Solar energy - Storage breakthrough at MIT?

Ever wonder how we can make solar energy available at night? Batteries are too expensive and inefficient, so until now people have been proposing beaming power down from collectors in orbit, where the sun always shines. Also expensive.

So it's exciting to read about a potential breakthrough at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the project leader says it's easy and cheap:

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. "This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said MIT's Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science.

Plastic oh no ban, industry says

Don't celebrate the Seattle 20¢ plastic bag fee/styrofoam ban just yet, canvassers are gathering signatures on a petition that would put a bag fee repeal on the November ballot.

Who could possibly want a repeal of the fee? Why, the plastics industry. Of course, they call it a tax:

Stuff I noticed in France

It's good to be home, lame attempts by Danny Westneat to whip up a tax revolt in Seattle notwithstanding. I see America continues to be economically bloodied yet unbowed.

Nonetheless, having had two weeks to see the land of Binoche, escargot and Sarkozy up close and personal, I have to say that France has it all over America in many important ways.

Cityscape. Tired of high speed, high volume traffic in city neighborhoods and on arterials? Then stop facilitating it! France has expanded its freeways, but retains the traditional configurations of its surface streets in cities and villages.