Forest Waterfall wallpaper, Solar and other news

Forest Waterfall wallpaper

Solar power generation around the clock

A Californian company, SolarReserve, is developing a solar power system that can store seven hours’ worth of solar energy by focusing mirrors onto millions of gallons of molten salt, allowing the plant to provide electricity 24 hours a day.

Because the salt is cheap – made from potassium and sodium nitrate – it makes this solar plant competitive with fossil fuels. And of course it means at night there would be no need to which over to fossil fuels to generate electricity.

Signature of Antimatter Detected in Lightning

During two recent lightning storms, Fermi recorded gamma-ray emissions of a particular energy that could only have been produced by the decay of energetic positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons.

That doesn’t mean that if you’re struck by the special gamma rays you’ll be zapped into an alternate universe, but it will still really really hurt.

You may have heard already of the little town of Greensburg, Kansas. President Obama mentioned them in a speech on green energy and they were featured on an episode of  Planet Green, How an Entire Town Leveled By a Tornado Is Rebuilding Green

Some are surprised that this conservative Midwest community has embraced a green ethos with such fervor. But actually, Dixon says, it’s not that far removed from the common-sense approach of their farming ancestors. “Sometimes we hear the word ‘green’ and we think modernistic,” he says. “But green is just being good stewards of the resources we’ve been blessed with.”

I’ve mentioned this before, but my grandparents, children of the Great Depression did not have have a trendy green point of view. They did have ideas about saving energy and generally respecting nature because to do otherwise was considered something irresponsible and selfish folks did.

From Ft. Hood to Florida: Lots of Questions, Few Answers on the Psyche of Shooters - From Ft. Hood to Florida: Lots of Questions, Few Answers on the Psyche of Shooters.

Wheeler Crest Eastern Sierra wallpaper, Nitrogen loss threatens desert plant life with implications for global warming

Wheeler Crest Eastern Sierra wallpaper

Nitrogen loss threatens desert plant life, study shows

Sparks (associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology) and lead author Carmody McCalley, a graduate student, warn that temperature increases and shifting precipitation patterns due to climate change may lead to further nitrogen losses in arid ecosystems. That would make arid soils even more infertile and unable to support most plant life, McCalley warned. Although, some climate models predict more summer rainfall for desert areas, the water, when combined with heat, would greatly increase nitrogen losses, she added.

“We’re on a trajectory where plant life in arid ecosystems could cease to do well,” she said.

….In addition, the researchers note, more nitrogen oxides in the lower atmosphere creates ozone near the ground, which contributes to air pollution and increases the greenhouse effect that warms the planet.

With deserts accounting for 35 to 40 percent of the Earth’s surface and arid and semiarid lands being the most likely areas for new human settlements, air quality issues, loss of soil fertility and further desertification need to be considered as the climate warms, the researchers said.

McCalley and Sparks findings are bad news for climate models that predict global warming as current models do not take into account non-biological factors to predict nitrogen gases released from the soil. So global warming may be accelerating faster then current data would suggest.

Everyone, short or tall, regardless of national origin, poor or wealthy is dependent on the nitrogen cycle for their existence. Despite that importance, I guess the nitrogen cycle is not glamorous enough to get much in the way of press coverage. It is covered in high school and college general biology classes, yet most of the people I know that are even aware of it are people employed in science related work or that do some vegetable gardening. Some plants such as legumes (Lentils, chickpeas, field peas) fix their own nitrogen, but many of the plants we depend on such as corn( eaten directly or indirectly through meat) must have nitrogen added. A step by step introduction to the cycle of fixation is available here, USABLE NITROGEN, STEP BY STEP

North American Origins for the Falklands Wolf

Dr. Slater said the research showed that the maned wolf and the Falklands wolf last had a common ancestor six million years ago. “But canids didn’t show up in South America until two and a half million years ago,” he said, after the isthmus of Panama was formed. He said it was quite likely that the two species evolved in North America and then, faced with increasing competition from canids that entered the continent from Asia, “managed to survive by going to South America.”

