Earth Equity News

A Whale of a Turbine. Guardian, June 24, 2008. "A Pennsylvania professor has developed a new wind turbine that draws inspiration from... the flippers of a humpback whale. Those knobby flippers were long considered one of the oddities of the sea, found on no other earthly creature. But after years of study, starting with a whale that washed up on a New Jersey beach, Frank Fish thinks he knows their secret. The bumps cause water to flow over the flippers more smoothly... [and] what works in the ocean seems to work in air. Already a flipperlike prototype is generating energy on Canada's Prince Edward Island, with twin, bumpy-edged blades knifing through the air. And this summer, an industrial fan company plans to roll out its own whale-inspired model -- moving the same amount of air with half the usual number of blades and thus a smaller, energy-saving motor. Some scientists were sceptical at first, but the concept now has gotten support from independent researchers, most recently some Harvard engineers."