Can Aluminum Go Green?
Many emissions from Earth can cause warming, from cars to cows and a multitude of other things. Some of the top contributors to the warming are electricity power plants (40%), transportation (33%), farming, deforestation, fertilizers, and oil and gas drilling. An important single digit contributor is aluminum. It seems like such a clean and benign […]
The Limits to Growth
If you are a pessimist and revel in the gloom and doom the future may hold, robots and artificial intelligence (AI) can add a lot of fodder. Robots are mostly in manufacturing plants today, but their presence is growing in many other places, including hospitals, restaurants, retail stores, and homes. Millions of jobs will be […]
Can You Wait Just A Zeptosecond?
An Electron escaping a helium atom (M. Ossiander (TUM) / M. Schultz (MPQ)) I am sure we all remember learning about atoms when we were growing up. The atomic nucleus is the small, dense region consisting of protons and neutrons at the center of an atom. The protons are positively charged, and neutrons are electrically neutral. (Scientists have since learned […]
Which Is Worse: Power Outage or Digital Outage?
A friend in Westport, Connecticut called me yesterday from his landline. Landlines have declined due to the advancement of mobile network technology and the obsolescence of the old copper wire network. Eventually the metallic networks will be completely out of date, perhaps within the next five years. I don’t know many people who have landlines […]
The Power of Wind
Last weekend, the weather was nice so we departed our summer home on Lake Wallenpaupack for a random motorcycle ride on the backroads of northeastern Pennsylvania. We rode through Greentown, Hamlin, Jessup, Archbald (not a typo), Jermyn, Carbondale, Waymart, Honesdale, Hawley, Paupack, and back to Greentown, where we live. During the second half of our […]
