The farm is called Horns Rev 2, and was commissioned by the Danish utility Dong Energy.

The farm is spread over 35 kilometers, and generates 209 megawatts - enough to power 200,000 homes, Dong Energy estimates.

Made by German company Siemans, the 91 turbines, combined with labor and setup, cost $1 billion.

Here is the platform where tourists can stay - the hotel is the boxy container on the right. It will also house 24 on-site workers for maintenance. According to the New York Times:

Andris Piebalgs, the European Union energy commissioner, said on Monday that a study by the European Wind Energy Association showed offshore wind could be the dominant source of employment in the sector in Europe by 2025, providing 200,000 jobs.

And here is what the farm looked like during construction.

The Energy Ball's shape takes advantage of the Venturi Effect, which usually measures the pressure created when water moves through a contained space. According to Inhabitat:

This spherical Energy Ball takes those principles and uses them to channel air through its six blades and around its generator. This results in highly efficient turbine that can take advantage of very low wind speeds.

I still think the main advantage of this device, aside from how awesome it looks, is that it doesn't make much noise. So you could easily imagine a suburb powered by these things mounted on roofs, spinning quietly in the breeze.

Home Energy [via Inhabitat]

Jacobson's study is of wind currents at a 80 meters in the air — right in the wheelhouse for towers that hold big, multi-megawatt wind turbines. But designer Philippe Starck's transparent "Clear Conscience" windmill can fit into the crowded urban landscape and maybe get over the whole "wind turbines are eyesores" criticism in the process.

On an even more local scale — the palm of your hand — HYmini's handheld wind generator is an insanely cute, if slightly impractical device. It requires all sort of finagling to get right and even then doesn't produce a whole lot of juice, but the idea is amazing. Give this gadget a couple generations though and there could be millions of them spinning out power in cool afternoon breezes around the world.

Sources (and images): PopSci, Stanford University, Hyperexperience

• Wind power may not be a clean energy source of the future after all. Though Sweden has just built a massive wind farm at sea, most countries have found wind an inefficient and unreliable energy source. [New York Times]
  
  Why brain damage is okay and MySpace experiences white flight after the jump.

• Just because you're brain damaged and lose a huge part of your memory, it doesn't mean you don't care. A study published today shows that people with profound memory loss can still empathize with other people and figure out what they are feeling. In other words, you don't need specific memories of your life in order to have social skills. So that whole subplot about the hot, romantic amnesiac on Gray's Anatomy is based in scientific fact, OK? [Scienceblog]
  
• Apparently, your race and parents' educational background are the main things that determine whether you'll join MySpace. Researchers at Northwestern found that Latinos prefer MySpace, as do the children of people with less than a high school education. White kids whose parents went to college prefer Facebook. Could mass social network abandonment for Facebook be the white flight of the future? [Northwestern University]
  
• Mars doubled in brightness over the past month, and backyard astronomers are taking pictures of its blue-white polor ice caps. Meanwhile, it turns out the sun may be smaller than we thought. [NASA and New Scientist]