Blogs / Discoblog

· The “Father of the internet” says the Web will run out of IP addresses in 2010.

· Chances are, if you’re reading this, you spend 25 percent of your time doing personal tasks online at work.

· Google’s Tenth Birthday contest: The five best ideas to help as many people around the world as possible will get a total of $10 million in funding. Hurry! Submissions are due by October 20th.

· Dear Sarah Palin: In case you hadn’t noticed, a village in Alaska is melting.

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The higher you go, the windier it gets—wind at high altitudes is more abundant and consistent than the airflow at ground level. That’s a gold mine for those seeking to harness wind energy. But our standard turbines, behemoth windmills with heavy spinning blades, can only be built so high. So how do you get “up where the air is clear” and the wind rarely stops? You fly a kite.

In a recent experiment, Dutch researchers say they flew a 10-square-meter kite and created enough energy to power 10 houses. The kite is attached to a generator by a string; it generates power by pulling the string and turning the generator as the wind lifts it higher in the sky. Study leader Wubbo Ockels (who’s a former astronaut) says he then turns the kite so that it loses lift and descends, allowing the process to repeat. If the researchers had to use a lot of extra energy to pull the kite back down, the technique wouldn’t be nearly as promising.

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·Who wants an electric scooter? Two weeks ago the answer was Paris taxi drivers; this week it’s Providence, R.I., police officers.

·For a cool $10,000, you too could have a glorious piece of geek decor: the Periodic Coffee Table.

·“Einstein was wrong, and I can prove it!”—rating the minds of fringe scientists.

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When Google Street View was released less than a year ago, its 360-degree panoramic shots from ground level changed the way people explored new cities (along with providing a Web-based haven for people watching). Now, Google is taking this technology to a higher level (har) with Google Sky, an Internet tool that brings you unlimited online stargazing opportunities. Google Sky lets you traipse amongst the celestial bodies, search for planets and galaxies, and even switch to microwave and infrared views. And if you’re not having luck finding anything cool yourself (there’s a lot of nothing out there), you can head to the image galleries, which take you to some sweet shots from the Hubble, Chandra X-Ray, GALEX UV, and Spitzer infrared scopes.

The tool is a bit slow, so if you’re not the biggest fan of watching images load you can download the Google Earth application for free, which includes Google Sky as an additional feature.

Image: Google