Ever since Plato wrote about the lost island of Atlantis, scientists and enthusiasts of every ilk have been searching for it. One location that’s gathered a lot of attention is Dogger Bank, a vast shallow sandbank in the North Sea. Larger than Connecticut, the bank might once have formed a land bridge connecting the U.K. with continental Europe, but disappeared 7,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, when melting glaciers caused seas to rise.
Here’s a nightmare story for you: Machines, endowed with artificial intelligence, get smarter than their creators, take charge and attempt to save humans from themselves. Oops. Smarts, it turns out, are different from wisdom. Pooh-poohing a saying variously attributed to Socrates, Aristotle as well Albert Einstein — the more I know, the more I realize I know nothing — the machines push ahead and bring civilization crashing down on all of us.
The Scheid family has been farming grapes in the lush agricultural region of California’s Salinas Valley for almost half a century. They own 12 estate vineyards on a 70-mile stretch just miles from the ocean. Every year, they harvest enough pinot noir, chardonnay and other varieties from their 4,000 acres to fill more than a million cases, wines that find a home on the shelves of national retailers like Kroger and Whole Foods, as well as a multitude of restaurants.
Germany’s huge new offshore wind farm Merkur is an awesome sight in its own right. But it’s also a great illustration of why GE’s decision to combine its Renewable Energy business with its Grid Solutions unit, announced today, makes a lot of sense.
Dan Juhl was building a wind farm in Woodstock, Minnesota, back in 1998, and he’d hit a snag. He needed to supply electricity to a small office building for the farm’s engineers and operators, but he couldn’t afford the local utility’s fees for hooking the building up to the grid. He could tap the wind turbines, but then how would he keep the lights on through the summer doldrums, when the wind dies down for days or weeks at a time? The solution seemed obvious: use solar panels to complement the wind.
Much like hurricanes in the northern Atlantic, typhoons are a perennial menace threatening Japan, the Philippines, China and other nations sitting on the Pacific Rim. Last year the region endured 11 of these tropical cyclones, whose winds can toss vehicles into the air, uproot trees and tear roofs from houses.