Daily News Channel
Grammy-nominated singer Akon has a goal of bringing solar-powered electricity to 1 million homes in Africa by the end of the year, and the singer is using millions of his own dollars for the cause. Akon started an initiative called “Akon Lighting Africa” this month
The strangest world you’ve probably never heard of is located not that far from Earth. Indeed, it’s part of our own solar system, orbiting friendly, familiar Saturn — part of the planet’s giant swarm of 62 moons.
It’s good news for solar advocates and bad news for competitors: General Electric is breaking into the solar business in a major way. In April, GE announced it had built a solar module with the highest publicly reported efficiency rate for cadmium telluride thin film — the most popular low-cost solar technology.
At Conergy AG’s Hamburg headquarters, on the top floors of a futuristic building with a striking, curved glass roof, Hans-Martin Rüter, founder and CEO of one of Germany’s most successful solar-energy companies, muses over last year’s acquisition of New Mexico– based Dankoff Solar Products Inc.
“Lights All Askew in the Heavens,” proclaimed a headline in the New York Times on November 10, 1919. The reason: results had just come in from the very first test of Albert Einstein’s new general theory of relativity
Esoteric climate-science warnings about America’s oil dependence can make even the most well-meaning of eyes glaze over. Amanda Little, author of Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells — Our Ride to the Renewable Future, took a different approach
Peter Gathungu walks more than a mile to a shopping center, where he pays a sizable sum to charge his cell phone. That’s because electricity is nonexistent in Gathungu’s hometown of Njoro, in northwest Kenya. Landlines and other forms of communication are not as efficient, so Gathungu and millions of others in emerging nations rely on mobile phones.
The world’s largest, fastest fully solar-powered boat is being built in preparation for a round-the-world challenge. The futuristic-looking “Planet Solar,” which is 100 percent powered by sunlight, is the brainchild of Swiss engineer Raphael Domjan, a former paramedic with a passion for innovative design and renewable energies.
If water is the elixir of life, it’s no wonder that Earth — which is 70% ocean — simply teems with living things.
As NASA prepares to hunt for Earth-like planets in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy, there’s new buzz that "Star Trek’s" vision of a universe full of life may not be that far-fetched. Pointy-eared aliens traveling at light speed are staying firmly in science fiction, but scientists are offering fresh insights into the possible existence of inhabited worlds and intelligent civilizations in space. There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of the new book “The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets.” He made the prediction based on the number of “super-Earths” — planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants like Jupiter — discovered so far circling stars outside the solar system.