Danish physicist Niels Bohr, whose model of atoms helped explain the spectrum of light emitted and absorbed by different elements, as illustrated by the spectrum emitted by the Sun. AB Lagrelius & Westphal, via Wikipedia (Niels Bohr photo); N.A.Sharp, NOAO/NSO/Kitt Peak FTS/AURA/NSF (solar spectrum) Niels Bohr's model of the hydrogen atom—first published 100 years ago and commemorated in a special issue of Nature—is simple, elegant, revolutionary, and wrong. Well, "wrong" isn't exactly accurate—incomplete or preliminary are better terms. The Bohr model was an essential step toward an accurate theory of atomic structure, which required the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. Even in its preliminary state, the model is good enough for many calculations in astronomy, chemistry, and other fields, saving the trouble of performing often-complex calculations with the Schrödinger equation. This conceptual and mathematical simplicity keeps the Bohr model relevant. Despite a century of work, atomic physics is not a quiet field. Researchers continue to probe the structure of atoms, especially in their more extreme and exotic forms, to help understand the nature of electron interactions. They've created anti-atoms of antiprotons and positrons to see if they have the same spectra as their matter counterparts or even to see if they fall up instead of down in a gravitational field. Others have made huge atoms by exciting electrons nearly to the point where they break free, and some have made even more exotic "hollow atoms," where the inner electrons of atoms are stripped out while the outer electrons are left in place. Bohr and his legacy The Bohr atomic model is familiar to many: a dense nucleus of positive charge with electrons orbiting at specific energies. Because of that rigid structure (in contrast to planets, which can orbit a star at any distance), atoms can only absorb and emit light of certain wavelengths, which correspond to the differences in energy levels within the atom. Bohr neatly solved the problem of that feature of the hydrogen spectrum and (along with contributions by other physicists) a few more complex atoms. Even though the Bohr model was unable to provide quantitative predictions for many atomic phenomena, it did explain the general behavior of atoms—specifically why each type of atom and molecule has its own unique spectrum. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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GameInformer In the coming console wars, small differences between multiplatform games probably aren't going to be enough to give a system a significant advantage over another. It's the exclusive titles that are going to largely determine the winner in the next-gen console battle. Which is why today's leaked announcement that Respawn Entertainment's Titanfall will be exclusive to Microsoft systems and PCs is such a big deal. Microsoft was rumored to have picked up the exclusive console rights to Respawn's online-focused first-person mech shooter back in April, and that information has now been confirmed in the latest issue of Game Informer, which leaked out in digital form via Google Play today. While Respawn is working on the Xbox One and PC versions, an Xbox 360 version is also being developed by an outside developer. The article also reveals the Titanfall name for the first time and a spring 2014 release window. Titanfall will use a heavily modified version of Valve's Source engine to produce 60 fps performance, according to the article. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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It has been over three years since Amazon Web Services introduced its Relational Database Service (RDS). But until now, RDS has ostensibly been in "beta"—available only to a subset of customers. This week, Amazon announced that RDS is generally available. It now supports multiple database types, and customers can get a service-level agreement for their hosted databases if they're mirrored across multiple Amazon "availability zones" (AZs). Amazon is committing to "reasonable efforts" to ensure that multi-AZ RDS instances have at least 99.95 percent uptime. Facing increased competition from Google's Cloud Platform—which includes the MySQL-based Google Cloud SQL relational database service—Amazon has expanded the types of databases that can be hosted with RDS as well. RDS is now available in three database "flavors": MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle (though the multizone service-level agreement is only available with MySQL and Oracle databases). RDS also now supports "read replicas" within and across availability zones to help scale up applications with high volumes of database reads. By comparison, Google Cloud SQL includes geographic replication as part of the service but offers no service-level guarantees. At their most basic configurations, the pricing for RDS and Google's Cloud SQL services are very similar—though the different approaches to pricing and instance configurations vary widely based on size and usage levels. