miniature nuclear power plant can power 20,000 homes

Scientists at Los Alamos, the same government laboratory that developed the atomic bomb, are developing a miniature nuclear power plant that is capable of powering 20,000 homes. The power plants, no bigger than a garden shed, will be buried underground and completely sealed. Since there are no moving parts in the power plant, there is no risk of having a Chernobyl-like meltdown, and they are based on 50 year old, safe, proven technology.

The company's goal is to produce electricity for 10 cents per watt any where in the world. They are set to produce 4,000 plants between 2013 and 2023.

The plants have to be refueled every 7 to 10 years, but who cares when it can power 20,000 homes!

Full article can be read here.

PHP single line if statement, short if statement, condensed if statement

This is something I always have to google, so I figured I'd put it here for my own reference (and hopefully yours too).

The single line if statement is written as follows:

$canIaffordit = ($price <= 1.50) ? "yep" : "nope";

Where $canIaffordit is the variable that will be assigned the value "yep" if $price is less than or equal to $1.50, or the value "nope" if $price is greater than $1.50.

Remember, this can also be used for any PHP comparison operator. You could also use it to run functions that return values such as:

$packsoframenIcanafford = ($moneys > 0) ? packsoframen($moneys) : 0;

where the function packsoframen would return the number of packs of ramen I can afford given the amount of money I have. (So if I have $1.00, I can afford 10 packs of ramen, and the function will return 10)

The short if statement, one line if statement, or single line if statement, is called the ternary operator in PHP.

Sweet coating makes solar panels 30% more efficient

A new coating material, developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, allows solar panels that the coating is applied to absorb nearly all available light, and as a result makes them 30% more efficient. Treated panels can soak up a whopping 96.2% of available sunlight.

One of the problems the coating solves is that current solar panels cannot absorb all frequencies of the light spectrum. The bluish color of current solar panels indicates that they are not absorbing much of the blue spectrum of visible light. The coating developed at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute solves that problem, making treated panels appear more black than blue.

Another problem the coating solves is the necessity of having to rotate solar panels in order to catch the best angle for light absorption. Now solar panels can remain in one position and will absorb light equally from any angle.

Read original article here.

PayPal for sellers : unconfirmed addresses are now covered for eligible sales

PayPal sent out an email on October 30, 2008 notifying PayPal sellers of some great new improvements:

1. No annual coverage limit - all claims are now covered at no additional cost to the seller.
2. International sales are now covered by PayPal seller protection.
3. eBay sales to unconfirmed addresses are now covered by PayPal seller protection.

Unconfirmed addresses were a particular hassle in the past. My brother (the other fractal brother) sold a Motorola Razr to someone with an unconfirmed address. The person lied about not receiving the phone, then made a claim. So not only did he lose the money for the phone, but also lost the phone (which was probably turned around and sold again on eBay).

Thanks PayPal!

Say goodbye to centralized torrent sites like mininova, pirate bay - with tribler

Tribler, a bittorrent based P2P client, is said to be the world's first 'true P2P' client for bittorrent. Essentially, rather than having .torrent files hosted on a central server, such as The Pirate Bay or mininova, Tribler is able to search for torrent files on individual's computer - eliminating the need for a centralized server.

"BuddyCast", Tribler's decentralized search feature, lets users tag and rate torrents in order to moderate the flood of spam one might expect from a decentralized torrent P2P model.

The Tribler bittorrent client is being developed by several major European universities and Harvard.