Utah paleontologists probing for signs of dinosaurs’ rise

Chinle Formation proves to be rich in clues about the environment where dinosaurs first evolved. 

A fossil of a fish found by paleontologist Randy Irmis in southeast Utah. Friday, October 4, 2013

For paleontologists Randall Irmis and Andrew Milner, the tiny stuff matters, especially when you’re exploring the dawn of big reptiles. Microscopic fossilized pollen, two-inch fishes, even the color of the rock that bones are embedded in say a lot about the landscapes dinosaurs roamed, the climate, what they ate and what their prey ate. 

And, more important, such details can help explain how they evolved during the late Triassic more than 200 million years ago to dominate the Earth’s land forms for millions of years.

Among the best places to look for clues is Utah’s Chinle Formation, the dark red and orange conglomerates deposited when the Colorado Plateau was a swampy tropical place.

While exploring federal lands in southeast Utah, Irmis and his team of students and volunteers discovered the remains of small fish and a phytosaur. These finds could lead to troves of ancient bones when they return next year with an excavation permit from the Bureau of Land Management. 

"It’s not just a few scales and bones, but the whole skeleton of many different fish," said Irmis, a curator at the Natural History Museum of Utah. He blogs about his excavations in The New York Times. 

The BLM has asked the news media to not disclose the exact location to deter vandalism or theft of the publicly owned resource. 

The phytosaur was a crocodilelike reptile that prowled freshwater environments for prey that included early dinosaurs. The dominant predator, phytosaurs died off like so many other species at the end of the Triassic. 

Phytosaur species have a long snout like modern crocodiles, but the nostrils are close to the eyes rather than protruding from the end of the snout. This is evidence that the crocodile did not descend from the phytosaur and the two creatures developed long snouts independently in a process known as "convergent evolution," according to Milner, a paleontologist with St. George’s Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm. 

He and his colleagues have found numerous phytosaurs, as well as early crocodiles that look nothing like their modern descendants. "When phytosaurs went extinct, it opened up a niche for crocs to evolve," Milner said. The disappearance of the phytosaur also made room for other reptiles.

By Brian Maffly | Reposted from The Salt Lake Tribune

Russia Floats Plan for Nuclear Power Plants at Sea

Arctic oil and gas exploration provides impetus for seaborne stations.

The Akademik Lomonosov, seen here at Baltiyskiy shipyard in St. Petersburg in 2012, is meant to be the first vessel in a new Russian fleet of floating nuclear power plants. One major intended use is to power oil and gas exploration in the Arctic.

Photograph from Baltisky Shipyard via Reuters


... Russian state-controlled energy company Rosatom is moving ahead with plans to build the Akademik Lomonosov, a ship that would contain a pair of small nuclear reactors capable of generating up to 70 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough to provide a city of 200,000 people with electricity as well as heat and desalinated water for drinking. Rt.com, an English-language Russian news website, has reported that the Russian company envisions the craft, which is scheduled for completion in late 2016, as the harbinger of a new breed of small, portable, ship-based power plants that it might manufacture and export to other countries.

But it is clear that a major impetus behind the effort to develop modular, portable, nuclear power at sea is Russia's own drive for oil and gas exploration in remote reaches of the Arctic.

Melting sea ice has opened the prospect of greater access to the Arctic's riches, including 30 percent of the world's undiscovered natural gas, according to a U.S. Geological Survey estimate. Sixty percent of that fuel is in the Russian Arctic, home to four of the ten largest natural gas fields in the world.

But one of the great ironies of the industry is that it will take energy to extract that energy.

The challenge of powering an energy-extraction infrastructure in Russia's Far East is great enough that momentum continues to propel the floating nuclear effort forward, despite a boatload of financing problems and delays.

... Russia's new floating nuclear power plant, the Akademik Lomonosov, is to have ten times the capacity of the 10-megawatt reactor that was aboard the old Sturgis. It will contain a pair of KLT-40 reactors—the same type used in the Russian Arktika-class nuclear-powered icebreaker ships, which are roughly the same size. (Russia's much-vaunted fleet of 37 icebreaking ships include four that are nuclear-powered, with three more planned by 2017.)  At a displacement of 21,500 tons, the Akademik Lomonosov would be far more humble in scale than the massive floating power plants once envisioned by U.S. utility companies. And according to the website of Rosatom's subsidiary OKBM, the ship would be towed to its destination, rather than sailing under its own power.