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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Elisa atene The smartcards used to pay for public transportation in the Netherlands may now be hacked with an Android phone, according to a report from NOS.nl. The crack requires two free apps that allow the cracker to load the card with money and travel without paying anything. NOS carries little detail on the nature of the hack, but Dutch hackers appear to have a somewhat long and storied history of cracking Netherlands’ smartcard, the OV-Chipkaart. The chip inside the card has been modified repeatedly by the card creator, Trans Link, but there are no shortage of tutorials on how to hack them, and there are plenty of stories about hacks that have taken place. There are also less technical Android apps to circumvent paying for transport, like OV Hacker, which plays the tone a Chipkaart would make when successfully scanned in order to trick bus drivers. A research article from 2009 laid out how the RFID chip inside the card can be read with an NFC reader, decrypted with one application, and the reloaded with the desired amount by another application. The chip has been modified since then, but there’s at least one thread on the xda-developers forums where a user notes that his Android smartphone was able to read out the (encrypted) contents of his OV-Chipkaart with the NFC reader inside his phone. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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We learned yesterday that the National Security Agency (NSA) obtained a top-secret court order that forces Verizon to hand telephone records of millions of US customers over to the government. Today, the Obama administration is defending the practice as a critical tool for preventing terrorist attacks. The Guardian, which uncovered and published the secret court order, today detailed the White House's response. The Guardian wrote: The White House has sought to justify its surveillance of millions of Americans' phone records as anger grows over revelations that a secret court order gives the National Security Agency blanket authority to collect call data from a major phone carrier. Politicians and civil liberties campaigners described the disclosures, revealed by the Guardian on Wednesday, as the most sweeping intrusion into private data they had ever seen by the US government. But the Obama administration, while declining to comment on the specific order, said the practice was "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States." The phone record collection doesn't target only suspected terrorists. The court order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forces Verizon to give the NSA "all call detail records or 'telephony' metadata created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls." The order, which covers a three-month period ending July 19, means the government is receiving data such as "phone numbers of both parties, the duration of the conversation, the time of the conversation, location data, telephone calling card numbers, and unique identifiers pertaining to the phones," as we noted yesterday. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Lee Hutchinson/Aurich Lawson Specs at a glance: Nokia Lumia 928 Screen 768×1280 4.5" (332 ppi) AMOLED OS Windows Phone 8 (8.0.10211.204) CPU Dual core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus (MSM8960) RAM 1GB GPU Qualcomm Adreno 225 Storage 32GB NAND flash, non-expandable Frequencies supported CDMA (800, 1900 MHz); GSM (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz); UMTS (850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz); LTE (700, 800, 900, 1800, 2100, 2600 MHz) Networking 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, NFC, LTE Ports Micro-USB, headphones Camera 8.7MP rear camera, 1.2MP front camera Size 5.24" × 2.71" × 0.40" (133 × 68.9 × 10.1 mm) Weight 5.7 oz (162 g) Battery 2000 mAh (non-removable) Starting price $499.99 with no contract; $99.99 on-contract Nokia's Lumia 928 is a lightly updated version of last year's Windows Phone juggernaut, the Lumia 920. Six months after the 920's release, the 928 brings a few small improvements over the 920—the shape is a bit more squarish, it has a new Xenon flash for its camera, and it has an AMOLED screen that looks absolutely marvelous. As with its predecessor, the Lumia 928's camera is one of its most heavily promoted features. With this in mind, Ars reporter Casey Johnston wrote a brief hands-on post with our Lumia 928 as soon as we received it from Nokia. The comments from that article brought up a lot of questions about the camera, including requests for full-resolution original images directly from the device. We've done our best to answer the call, and in the image comparisons below, we've included links to full-res versions of all the included pictures. First things first, though. Last year in our Ultimate Guide to Smartphones feature set, we wound up preferring HTC's flagship Windows phone, the 8x, over the Lumia 920. A lot of it had to do with the fact that the 920 was just a darn big phone. The 928 is a bit taller (133 mm versus 130) but it's also a teeny bit narrower and skinnier (about 2 mm on width and about .6 mm on thickness). And the difference in size isn't nearly as apparent as the difference in shape—the 928 is a lot more squared off. Read 45 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Culture secretary, Maria Miller, is planning to meet with Google, Facebook and other major online companies to discuss how to police access to illegal content on the internet. The move comes in the wake of the trials of Mark Bridger (jailed for the murder of five-year-old April Jones) and Stuart Hazell (jailed for murdering 12-year-old Tia Sharp), both of whom had accessed child pornography online. MPs and charities have already called for ISPs and search engines to restrict access to pornography in reaction to the cases, but the demands feed into wider concerns about access to adult content as evidenced by the fact the government is investigating an initiative to block access to porn over public Wi-Fi. