Morihei Ueshiba"A good stance and posture reflect a proper state of mind."
Facebook forms PAC for political donations
Facebook is forming a political action committee, strengthening ties of the social networking giant with Washington politicians as the company also faces growing questions about how it handles users’ privacy.
Facebook’s PAC “will give our employees a way to make their voice heard in the political process by supporting candidates who share our goals of promoting the value of innovation to our economy while giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” spokesman Andrew Noyes said in a e-mailed statement.
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Glowing millipedes ooze cyanide to foil attacks
Mysterious glowing millipedes apparently use their radiance to warn nighttime predators to stay away, scientists now find.
Map is salt of the Earth — or of Earth's oceans
A NASA-built instrument aboard an international satellite has made its first global map of the saltiness of Earth's seas, just three months after the high-tech sensor rocketed into orbit.
Military spearheads clean-energy drive
PATUXENT RIVER NAVAL AIR STATION, Md. — With the Navy’s Blue Angels and their F/A-18 Hornets arrayed in a neat line behind him, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus announced that they would perform in the Labor Day Air Expo using a 50-50 mix of a plant-based biofuel and conventional fuel.
“It’s part of our process to move to alternative energy all across the Navy,” Mabus told reporters gathered on the sun-baked runway before him on Sept. 1. “The main reason we’re moving toward alternative fuels in the Navy and the Marine Corps is to make us better war fighters.”
View Entire Story » | 0 CommentsToyota adds first tiny 'minicar' to Japan lineup
share: diggfacebooktwitter Minivehicles, or "kei," are defined under Japanese regulations as having maximum length of 3.4 meters (11.15 feet), width of 1.48 meters (4.86 feet), height of 2 meters (6.56 feet) and engine displacement of less than 660 cc. Minicars are popular not only for the tax savings but also with people who use cars for short commutes or grocery shopping, as well as with those who don't see cars as status symbols as did the older generation. Nissan Motor Co., Japan's No. 2 automaker, has a partnership with Japanese automaker Mitsubishi Motors Corp., under which Mitsubishi makes minicars for Nissan.
View Entire Story » | 0 CommentsRadioShack to Carry Nook
RadioShack will begin selling Barnes & Noble Nook e-readers next month. The retailer already carries iPads and Kindles.
Which came first: Galaxy or black hole?
The relationship between a galaxy and its black hole is as mystifying as any of those found among families on Earth. Scientists don't even know which came first — galaxies or their black holes.
238 Million Smart Meters to Be Deployed in Europe by 2020, Forecasts Pike Research
LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cumulative investment in smart grid technologies within Europe will total $80.3 billion by 2020, according to a Pike Research report.
Laser detects roadside bombs
Future of Tech: Lab scientists are pitching a new high-tech laser that is able to detect roadside bombs before they explode, potentially thwarting the deadliest weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Video: NASA orbiter spots footprints on the moon
Close-up shots of the moon taken by an orbiter 15 miles above the surface show some of the Apollo landing sites including footprints and rover tracks left by astronauts in 1972. Scott Pelley reports.
Crazy Horse sculptor's widow carries on mountain dream
CUSTER, South Dakota (Reuters) - Nearly every morning for more than half a century, 85-year-old Ruth Ziolkowski rises around dawn, puts her feet on the ground and gives thanks she is part of a dream.
Humankind's most ambitious science projects
To improve our view of a vast and complex universe, scientists are creating increasingly ambitious new tools. The work is not easy. Truly big science requires decades of expensive commitment from multiple nations. But the instruments that result are nearly as awe-inspiring as the new worlds they help us discover.
A nano-sized electric motor
Future of Tech: Scientists have downsized the electric motor to the molecular level. That is, they've created an electrical motor that's the size of a nanometer. About 60,000 of them could fit on the width of a human hair.
Desert RATS tests asteroid exploration tech
Futuristic technology that could help astronauts explore an asteroid in deep space is getting a workout in the Arizona desert during NASA field trials.
LEED 2012: The USGBC Adds Teeth, Real-Time Reporting To Its Green Building Ratings
Responding to criticisms that its ratings can be meaningless and easily gamed, the USGBC is introducing new rules so buildings must continually recertify and measure their energy use against their neighbors.
If you’re paying attention, you no doubt have seen the plaques placed near the doors of major new commercial buildings, announcing an impressive LEED rating. For building owners, in this real estate cycle and all those that will follow it, a good LEED rating shows that you're thinking about the planet. And for renters, it shows that your landlord is working to reduce costs and make the workplace more healthy. Everyone wins. But what does your skyscraper’s gold or platinum LEED rating really mean?
