Astronomical!

original article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/24/opinion/global/24iht-june24-ihtmag-das-32.html?src=recg

An international team of astronomers recently presented compelling evidence that our galaxy is teeming with lonely Jupiter-sized planets adrift between stars. Alone in the void, unattached to any parent sun, these cosmic orphans appear to fill the heavens in vast numbers. Extrapolating from what they observed, Takahiro Sumi, an astrophysicist at Osaka University, and his colleagues reported in the journal Nature that there could be as many as 400 billion of these lonely wanderers in our Milky Way galaxy alone....

As if on cue, NASA then announced that its Kepler spacecraft, two years into a three-and-a-half year mission to find Earth-size planets around nearby stars, had found a totally unexpected profusion of candidates. Of the 1,235 suspected planets spotted so far, moreover, about a third were in multiplanet solar systems like ours. Judging from these discoveries, it would appear that planets out there are as numerous as grains of sand. Twenty-five years ago, when I was a student in high school, only nine planets were known, all in our solar system. We learned their names and sequence from the sun, from the fleet-footed Mercury to icy Pluto. We learned of the runaway greenhouse effect that had stoked Venus to blistering temperatures and read about the giant storm that is Jupiter’s red spot, and we gazed at pictures of the rings of Saturn that the Voyager spacecraft had sent back....

It may come as a surprise that it was only in 1995 that a planet beyond our solar system was first sighted. The discovery by the Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz was confirmed soon after by an independent team in the United States. I was a graduate student then and remember the great excitement this stirred among astronomers. Like Kant, many had believed that the processes that gave rise to our solar system were not unique, and that there were other planets in the universe. Now, observations had finally caught up with belief.

Finding “exoplanets” (for extrasolar planet, as planets outside our solar system are now referred to) is no easy matter. Planets emit no light of their own, and only reflect the light of their stars. Given the interstellar distances involved, even the stars nearest to us appear only as pinpoints, so it’s a technological challenge to identify a planet thousands of times dimmer.

Mayor and Queloz met the challenge by using a spectrograph at the Haute-Provence Observatory in southeastern France to observe the rhythmic wobble of a sun-like star known as 51 Pegasi, a wobble created by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. This “radial velocity” technique has been used since to find many planets, but its reliance on spotting the wobble of a star tends to pick out larger planets close to their parent star — like the Jupiter-sized one Mayor and Queloz reported — which most scientists think could not be capable of supporting life.

There are ways to detect smaller planets, and the Kepler spacecraft launched on March 7, 2009, was specifically designed, according to NASA, “to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover dozens of Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets.” Kepler continuously monitors 145,000 stars in the Milky Way for the brief dimming of light that would indicate a “planetary transit” — a planet crossing the face of the star....

The team that discovered the wandering orphan planets, led by Takahiro Sumi and including David Bennett from the University of Notre Dame, used an even more arcane technique — gravitational microlensing — to spot these otherwise totally invisible bodies. Based on Einstein’s premise that gravity bends light, the technique can see dark objects in the sky by measuring the light they bend from stars behind them. The astrophysicists thus saw 10 drifters, and estimated that there may be one or two of them for each of the approximately 200 billion stars in the Milky Way.

That’s a quantum leap from the nine I knew in high school (reduced to eight after Pluto was demoted to a “dwarf planet” in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union), and even from the 500 or so exoplanets confirmed as of early this year. And if Jupiter-size planets, which are easier to spot, are numbered in the billions, surely there must be many Earth-size planets out there, spinning around their stars at just the right distance to support life? It is time to rewrite the texts.

You may wonder at this point why something so Earth shattering as the discovery of innumerable planets has not caused more excitement in the broad public....

The confirmation that planets are a dime a dozen is really the culmination of the scientific revolution first started by Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler more than four centuries ago, a revolution in which our home planet lost its special place at the center of the universe. The prevailing cosmology before Copernicus — codified by the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in the first century A.D. and, though dead wrong, accepted for the next 1,500 years — held that the Sun, Moon and planets (the six known ones) all revolved around Mother Earth, under a canopy of stars. It was a rational and well organized universe, in which the Roman Catholic Church could point with authority to heaven above and hell below.

Then Nicolaus Copernicus, a timid Polish canon, put forward an alternate, heliocentric system in which the Sun replaced Earth at the center. In 1543, just before he died, Copernicus finally summoned the courage to publish his treatise, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (“On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres”), which would inspire Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler to pursue the studies that became modern astronomy. In an age when science was inextricably linked to religion, the Catholic Church did not surrender lightly its geocentric universe. To challenge it was “false and contrary to Scripture,” Galileo was told by the Inquisition, and even though he disowned his ideas, he spent his last years under house arrest. (In 2000, Pope John Paul II formally apologized for Galileo’s trial).

But there was no turning back. Within a few decades, Isaac Newton confirmed Kepler’s ideas on planetary motion and described the natural laws that have shaped our view of the cosmos ever since. Once the Earth had been displaced from the center of the universe, it was only a matter of time before the Sun was reduced to a garden variety star in a remote spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy; the Milky Way itself to one of a hundred billion galaxies; and our planet to a speck of cosmic dust.

The Gas Is Greener

original article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/opinion/08bryce.html?hpwhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

snippets:

IN April, Gov. Jerry Brown made headlines by signing into law an ambitious mandate that requires California to obtain one-third of its electricity from renewable energy sources like sunlight and wind by 2020.

