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A five pound, quarter of a million dollar gold nugget was found on Butte County public land this summer. The nugget, found in July, is currently being held at Kagin's Inc. in the Bay Area and will be unveiled to the public at the San Francisco Fall Antiques Show scheduled to begin Thursday. Information about the nugget and its finder remain vague. The person who found it has chosen to keep their identity a secret, and the location of its discovery is only being described as somewhere in the foothills in Butte County on public land. The Butte Nugget was...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has canceled her trip to Morocco this week for a meeting on the future of Syria's opposition because of a stomach virus, the State Department said on Monday. Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns will travel to the meeting in her place.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – While NASA is already planning the particulars of how to retire its space shuttles —– including announcing this week which museums will get to display them — a bid to continue flying the orbiters as a commercial service is still in the works, even if it is considered a long shot, SPACE.com has learned. United Space Alliance (USA), a prime NASA contractor, is working on a plan to commercially fly the Atlantis and Endeavour space shuttles twice a year following the construction of a new external fuel tank. The idea was first discussed in February but...

Dr. Long Que, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Louisiana Tech University, has reported success in designing and fabricating a device that allows microscale electronic devices to harvest their own wasted energy. The work was described in a paper published in the September edition of Applied Physics Letters, co-authored by students Pushparaj Pathak, Tianhua Zhang, Yuan He, and Shashi Yadav. Developed at Louisiana Tech and described in the paper, this technology uses a cantilever made out of piezoelectric material -- material capable of converting distortions to itself into electrical energy -- and is coated with a carbon nanotube film on...

January 20, 2009 - President Obama made some big promises to the people. One year later has he kept his word? Let's take a look at what he said and then what he did. Barack Hussein Obama made a lot of promises during his two-year long campaign, and attempted to solidify these pledges in his inaugural address. True, these promises took a softer form (some might call it pap) in his inaugural speech, but those who supported him and voted for him in 2008 understood what he was meant to do on their behalf. This was, of course, before...

New Energy Technologies, Inc. (OTCBB: NENE), developer of MotionPower™ technologies for generating sustainable electricity from the kinetic energy of moving vehicles and SolarWindow™ technologies capable of generating electricity on see-thru glass windows, today announced that researchers have developed a novel, patent-pending process for ‘spraying’ solar cells and their related components onto glass – a technical achievement recently presented in AZoNano’s (peer-reviewed, Journal of Nanotechnology Online; Dec. 20, 2009), “Nanotechnology Thought Leaders” series. “The ability to spray solar coatings directly onto glass follows on the heels of our recent breakthrough which replaced visibility-blocking metal with environmentally-friendly see-thru compounds, and marks...

Astronomers have uncovered evidence that a massive, explosive white dwarf star in a binary star system with a Sun-like star in our Milky Way Galaxy is growing in mass and is much closer to our solar system than previously thought. The report is being presented by Drs. Edward M. Sion, Patrick Godon and student Timothy McClain of Villanova University at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC. This result is of special interest because it may shed light on the still unidentified type of stellar objects that explode as Type Ia supernovae, the kind of supernova...

Sandia National Labs recasts solar industry with MEMS PORTLAND, Ore. — Sandia National Labs has harnessed silicon's natural tendency to grow into islands and used micro-electro-mechanical systems techniques to free those islands into the world's smallest solar cells. Sandia claims the micron-sized solar cells are as efficient as their wafer-sized big brothers, but consume only one hundredth the amount of semiconductor. Rather than force solar cells to grow across an entire wafer in a perfect crystalline lattice, and throw the whole wafer away if any imperfections develop, Sandia National Labs has found that smaller is better. Measuring just 100 microns...

December 23, 2009: The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery. "Using data from Voyager, we have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system," explains lead author Merav Opher, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from George Mason University. "This magnetic field holds the interstellar cloud together and solves the long-standing puzzle of how it can exist at all." The discovery has implications for the future when the solar system will...

'House Democrats don't want Gore humiliated' Climate Depot Exclusive Washington DC -- UK's Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington. Monckton told Climate Depot that the Democrats rescinded his scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Friday. Monckton said he was informed that he would not be allowed to testify alongside Gore when his plane landed from England Thursday...

