Mt. Hood resorts opening some lifts for Halloween skiers

It's only the fourth time since 1984 that Timberline will be open before Halloween

IPCC will 'probably' make more mistakes, vice chair claims - Telegraph

Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele conceded that the IPCC had been "naive and incompetent" in its handling of the incorrect claim that every glacier in the Himalayas could be melted by 2035, and accepted that there "probably would be mistakes" in a larger report scheduled for 2013-14.

Amtrak Orders Greener Locomotives - NYTimes.com

From 2013 to 2019 it will buy 70 new electric locomotives for use on the Northeast corridor between Washington and Boston and the Keystone Corridor between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, replacing 64 locomotives, some of which date to 1980 and have 3.5 million miles on the odometer.
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This works better in a train than in a car. In the car, the current goes back into the battery, which has limited capacity and can only accept it relatively slowly. On the train, the energy goes back into the overhead power lines and the electric grid, which can accept all of the energy quickly.

Jürgen Wilder, vice president and general manager of rolling stock at Siemens, explained that this allowed trains to exchange energy. “Maybe another locomotive at the same time can be accelerated with the power that locomotive is going to give back,” he said.

How valuable are random pulses of electricity injected back into the grid?