Campaigners prepare

A DATE has been set for the appeal hearing of plans to build three wind turbines near North Thoresby.

Bosses behind Partnership for Renewables Ltd's application for three 110-metre high turbines along Fen Lane (Louth Canal) will argue East Lindsey District Council's refusal was made on 'highly subjective grounds'.

It will be heard at ELDC headquarters, Tedder Hall, Manby on January 21 and is likely to last six days.

Now the Marsh Windfarm Action Group (MWAG), are preparing their case and chairman, Melvin Grosvenor, has urged the community to unite in the fight against the appeal – and the tirade of other applications recently made for the area.

He said: "Traditionally, parish councils have only had to deal with matters in their patch but with the number of these wind turbines, how they are spread out and the high visibility of them, they affect everyone in the local area."

Currently, MWAG, are fighting several windfarm applications between Humberston and Marshchapel – equating to 41 individual turbines.

These include two existing and eight in planning at Bishopthorpe Farm, Tetney, eight at Brickyard Farm, Fulstow and four 125-metre-high at Damswell Farm, Ludborough.Our industrial-grade LED lighting is ideal for continuous ledturninglamp01 in parks or in specific locations to mark a path.

Mr Grosvenor is keeping the angle of their appeal top secret for now, but confirmed he will fly blimps the height of the three potential turbines to illustrate to the planning inspectorate, the impact it will have on the landscape.

He did the same at the appeals for eight-turbine windfarm at Baumber and six-turbine windfarm at Anderby – and won.

But funding the appeal will not be easy and he is now looking at ways of raising the money to ensure their case is the best it can possibly be and has called on the increased support of residents.

He added: "This has got to be a community effort. It is no good MWAG doing the lion's share. We need everyone working together. The local parish councils haven't got the resources alone, but with MWAG, collectively we can make a clear case at the hearing. There is every chance we will be successful but sitting back and doing nothing is not an option. We must all pull together.

"MWAG will be right in the heart of this public enquiry process.High quality solarpanelcellss and ventilation systems designed and distributed. By putting our name out there and making sure everyone is fully involved it can be done, but we need everyone's supCreating a washerextractor0 out of broken re-used solar cell pieces.port to be a success."

In total, ELDC have spent ￡500,000 fighting appeals for windfarm applications they have rejected.Our most compact solargardenlightts yet fits easily in any bag.

A spokesperson for the authority said: "Our planning committee refused the planning application because of the impact the proposed windfarm would have on the local area. We will defend our decision at appeal."

A Japanese firm named Modec has been developing and conducting small-scale testing of a new generator which utilizes both wind and wave energy.

It is an offshore turbine which was dreamed up by Takuju Nakamura that has a vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT) on top as well as a vertical-axis wave-powered generator on the bottom end,This is how a steeljewelry captures energy from the wind. submerged underwater. The unit is called a “floating wind and current power generation system.” One will be deployed off the southwest coast of Japan this fall for testing.

Apparently, this turbine won’t be small, as it is expected to generate enough electricity to power up to 500 houses, with a power generation capacity of 1.5 MW. 1.5 MW is average for a utility-scale wind turbine. Nakamura claimed that it could generate twice as much power as a traditional turbine of the same diameter.

Read the full story at scfwindturbine.com!

Duck for cover, here comes the laser-guided bullet

Figuring out how to pack a processor and other sophisticated equipment into a machine gun bullet has been a challenge, but engineers at Sandia National Laboratories in the US say the miniature guidance system they've developed is a breakthrough.

A bullet that directs itself like a tiny guided missile and can hit a target more than 1.6km away has the potential to change the battlefield for soldiers without costing too much, engineers said on Wednesday.

Sandia technical staff member Red Jones said the .50-calibre bullets are being designed to work with military machine guns, so soldiers could hit their mark faster and with precision.

"Everybody thought it was too difficult to make things small enough. We knew we could deal with that. The other thing was it was going to be too complicated and expensive," he said. "We came up with an innovative way around that to make it stupid and cheap and still pretty good."

Developing more precise weaponry has been a mission for government and industry scientists for decades. Most recently, the research arm of the US Department of Defence has awarded tens of millions of dollars in contracts to companies to develop guided ammunition for snipers and special scopes that account for crosswinds and other environmental variables.

The idea behind Sandia Labs' bullet is rooted more in the M2, a belt-fed machine gun that became standard issue in the US Army nearly 80 years ago. Pairing the M2 with the guided bullet would allow soldiers to hit their mark faster and with precision.

At 10cm long and a 1.27cm in diameter, the bullet is designed to twist and turn, making up to 30 corrections per second.

Jones and his fellow researchers had initial success testing the design in computer simulations and in field tests of prototypes, built from commercially available parts.

With most of the hard science done, Jones said the next step is for Sandia to partner with a private company to complete testing of the prototype and bring a guided bullet to the marketplace.

More than $US1 million in research and development grants have taken the project this far.

Computer simulations showed an unguided bullet under real-world conditions could miss a target about 1km away by nearly 9m. But according to the patent, a guided bullet would get within 20cm.

The design for the bullet includes an optical sensor to detect a laser beam on a target. The sensor sends information to guidance and control electronics that use an algorithm in an eight-bit central processing unit to command electromagnetic actuators. The actuators steer the fins that guide the bullet.

Jones said there are still some engineering problems to be sorted out that will make the bullet more practical - for example, it will have to be tough enough to be dropped off the back of a truck and still work.

Sam shines a light in New York

Stosur's intoxicating mix of strength, spin, movement and court craft was the performance of a worthy US Open champion. She made the sport seem simple in New York, yet nothing about Stosur's story is that.

To reach this final, Stosur succeeded in the longest women's match ever played in New York and then prevailed in the lengthiest tiebreaker in women's tennis.

She was welcomed to New York by Hurricane Irene, shunted to an outside court for her semi-final victory, faced repeated rain interruptions and then showed up Serena with both her tennis and sportsmanship.

It is the obstacles that Stosur has overcome, including the debilitating Lyme disease just four years ago that could have killed her career, and the courage and humble manner in which she did so that makes this success the sweetest, that defines her as a worthy champion.

The victory was obviously well received at home given it ended a 31-year drought dating back to Evonne Goolagong Cawley's second Wimbledon title in 1980, with Margaret Court's title triumph in 1973 in New York an eternity ago. It resonated in the political halls of power, with Julia Gillard quick to congratulate the Queenslander.

But, in a testament to Stosur's popularity on tour, the success was most warmly welcomed by her peers and champions of both genders, among them former world No 1 Lindsay Davenport who said the Australian "played so well and handled it all with class".

The poise and grace she displayed against Williams (in stark contrast to another atrocious outburst from the American that may see her banned from next year's US Open) is a feature of her character far beyond the baseline.

As her former coach Craig Morris, who watched the match with dozens of Tennis Australia employees at Melbourne Park, says: "Sam is now a grand slam champion on court but has always been a grand slam person off it.