Month: May 2018

US Geological Survey

Hawaii's Mount Kīlauea eruptions have caused damage throughout the Island of Hawai'i, but a new concern has been slowly building: earlier this week Reuters reported that lava is creeping onto the property of a 38 MW geothermal plant called Puna Geothermal Ventures (PGV). Lava damage could cause problems for the plant's operations in the future, and some officials are concerned that damage to geothermal wells could result in releases of hydrogen sulfide gas, which is toxic to humans. Although lava had been held back by a natural berm for days, yesterday Reuters again reported that a new lava flow had entered the 815-acre PGV property.

Thus far, the only structure that has been destroyed at the geothermal plant has been an old warehouse that was used in the early days of the plant and had been used for storage since, according to a Hawai'i County spokeswoman.

Enlarge / Plants. (credit: James Petts / Flickr)

Plants, like all living things, need nitrogen to build amino acids and other essential biomolecules. Although nitrogen is the most abundant element in air, the molecular form of nitrogen found there is largely unreactive. To become useful to plants, that nitrogen must first be "fixed," or busted out of its molecular form and linked with hydrogen to make ammonia. The plants can then get at it by catalyzing reactions with ammonia.

But plants can't fix nitrogen. Bacteria can.

Some legumes and a few other plants have a symbiotic relationship with certain bacterial species. The plants build specialized structures on their roots called nodules to house and feed the bacteria, which in turn fix nitrogen for the plants and assure them a steady supply of ammonia. Only 10 families of plants have the ability to do this, and even within these families, most genera opt out. Ever since the symbiosis was discovered in 1888, plant geneticists have wondered: why? If you could ensure a steady supply of nitrogen for use, why wouldn't you?

Enlarge / How could Peter Bright ditch all this for the minimalism of MacOS? He loves the color purple far too much to do that, right? (credit: Ethan Miller / Getty Images)

Ten years ago around this very time—April through June 2008—our intrepid Microsoft guru Peter Bright evidently had an identity crisis. Could this lifelong PC user really have been pushed to the brink? Was he considering a switch to... Mac OS?!? While our staff hopefully enjoys a less stressful Memorial Day this year, throughout the weekend we're resurfacing this three part series that doubles as an existential operating system dilemma circa 2008. Part two ran on May 4, 2008, and it appears unedited below.

Last time, I described how Apple turned its failure to develop a modern OS into a great success. The purchase of NeXT gave Apple a buzzword-compliant OS with a healthy ecosystem of high-quality third-party applications. Meanwhile, Microsoft was lumbering along with Windows XP. Although technically sound, it was shot through with the decisions made more than a decade earlier for 16-bit Windows.

In 2001, when XP was released, this was not such a big deal. The first two or three versions of Mac OS X were troublesome, to say the least. Performance was weak, there were stability issues, and version 10.0 arguably wasn't even feature complete. It wasn't until early 2002 that Apple even made Mac OS X the default OS on new Macs; for the first few months of its life, XP was up against "Classic" Mac OS 9.

Enlarge / HP ZBook x2. (credit: Peter Bright)

Since Microsoft's Surface Pro 3 proved that there was a market for tablet-sized PCs sporting detachable keyboards, we've seen an abundance of minor variations of the concept from the major PC OEMs. For the most part, they've stuck pretty close to Microsoft's basic formula, with tweaks in screen size and resolution, connectivity options, and hinge design distinguishing one from another.

By comparison, the new HP ZBook x2 looks like it will be one of the more unusual riffs on the concept. The fundamentals remain the same, but ZBook is HP's mobile workstation branding, and, accordingly, the ZBook x2 is aimed specifically at artists, engineers, designers, and other professional users. In particular, it's aimed at those users who like the flexibility of the Surface Pro form factor—a machine for drawing and sketching, but also for sending emails, filing accounts, or whatever else a user needs to do. Yet, the ZBook x2 also offers more power than other systems of this type.

This extra power comes from three things in particular. The first is the processor; HP is offering the new 8th generation Intel Core chips with four cores and eight threads. Second is the GPU: there's a discrete Nvidia Quadro M620 GPU with 2GB of dedicated GDDR5. And finally there's RAM: up to 32GB.