.0-> 0

Submitted by

wcrowe

on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @04:01PM

wcrowe writes "The USGS has updated the magnitude of the March 11, 2011, Tohoku earthquake in northern Honshu, Japan, to 9.0 from the previous estimate of 8.9. Independently, Japanese seismologists have also updated their estimate of the earthquake’s magnitude to 9.0. This magnitude places the earthquake as the fourth largest in the world since 1900 and the largest in Japan since modern instrumental recordings began 130 years ago."
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+ - Stanford Solar Breakthrough-> 0

Submitted by wcrowe on Monday March 14, 2011 @04:08PM

wcrowe writes "Quantum dot solar cells are cheaper to produce than traditional silicon cells, but they haven't caught on due to their relative inefficiency. For Stacey Bent, a chemical engineering professor at Stanford, this represented something of a challenge. She knew that solar cells made of a single material have a maximum efficiency of about 31 percent, a limitation of the fixed energy level they can absorb, and that quantum dot solar cells didn't share this limitation. "Quantum dots can be tuned to absorb a certain wavelength of light just by changing their size," the Stanford report on her research says. "And they can be used to build more complex solar cells that have more than one size of quantum dot, allowing them to absorb multiple wavelengths of light.""
Link to Original Source

+ - Dell to power OKC campus with 100% wind energy 2

Submitted by wcrowe on Tuesday February 24, 2009 @06:49PM

wcrowe writes "Dell announced plans today to power its 240,000 square-foot Oklahoma City campus with 100 percent wind energy. The move is expected to significantly reduce the facility's CO2 emissions. Dell is among the first large businesses in the area to be powered entirely with renewable energy."

+ - Iran in possession of new weapon: Photoshop 0

Submitted by wcrowe on Friday July 11, 2008 @11:20AM

wcrowe writes "Iran now has the ability to wipe out Israel — with Photoshop. The Guardian reports:
'A photograph of four missiles being fired by Iran ratcheted up the tensions between the Islamic state and the US and Israel. But now it appears that Tehran may have enhanced the pictures.'

Here's a link to the story."

+ - "Uncontacted" Amazon Tribe story a hoax 0

Submitted by wcrowe on Tuesday June 24, 2008 @09:51AM

wcrowe writes "The story about an "uncontacted" Amazon Tribe discuss last month appears to be a hoax. The Guardian reports, "They are the amazing pictures that were beamed around the globe: a handful of warriors from an 'undiscovered tribe' in the rainforest on the Brazilian-Peruvian border brandishing bows and arrows at the aircraft that photographed them. Or so the story was told and sold. But it has now emerged that, far from being unknown, the tribe's existence has been noted since 1910 and the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that 'uncontacted' tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry.""