Category: Uncategorized

A tower of salt, surrounded by sunlight-sensing and -reflecting mirrors. Photo © SolarReserve

Two months ago we posted about non-photovoltaic solar power via a story from Scientific American, and this week they’re exploring the subject again, this time in the desert of Nevada with the first utility-scale “concentrating solar” plant that can provide electricity even at night. Concentrating solar involves storing heat from the sun rather than converting light into electricity, and apparently molten sodium and potassium nitrates can do this very effectively. Knvul Sheikh reports:

Deep in the Nevada desert, halfway between Las Vegas and Reno, a lone white tower stands 195 meters tall, gleaming like a beacon. It is surrounded by more than 10,000 billboard-size mirrors focusing the sun’s rays on its tip. The Crescent Dunes “concentrating solar power” plant looks like some advanced communication device for aliens. But the facility’s innovation lies in the fact…

Dabancheng wind farm in China’s Xinjiang province (Source: Bob Sacha/Corbis, via Dailytech.com)

Wind power, as we’ve written before, has great potential as an alternative energy source, although there are certain issues to take into account. China is installing the most new wind turbines per year, but has yet to produce the most wind-generated electricity given barriers by the coal industry. Prachi Patel reports for Conservation Magazine:

China is the world’s top wind energy installer. The country’s wind installations have a capacity of generating 145 Gigawatts, twice that of the United States and about a third of the world’s total wind power. Yet the country produces less wind electricity than the US. Last month, researchers from Harvard University and Tsinghua University argued in the journal Nature Energy that this underperformance is due to deliberate favoring of coal over wind by grid operators, delays in connecting new wind farms to the…

This 4 July 2016 video shows a tawny pipit in the Murcia region in Spain.

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According to news reports Over 30 people have been killed following heavy rains that lashed Uttarakhand  resulting in landslides and road blockages. Death toll due to cloudburst & incessant rains in Chamoli and Pithoragarh could likely rise further.

Due to the heavy rain  in cloudburst, river Alaknanda was flowing above the danger level. The  flash floods is causing heavy casualties.

Flash floods are slightly different from normal floods. Normal floods involve water rising and overflowing from its normal path. However, flash floods appear quickly and move swiftly across land with little warning. Flash floods occur for a variety of reasons including concentrated rainfall during a slow moving thunderstorm, hurricanes, and tropical storms.

A cloudburst is sudden copious rainfall. It is a sudden aggressive rainstorm falling for a short period of time limited to a small geographical area.They are called ‘bursts’ probably because it was believed earlier that clouds were solid…