Yet another hazard of settling for energy that’s less than sustainable.
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Worst Oil Spill Ever?
April 30th, 2010Global Warming Scientists: Speak from the Heart, not the Head
April 1st, 2010In a recent article in Newsweek, Sharon Begley outlines how scientists are sobtaging their own message about global warming, and what they can do to change. Begley quotes that scientist feel that they are “guardians of the truth”, and once they convey that truth to an audience are removed from obligation. Read on:
“It’s a safe bet that the millions of Americans who have recently changed their minds about global warming—deciding it isn’t happening, or isn’t due to human activities such as burning coal and oil, or isn’t a serious threat—didn’t just spend an intense few days poring over climate-change studies and decide, holy cow, the discretization of continuous equations in general circulation models is completely wrong! Instead, the backlash (an 18-point rise since 2006 in the percentage who say the risk of climate change is exaggerated, Gallup found this month) has been stoked by scientists’ abysmal communication skills, plus some peculiarly American attitudes, both brought into play now by how critics have spun the “Climategate” e-mails to make it seem as if scientists have pulled a fast one.
Scientists are lousy communicators. They appeal to people’s heads, not their hearts or guts, argues Randy Olson, who left a professorship in marine biology to make science films. “Scientists think of themselves as guardians of truth,” he says. “Once they have spewed it out, they feel the burden is on the audience to understand it” and agree.”
What’s your view?
The Secret Agent Side of Green Tech: The Doomsday Vault
March 11th, 2010
Buried in rock on an icy, barren, and unforgiving island not far from the North Pole lies what might just be the next Noah’s Ark. The Svalbard “Doomsday” vault is a refrigerated, heavily fortified, and virtually impenetrable storehouse for a very valuable, if unexpected item: seeds. The vault was built to house natural, and pure strains of the worlds staple crops, and store them for later use in case of disaster.
“Anyone seeking access to the seeds themselves will have to pass through four locked doors: the heavy steel entrance doors, a second door approximately 115 meters down the tunnel and finally the two keyed air-locked doors,” the Global Crop Diversity Trust writes. “Keys are coded to allow access to different levels of the facility. Not all keys unlock all doors.”
The vault exists in part to protect us from ourselves. In an age where companies like Monsanto believe they can improve upon a potato’s genetic code by causing it to produce pesticide within its own cell, anything is possible. The vault exists to keep the natural crops pristinel, so that we will have seeds to return to if or when we realize GMO agriculture is not beneficial. To achieve this, the vault was placed on the fairly inaccessible and unforgiving island of Svalbard. It is so far north that the ground remains permafrost-ed, of permanently frozen. This serves as a backup in case the vaults freezers fail. Once frozen, seeds can be stored virtually forever, until humanity needs to use them once again.
Kyoto Protocol: An Anti-Climate-Tic Ending
October 19th, 2009
As 2012 draws closer and closer, so too does the end of the prestigious Kyoto protocol.
The Kyoto protocol is a global initiative aimed at stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Which as most would agree is a great thing.
Although according to NPR, drafting a new agreement in the near future seems unlikely. The reason for this is strong opposition from the United States Congress. Although President Clinton signed the original pact, the U.S. refused to ratify the original agreement and is slowing the creation of a new draft because the original pact did not require any action from developing countries like China, which is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter.
Both the Bush and the Obama administration felt that this was a fatal flaw in the protocol. There has been little progress but not for lack of effort. In an interview between NPR and European Commission Vice President, Margot Wallstrom, she said that it has been very difficult negotiating a treaty that the U.S would agree to and that all parties involved would rather be on track to a solution.
Hopefully these issues will be worked through in December when world leaders meet in Copenhagen to discuss next steps.
How Clean is Your Hospital?
September 11th, 2009
Hospitals are generally thought of as a place where you to go to feel better. And yes, they usually do succeed in that regard, despite stealing your paycheck and the rights to your first-born child in the process. But what you probably didn’t know, is that hospitals create a large amount of business for themselves; and that’s not a good thing.
Close to 2 million people acquire infections from hospitals each year and more than 250 related deaths occur each day in the United States, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That is why professors at the University of Florida have developed a new technology to monitor health-care workers’ hand hygiene by detecting sanitizer or soap fumes given off their hands.
The trademarked system, called HyGreen, logs, down to the second, the frequency of hand cleaning and contact with patients in a database that clinical supervisors can review immediately.
Is this big brother? “No,” says Richard J. Meiker, M.D., Ph.D., and UF College of Medicine anesthesiology professor who helped develop the technology. “This is just another tool.”
“A hospital worker never wants to be responsible for someone getting sick or dying from an infection acquired in the hospital.”
Read more from Science Daily.
What Can A Speed Bump Do for the Power Grid?
September 11th, 2009
The Burger King on U.S. Highway 22 in Hillside, N.J., looks no different from any other franchise in the state. Customers pull in and out all day, and at least 100,000 cars visit the drive-thru each year. And now a newly installed, mechanized speed bump will both help them slow down and harvest some of that coasting energy.