While LEED ratings have increased in public consciousness (with 1.5 million 6.8 billion square feet of commercial space certified since 2000), there has been way too little transparency about how new buildings with high LEED scores actually perform. So, while the marketing excitement of a platinum rating may score some points, it can hit a dead end under scrutiny. Some engineers, for instance, complained that LEED points were too easy to rack up in an incoherent building: Many cited the fact that a bike rack earned points in a building that might have a faulty boiler. And landlords faced no penalty if they declined make improvements or even use the technology they installed once given a rating by LEED. At its weakest, a LEED certification amounted to a one-time endorsement of a building’s design, with no follow-up.
Now, though, the system is changing--from within--to better reflect how LEED buildings actually save energy and water and how they can improve.
The nonprofit United States Green Building Council (USGBC), which administers LEED, says its volunteer members want to think of green buildings as assets rather than as checkoffs. The latest version of the building-rating system, called LEED 2012--which will launch in November and the go to USGBC members for a vote in November next summer--takes advantage of new technology and building practices that make real-time energy and water management commercially viable. Sharing this data so that other commercial real estate owners can compare their energy use is now going to be required. “Our goal is to show that real leaders share data,” says Scot Horst, USGBC’s Senior VP for LEED. LEED 2012 will also require owners to recertify every five years. So if you invest in a LEED rating when you open, you’ll have to prove over time that you’re staying current with available energy-saving techniques.
To get all the data from buildings ready for public consumption, the USGBC is inviting software developers to make that data legible. Horst showed Fast Company a preview of LEED 2012 in the Council’s airy headquarters in the heart of Washington, D.C. Using a database called the Green Building Information Gateway, the software allows an owner to tap into comparable data from similar buildings.
“I think of it like the Zagat rating,” says Horst. “Everyone will see the [LEED] plaque, but customers will go to the building with the current year on the plaque.” Presumably a “LEED 2011” plaque will look as cutting-edge in 2017 as a bike rack looks now.
LEED scores actually come from many separate tests, though the general public tends to pay attention only to the LEED-New Construction exam. For landlords who have earned certification under LEED for Existing Buildings’ Operations and Maintenance (or “ee-bomb”), these reporting requirements are not so new. Indeed, Horst says, LEED has certified more existing buildings than new ones--though new ones tend to draw both hype and suspicion.
For every other kind of landlord, the new rules create a stiff marketing challenge. Horst readily acknowledges that some owners have gotten used to patching together credits in order to lure tenants (the bike rack problem) but he argues that the market has evolved too far for this to continue. “Now the LEED rating is the beginning of a relationship,” says Horst, before offering an analogy: “If I leave the church [after getting married] and then I’m a pain in the ass, my wife is not going to stay with me.” Likewise, he hopes, tenants in the current marketplace will not stay with a landlord who can’t keep up with best practices in energy management.
Using LEED 2012, owners can keep an eye on performance with new apps available on LEED Online. It’s not clear that a full dashboard will be ready when the program launches next year, but the stockpile of apps will make actual performance--rather than just the components--easier to compare. (One potential app for sale maps energy-sucking boilers near the end of their useful lives.) “Faster, cheaper, more automatic” is LEED’s mantra for its new system, which is now open for a second wave of public comment. Software vendors would post the apps in exchange for the right to sell beefed-up versions of these tools to building owners.
According to Horst, more than 30 companies are developing tools with USGBC to help owners track and fix buildings’ performance. Some silently monitor equipment such as boilers to pinpoint areas of failure. Others consolidate information from different parts of a building.
“The apps area will be a place where you can see what the market is doing about LEED,” says Horst. “Some may tell a story about LEED, some may connect to LEED. The idea is that each LEED point creates an opportunity for automation, whether it’s in tracking your waste or something else.”
The timing of LEED 2012 is intelligent--New York and San Francisco are starting to mandate retrofits of older buildings, and tuning them up is a lot more cost-effective than wrecking them. While some skeptics might smell an attempt to brush back upstart systems like the more stringent (and so far, all but impossible to meet) Living Building Challenge, USGBC executives say the new focus on performance data matches how forward-thinking landlords are using LEED. “A great deal of what’s happening in green building comes from our own projects,” says Chris Pyke, USGBC’s verbally adept VP of research. “The goal of getting the data online is to enable owners to compete with each other.”