The Falklands wolf was hunted to extinction by 1873. The researchers used DNA from museum specimens to build a family tree.

Sunset Gulls wallpaper

Clouds and Mountains wallpaper, Rare Arnoux’s beaked whales sighted, Using AIDS virus to cure brain disease

 

Clouds and Mountains wallpaper

Rare whale gathering sighted

A large group of a rarely sighted, mysterious species of whale has been seen off the coast of Antarctica.

Approximately 60 Arnoux’s beaked whales were seen and photographed frolicking on the surface in the Gerlache Strait.

Few sightings of this enigmatic species are made in the wild, and even less in waters near to shore.

The sighting, of the largest group ever recorded, is also the first time this species of whale has been seen socialising at the water surface.

Arnoux’s and Baird’s Beaked Whale ( which might be the same species) generally prefer the waters just off a continental shelf, but there have been occasional sightings in locations ranging from the North Pacific to the coast of Baja California to the Sea of Japan. These beaked whales – the beak is an extension of the males tooth – are some of the least understood animals in the world. A rough estimate puts their world wide population at 30,000 individuals. At 12m long you’d think they’d be hard to miss. They might purposely avoid large ships, but since there is little known about their behavior its hard to tell what they do or why they behave the way they do. One scientist described the group of beaked whales in this sighting – “The whales were very tactile with each other, slapping the water with their tails, surfacing rapidly.”

Scientists halt brain disease with new gene therapy

Scientists have managed to halt a rare and fatal brain disease with an experimental gene therapy technique using a deactivated version of the AIDS virus, a study published on Thursday showed.

The international team used a disabled form of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to deliver working genes to two boys with the brain disease X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD). Their success may help shape future treatment

Besides the major break through itself the irony is striking. Taking a often deadly virus and turning it around to effect healing.

Fox News owns the extremist images featured at Capitol Hill rally it promoted

In aggressively promoting Rep. Michele Bachmann’s November 5 anti-health care reform rally on Capitol Hill, Fox News has chosen to associate itself with the offensive and extremist rhetoric emanating from that event. This rhetoric includes the disturbing signs — such as one of a pile of Holocaust victims’ bodies captioned “National Socialist Health Care, Dachau, Germany – 1945″ — displayed at the event.

I’ve seen images of Dachau in history books and they’re very disturbing. More disturbing then some obviously ignorant people comparing health care reform to Nazi death camps. We do not have death camps in the U.S. but we do let thousands of our fellow Americans die for lack of health care, Study links 45,000 U.S. deaths to lack of insurance

Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.

“We’re losing more Americans every day because of inaction … than drunk driving and homicide combined,” Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.

Rep. Michele Bachmann(R-Minn) and her supporters seem to have things backwards.

Feather Sound Wave wallpaper, Possible metal-air battery on the way, Special lizard gets a break from judge

Feather Sound Wave wallpaper

Betting on a Metal-Air Battery Breakthrough.

A spinoff from Arizona State University says it can develop a metal-air battery that dramatically outperforms the best lithium-ion batteries on the market, and now it has the funding it needs to prove it.

If successful they’ll produce a battery that will have 11 times the energy density of lithium-ion based batteries and cost about 30% less. The funding is part of that research grant package recently passed by the Obama administration.

RARE PHOTOS: Sperm Whale EATS Giant Squid. Amazingly good quality photos. We’ve seen the pictures of giant squid, usually of the body and tentacle spread out. By themselves they look the mythic monsters of the deep. In a Huge sperm whales mouth ( a large male can reach 20.5 metres (67 ft) long), the squid looks like a tasty little snack.

Flat-tailed horned lizard gets boost from Arizona judge

U.S. District Judge Neil V. Wake’s ruling follows a recent U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals order that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reconsider its earlier decision to deny the lizard protection under the Endangered Species Act. That decision rejected a Bush administration policy that environmentalists complained favored development at the expense of the lizard and many plants and animals across the nation.