“We use the weight of a car to throw a lever,” explains Gerard Lynch, the engineer behind the MotionPower system developed for New Energy Technologies, a Maryland-based company. “The instantaneous power is 2,000 watts at five miles-per-hour, but it’s instantaneous which means some form of storage will be required. The real key is how do I get a million cars to do that for me.”
This demonstration project won’t actually provide electricity to either the Burger King or the grid, but it will employ a mini-flywheel—a mechanical device that stores energy by spinning—to test storage potential. A higher price can be charged for electricity that is fed into the grid at the right moment.
“How do we capture and hold these pulses efficiently so we can dispatch them at the right time when the electricity rate is most advantageous,” Lynch says. “Here in Hillside, the average price when you take delivery is 17.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. It’s double that in peak summer. The idea is: let’s hit it all day and return that power at 3 PM in the afternoon.”
Read more from Scientific American.
Bacteria Clean Sewage and Create Electricity
September 11th, 2009
Bacteria gets a bad rep. People avoid it like the plague. In fact, people hate bacteria so much, that antibacterial products like hand sanitizer have become a multi-billion dollar industry. But what if I told you not all bacteria was bad; in fact, what if I said that bacteria could be a key source of renewable energy?
Ok, maybe I can understand why you’d hold a grudge if you suffer from gum disease, strep throat, cholera or any other bacterial illness, but scientists from Penn State University are doing everything they can to bring the single-celled organism back into the public’s good graces.
Sewage is loaded with energy-rich sugars that researchers have struggled for years to convert into useful power. To do so, investigators have experimented with nature’s experts on breaking down waste — bacteria.
“It’s kind of like the movie ‘The Matrix,’” said environmental engineer Bruce Logan at Penn State University. “Instead of wiring people up to generate electricity, we are using bacteria to directly generate electricity.”
All the energy that bacteria could generate from wastewater could help power the considerable needs of wastewater treatment. For instances, in the United States, roughly 33 billion gallons of wastewater are treated daily for an annual cost of more than $25 billion, and some 1.5 percent of the electricity produced every year goes into wastewater treatment alone.
Read more from Live Science.
Teenager Invents Solar Panel for Developing World
September 11th, 2009
What were you doing when you were 18? Take a second and think about it. You were probably hanging out at the mall, at the skate park, or maybe if you were a hard-worker you had a part-time job at the local take-out spot.
Whatever you were doing, I can almost guarantee that you didn’t invent a solar panel that could possibly solve your entire country’s energy needs. That’s right, an 18-year old from a rural village in Nepal believes he has found the solution to the developing world’s energy needs.
Even crazier, the young inventor, named Milan Karki, says hair is to the key to using solar panels and revolutionizing renewable energy.
“First I wanted to provide electricity for my home, then my village. Now I am thinking for the whole world,” said Milan, who attends school in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu.
The teenager already has plans to commercially produce his invention. The panel, which produces 18 Watts of energy, could be sold for about 12 EUR if were to be mass produced, about one quarter the price of the silicon model already on the market.
Read more from Dailymail.co.uk
New Study Shows Snow Melting Sooner
August 11th, 2009
We’ve all seen it. That white fluffy blanket of snow that looked so nice after it fell a couple weeks back is no longer white and fluffy. It has been capped with a layer of dark sooty particulate matter, turning it from white to gray to black.
Which is no good whether you’re trying to ski on it, make Frosty the Snowman, or throw it at your friends. It’s just downright frustrating.
And no, this is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. A new study shows that pollution from automobiles and coal-fired power plants is contributing to the melting of mountain snowpacks up to a month early, exacerbating water shortages and polluting streams in the arid West.
So aside from just being an aesthetically unpleasing feature of landscapes in winter, there are far more serious consequences in store for the Rockies, the Sierra Nevadas, and the Cascades.
The study, conducted by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, found that particulate emissions from automobile tailpipes and industry smokestacks settles on snow-covered mountains and covers them with a dark layer that absorbs more sunlight and melts the snow faster.
So, not only will there be less water in the summer months, the water that will be available will have higher concentrations of dirt, ash and soot from as far away as China.
Read more from redgreenandblue.org
Imagining the Tech World in 2050
June 29th, 2009
Everyone loves predicting the future. It offers endless possibilities of fantastical technological inventions and advances. When will there be flying cars or time travel? Filmmakers and fiction writers concoct extraordinary tales that capture the attention of mass audiences time and again.
So when several of the world’s top scientists met at the kickoff event of a collaboration between IBM and the University of Southern California to explore the intersection of creative arts and science and technology, it was only natural for them to foresee how technology would affect life in 2050.
As one might expect, the predictions created quite a buzz. Suggestions included that supercomputers will soon become handheld devices; clean water and energy will be available to the entire world, and personal pharmacies built into the human body will administer medicine based on data from internal sensors.
Seem like a bit much? Think back to a world 20 years ago when the Internet was used only by the military and computers were the size of a large living room.
IBM scientist Don Eigler suggests that by 2050 we will have laptops with 100,000 times more horsepower than a state-of-the-art machine today. “What would you do with it?” he asked the audience. “We’ll find new ways. I just can’t think of any today.”
Read Dan Farber’s report in CNET.
