Off the coast of Europe, offshore wind turbines with an installed capacity of over 6,600 MW generate enough electricity to power almost five million households. In the United States, the number of households powered by offshore wind is almost zero, though, with luck that, is about to change, if only slightly. The foundations for the first US offshore wind farm are rising above the waters off Block Island, RI. The 30 megawatt, 5 turbine Block Island Wind Farm is scheduled to be online in 2016. The Block Island Wind Farm will supply most of Block Island’s power and will help to reduce air pollution across southern New England. Of course, opponents of clean energy have filed another lawsuit to stop the project. Deepwater Wind, the lead firm behind the project, has condemned the suit as baseless and says that “the project is proceeding at full speed.”
While this may be the first US offshore wind project, Block Island, an island in the Atlantic Ocean about 13 miles south of the coast of Rhode Island, is no stranger to wind power. The first wind mill, known as the Harbor Mill was originally built in 1770 and transported to Block Island around 1810. A second wind mill, the Littlefield Mill was installed around 1815. Both stood through the turn of the twentieth century.
The first reports from accidents are often wrong. In the case of the capsizing of the whale-watching boat, Leviathan II, off Tofino on Vancouver Island with the loss of six passengers, the 
In early October, the headline in the Philadephia Inquirer was 
For several years now, we have posted about the so-called 
In 1998, the United States Naval Academy dropped celestial navigation from its curriculum. If a naval officer wished to know where he or she was, the officer simply had to read the display on a GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver. Sextants, chronometers, and nautical almanacs became artifacts of another, less technological time. Now, a decade and a the Navy has had second thoughts. Recent concerns about potential cyber-attacks on global positioning satellite software and data, which could disable or spoof GPS navigation systems world-wide, has led the 
When Ferdinand Magellan rounded the tip of South America in 1521, he encountered favourable winds. He named the ocean Mar Pacifico meaning “peaceful sea” in Portuguese. Today,