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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AMD's low-voltage APUs could find a new home in both Chromebooks and Android devices. AMD AMD continues to soldier forward in the PC market, but CEO Rory Read wants the company to get at least 20 percent of its revenue from other sources by the end of this year. Some of this money will come in from next-generation game consoles like the PlayStation 4 or the Xbox One. And some of it, according to a report from PC World, will soon be coming from Android tablets and Chromebooks. "We are very committed to Windows 8; we think it's a great operating system, but we also see a market for Android and Chrome developing as well," AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager Lisa Su said at this week's Computex trade show. This runs counter to her statements from earlier this year, when the company was "betting heavily on Windows 8" and had no immediate plans to support Android. Su didn't give a timeframe for when either Chrome OS or Android versions compatible with AMD chips would be available. However, the company did recently announce some low-voltage APUs (codenamed Temash) with TDPs of as little as 3.9 watts that could easily fit into this type of device. Those chips will supposedly be shipping soon, if they aren't already. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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On Wednesday, The Guardian published a secret order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing the National Security Agency (NSA) to demand vast swaths of metadata from Verizon. The order, which specifies that Verizon hand over the information on an “ongoing, daily basis,” encompasses the phone records pertaining to all of Verizon's American customers, whether the communications are between US-based callers, or between a US caller and an international caller. The order is unique in its broad demands and shows that the NSA is amassing a hoard of metadata that includes the phone numbers of both parties, the duration of the conversation, the time of the conversation, location data, telephone calling card numbers, and unique identifiers pertaining to the phones. While this order does not permit the NSA to listen to the conversation itself and also does not require Verizon to hand over the “name, address, or financial information of a subscriber or customer,” the metadata still offers more information about the phone calls of American citizens than many would feel comfortable handing over. The document also contains a gag order preventing recipients from talking about the NSA's demands. Gag orders have been the subject of much controversy, and in March a federal judge in California ruled that such gag orders are unconstitutional. When that ruling was made, the judge gave the government 90 days to appeal before the ruling took effect. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Wikimedia Hundreds of thousands of websites could be endangered by publicly available attack code exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Plesk control panel. This particular vulnerability gives hackers control of the server it runs on according to security researchers. The code-execution vulnerability affects default versions 8.6, 9.0, 9.2, 9.3, and 9.5.4 of Plesk running on the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems, a configuration used by more than 360,000 websites. Plesk running on Windows and other types of Unix haven't been tested to see if those configurations are vulnerable as well. The exploit code was released Wednesday on the Full-Disclosure mailing list by "kingcope," a pseudonymous security researcher who has frequented the forum for years. He has a proven track record for developing reliable exploits. "This vulnerability has a high severity rating," kingcope wrote in an e-mail to Ars. "An attacker can use this exploit to get a command line shell remotely with the privileges of the configured Apache user." Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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First look at Windows 8.1 If you want to know what the Start button will look like in Windows 8.1 when it ships later this year, Microsoft now has a video to show you. The video highlights a bunch of the user interface changes that Windows 8.1 makes. In it, Jensen Harris of the Windows User Experience Team demonstrates the richer customization options, the better All Apps view, and the more flexible multitasking. In addition to making the division between applications in the side-by-side multitasking view flexible (as distinct from Windows 8's fixed sizes), Windows 8.1 also uses the split view automatically in some circumstances. For example, Harris demonstrates opening an image attached to an e-mail. The image does open in the photo viewer. But rather than completely obscuring the mail app, it instead shrinks the mail app to a narrow strip with the picture occupying most, but not all, of the screen. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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A new federal judge assigned to the case of Wisconsin man Jeffrey Feldman has stayed a previous decision that would have compelled Feldman to decrypt several hard drives believed to contain child pornography. Previously, Feldman had until Tuesday June 4, 2013 to comply. Feldman's case could have significant implications for compelling criminal suspects to decrypt digital storage devices going forward. In a two-page decision (PDF) published on Tuesday, the new magistrate in the case, Judge Rudolph Randa, granted an “emergency motion to vacate or stay Judge Callahan’s order and to establish a de novo briefing schedule on the issue of Feldman’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.” Callahan, the previous judge, was taken off the case as he was not an "Article III Judge" and did not have the authority to grant such an order in the first place. