flickering pictures

Why shallots? Why not shallots?
From the Times of India:

India would make Pakistan a barren land in the next six years by blocking its water through construction of dams in violation of the Indus Water Treaty, Pakistan Indus Water Commissioner Jamaat Ali Shah said on Monday.
[…] Dismissing India’s claim that it had stopped Pakistan’s water […]

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CNN reports:

Exxon Mobil, the leading U.S. oil company, said its third-quarter net profit was $14.83 billion, [or] $1,865.69 per second, nearly $400 a second more than the prior mark.

No U.S. company has ever earned more profit in a single quarter.
To put things into perspective, $14.83 billion is enough to wipe out the crippling external debts […]

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The Los Angeles Times reports that peeling a strip of Scotch tape off the roll in a vacuum chamber releases enough energy to x-ray your finger. The process is called triboluminescence and apparently creates visible light, too — something you can try at home — though you likely haven’t noticed unless you’ve been taping […]

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Incidentally, 420 miles is the distance from New York to Boston and back again. In (an admittedly unfair) comparison, Toyota advertises 45mpg (highway) for its Prius.
And the engineering students, by the way, don’t attend classes at M.I.T., Stanford or Cambridge, but rather at the Rashtreeya Vidhyalaya College of Engineering, Bangalore.
From the Times of India:

The […]

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I love this sort of thing.
From Damn Interesting:

In 1891, Nikola Tesla gave a lecture for the members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York City, where he made a striking demonstration. In each hand he held a gas discharge tube, an early version of the modern fluorescent bulb. The tubes were not […]

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Not to be a jerk or anything, but it kind of seems like a stupid question: should we find new ways to feed and maintain our addiction to oil, or decrease our reliance on the fossil fuels that are empoverishing our people and altering our fragile climate?
These folks think they have the answer:

I work in […]

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Gas prices through the roof? Trust a practical country to come up with a practical solution.

From the Times of India:

The engines of the buses have been tuned to allow a maximum speed of 60 km only, an official said here on Wednesday.
The tuning of the engines would give 0.40 km mileage per litre. “The […]

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Researchers in Idaho have created inexpensive photovoltaic plastic sheets with nanoantennas that collect waste energy from factories and power plants as well as the sun. They store energy 24 hours a day — whether the sun is shining or not.
This could be a huge breakthrough for clean, green solar power, since critics have long […]

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The good people at FlowingData (I’m really getting hooked on that site) have put together a neato animated bar chart to show the ups and downs of gasoline prices across eight U.S. regions since April 1993. Back then, the price the pump was a mere $1.07 per gallon — or a piddling 28 cents […]

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Russia plans to launch the world’s first floating nuclear power plant in 2010 — a two-reactor barge the size of a football field. The idea is to sail it around the Arctic Ocean bringing electricity to isolated coastal towns, where shipping coal or other fossil fuels is inefficient and unprofitable. The ship will […]

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