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 The
bright future of microgrids
The nation's thirst for electricity could grow 400 billion watts in the
next quarter century, but microgrids may meet the demand without the need
for a thousand new powerplants. Microgrids,
clusters of small generators serving office buildings, industrial
parks, and homes, could make area-wide blackouts a thing of the past.
A fold-your-own
protein kit
The Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction is the Grand Prix of
bioinformatics, where competitors start with gene sequences and try to
determine the shape of unknown proteins. A
new visualization tool called ProteinShop jump-starts the race with
mathematical concepts that move chains of amino acids like a robot's very
long arm.
Tahiti
sunshine means Rocky Mountain snow
When the sea surface heats up or cools off in the tropical Pacific, wind
patterns change in middle latitudes. Shifts in the way moist air gets transported
in the atmosphere directly affect precipitation and snow accumulation in
the Western United States. A new computer model links
El Niño to water resources in the West.
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