tower

eSolar is doing what so many other solar start-ups wish they were already doing: feeding electricity into the grid.

The 2-year-old concentrating solar company on Wednesday will host an event in Lancaster, Calif., to celebrate the opening of a demonstration facility that's converting the sun's desert heat into electricity.

At five megawatts--enough to supply about 1,500 homes or up to 4,000 during peak hours--it's making a modest contribution to overall electricity generation. But the Lancaster plant has been crucial to proving that eSolar's technology produces cost-effective electricity and can be replicated, said company CEO … Read more

Plants vs. Zombies is a fun, funny, and remarkably well-designed game that should prove addictive for newcomers to tower-defense games, as well as challenging and satisfying to serious fans of this real-time-strategy subgenre. The interface and gameplay start out simply: you must plant seeds, collect sunlight, and tend a gridded garden that is your only defense against ravenous waves of the cartoonish undead. Zombies advance right to left in rows, and you have to decide which kind of plants to use and where to put them, whether you choose sunflowers to accelerate sunlight production or a variety of other plants … Read more

Other Music isn't the sort of place you'd go to pick up the new U2 record; its primary mission is to turn its customers onto, well, other music. Now, some of Other Music's titles are available as MP3 downloads.

The physical and download Other Music stores are an attempt to classify the unclassifiable; there's "In" (indie rock); "Out" (experimental, free jazz, noise, 20th century composers, and early electronic pioneers); "Electronica" (new electronic music including ambient, electro, and underground hip-hop); "Then" (influential artists from the '60s, '70s, and '80s); … Read more

Abengoa Solar of Spain on Monday reported successful tests of its second solar tower in operation, in which the sun's heat is used to make electricity.

The 531-foot solar tower, located near Seville, Spain, features a number of improvements on the first design and has exceeded the anticipated output. Called PS20, the installation is the largest in the world with a capacity of 20 megawatts, enough electricity to supply 10,000 homes, according to the company.

A solar tower configuration uses a field of heliostats, or mirrors, to concentrate sunlight onto a receiver held in the tower. The heat … Read more

GeoDefense is a fun and extremely challenging tower-defense game, with unique gameplay that combines intense puzzle-solving with arcade action in a frenetic, colorful, vector-graphics environment.

The interface and basic play-style resembles other similar tower-defense games: you drag and drop five types of upgradeable, sellable towers into strategic positions along a preset path to destroy waves of incoming "creeps" (geometric shapes and blobs of varying toughness and speed). What makes GeoDefense so compelling is its surprisingly rich level design, forcing you to formulate--and precisely execute--unusual strategies for nearly every level, with changing maps, resources, durations, and enemies, on 30 … Read more

I write this post every week and while I try to bring you folks all my favorite iPhone app finds, inevitably I end up missing a few along the way. With the current count of apps at the iTunes store now at almost 35,000, it would be impossible to cover everything, but hopefully I can at least bring you a worthy download every week. With that said, this week I'm going to talk about a new game and then grab one app out of the past that's worthy of a look if you haven't checked it … Read more

We're getting close to the day when a major artist or group releases a download-only album. Maybe it'll be the next Rolling Stones or Sufjan Stevens album. That'll be a dark day.

Just last week, I went to my local record store to pick up "Hemispheres," the new release of Bill Frisell and Jim Hall, a jazz guitar duo. I left the store empty-handed.

Next, I checked on Amazon.com. It stocked the album in MP3 format only. Great, but I refuse to pay $17.98 for a crappy-sounding MP3.

Next, I checked the record … Read more

7 Cities is a "tower defense" real-time strategy game, which pits your bristling array of Meso-American towers against a relentless pirate armada and their beastly aquatic allies. You can play the game's survival or seven-level campaign mode (in which you defend seven ever-more-precariously situated cities), and in both you must spend your gold wisely to build defenses around the set path--a river or rivers--upon which your enemies advance.

Similar to other games, you can choose from a variety of towers (such as arrows, cannons, lightning, and even power-boosting Obelisk towers) to take down enemies and boss monsters … Read more