Abu Dhabi Plans World’s Largest Concentrated Solar Plant
When completed in 2012, Masdar’s $600 million project will cover 741 acres, feature 769 parabolic mirrors, and have a 100 megawatt capacity–enough energy for 62,000 households. This is Masdar’s second solar plant inside Abu Dhabi. The first is a 10-megawatt photovoltaic installation.
Somewhat ironic in that Abu Dhabi also has one of the world’s largest carbon footprints. Perhaps they are planning for a future that has less available cheap fossil fuels.
A new study published in the June 10, 2010 issue of the journal Nature has found a number of genetic variants in people with autism and the discovery may lead to new treatments.
The results from the second phase of the collaborative Autism Genome Project showed that individuals with autism tend to carry more sub-microscopic insertions and deletions called copy-number variants or CNV in their genome than those without the condition do.
This blog doesn’t get enough traffic to make that much of a difference, but hopefully news reports like this will steer people away from the tragic beliefs spread by the “Autism Doctor” that autism was caused by vaccines. Those beliefs have been echoed by many web sites and a few celebrities.
Revealed: the secret life of the cricket on a sex safari
A network of CCTV cameras and microphones has recorded every move made by a colony of crickets throughout a breeding season to reveal unprecedented details of their behaviour and mating habits.
A British research team has used 96 cameras to gain new insights into the breeding patterns of the field cricket, Gryllus campestris.
The mating strategies of crickets are interesting, but this paper reports them in such a way that a larger excerpt would not have been safe for viewing at work.
Oil from spill could have powered 38,000 cars for year, UD researcher says
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) suggests using beer ingredients to clean up spill. Gee why hasn’t anyone thought of that before. Just haul a few thousand tons of hops and barley than dump them into the Gulf. That will clear up the oil in no time. Chuck makes about $175K a year coming up with keen ideas like that.
Some call them urban myths, some conspiracy theories. These little bits of nonsense that get started to explain something away inconvenient truths or frequently to deflect blame away from the responsible party. One of the theories that seems to be gaining traction among a certain segment of the populace is the idea that BP shouldn’t be held responsible for the Gulf spill because those mean and all POWERFUL environmentalists made BP go too far from shore to drill in deep water. BP, like most corporations are motivated by money. A subset of that belief is making money in a way that is easiest. BP drilled in the Deepwater Horizon site for one simple reason – that is where the oil was, Right-wing pundits ludicrously blame oil spill on environmentalists
Limbaugh: “What the environmentalist wackos are making us do is drill down 35,000 feet.” Rush Limbaugh claimed on his May 17 broadcast: “What the environmentalist wackos are making us do is drill down 35,000 feet, 6.6 miles, when there’s oil practically begging to be taken out of the ground in areas that are now off-limits because of U.S. regime regulations.”
Doocy(Fox cable news): “Back in the day, they used to just drill pretty close to shore,” but environmentalists “pushed them out further and further.” On the June 3 edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy stated that “back in the day they used to just drill pretty close to shore,” but “as the environmentalists said there’s a real danger here, they pushed them out further and further.” Doocy then cited an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily that he said made the “good point” that “questions would this be so tough to cap and stop if it weren’t pushed into water almost a mile deep by environmentalists.”
BP like all oil companies drills where their studies say there is going to be oil. They use geological studies and then they drill a small test well.
MMS: “remarkable increase” in deep-water drilling due in part to “finding of reservoirs with high production wells.” According to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS): “The deepwater portion of Gulf of Mexico has shown a remarkable increase in oil and gas exploration, development and production. In part this is due to the development of new technologies reducing operational costs and risks, as well as the finding of reservoirs with high production wells. ”
MMS (Minerals Management Service) report: “Best source of new domestic energy resources lies in the deep water Gulf of Mexico.” In a 2004 report — titled Deep Water: Where the Energy Is — the MMS stated that “our best source of new domestic energy resources lies in the deep water Gulf of Mexico and other frontier areas.” MMS reported that due to “declining production” in “near-shore, shallow waters” in the Gulf of Mexico, “energy companies have focused their attention on oil and gas resources in water depths of 1,000 feet and beyond.” MMS estimated that “the deep water regions of the Gulf of Mexico may contain 56 billion barrels of oil equivalent, or enough to meet U.S. demand for 7-1/2 years at current rates.”
Maybe I missed that news report where some environmentalists twisted BP’s arm to place drilling rigs where environmentalists wanted them drilled. This may not have made the news because of the super secret plot by the all-powerful environmental movement. We know that BP never complained,
The cost per day of the oil spill to BP so far has been $16 million. That number is dwarfed by the $66 million per day the firm made in profit in the first quarter of this year. Indeed, in 2009 BP’s total profits were $14 billion. As CNN’s Christine Romans notes, even if the cleanup costs were to rise to $14 billion, it would simply mean that BP went one year without make a profit, let alone losing money.
Those awful environmentalists forced BP to make $66 million a day? Limbaugh, Doocy, Fox and others of that ilk will never point out how ludicrous their thoughts are because their listeners eat up that urban myth-alternative reality garbage, which in turn generates huge advertising dollars which earns the people who spread the distortions and twisted logic big bucks. So they have no incentive to tell the simple, but boring truth.
tangledwing 