Solar Plane Almost Ready for Record Flight
In Switzerland, two pioneers are coming closer and closer to a flight around the world powered only by solar energy.
It doesn't make good business sense, physics sense, or much of any kind of sense, to try to fly an airplane on solar power. Not yet. With the state of the technology, and how relatively young the solar sector still is, such an endeavor would be considered quixotic today—let alone in 2003, when Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, co-founders of Solar Impulse, announced they would design a solar-powered aircraft and fly it around the world. It would be a statement, they said, about our global dependence on fossil fuels and the untapped promise of burgeoning green technologies. The Swiss pilot-entrepreneurs were after "perpetual flight": a plane that could climb to 9,000 feet and fly on the sun's energy by day, then descend below cloud cover to lower altitudes, where it would cruise on stored battery power by night.
Have You Experienced Compact Fluorescent Failure?
Filed under: Gadgets and Tech, Home
As CFLs continue on the path towards mass adoption (or bridging the gap until LED bulbs become more affordable) prices are going down, bulbs are being mass-produced, and consumer groups are complaining that the quality standards are deteriorating rapidly. Has the aggressive push to make CFLs more affordable hurt quality and therefore damaged some of the CFL's hard-earned reputation?A well-manufactured CFL is supposed to last 10 times longer than an incandescent bulb, reduce emissions, and save up to $5.40 a year per bulb. Unfortunately, the push to produce these things cheaply -- CFLs can now be had for as little as $1, as opposed to $10+ years ago -- has resulted in an inferior crop of bulbs, many of which apparently fail immediately or after a few days of use.
The explanation for why this is happening appears to be in the complexity of the bulbs themselves. As explained by Alan Feit, president of Feit Electric:
"There are 40 to 50 components that go into these things. While manufacturers try to inspect all incoming materials, one little mistake may cause a performance problem."Here's what I want to know, since I haven't bought any CFLs in the last year or more (mine are a few years old and still working thankfully): have any of you received a bum CFL recently? Is there a real problem with quality going on, or is this piece in the NYT just hype?
[via Gawker]
Have You Experienced Compact Fluorescent Failure? originally appeared on Green Daily on Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:30:00 EST . Please see our terms for use of feeds.