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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FirasMT In the past few years, there have been a regular series of announcements about devices that cloak something in space. These typically bend light around the cloak so that it comes out behind the object looking as if it had never shifted at all. In contrast, there's just been a single description of a temporal cloaking device, something that hides an event in time. The device works because in some media different frequencies of light move at different speeds. With the right combination of frequency shifts, it's possible to create and then re-seal a break in a light beam. But that particular cloak could only create breaks in the light beam that lasted picoseconds. Basically, you couldn't hide all that much using it. Now, researchers have taken the same general approach and used it to hide signals in a beam of light sent through an optical fiber. When the cloak is in operation, the signals largely disappear. In this case the cloak can hide nearly half of the total bandwidth of the light, resulting in a hidden transmission rate of 12.7 Gigabits per second. The work started with the Talbot effect in mind, in which a diffraction grating causes repeated images of the grating to appear at set distances away from it. The cloaking device relies on the converse of this. At other distances, the light intensity drops to zero. The key trick is to convert the Talbot effect from something that happens in space to something that happens in time. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Google is bringing the stock Android 4.2 keyboard to the Google Play store for free. Andrew Cunningham We've written before about how Google is working behind-the-scenes to break different Android components out from the core of the operating system. This allows the company to update the operating system without needing to wait for its partners to do so. Today, Google continued this adventure by releasing the stock Android software keyboard on Google Play, giving users of devices from Samsung, HTC, LG, and others an easy way to stop using their respective OEM-supplied keyboards. Google's Keyboard is only available in English for now, but other countries will reportedly be added soon. Google's keyboard offers both gesture-based typing and typing suggestions and was last updated as part of Android 4.2. Now it will be available for all Android phones and tablets running version 4.0 and above. Downloading and launching the Google Keyboard app will walk you through turning on the keyboard and setting it as your default, after which your Android phone will have the same typing experience available on Nexus devices. Switching back to the keyboard that came with your phone (or any other alternative keyboards you may have downloaded) can be done from the device's Settings page. In an attempt to mollify other third-parties that might be threatened by Google offering its own keyboard in its app store, Google threw them a bone in the announcement post: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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bbmcshane Under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Americans are generally protected from unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents—but we have less privacy at the border, usually when entering the United States from abroad. At present, border agents do not have to provide a warrant or have reasonable suspicion to search your laptop—they essentially just need a hunch. For some time now, civil liberties groups have been pressing to change that policy. At the very least, these groups would like to compel the government to explain its legal rationale. Back in February 2013, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released an executive summary (PDF) of its findings that was intended to justify warrantless border searches of laptops. However, that summary did not include any substantial analysis of the reasoning the government provides. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Changing the channel with a wave from the kitchen in the WiSee test apartment. University of Washington Flipping off your television may gain a whole new meaning thanks to a technology being developed by a team of researchers at the University of Washington. The team, led by Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Shyam Gollakota, developed a system dubbed WiSee, which uses radio waves from Wi-Fi to sense human body movements and detect command gestures from anywhere within a home or office. The results of the WiSee team's research have been submitted to the ACM's 19th International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom '13). Unlike other "machine vision" sensors such as Microsoft's Kinect, the system can sense gestures anywhere within a house or office environment using the Wi-Fi signals created by devices already in the environment. The user doesn't need to be within line of sight of the WiSee receiver—or even in the same room. A demonstration of WiSee in action. WiSee "sees" gestures by detecting subtle changes in the radio signals bouncing off of and passing through human bodies as they move. Changing the body's position or moving a hand or foot causes a small Doppler frequency shift in Wi-Fi signals that can be detected by a receiver. Using algorithms to screen out normal variations in the broadband signals of devices and correct for normal gaps in broadcasts, WiSee can separate out the signatures of a series of movements from the rest of the broadband signals. And by using multiple antennas and a Wi-Fi receiver with multiple input multiple output (MIMO) capability, WiSee can "lock on" to a specific user with an antenna from among a group of other people in a space. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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In the immortal words of Rihanna, "where have you been?" After a long hiatus from Amazon, the giant Kindle DX has made a triumphant return to the online store, according to The Verge. Literally nothing about the product appears to have changed—features and price all appear to be the same. The Kindle DX has been on life support since being introduced back in mid-2009. It's a giant 10-inch screen e-reader meant for textbooks and newspapers and priced at a whopping $489. Seven months later, the iPad was introduced for $10 more, and the world more or less forgot about the unwieldy single-tasking device. After minor upgrades and price drops, the Kindle DX was seemingly retired from Amazon’s store back in October when it was priced at $299. Now it has made an unceremonious return, with no apparent differences. The Kindle DX is now almost an artifact of the olden days of the Kindle line—the QWERTY keyboard is intact, as is the free 3G network access, and there is nary a “Special Offer” to be found crowding up the sleep screen. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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A new study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project finds that for the first time, a majority of American adults (56 percent) own smartphones. Thirty-five percent have mobile phones that aren’t smartphones, with 9 percent owning no cell phone at all. The research also found that, as you might expect, wealthier Americans have a higher likelihood of owning a smartphone, but “younger adults—regardless of income level—are very likely to be smartphone owners.” That seems to suggest that the trend toward smartphone adoption will continue. As we’ve seen over the last few months and years, Android users are on the rise—now representing 28 percent of all mobile phone users in America, with iPhone users at 25 percent and BlackBerry users falling sharply to 4 percent, according to Pew. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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mygothlaundry Patent reform is in the air. Five bills are pending in Congress and just yesterday the Obama Administration put out a strongly worded report on the issue. Given the timeliness of the issue, it's no shock to see an op-ed about the issue in today's New York Times, suggesting a solution to "[t]he onslaught of litigation brought by 'patent trolls.'" But the missive comes from a surprising and influential source—Randall Rader, the Chief Judge for the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears all patent appeals. The jurisprudence coming from that court in the past two decades has done a great deal to enable—arguably, to create—modern patent trolling. It enacted the State Street Bank decision, which opened up the floodgates to software patenting in 1998. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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BlackBerry's next flagship handset will be the all-touchscreen BlackBerry A10 according to CNET. The A10 will follow in the footsteps of the BlackBerry Z10 and Q10, the company's respective touch-enabled and keyboard-equipped handsets. The A10 is slated to launch during the holiday season. There is not much more information about the A10, but apparently Sprint has confirmed that it will carry the handset. That's an interesting bit of news since the carrier held out on BlackBerry's first touchscreen device and opted to wait for the launch of the Q10. And that device still doesn't have a solid release date beyond "late summer." BlackBerry sales have been under some scrutiny lately. Shipping estimates for its Z10 handset have been improperly reported. BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins told AllThingsD back in February that the handset launch was one of the best ever in Canada but there were no official sales numbers to refer to. Later in March, BlackBerry held its financial earnings call and revealed that the company had missed its sale projection for the final quarter of its fiscal 2013 year. It's also unclear how many Z10 handsets are actually being sold because the company isn't releasing much information about sales either. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Mac users running the latest version of Apple's OS X are now fully protected against an attack that allows hackers to hijack some encrypted browsing sessions. Apple OS X users also received new defenses against malware attacks that exploit Oracle's frequently abused Java browser plugin. In all, an OS X update released Tuesday fixes more then 30 security bugs in addition to a host of minor usability issues. On the same day, Apple also updated its Safari browser to plug more than two dozen security holes, some of which could allow attackers to remotely execute malicious code. The most notable fix included an update to the open-source OpenSSL cryptography library to prevent attacks that allowed hackers to hijack browser sessions even when they were protected by the HTTPS encryption. Banks, e-commerce merchants, and other sites use this encryption to prevent snooping on sensitive transactions and to prove the authenticity of their webpages. The "CRIME" attacks—short for Compression Ratio Info-leak Made Easy—are able to decrypt encrypted communications when they incorporate one of two data-compression schemes designed to reduce network bandwidth. The OpenSSL fix works by disabling compression when using the transport layer security (TLS) protocol. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The day before Iowa City voted to ban the use of red-light cameras, drones, and license plate readers, another city council in Northern California voted to approve the purchase and installation of 39 license plate readers (LPRs) to be deployed at its city border. The Piedmont city council approved a measure (PDF) on Monday evening to spend $678,613 to acquire and install 39 cameras at 15 locations along its city border with Oakland (which completely surrounds it). Piedmont has not yet said when it expects the system to be fully deployed. The city of 11,000 people will now become one of a short list of cities around the United States (including Tiburon, CA, and Sugar Land, TX) to have LPRs scanning every car that drives in and out of the city, instantly checking them against a “hot list” of wanted vehicles. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Guoyan Wang and Yan Liang / Nature The ultimate dream of nanotechnology is to be able to manipulate matter atom-by-atom. To do that, we first need to know where to find the atoms. In what could be a major step in that direction, researchers have developed a method that can determine the shape of a single molecule and identify its constituent atoms. Nature limits what can be seen with the help of light alone. Only objects separated by less than half the wavelength of the light that illuminates them can be observed. To overcome this limit, Edward Hutchinson Synge came up with an idea in 1928 of imaging things at an even finer scale. The idea was to shine light on a small particle and study the scattered light that reflected back, making the wavelength of incoming light irrelevant. The realisation of Synge’s goal had to wait until the 1980s, when Heinrich Rohrer, the father of nanotechnology, developed a completely different technology: scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM). This method uses a special property of electric current called quantum tunnelling to achieve single-atom resolutions. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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It started with rumors, graduated to leaked photos, and now we can safely say that the Samsung Galaxy S 4 Active is official. Samsung confirmed the existence of the device today in a press release, referring to the device as a rugged version of Samsung's latest handset. The phone features the same specifications as its less-adventurous sibling: a 5-inch display and 1080p resolution, a 1.9GHz quad-core processor (it isn't specified in the press release whether it's Qualcomm's Snapdragon 600 or something else), and Android 4.2 with the touchscreen overlay. The are a few differences in hardware, however; the Galaxy S 4 Active features an LCD TFT rather than an Super AMOLED, and its rear-facing camera is only 8 megapixels, though there's a physical camera shutter button for users to take shots under water without having to press the screen (there is also a camera mode dubbed "Aqua Mode," which increases the "visual quality and clarity" of underwater images). It has a 2,600 mAh battery pack and will be available with 16GB of internal storage that can be expanded further via a microSD slot. It will also support both LTE and 3G HSPA+ and will be available in varying colors, including blue, gray, and orange. As for how rugged and ready for adventure it really is, the Galaxy S 4 Active received an Ingress Protection factor of 67, which means that it can be submerged under water for about half an hour before it goes kaput. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The two sites, located south of the Massachusetts/Rhode Island border. Department of Interior Yesterday, the US Department of Interior announced that it would hold its first-ever competitive auction for offshore wind leases. The auction will take place at the end of July and provide companies with access to two sites situated south of Newport, RI, both of which span the border between Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Combined, the sites are estimated to be capable of hosting an installed capacity of 3.4GW of power. Their actual generation will be based less on the availability and strength of the wind or downtime for maintenance. In general, offshore wind is far steadier than what land-based wind turbines experience, meaning that the new site should get more out of every bit of hardware installed. The tradeoff is that installation and maintenance costs are much higher, so the energy produced by offshore wind is generally more expensive than solar power (in contrast, onshore wind is competitive with coal power). Nevertheless, the two closest states have renewable energy standards that require that a certain percentage of their electricity comes from sources like wind. And both the Energy and Interior Departments have been anxious to help the technology mature in the US (it has been widely used in Europe). Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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