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As India experienced its worst power failure ever last week, leaving 600 million people without electricity, disrupting the operation of hospitals and public services and shutting down transportation in key regions vital to the country’s economy, New Delhi will have to face up to some critical power realities. On one level, increasing demand for electricity as a result of increasing demand for consumer electronics, particularly air conditioners, caused the crash. On another level, the entire power grid collapsed as a result of one or more states overdrawing power to meet excess demand. This post origionally ran at Oilprice.com. There are two main problems here that represent a mixture of policy and technology: First of all, India, already the sixth-largest electricity consumer in the world, depends almost entirely on hydro-electricity, which is not sufficient to supply its growing demand. Secondly, the grid is outdated, under-managed, abused and dangerously centralized.  Let’s start ...

Jul 23, 2012 6:00 PM   The iPhone's native weather app does its job well enough. But why use that to see the forecast when something so beautiful as Solar exists? Just released today, Solar gives you the weather in a wonderfully designed, intuitive app. It's gorgeous, with background color schemes that were designed to resemble a Rothko as well as reflecting the current state of weather in the city you're checking on. But it also just makes sense. Launching the app brings up weather for the city you're currently located in. Drag your finger up the screen and it cycles through the conditions for the next 24 hours. Swipe downward and it shows the three-day forecast. Then pinch to zoom out and see the other cities you've added to your list, represented by colorful, Windows Phone-esque tiles. Lacking ads and overly-technical data, Solar is radiant, chromatic, and delightfully stripped down to give you those vital details before you step outside. The Best: Gorgeous int...

This image of an M7.7 solar flare was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft on July 19, 2012. A gigantic sunspot unleashed an intense solar flare early Thursday (July 19), though the solar storm shouldn't pose any serious problems to us here on Earth, scientists say. The flare erupted from a sunspot known as AR 1520 at 1:13 a.m. EDT (0513 GMT) Thursday and peaked about 45 minutes later. The outburst qualifies as an M7.7-class solar flare, meaning it's a bit weaker than the sun's most powerful blast, X-class flares. The sun storm also produced a coronal mass ejection (CME), a huge eruption of solar plasma that can streak through space at speeds of 3 million mph (5 million kph) or more. CMEs that hit Earth can wreak havoc, spawning geomagnetic storms that can disrupt GPS signals, radio communications and power grids. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a spacecraft that constantly watches the sun in different wavelengths of light, recorded a video o...