Solar Power and Hydrogen Fuel Cells….. His energy bill is $0.00 - Yahoo! News

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His energy bill is $0.00 - Yahoo! News
EAST AMWELL, N.J. - Mike Strizki lives in the nation’s first solar-hydrogen house. The technology this civil engineer has been able to string together – solar panels, a hydrogen fuel cell, storage tanks, and a piece of equipment called an electrolyzer – provides electricity to his home year-round, even on the cloudiest of winter days.

Mr. Strizki’s monthly utility bill is zero – he’s off the power grid – and his system creates no carbon-dioxide emissions. Neither does the fuel-cell car parked in his garage, which runs off the hydrogen his system creates.

It sounds promising, even utopian: homemade, storable energy that doesn’t contribute to global warming. But does Strizki’s method – converting electricity generated from renewable sources into hydrogen – make sense for widespread adoption?

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I’m watching and waiting for this for my own home.

The universe is a string-net liquid - fundamentals - 15 March 2007 - New Scientist

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The universe is a string-net liquid - fundamentals - 15 March 2007 - New Scientist

Herbertsmithite could be the new silicon - the building block for quantum computers.

In theory, quantum computers are far superior to classical computers. In practice, they are difficult to construct because quantum bits, or qubits, are extremely fragile. Even a slight knock can destroy stored information.

In the late 1980s, mathematician Michael Freedman, then at Harvard University, and Alexei Kitaev, then at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Russia, independently came up with a radical solution to this problem. Instead of storing qubits in properties of particles, such as an electron’s spin, they suggested that qubits could be encoded into properties shared by the whole material, and so would be harder to disrupt (New Scientist, 24 January 2004, p 30). “The trouble is the physical materials we know about, like the chair you’re sitting on, don’t actually have these exotic properties,” says Freedman.

Physicists told Freedman that the material he needed simply didn’t exist, but Joel Helton’s group at MIT might just prove them wrong. The material would be a string-net liquid with elementary and quasi-particles at the end of each string. Physicists could manipulate quasi-particles with electric fields, braiding them around each other, encoding information in the number of times the strings twist and knot, says Freedman. A disturbance might knock the whole braid, but it won’t change the number of twists - protecting the information.

“The hardware itself would correct any errors,” says Miguel Angel Martin-Delgado of Complutense University in Madrid, Spain.

The Raw Story | Kucinich: ‘Impeachment may well be the only remedy which remains to stop a war

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The Raw Story | Kucinich: ‘Impeachment may well be the only remedy which remains to stop a war of aggression against Iran’
During a speech on the House floor on Thursday, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) declared that “impeachment may well be the only remedy which remains to stop a war of aggression against Iran.” The 2004 presidential candidate, who is running again in 2008, told RAW STORY that his House floor statement “speaks for itself.”

“This House cannot avoid its constitutionally authorized responsibility to restrain the abuse of Executive power,” Kucinich said on the floor today. “The Administration has been preparing for an aggressive war against Iran. There is no solid, direct evidence that Iran has the intention of attacking the United States or its allies.”

Kucinich noted that since the US “is a signatory to the U.N. Charter, a constituent treaty among the nations of the world,” and Article II states that “all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” then “even the threat of a war of aggression is illegal.”

“Article VI of the U.S. Constitution makes such treaties the Supreme Law of the Land,” Kucinich continued. “This Administration, has openly threatened aggression against Iran in violation of the U.S. Constitution and the U.N. Charter.”