- Cracking Rock to Get More from Geothermal Fields
An enhanced geothermal project fractures hot rocks at unproductive wells, an approach with low financial risk.
Growth in conventional geothermal power last year was a tepid five percent. A recently-demonstrated enhanced geothermal method could squeeze more usable energy from existing wells.
- Surfing Logs Reveal Global Eating Patterns
The way we view online recipes reveals how our eating habits change over time, say computational sociologists.
- Better Computer Models Needed for Mega Wind Farms
Interactions between hundreds of wind turbines make power output difficult to predict.
With wind power getting cheaper, wind farm developers are drawing up plans for farms an order of magnitude bigger than anything around today, some with more than 1,000 turbines. But there’s one big problem: the economics of wind farms depends on accurate predictions of power output, and it is far more difficult to model how such large wind farms will behave.
- The Ads That Know Too Much
Ads that follow you from one website to another are increasingly common, but in the rush for more tailored advertising, age-old wisdom may be lost.
All over the Web, ads are getting more personal. They follow you from one site to the next and know your browsing history. But are such ads really effective? The answer may not be as obvious as digital marketers assume.
- Will Robots Create New Jobs When They Take Over Existing Ones?
A new class of smarter robots is being readied for the workplace.
A new class of industrial robot is appearing. These robots are smart, affordable, and safe enough to work alongside humans, and they can do many tasks that human workers perform today (see “This Robot Could Transform Manufacturing”). But does that necessarily mean there will be fewer jobs left for humans to do?
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