Forced Green

Looks like T. Boone and Walmart are in the lets make a deal phase.  Walmart
has announced it would buy 15 percent of the electricity for its Texas
facilities from Duke Energy wind farm.  That 15 percent equates to 226
million kilowatt hours or 18,000 homes could be powered for a year.

Walmart is buying the power and accompanying renewable energy credits
beginning in April from a Duke Energy wind farm in Notrees, Texas. The power
will supply WalMart’s 360 facilities within the competitive Texas grid. Read more…

Ambrosia for Evergreens

If this seems a little early, some folks do have a tradition of buying their
Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving.  So……

To prolong the green and beauty of Xmas trees and the freshness of natural evergreen

holiday decorations, mix a batch of this special holiday concoction.

*    add 1/4 cup of Miconized Iron (available at garden centers) to
one gallon of hot water

*    add 2 cups of light corn syrup

*    add 4 tsps of chlorine bleach

This stuff is powerful and can stain carpets, so keep a plastic sheet spread underneath.

Trim an inch off of the tree trunk and add more as it evaporates. Using a
turkey baster would help in reducing spillage.

Your tree and natural evergreen decorations will remain fresh and beautiful right
through the holidays.

Alright, now hit me with your best family secret recipe for keeping your greens
fresh through the holidays.  Come on, tell me…

For you futurists, geeks and of course, you greenies……… look at this!

Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science By Betsy Mason
A new crop of supercomputers is breaking down the petaflop speed barrier, pushing
high-performance computing into a new realm that could change science more profoundl
than at any time since Galileo, leading researchers say.

When the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was announced at the
international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely
managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors
broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations Read more…

T. Boone Pickens is delaying his plans to build the world’s largest wind farm, according
to The Arizona Republic, which cited his remarks at a conference on Tuesday in Phoenix.

The Texas oilman, who has created a stir by his endorsement of wind power as part of a
national strategy to reduce dependence on foreign oil, cited the fall in natural gas
prices, a competing source of electricity generation, as a deterrent.

Pickens has leased hundreds of thousands of acres for a giant wind farm in West Texas,
where he plans to erect 2,700 turbines and produce energy for urban areas such as Dallas
and Fort Worth. Read more…

The Global Seed Vault, opened this year on the far-northern Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, is a backup for the backups. It’s badly needed as around half the seed banks in developing countries are at risk from natural disasters or general instability.

Superman had it right: if you want to keep something safe, build a mountain fortress above the Arctic Circle. That’s the thinking — more or less — behind the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Almost every nation keeps collections of native seeds so local crops can be replanted in case of an agricultural disaster. The Global Seed Vault, opened this year on the far-northern Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, is a backup for the backups. It’s badly needed — as many as half the seed banks in developing Read more…

A new study by scientists has determined that a type of rock found at or near
the surface in the Oman and other areas around the world could be harnessed to
soak up huge quantities of globe-warming carbon dioxide (CO2).

Geologist Peter Kelemen and geochemist Juerg Matter, both from Columbia University’s
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, made the discovery during field work in the Omani
desert, where they have worked for years.

Their studies show that the rock, known as peridotite, reacts naturally at Read more…