Instead of using highly enriched uranium like the Russian  icebreakers' reactors, the Akademic Lomonosov's units will be modified to run on lightly enriched uranium, to conform to International Atomic Energy Commission rules aimed at preventing fuel from being stolen and diverted for use in nuclear weapons.  The company catalogued a number of other safety features in a presentation to the IAEA this summer. It said the Akademic Lomonosov is designed to withstand a range of different catastrophic events, ranging from an earthquake with a magnitude of 10 and a tsunami large and powerful enough to cast the floating power craft ashore. It even could withstand having a 10-ton aircraft crash into it, according to the presentation.

In addition to its system of passive circulating coolant and control rods, in the event of an emergency, operators could deploy additional backup active and passive cooling devices and another system designed to reduce pressure building up inside the containment.

A corporate website touts the power plant's nuclear technology as proven to be resilient in a disaster, by citing a macabre example: the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, which sank in shallow waters in the Barents Sea in August 2000, apparently after one of its torpedoes exploded, killing its entire 118-man crew. "Even the long stay [of the] wrecked ship under water did not lead to the exit of radioactivity in the environment," the OKBM website proclaims. 

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Feathered Dinosaurs: Deinonychus

Deinonychus sculpture head shot. With a mouth full of teeth, Deinonychus may not appear to be very bird-like, but fossils now indicate that it was a bird.

Deinonychus sculpture full body. Deinonychus was initially thought to be a bird-like dinosaur that represented what the ancestors of birds were like before flight had fully evolved. It is now known that Deinonychus had ancestors that were capable of flying which means that it was really a bird which had lost the ability to fly. 


Sculpture by Stephen Czerkas, © 2002.

Reposted from the Arizona Museum of  Natural History 

New Offshore Drilling Frontiers: Brazil Plunges Into Offshore Oil

Photograph by Felipe Dana, AP

In October 2010, former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva happily raises his hands, covered with the first oil from the massive deepwater oil field which now bears his name. The "Lula" field holds some 6.5 billion barrels of oil.

Lula is just part of a massive deepwater oil inventory at the disposal of Brazil's national oil company Petrobras—perhaps 48 billion barrels in all. Recovery of these reserves promises to make Brazil a major player in the international petroleum market.


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How Feathered Dinosaurs Learned to Fly

The Evolution of Feathered Dinosaurs into Birds

 

As little as 50 years ago, the idea that birds descended from dinosaurs seemed completely ridiculous--after all, birds are small, light, fluttery creatures, while dinosaurs were huge, plodding, and distinctly unaerodynamic. But as the evidence--small dinosaurs possessing feathers, beaks, and other birdlike characteristics--began to mount, the connection between dinosaurs and birds became apparent to scientists and the general public. Today, it's the rare paleontologist who disputes the descent of birds from dinosaurs, though there are some who try.

This doesn’t mean, though, that all the technical aspects of the dinosaur/bird transition have been settled once and for all. Researchers still disagree about which dinosaurs were most closely related to modern birds, whether terrestrial dinosaurs sported aerodynamic or strictly ornamental feathers, and--perhaps most contentiously of all--how these reptilian proto-birds managed to achieve the huge evolutionary leap into powered flight.

Theory #1: Feathered Dinosaurs Took a Running Leap

Extrapolating backward from the behavior of modern birds, like ostriches, it's reasonable to infer that the small- to medium-sized, two-legged theropods of the Cretaceous period (notably the ornithomimids, or "bird mimics," but other feathered theropods as well, including raptors and possibly even small tyrannosaurs) could attain top running speeds of 30 or 40 miles per hour. As these theropods ran (either chasing down prey or trying to outrun bigger carnivores), their coat of insulating feathers gave them a slight aerodynamic "bounce," helping them land their next meal or live another day. Since well-fed dinosaurs, or those that avoided being eaten, produced more offspring, the evolutionary trend would be toward larger feathers, which provided more "lift."