The FINANCIAL -- As a testament to the growing demand to improve patient care while reducing healthcare costs, Toshiba America Medical Systems, Inc. has installed the first Aquilion ONE dynamic volume CT system in the Western U.S. at Nevada Imaging Centers in Las Vegas. "As the only dynamic volume CT system in the world, the Aquilion ONE's ability to image an entire organ and show function means faster, more accurate diagnosis, better patient outcomes and ultimately lower healthcare costs," explained Dr. William W. Orrison, chief of Neuroradiology, Nevada Imaging Centers. "Nevada Imaging Centers is committed to best-in-class solutions for...

The dramatic surge in oil prices—including a $16-per-barrel jump in just two days last week—has left Washington regulators scrambling to exert new oversight on futures trading in oil and other commodities. The U.S. regulatory agency's abrupt shift toward more rigorous oversight in the past two weeks also represents a stark example of how the pinch from high gasoline prices has changed the political landscape and made energy traders prime suspects in congressional inquiries. As recently as May 20, the U.S. commodities regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), insisted at a Senate hearing that speculation was not causing the...

Abengoa Solar Purchases 3,000 Acres for $1 Billion Solana Generating Plant Abengoa Solar, a Spanish-based solar energy company, has purchased roughly 3,000 acres near Gila Bend, AZ, where it intends to develop the world's largest solar power plant. An investment entity associated with Brandon Wolfswinkel of Tempe, AZ, sold the land for $45.12 million, or about $14,700 per acre. Abengoa Solar, which has solar plants in Spain and northern Africa, will construct and operate the 280-megawatt, $1 billion facility known as the Solana Generating Plant. The plant will use thousands of giant mirrors covering 1,900 acres to harness the sun's...

Solar's had a pretty rough time breaking the ~40% efficiency level over the years, but Idaho National Laboratory researchers have apparently developed a nano-antenna array capable of collecting power not from photonic energy as is done today, but from infrared energy that could be harvested in any weather (or even at night). The cell production process is even supposed to be ridiculously cheap compared to making standard silicon photovoltaic cells, but, as always, there's a rub. The grid collects its oscillating IR energy at ten thousand billion times per second, which is proving to be a challenge to the...

Millennium Cell Inc. and Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies announced today the completion of a pre-production version of the HydroPak™ portable power generator that incorporates a unique water-activated cartridge system. The HydroPak™ product combines Horizon’s fuel cells with Millennium Cell’s Hydrogen on Demand® storage technology to offer a clean and quiet power generator for use by consumers and professionals for emergency and recreational purposes. Millennium Cell's HydroPak fuel cell This power source is a high energy alternative to lead acid battery packs and portable generators. The HydroPak™ system, together with each cartridge:\ Provides infinite shelf life and enough energy to recharge an...

Brighter LEDs pave the way for a new type of home interior lighting The LED, or Light Emitting Diode, has been around since the late 60’s but only over the last few years have LEDs made headway into commercial mainstream use. Some new vehicles now use LED’s in headlights and taillights. The benefits of this are brighter light and much improved life span for the bulbs. Some stop lights also use LEDs to combat against the hazard of a stop light burning out. Of more interest to technophiles is the advent of LEDs for use as backlighting in our notebook...

Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices. The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers. "It's not a small improvement," Cui said. "It's a revolutionary development." The breakthrough is described in a paper, "High-performance...

BERKELEY – Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have built the smallest radio yet - a single carbon nanotube one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair that requires only a battery and earphones to tune in to your favorite station. The scientists successfully received their first FM broadcast last year - Derek & The Dominos' "Layla" and the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" transmitted from across the room. In homage to last year's 100th anniversary of the first voice and music radio transmission, they also transmitted and successfully tuned in to the first music piece broadcast in 1906, the...

Not literally of course, but a new service in the US promises to provide Internet access from motor vehicles on 95 percent of US roads. Autonet Mobile (www.autonetmobile.com), which bills itself as the first Internet service provider for cars, will debut its new service at ShowStoppers during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The company also promises to announce an agreement with a world leading car rental company to offer a portable, wireless Internet service by the end of the first quarter of 2007. It says the service will let passengers check email, surf the web, game or communicate...

Altair Nanotechnologies Inc., a leading provider of advanced nanomaterials and alternative energy solutions, detailed why its NanoSafe rechargeable, nano titanate battery technology provides fundamental improvements, including high power versus other rechargeable batteries. In anticipation of Altairnano's delivery of its first NanoSafe battery pack for use in an electric vehicle in September, this is the final of four planned news releases identifying features of Altairnano NanoSafe batteries that may prove advantageous in the power rechargeable battery market. In the three previous releases, Altairnano detailed why its nano titanate battery technology delivers high battery safety, rapid recharge and long battery life. The...