Power from controlled Tornadoes

Louis Michaud an engineer with 24 years of experience in the energy field, wants to build a power plant the harnesses man made tornadoes to generate electricity. he has several patents on his designs and many scientists claim it is at least feasible in concept. He calls his concept an Atmospheric Vortex Engine. You can look up the Wikipedia article on it here.
Currently Michaud is trying to raise the $60 million that he estimates would be needed to build a prototype. A few small scale prototypes have already been built and tested. Michaud envisions a vortex that climbs 20 twenty kilometers into the atmosphere for the finalized plant. If it works, his "power plants" would be visible to anyone in the vicinity of the plant. And they certainly would look incredible.

Via UberReview: What a Concept, Emissions Free Tornado Power

Power outages in San Francisco

Yesterday afternoon a major power outage in San Francisco took many popular websites down. Sites affected included CraigsList, TypePad, and LiveJournal. The most surprising thing in all of the outages, was not that the power went down, but rather that the backup systems for many of these sites failed completely. Companies spend fortunes to provide backup power systems and redundancy for their servers. To have all of that redundancy fail at the same time is unprecedented. It just shows us how fragile our information infrastructure is.
Power Outages In San Francisco Bring Down Major Websites

Power without wires or batteries

A team of scientists led by Prof. Marin Soljacic, from MIT, have demonstrated a working method of transmitting power wirelessly using a system known as electromagnetic resonance. Transmitting power wirelessly is not new, but using electromagnetic resonance to do so is. All previous methods of power transmission involved using radiation in some form. Most commonly radio waves. But since radiation tends to go all directions, it isn't very efficient and tends to waste a lot of power. Other methods such as magnetic induction required very close, almost touching, proximity. This method is unique, in that the distance can be quite a ways away. say, across the room.
Soljacic says he envisions a day when wires and batteries are unnecessary. Maybe one day you and I will be able to power your whole house without wires.

Physorg article: Goodbye wires... MIT experimentally demonstrates wireless power transfer

Secret Nuclear plans from 1940 revealed

It seems that James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron, sent detailed plans for building a nuclear reactor to the royal archives for safekeeping in 1940. Those plans were lost, and have remained sealed until recently when they were opened to mark the 75th anniversary of the discovery of the neutron. James sent them to royal archives because he felt that it would be irresponsible to publish them during WW2. There they remained until their rediscovery during a cataloging effort currently underway.
The most interesting thing about this news, is that the first nuclear reactor was built in 1951. A full 11 years after the work done by James in the UK. Makes you wonder what might have happened if his work hadn't been lost.

Check out the story at BBC News: Nuclear reactor secrets revealed

USB power in your car

I really don't know why someone didn't think of this before. With as many devices as there are out there that charge using a USB port, this could be really useful. 12 volt power extenders, aren't anything new. In fact I've got one in my car right now. But adding a USB charge port to the extender is sheer genius.

You can buy it here: VictorMall, though you will need to be able to read korean to decifer the site.
Found via Gizmodo: Seiko EM-49 Car Socket Power Strip