From there, the theory goes, it would only have been a short step to taking actual flight for brief periods of time. At this point, though, it's important to realize what the phrase "short time" means in an evolutionary context. There wasn't a single defining moment when a small, feathered theropod accidentally ran off the side of a cliff and took flight like a modern bird. Rather, you have to picture this process happening gradually over the course of millions of years--and with multiple theropods, not any specific genus.

In the excellent Nova episode The Four-Winged Dinosaur (about the specimen of Microraptor that had recently been discovered in China), a scientist is quoted to the effect that the hatchlings of modern birds recapitulate their evolutionary heritage. That is, though they're still unable to fly, they can jump farther, and scuttle up inclined surfaces, with the aerodynamic lift provided by their feathers--the same advantages that may have been enjoyed by Cretaceous theropods.

Theory #2: Feathered Dinosaurs Fell Out of Trees

Birds aren't the only animals alive today whose behavior can be extrapolated back to extinct dinosaurs. Flying squirrels glide across forests by leaping off the tall branches of trees and spreading the flaps of skin attached to their arms and legs. They’re not capable of powered flight, of course, but they can glide for impressive distances, up to two-thirds of the length of a football field for some species.

Conceivably, some species of feathered theropod might have lived high up in trees (this would entail their having a relatively small size and the ability to climb). These feathered dinosaurs might then have followed the same evolutionary path as flying squirrels, gliding for longer and longer distances as their feathers slowly evolved to the optimum shape and configuration. At some point, the evolutionary innovation of flappable wings would have allowed them to take to the air for indefinite periods of time. Voila - the first prehistoric birds!

The main problem with this "arboreal" theory of flight, as it’s called, is that it's easier to imagine powered flight evolving in the ground-up alternative (picture a terrified dinosaur desperately flapping its vestigial wings to try to escape a larger carnivore) than as a result of tree-to-tree gliding. Also, despite millions of years of evolution, no flying squirrel (with the exception of Bullwinkle's pal Rocky) has managed to achieve powered flight--although, to be fair, bats certainly have.

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Check out Bob's Dinosaur Blog !

Bob Strauss is a freelance writer and book author; one of his specialties is explaining scientific concepts and discoveries to both a lay and professional audience.

Bob Strauss is the author of two best-selling question-and-answer books that range across the expanse of science, biology, history and culture: The Big Book of What, How and Why (Main Street, 2005) and Who Knew? Hundreds & Hundreds of Questions & Answers for Curious Minds (Sterling Innovation, 2007).

New Offshore Drilling Frontiers: Farther, Deeper Into the Gulf of Mexico

Photograph by Mike Duhon

Shell's Perdido project 200 miles (322 kilometers) off the Texas coast in the Gulf of Mexico is the deepest of the world's deepwater drilling sites and the farthest from the shore. It began retrieving oil and gas from beneath more than 8,000 feet (2,438 meters) of water just three weeks before BP's Deepwater Horizon accident closer to shore.

Perdido became the first project to produce oil from the Gulf of Mexico's next big oil frontier—the Lower Tertiary Trend. Pulling oil from that band of 60 million-year-old rock requires going further offshore than conventional Gulf rigs and drilling far deeper—delving below the seafloor to depths greater than the height of Mount Everest.

Tapping Lower Tertiary oil requires evolving knowledge and technology to deal with novel problems like poor imagery, scorching temperatures, and enormous pressures at depth. But the rewards appear to be well worth it for energy companies—billions of barrels of oil are believed to lie in the formation.

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Pterosaurs Took Flight on All Fours

Pterosaurs took flight using all fours, a discovery that flies in the face of previous research on the ancient reptiles, a new study says.

Two of the giant creatures' "legs" were extremely strong wings, which when folded, created "knuckles" that allowed the animals to walk and jump (above left, the pterosaur known as Hatzegotpteryx in an artist's rendering).

