mojave desert

In Mojave, the world's most exciting planes take flight

MOJAVE DESERT, Calif.--It's hard to imagine a more complete -- and impressive -- collection of aviation facilities and aircraft anywhere on the planet than the one in this vast, arid, wide-open wasteland northeast of Los Angeles.

Thanks to its endless amounts of dry, flat terrain, useless to most people, and the fact that there are only a few ways in -- vital for security -- the Mojave is, and has long been, the beating heart of the aviation world. It's here that Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier. And where Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne ushered in … Read more

Getting schooled with the Air Force's elite test pilots

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif.--He might be the most famous airman in the history of the U.S. Air Force, and he's a graduate of the Test Pilot School.

In 1947, Capt. Chuck Yeager became the first person to break the sound barrier, hitting Mach 1.0 in a Bell X-1 rocket plane 42,000 feet above this Mojave Desert outpost. And today, to commemorate the import of the event that ushered in the supersonic era, the aircraft hangs from the ceiling in the entryway of the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Yeager … Read more

A Google a Day

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Amazon.com offers a cheaper. ad-supported Kindle

Google launches a trivia page called A Google a Day

A U.S. Court of Appeals rules that the Winklevoss twins who sued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

must accept their settlement of $65 million and just be quiet already

Google plans to invest $168 million in a solar power plant in the Mojave Desert

New legislation may propose a sales tax on all online transactions

Sony introduces two new OLED monitors

Mojave Desert town to go almost fully solar

A small town on the outskirts of the Mojave Desert may soon get 85 percent of its power needs exclusively from solar energy.

The municipal solar power plant for Nipton, Calif., will be equipped with High Gain Solar arrays (HGS) from Skyline Solar, the company announced Thursday.

Skyline Solar's HGS arrays are designed to use less silicon to save manufacturing costs while still providing effective solar energy. To do that the company uses a reflective metal cradle made of sheet metal to concentrate sunlight onto monocrystalline silicon cells. The company claims that its concentrated solar arrays offers 10 … Read more