What’s good for one is not always best for all.

Solitary wind turbines produce the most power when pointing directly into the wind. But when tightly packed lines of turbines face the wind on wind farms, wakes from upstream generators can interfere with those downstream. Like a speedboat slowed by choppy water from a boat in front, the wake from a wind turbine reduces the output of those behind it.

Pointing turbines slightly away from oncoming wind – called wake-steering – can reduce that interference and improve both the quantity and quality of power from wind farms, and probably lower operating costs, a new Stanford study shows.

“To meet global targets for renewable energy generation, we need to find ways to generate a lot more energy from existing wind farms,” said John Dabiri, professor of civil and environmental engineering and of mechanical engineering and senior author of the paper. “The traditional focus has been on the performance of individual turbines in a wind farm, but we need to instead start thinking about the farm as a whole, and not just as the sum of its parts.”

Read more at Stanford University

University of Houston associate professor of chemistry, Vassiliy Lubchenko, is reporting a new finding in Nature Communications on how sickle cells are formed.

For more than a billion people around the world, running water comes from “intermittent systems” that turn on and off at various times of the week.

Scientists have finally found malaria’s Achilles’ heel, a neurotoxin that isn’t harmful to any living thing except Anopheles mosquitoes that spread malaria.

A joint team of scientists at the University of California, Riverside, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is getting closer to confirming the existence of an exotic quantum particle called Majorana fermion, crucial for fault-tolerant quantum computing — the kind of quantum computing that addresses errors during its operation.

Astrophysicists at Western University have found evidence for the direct formation of black holes that do not need to emerge from a star remnant.

Many patients, especially those who are anesthetized or emotionally challenged, cannot communicate precisely about their pain.

Right whales don’t sing—or do they?

Social and environmental responsibility in globalized supply chains are hard to police. 

A surprising number of students eating in university dining halls have been helping themselves to servings of tuna well beyond the amounts recommended to avoid consuming too much mercury, a toxic heavy metal.