| The Year in Energy and Flying Windmills |
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Better battery: Semi-solid electrode materials are pumped through tubes in this prototype that could lead to more affordable electric cars. Yet-Ming ChiangSurprising successes helped offset disappointing failures in solar, biofuels, and nuclear power.It was supposed to mark the ascendance of the electric car as the first full year of sales for GM's Volt and Nissan's Leaf, which represent the leading edge of electric vehicles planned by major automakers. But GM fell far short of its sales goals for the year, no doubt plagued by high costs due to expensive batteries. And the company ended the year under a cloud of smoke as the Volt's battery pack caught on fire after safety testing.It was the year by which advanced-biofuels companies were supposed to be producing 250 million gallons of fuels from grass and wood chips to meet a U.S. federal mandate. [Read the full article] Antipiracy legislation headed for a U.S. Senate vote in January could be fraught with downsides.Internet legislation that is scheduled for a vote in the U.S. Senate next month would aim to stop the unlicensed downloading of billions of dollars' worth of movies and music—as well as the trade in counterfeit drugs and other goods—by blocking access to certain websites, many of them registered abroad. But its basic strategies could lead to trouble on several fronts.For one thing, the crackdown may unintentionally weaken Internet security. That is because the legislation could let courts order Internet service providers, search engines, domain-name servers and others to block Web addresses or send people to addresses other than the ones they typed or clicked. That trick, called redirection, is just the kind thing security engineers want to stamp out, because it's also a key tool for committing Internet fraud. [Read the full article] In October, a reanalysis of historical observations suggested that Earth narrowly avoided an extinction event just over a hundred years agoOn 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation. Jos Bonilla counted some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun.Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L'Astronomie in 1886. Unable to account for the phenomenon, the editor of the journal suggested, rather incredulously, that it must have been caused by birds, insects or dust passing front of the Bonilla's telescope. (Since then, others have adopted Bonilla's observations as the first evidence of UFOs.)Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, give a different interpretation. They think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. [Read the full article] 
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