Science Traveler is my official author website and focuses primarily on my non-fiction writing – Nikola Tesla, Abraham Lincoln, Science Traveling. Not long ago I started a new blog for my more creative writing endeavors – memoir, writing prompt experimentation, and even a little preview erotica. It’s called Hot White Snow.
The blog’s title comes from the first piece I wrote for the site, a response to a writing challenge on a now largely defunk writing website. The prompt asked us to write a story using a color as a theme, especially concentrating on any emotions connected to that color. The result was a somewhat dreamy scene involving a hot tub, frolicking snowshoe rabbits, and some steamy snowmelt.
The blog header photo above was chosen for the heat evoked by the redness arching through the cool white snow.
Other posts have included vignettes derived from my travels, some creative musings, and memoir-ish meanderings from life and loves. One of my most recent involved my Great Wall of Books.
Feel free to follow me on Hot White Snow, or check in periodically for updates cross-posted here on Science Traveler.
David J. Kent is an avid science traveler and the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, now available. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World (both Fall River Press). He has also written two e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
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Man-made climate change has been described by scientists and policymakers as one of the greatest challenges of our time. It has also been called a hoax by fossil fuel industry lobbyists and oil-state politicians. 
Author Chris DeRose takes a more detailed look at a period in Abraham Lincoln’s life that is normally glossed over in other biographies – his single term as a U.S. Congressman. The first few chapters highlight the political status of the time, as well as the political wrangling between different factions both within and external to the Whig party. The book goes into various aspects of the key question of the day, slavery. Doing so makes it clear that the post-Civil War reinvention of history to suggest the South wasn’t fighting to maintain and expand slavery is hogwash.
Solar and wind energy, along with hydroelectric power, may seem like recent ideas, but Nikola Tesla had them in his sights a long, long time ago. As this post goes up on Science Traveler, the new 
The title comes from the controversy (assuming you knew there was a controversy) over whether Edwin Stanton, upon Lincoln taking his last breath, said “Now he belongs to the ages” or “Now he belongs to the angels.” With this contrivance as a starting point Gopnik presents what amounts to six essays.
Nikola Tesla believed that the thermo-dynamic process, i.e., the burning of fossil fuels, was “wasteful and barbarous.” He foresaw the limitations on supply and the inherent dangers to man and the environment (though even Tesla couldn’t anticipate the impacts of fossil fuels on climate change). “Whatever our resources of primary energy may be in the future,” Tesla argued, “we must, to be rational, obtain it without consumption of any material.” He believed that natural, renewable, sources of energy could “eliminate the need of coal, oil, gas or any other of the common fuels.” Two of the renewable energy sources that he investigated were hydrothermal and geothermal energy.
There are temperature differentials in the earth as well. In 1900 Tesla was already contemplating what today we call geothermal energy. In a somewhat long-winded and metaphysical treatise called “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy,” Tesla wrote that “it is a well-known fact that the interior portions of the globe are very hot, the temperature rising, as observations show, with the approach to the center at the rate of approximately 1 degree C. for every hundred feet of depth.”
