The goal of the project is to produce one gigawattt of power within “years, not decades,” as explained by Larry Page, Google Co-founder and President of Products. One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco.

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The new technology known as programmable metallization cell (PMC) should be commercially available in memory devices within 18 months.

I wonder how PMC technology will affect PCs.

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I think every home should have a windmill and solar panels to create hydrogen for fuel-cells.

The following image was scanned from a book and shows the process: wind/solar fuel cell process.

The distance of the planet from Gliese 581 is within the right distance to make temperatures similar to Earth.  There is no proof that water exists yet.

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Interesting fact - a piece of space debris the size of a small marble, traveling at 22,000 miles per hour, has the kinetic energy of a 400 pound safe dropped from about 100 feet. Imagine the damage that would result if a marble-sized object were to collide with a space craft.

So then why are people wasting time and money and needlessly fueling the fire. Apparently, a group of people are sending part of James Doohan’s ashes to space. James Doohan is better known as Scotty, the engineer of television’s Starship Enterprise. This article talks about it, but it does not talk about what happens after the rocket gets to space (does it disintegrate, crash back to earth, or contribute space debris?).

Researchers at Saint Louis University in Missouri have come up with batteries that can run on just about any sugar source. Sugar fuel is biodegradable, renewable and can last four times longer per charge than typical lithium ion batteries. The sugar battery contains enzymes that convert sugar into electricity with water as the main byproduct.

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Wikipedia is interesting in that it shows up on the front page of google for lots of search phrases.  Therefore a student is likely to find Wikipedia when they are looking for information (about 50% of all internet searches happen on google).  Since Wikipedia is edited by the general public, it cannot always be trusted as reliable source.

It is still a good idea to use Wikipedia, but research should be backed up by other sources as well.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with checking the amount of Google back links – just type link:domainname.whatever into the Google search box.

The funny thing about Google PR is that it doesn’t seem to change real time like Alexa Ranking (check out alexa.org). One day a site can have 5/10 PageRank and the next it can be 0/10. One would think you could monitor a steady fall from 5 to 0.

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