The Navy is hoping to one day run a huge chunk of its fleet on biofuels. So the Navy’s advanced researchers — and their partners at the U.S. Department of Agriculture — are turning to a tiny robotic helicopter to help them figure out which crop they might be able to convert into their fuel of the future.

The experiment is taking place over 35,000 acres of Maui soil, on the fields of Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar, the state’s largest commercial sugar plantation. That’s the site of a $10 million, five-year gamble to test which of plantation’s crops might work as grow-your-jetfuel. The drone helicopter will track every temperature fluctuation and sprouting bud emerging into the Hawaiian sun.

Headline: Man goes into store to buy bullets but leaves arrested

Text: An Ewa Beach man who walked into a Kakaako gun shop hoping to buy some bullets got more than he bargained for Tuesday when he was arrested for allegedly being a felon in possession of a handgun.  Police said the man, 23, of an Aawa Drive address, walked into Magnum Firearms and Range on Queen Street about 1:45 p.m. Tuesday and asked a store employee if he could purchase ammunition.

Dumber: they guy in the article, however is dumber.  Really dumber… (emphasis added)

When the employee asked the man if he had the weapon on him, the man went to his vehicle to get his gun, police said. When the employee asked if he was allowed to own a gun, the man said he was a felon, police said. An off-duty sheriff from another jurisdiction overheard the conversation and detained the man until police arrived, police said

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Chris Kojima was working at Pier 30 Thursday morning.  He was aboard the Young Brothers tug Manuokekai when two humpback whales suddenly surfaced right alongside his tug boat.

"I got blasted a couple times by the spray coming of their nostrils," he said.

Kojima snapped dozens of photographs and shot video of the pair.  An adult or older yearling about forty feet long, and a smaller juvenile humpback were side by side.

"Seems like they were pretty much lost," Kojima said. "They were just doing circles, going up and down for air right in front of our boat all morning."

photos here (KGMB/KHNL)

After 40-Year Battle, Train May Roll for Oahu

…sometime this spring, a $5.3 billion project is scheduled to rise from the Kapolei farmlands that offers powerful evidence of how much this island, a symbol of Pacific tranquillity, is changing. A 40-year battle to build a mass transit line appears to be nearing its end. Barring a court intervention, construction is to begin in March on a 20-mile rail line that will be elevated 40 feet in the air, barreling over farmland, commercial districts and parts of downtown Honolulu, and stretching from here to Waikiki.

The two-track line —a 30-foot-wide span, with 21 elevated stations — is designed to accommodate an increasing crush of commuters and tourists while encouraging new growth and development, particularly on this undeveloped part of the island. The Honolulu rail project, scheduled for completion in 2018, seems certain to change sharply the nature of much of the south side of the island, as well as downtown Honolulu.

The discovery and acquisition last month by Stryker-Indigo New York of a photo album containing original 1906 and 1907 sports photographs of Oahu College (current day Punahou School) holds historical significance as they are the oldest known surviving original images of soccer being played in Hawai’i. The images, numbering twenty-four in total, include photographs of the 1907 Oahu College Girl’s soccer team. In all, there are three girl’s team soccer photos, as well as half-a-dozen individual female player portrait photos, in the collection. There is also an amazing image of the Oahu College Boy’s Soccer Team – the 1907 Oahu Island School League Champions.

And I believe that is Pauahi hall in the background.

For Democrats in Hawaii, Unease in an Oasis

Hawaii should be a happy outpost for the  Democratic Party. It has a Democratic governor. Democrats overwhelmingly control the Legislature. It has Barack Obama in the White House and all the prestige that brings, most recently an Asia-Pacific economic summit meeting with the president as its host, packing this city’s streets, restaurants and hotels with international leaders.

Yet these are hardly happy days for Hawaii Democrats. The governor, Neil Abercrombie, is ending his first year under a storm of criticism; he referred to himself the other evening as “the most unpopular governor in America.” Mr. Obama’s struggles in Washington have cast a bit of a pall here.

My objection – Hawaii is NOT an oasis (an isolated area of vegetation in a desert surrounding a water source).  We’re an island…

Source: Norm Chow to coach Hawaii

Chow previously served as offensive coordinator at UCLA, for the Tennessee Titans, at Southern California, North Carolina State and Brigham Young, helping to develop four Heisman Trophy winners

Moving to Hawaii will be a homecoming for the 65-year-old Chow.

Chow was born and raised in the plantation town of Waialua, located on Oahu’s North Shore. He graduated from Punahou School in Honolulu and got his coaching start at Waialua High and Intermediate School before becoming a graduate assistant at BYU in 1973.

KILAUEA’S KILLER MOOD SWING

For years Swanson has been gathering evidence about and alerting the public to Kilauea’s dark side. In a T.V. interview earlier this year, he described the threat:

“The most dangerous part of the explosions is something that is probably least known to people, and that is fact that they can produce clouds that are a mixture of hot ash and gases that can move horizontally across the ground surface at very rapid speeds—hurricane velocity.”

Searing hot ash and gas suddenly surging out of the volcano killed several hundred people in November 1790, according to rough historical estimates, making Kilauea the deadliest volcano active in the United States today.

Swanson says he is certain that this kind of surge will happen again, engulfing much of the volcano’s summit and spreading ash around the entire island. Yet he offers some comfort: such an event would probably be preceded by a dramatic sinking of the crater at the volcano’s summit, which would unfold over the course of several days—providing time to evacuate. Only there could be no going back for centuries.

Soooo… last night was cold and wet.  Now we’re looking at a hot, volcanic hurricane.  Lucky we live Hawaii.

State Department of Transportation officials planned to inspect the H-1 Freeway near School Street today to try to determine why soil washed onto the Ewa-bound lanes after a heavy rainstorm, prompting the closure of the Ewa-bound freeway for four hours and backing up traffic during the morning commute.

While skies are clearing over Oahu, the National Weather Service says the threat of more heavy rain still exists. Oahu, Molokai, Maui and Hawaii island remain under a flash flood watch until 6 p.m.

H-1 got closed right at the Punahou  over pass and there was flooding at the School Street on-ramp, so….  Heavy rains trigger traffic nightmares. (video at the link)

So what did that mean for Manoa?  For perspective, that spike of 3.5 inches in 6 hours is almost double of the next highest peak for the year.

Today, BWW is thrilled to announce that Punahou High School in Manoa Valley, Honolulu, has been selected as this week’s High School in the Spotlight! Punahou School in an independent college preparatory day school founded in 1841, and has an enrollment of over 3,750 students in grades K to 12. The curriculum at Punahou places an enormous importance on the arts, and stresses that its goal is to "make art a self-discovery process, with an emphasis on the journey itself, and to allow students to gain insight into their own abilities."