INNOVATION. INSPIRATION FROM NATURE - eBOOKS TAKE OFF! - BATTERIES TO STORE WIND ENERGY

[1] From the Washington Post:

In the past few years, entrepreneurs have developed and started marketing an array of inventions that imitate natural phenomena. For instance, the resurrection plant, a desert species common in Africa and Latin America, dries up and appears to be dead when water is scarce. It does so without breaking its cells' membranes, enabling it to revive when moisture returns. Researchers have learned to make some vaccines with a similar capability so they do not have to be refrigerated. Other inventors are developing friction-free surfaces modeled on the slippery skin of the Arabian Peninsula's sandfish lizard, an advance that could eliminate the use of ball bearings in many products as well as industrial diamond dust in automobile air bags.
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[2] From Tim O'Reilly:

The electronic book marketplace is finally taking off! There has never been more competition either in electronic books, or for books, in the broader electronic "republic of letters." It is true, perhaps, in the narrow sense, that no other party will be able to do a mass digitization project on the scale of Google's - but that was already true. The barrier has always been the willingness to spend a lot of money for little return; the settlement doesn't change that. Meanwhile, the settlement provides absolutely no barrier to publishers providing their own digital copies, and this is in fact happening. At O'Reilly, we are selling digital copies of all our books through subscription services like Safari Books Online (which also includes thousands of books from other publishers), as direct downloads from our web site in pdf, mobi, and epub formats, and through emerging ebook channels like Amazon's Kindle, Stanza, and the iPhone app store.
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[3] From Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends:

Scientific American reports that Xcel Energy, a Minneapolis-based utility company, has started to test a new technology to store wind energy in batteries. The company is currently trying it in a 1,100 megawatts facility of wind turbines in Southern Minnesota. The company started this effort because 'the wind doesn't always blow and, even worse, it often blows strongest when people aren't using much electricity, like late at night.' It has received a $1 million grant from Minnesota's Renewable Development Fund and the energy plant should be operational in the first quarter of 2009. And if this project is successful, the utility expects to deploy many more energy plants before 2020 to avoid more polluting energy sources.
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