The way a bird lifts off—using two legs—doesn't make sense for pterosaurs, which would have had to heave their 500 pounds (227 kilograms) airborne using only their hind legs, the study says.

Instead, the "remarkably strong" animals apparently made a leaping launch in less than a second from flat ground, with no aid from wind or ledges.

"Most people are familiar with images of pterosaurs as very skinny, almost emaciated-looking things—basically a hang glider with teeth," study author Michael B. Habib, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told National Geographic News. "They're actually built a lot more like Arnold Schwarzenegger than Urkel."

Habib compared bone strength in 20 species of modern birds and 3 species of pterosaurs to develop the new model, announced yesterday by the journal Zitteliana.

The finding is also consistent with the idea that bigger animals require more overall brawn to power their movement, Habib added.

"We put V8 engines in our biggest, heaviest cars, not V4s, like the one in my Camry."

—Christine Dell'Amore

Illustration by Mark Witton

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New Giant Toothless Pterosaur Found

With a wingspan longer than a full-size sedan, a new species of pterosaur dubbed Lacusovagus magnificens, or "magnificent lake wanderer," is the largest of its kind yet found, a new study reports.

The ancient flying reptile (seen at left in an artist's reconstruction) is also the first Chaoyangopterid—a family of toothless pterosaurs—found outside of China, noted Mark Witton, the University of Portsmouth researcher who named the species based on a partial skull fossil.

Witton made his discovery after examining remains from Brazil's Crato formation, layers of limestone that roughly date to the early Cretaceous period, about 115 million years ago.

The site, once a brackish lagoon, has yielded several other pterosaur species, but so far the skull fragments Witton analyzed represent the only existing Lacusovagus fossil.

The skull's size suggests that the Brazilian pterosaur had a roughly 16-foot (5-meter) wingspan and stood about 3.3 feet (a meter) high at its shoulders. With its long neck and jaw, the animal would have seemed as tall as a typical adult human (right).

"Some of the previous examples we have from this family in China are just 60 centimeters [24 inches] long—as big as the skull of the new species," Witton said in a university statement.


"Put simply, it dwarfs any Chaoyangopterid we've seen before by miles." 

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Pterosaur "Runway" Found; Shows Birdlike Landing Style

Like a prehistoric dance-step diagram, a patch of fossilized beach in France spells out the sequence of a pterosaur's landing, an August 2009 study says.

The "runway" suggests the birds landed like most modern birds, flapping their wings to slow down just before hitting the ground.

Photograph and illustration courtesy Jean-Michel Mazin via Kevin Padian


The first fossil footprints of a landing pterosaur have been discovered, a new study says.

The tracks offer rare insight into a dinosaur-age mystery: How did these flying reptiles move?

Whereas walking dinosaurs left footprints, a pterosaur in mid-flight would have left little more than droppings.

This critical difference has made analyzing pterosaur flight much harder than studying the gaits of their dinosaur cousins.

The 140-million-year-old pterosaur tracks, found along a long-gone lagoon in what is now southwestern France, could help change that.

Flying-reptile footprints are so common at the late-Jurassic-period site that paleontologists call it Pterosaur Beach. But from the start, it was obvious the newfound cluster is one of a kind.

"When my co-author showed it to me and said what he thought it was, it seemed both obvious and cool to me," said study co-author Kevin Padian at the University of California, Berkeley.

"It's great to have a landing track." 


How the Pterosaur Landed: Story in Stone

Like a dance-step diagram, the footstep fossils tell the sequence of the animal's movements as it landed.

The pterosaur first put its back feet down together and dragged its toes slightly. It then hopped back into the air for a moment before dropping onto its back feet a second time.

The flyer then looks to have lowered its wings, which had "hands" on either end, taken a step or two, turned, and walked off on all fours. (See "Pterosaurs Took Flight on All Fours.")

The relatively few landing tracks suggest that the pterosaur landed like most modern birds, flapping quickly right before landing to slow themselves down, the researchers say. (A few modern-day birds come in for a running landing, leaving lots of footprints.).

As exciting as the landing track is, Padian said, it's still solves only part of the mystery. "It would be equally cool to have a takeoff track." 