Pyke imagines an energy manager trying to make the case for investment in electric meters to her executive committee. “When they ask: ‘What’s the return on investment of that meter?’ Umm… a meter doesn’t have a return on investment! The things you do with that meter do.” Those things include turning lights off when you leave a room, using shared controls for A/C, and other rules that are less photogenic than (to use Pyke’s examples) “a solar hot water heater or a light bulb.”
The booming energy-services industry, led by huge companies that manage customers’ whole unruly mix of boilers and A/Cs and overhead lights for a fee, is predictably cheering on the change. Jeff Drees, U.S. president for $27 billion Schneider Electric, says he hopes landlords will now get LEED credit for syncing choices about design, fuel, operations, and maintenance into a single online dashboard. “No longer does a bike rack get credit over an integrated process,” says Drees.
The promise of new software tools means a new metric for how real estate owners price and trade their assets. This will only fly if real estate owners resign themselves to disclosure--which is perhaps why Horst talks so urgently about making data-gathering fast and automatic wherever possible.
Of course, when the government made managers of stocks and bonds disclose performance, the managers came up with zippy ways of hiding the facts. Why should landlords be any more forthcoming?
Pyke argues that landlords will see energy-performance disclosure as a way to create value. “The average [building owner] is still sitting there with spreadsheets and utility bills, maybe getting automated bills and exporting them into Excel,” he says. “There is a huge market for automation partners and I hope that we don’t know who those are yet.”
A database with real building performance, searchable and scalable, can make for frothy competition among secretive landlords. Can it also make for smarter energy management? Horst is careful not to predict the performance criteria for recertification before the comment period ends-perhaps because he wants to make sure to pick ones that tie to visible financial benefits.
“It’s very early days,” Horst says. “The idea is that over time there will be a number of applications and activities that we could never do ourselves.”
[Images, from top: The Taipei 101, a LEED Platiunum building, by Flickr user daymin. A screenshot from LEED2012's monitoring software, via the USGBC. The Bank of America tower, a LEED Platinum building, by Flickr user Bosc d'Anjou. A LEED Platinum plaque, by Flickr user tombdmot]
How do we stop asteroids from hitting Earth?
While scientists keep a close watch on the myriad space rocks near Earth, they don’t yet have a solid plan on what to do if one appears headed on a collision course toward our planet.
Strong, light blades a boost for wind energy?
Future of Tech: Bigger is better … when it's also lighter and stronger, goes the thinking of engineers and materials scientists designing the next generation of blades to wring energy from the wind.
GE Applying MRI Magnet Technology to Cost-Effectively Scale-Up to 15MW Wind Turbines
NISKAYUNA, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--GE scientists began work on Phase 1 of a 2 yr., $3M project from the U.S. DOE to develop a next generation wind turbine generator that could support large-scale wind applications in the 10-15MW range.
Jupiter probe looks back at Earth
Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: Our planet looks like a pale white dot alongside an even smaller dot in a photo sent back by NASA's Jupiter-bound Juno probe from 6 million miles away.
Heat-strapped Texas expects another power record
HOUSTON (Reuters) - The Texas power grid operator said electric usage this week could break the all-time peak seen earlier this month and urged consumers to reduce power use to avoid rolling outages.
Monsanto Corn Under Attack by Superbug
Corn genetically modified to thwart a voracious beetle are falling prey to that very bug in Iowa, the first time a major Midwest pest has developed resistance to a genetically-modified crop and raising concerns that some farming methods may spawn superbugs.
UPS Adds 100 All-Electric Vehicles
UPS added 100 all-electric delivery vehicles for deployment in California, bolstering its fleet of more than 2,200 alternative fuel vehicles...
View Entire Story » | 0 CommentsNewly discovered warrior wasp has giant jaws
A giant male wasp with jaws that, when open, are longer than its front legs was discovered on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, researchers announced last week.
Robots and the end of war as we know it
Rapid advances in robotics technology, combined with the need for innovative new technologies to combat insurgents on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, are turning robots and unmanned drones into the next hot area of military innovation. The most sophisticated of the new military bots weigh less than five pounds. Then there are others that can fit into your pocket, and be connected via a mesh network. That network gives them the ability to coordinate activities, such as detonating improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or scouting out locations, in real-time as part of a robot swarm.
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Federal funding to help expand Internet to rural areas
Telecommunications companies in Oklahoma and 15 other states will share more than $103 million in federal funding to help expand broadband Internet access to those areas of rural America that haven't been ...
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