The flat-tailed horned lizard is an American heritage species living in Arizona, California and Baja California. Not twenty years ago its habitat – dunes and gravel pans – were relatively safe from development. Now those same places make good locations for more suburban sprawl and solar power arrays. One solar company is set to develop 6,500 acres of flat-tailed horned lizard habitat, but also plans to mediate the impact by buying habitat elsewhere. Mediation is almost always a poor compromise, but better then nothing I guess. A gallery of flat-tailed horned lizard here. They look like little dinosaurs with spiked collars.

I thought it was the ingestion of sugar coated cereals while playing Nintendo, but when I’m wrong I’m not too proud to admit it – Inefficient Selection: New Evolutionary Mechanism Accounts For Some Of Human Biological Complexity

A painstaking analysis of thousands of genes and the proteins they encode shows that human beings are biologically complex, at least in part, because of the way humans evolved to cope with redundancies arising from duplicate genes.

Daniel Boone National Forest wallpaper, The revised future of plastics might be soy based

Daniel Boone National Forest wallpaper

In the iconic American movie The Graduate there is that famous scene among several in which one of the party attendees advises Benjamin about his future,

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir?

It turned out that Mr. McGuire, plastics as symbolism aside, was correct. Plastics surround us, You’re reading this post from a device made mostly of plastic. You can probably find plenty of plastic objects at arm’s reach. One of the benefits of plastic is that it is fairly durable in proportion to its cost. That is also part of the problem. Plastics are made from petroleum-based compounds and persist in the environment long after the product composed mostly of plastic is thrown away. As a practical matter we’ll need some products made of plastic compounds, synthesized from petroleum, for years if not decades. In the mean time making products like water/carbonated beverage bottles , shoes and toys from plastic is a tragedy on two fronts. They are wasteful uses of a precious non-renewable commodity and blights on the environment,  part of our throw-away culture. That’s where materials science comes in. Meet Stella

At first glance, this little yellow giraffe looks like a lot of other kids’ bath toys. But Stella is made from Renuva, a little-known material that could change for the better the way hundreds of things, from upholstery to airplane wings, are made.

The story of how Stella came to be made from this material, a soy-based alternative to polyurethane (which is typically petroleum-based), provides a model for how stuff can be better designed in the future.

Stella by Pfeiffer Labs made from soy-based polyurethane

Stella is something of a proof of concept made from soy-based polyurethane. While this one will probably end up in a museum, if you threw Stella away the sun, air and microbes would break Stella down much faster and with no toxic residue should she end up in a land fill or the local river bank.  A stat from the article – according to the United Soybean Board, “For every 1 million pounds of bio-based polyol products purchased, nearly 700,000 pounds of crude oil are saved.” There is a legitimate concern here that in going with a soy based plastic we might be repeating the mistake of bio-fuels in which food prices increased because grain/corn were diverted from food/feed to fuel. We’ll have to wait for an appropriate study to see the cost/benefit analysis. One thing they we could concentrate on is lessening our consumption of meat. It takes about 16 pounds of feed grain to produce one pound of animal meat. if we reduced our national meat consumption by 25%, besides  our national rate of heart disease going down, the acreage devoted to growing animal feed could be devoted to growing our plastic replacement. This would also have the added benefit of less pollution from animal waste. Such reduction in waste would also have cost saving benefits for society as a whole since that waste is a public health problem.

Kilimanjaro Glaciers May Vanish In A Few Decades

Among the findings:

– The summit lost 80 percent of its ice between 1912 and 2007. Some 26 percent of the ice present in 2000, Dr. Thompson’s last trip to the summit, vanished by the end of the period. The Furtwangler Ice Field in particular has lost 50 percent of its thickness since 2000. At that pace, it will vanish into a damp patch of summit soil by 2018. Glaciers on Mt. Kilimajaro’s flanks have lost some 40 percent of their area between 2000 and 2007.

Even during a severe drought 4,200 years ago that lasted 3 centuries Mt. Kilimajaro’s core saw none of the melting and refreezing that researchers see now.