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Makani Airborne Wind Turbine Inspired by a Googler Hobby

Photograph courtesy Makani Power

Resembling a drone aircraft on a string, the Makani Airborne Wind Turbine takes flight at its test site, the decommissioned U.S. Navy air station at  Alameda on San Francisco Bay.

By eliminating 90 percent of the material associated with a conventional wind turbine-largely by getting rid of the tower—the designers say they hope to reduce cost while accessing stronger winds.

The winged device is tethered to the ground and flies in large vertical circles at altitudes between 800 and 1,950 feet (250 and 600 meters). Its four wind turbines rotate as the craft moves. According to Makani Power, the speed of the craft increases along with wind speed.

Makani Power's website says the company is developing a 600-kilowatt (kW) prototype. That's considered the size of a medium commercial wind turbine; for comparison, a 600 kW land-based turbine installed in 2009 at University of Maine at Presque Isle generated 680,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity in its first year, enough to power about 60 average U.S. homes. But an airborne wind turbine might deliver more or less power, depending on the boost of stronger, more consistent winds or the cost of trickier operation.

Makani was founded in 2006 and received $10 million in initial start-up capital from Google's foundation, plus support from the U.S. Department of Energy.

One of Makani's three co-founders, Corwin Hardham, has told reporters he was inspired by his hobby of kite-surfing. It's not a coincidence that Alameda has a beach that is popular with Bay Area kite-surfers. It also isn't far from Google headquarters; the company's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are known to be avid kite-surfers.

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New Offshore Drilling Frontiers: In Africa, Turning the Valve on a New Era

Photograph courtesy Tunlow Oil

Ghana's President John Atta Mills opens the valve for Anadarko Petroleum Corporation's Jubilee project on December 15, 2010. The offshore well in some 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) of water may produce as much as 2 billion barrels of oil and 800 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

Partnering with Anadarko and other petroleum companies, Ghana's national oil concern has a 13.75 percent stake in the project and hopes to usher in a new era of prosperity for the African country—if its growing oil industry can be managed without corruption, violence, and environmental degradation.

Jubilee and another Anadarko well (Venus) near the Sierra Leone-Liberia border may bookend a 700-mile (1,100-kilometer) undersea basin with an active petroleum system and hundreds of millions of barrels of deepwater oil. These and other projects are helping a new group of West African nations join established giants like Angola and Nigeria as the continent's major petroleum exporters.

Toothy Texas Pterosaur Discovered; Soared Over Dallas

John Roach for National Geographic News

Long before six flags flew over Texas, a newfound species of winged reptile with an exceptionally toothy grin owned the skies over what is now the Lone Star State.

The recently discovered pterosaur, dubbed Aetodactylus halli, was identified based on a 95-million-year-old lower jawbone found outside of Dallas by amateur fossil hunter Lance Hall. 

The pterosaur had a relatively slender jaw filled with thin, needlelike teeth, which might have helped the creature pluck fish from the shallow sea that once covered the region, a new study says.

"It was hanging out near the ocean, and that is probably where it derived its food from," said study leader Timothy Myers, a paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

By comparing the jawbone to more complete pterosaur fossils, Myers and his team think A. halli was a medium-size animal with a nine-foot (three-meter) wingspan and a short tail.

Texas's Toothy Pterosaur a Rare Find

Pterosaurs ruled the skies from the late Triassic period, more than 200 million years ago, until dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, about 65 million years ago.

At 95 million years old, A. halli is one of the youngest members yet found in the Ornithocheiridae family of toothed pterosaurs, Myers said.

Despite being common elsewhere in the world, toothed pterosaur fossils are rare in Texas: A. halli is only the second ornithoceirid yet discovered in North America. 

The new pterosaur had 54 teeth in its lower jaw, which is an unusual amount for ornithoceirids, Myers added. Most other members of the family had just 30 lower jaw teeth. Only Boreopterus, a relative from the same time period found in China, is known to have had as many teeth as A. halli.

When the animal lived, a giant north-south interior seaway split North America from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, putting what is now Dallas underwater.

A. halli's jawbone was found in marine rocks exposed near a highway in Mansfield, southwest of Dallas, which would have been the southernmost end of the ancient sea. No other fossils from the animal have been unearthed nearby, Myers said.

"It could be that something caused the pterosaur to die and fall into the water," he said. "Decay started, and the lower jaw just fell off and got separated from the rest of the body."


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New Offshore Drilling Frontiers: Beneath Melting Arctic Ice, Stores of Oil

Photograph by Paul Nicklen, National Geographic

Ice floats on the surface of Alaska's Beaufort Sea—and oil lies beneath. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Arctic holds 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil, some 90 billion barrels that might be produced with existing technologies. But extreme conditions here will put conventional petroleum practices to the test.

Most of the Arctic's undiscovered oil is thought to lie offshore under less than 1,640 feet (500 meters) of water in some of the most remote places on Earth. The closest U.S. Coast Guard Air Station to the Beaufort Sea is some 950 miles (1,530 kilometers) away and the nearest major port lies 1,300 nautical miles (2,400 kilometers) distant.

Drilling will be difficult in this remote realm of frigid temperatures, high seas, shrieking winds, darkness, sea ice, and minimal visibility. And environmentalists worry that responding to spills here will be difficult or impossible, putting the region's unique ecosystem at lasting risk.

After a legal challenge by Native Alaskans and environmentalists delayed necessary federal clean air permits, Shell* postponed plans to drill in the Beaufort Sea this summer and is now aiming to explore the area in 2012. Outside U.S. waters, Arctic oil exploration is already under way.

—Brian Handwerk

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Pterousaurs - Flying Dinosaurs!

Pteranodon, the most famous of all pterosaurs (American Museum of Natural History)

Pterosaurs ("winged lizards") hold a special place in the history of life on earth: they were the first creatures, other than insects, to successfully populate the skies. The evolution of pterosaurs roughly paralleled that of their terrestrial cousins, the dinosaurs.

Paleontologists have found indisputable proof that modern birds are descended not from pterosaurs, but from small, feathered, land-bound dinosaurs (in fact, if you could somehow compare the DNA of a pigeon, a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Pteranodon, the first two would be more closely related to each other than either would be to the third). This is an example of what biologists call convergent evolution: nature has a way of finding the same solutions (wings, hollow bones, etc.) to the same problem (how to fly). Learn More About Pterousaurs Here
______________________________________________________________
Check out Bob's Dinosaur Blog !

Bob Strauss is a freelance writer and book author; one of his specialties is explaining scientific concepts and discoveries to both a lay and professional audience.

Bob Strauss is the author of two best-selling question-and-answer books that range across the expanse of science, biology, history and culture: The Big Book of What, How and Why (Main Street, 2005) and Who Knew? Hundreds & Hundreds of Questions & Answers for Curious Minds (Sterling Innovation, 2007).

Flying Wind Turbines Reach for High-Altitude Power: The Wild Windy Yonder

Photograph courtesy Makani Power

The landscape appears to pitch beneath the Makani Airborne Wind Turbine  during a test flight near the start-up company's headquarters in Alameda, California.

Moving a wind turbine from a 328-foot (100-meter) tower to 1,640 feet (500 meters) above the ground would tend to double the available wind speeds, and increase the available power eightfold, says Cristina L. Archer, a University of Delaware engineering professor and one of Caldeira's former post-docs.

"Above 2,000 meters [6,562 feet] you get rapid gradients of winds, with the jet streams [at 30,000 feet (9,144) meters] being [the] Mecca of winds," Archer said.

Even though airborne wind pioneers are currently aiming at altitudes far below the jet stream, they face significant technological challenges as they try to bring wind power down to the ground. Long runs of wire can be expensive and prone to tangling. The devices could pose a risk to air traffic or the environment. They would also have to be protected from bad weather.

Joe Faust, editor of the website Upper Windpower, said in an email that research is under way on alternative transmission methods, including beaming power via lasers or microwaves, although such solutions are far off. More immediately viable, perhaps, has been the work on nonconductive tethers that transmit power by applying their motion to generators or fluid pumps, or by operating saws or moving carts.


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