But there’s the rub: while energy sources like sunlight and wind are free and naturally replenished, converting them into large quantities of electricity requires vast amounts of natural resources — most notably, land.

Consider California’s new mandate. The state’s peak electricity demand is about 52,000 megawatts. Meeting the one-third target will require about 17,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity. Let’s assume that California will get half of that capacity from solar and half from wind. Most of its large-scale solar electricity production will presumably come from projects like the $2 billion Ivanpah solar plant, which is now under construction in the Mojave Desert in southern California. When completed, Ivanpah, which aims to provide 370 megawatts of solar generation capacity, will cover 3,600 acres — about five and a half square miles.

The math is simple: to have 8,500 megawatts of solar capacity, California would need at least 23 projects the size of Ivanpah, covering about 129 square miles, an area more than five times as large as Manhattan.

Wind energy projects require even more land. The Roscoe wind farm in Texas, which has a capacity of 781.5 megawatts, covers about 154 square miles. Again, the math is straightforward: to have 8,500 megawatts of wind generation capacity, California would likely need to set aside an area equivalent to more than 70 Manhattans. Apart from the impact on the environment itself, few if any people could live on the land because of the noise (and the infrasound, which is inaudible to most humans but potentially harmful) produced by the turbines.

Unfortunately, energy sprawl is only one of the ways that renewable energy makes heavy demands on natural resources.

Consider the massive quantities of steel required for wind projects. The production and transportation of steel are both expensive and energy-intensive, and installing a single wind turbine requires about 200 tons of it. Many turbines have capacities of 3 or 4 megawatts, so you can assume that each megawatt of wind capacity requires roughly 50 tons of steel. By contrast, a typical natural gas turbine can produce nearly 43 megawatts while weighing only 9 tons. Thus, each megawatt of capacity requires less than a quarter of a ton of steel.

Such profligate use of resources is the antithesis of the environmental ideal. Nearly four decades ago, the economist E. F. Schumacher distilled the essence of environmental protection down to three words: “Small is beautiful.” In the rush to do something — anything — to deal with the intractable problem of greenhouse gas emissions, environmental groups and policy makers have determined that renewable energy is the answer. But in doing so they’ve tossed Schumacher’s dictum into the ditch.

Data Center Infographic (Opportunities For Efficiency Improvements)

Original Article:

http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/16/data-center-infographic-opportunities-for-efficiency-improvements

CDC Says Lemon Eucalyptus As Effective As DEET

original articles:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/05/cdc-confirms-lemon-eucalyptus-oil-as-effective-as-deet.php?campaign=daily_nl

http://mattermore.org/2011/05/02/cdc-says-lemon-eucalyptus-as-effective-as-deet

snippets:

In two recent scientific publications, when oil of lemon eucalyptus was tested against mosquitoes found in the US it provided protection similar to repellents with low concentrations of DEET

Dr. Mohammed Abou-Donia of Duke University studied lab animals' performance of neuro-behavioural tasks requiring muscle co-ordination. He found that lab animals exposed to the equivalent of average human doses of DEET performed far worse than untreated animals.

Children with DEET toxicity reported lethargy, headaches, tremors, involuntary movements, seizures, and convulsions though the amount that led to this toxicity was unreported, according to the CDC.

Another plus, lemon eucalyptus doesn’t have the oily feel and unpleasant smell of DEET products. Look for products that contain the active ingredient p-Menthane-3,8-diol, such as Cutter Lemon Eucalyptus Pump 4oz, $7.95 which can repel mosquitoes and ticks for up to 6 hours.

Drumbeat of Nuclear Fallout Fear Doesn’t Resound With Experts

Original Article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/sciencehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif/03radiation.html?src=recg

Snippets:

The nuclear disaster in Japan has sent waves of radiation and dread around the globe, prompting so many people to buy radiation detectors and potassium iodide to fend off thyroid cancer that supplies quickly sold out.

The fear is unwarranted, experts say. People in Japan near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may have reason to worry about the consequences of radiation leaks, scientists say, and some reactor workers, in particular, may suffer illness. But outside of Japan, the increase is tiny, compared with numerous other sources of radiation, past and present.

In the world’s oceans, thousands of decomposing drums of radioactive waste pose bigger dangers than the relatively small amounts of radioactive water released from the Fukushima Daiichi plant. And natural radiation from rocks, cosmic rays and other aspects of the environment, experts say, represents the biggest factor of all — far bigger than all the man-made emissions, including the current increase from the crippled Japanese reactors.

Dr. Dale Dewar, executive director of Physicians for Global Survival, a group that advocates the abolition of nuclear arms, said the accident meant future generations would live in a world with higher levels of background radiation.

During the cold war, for example, more than 500 detonations pumped the global atmosphere full of deadly radioactive materials, some of which are still emitting radiation.

Figures from the United Nations put the total bomb radiation from decades of atmospheric testing at almost 70 billion curies. By contrast, the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant released about 100 million curies of the most dangerous materials.

As for Fukushima Daiichi, Japanese officials said on April 12 that the reactor complex had released about 10 million curies. In 1979, the reactor accident at Three Mile Island released about 50 curies into the environment.

Additionally, many experts say, the threat to the Japanese people is probably low because — unlike the radioactive fallout from the cold war and the Chernobyl accident — most of the radiation is believed to have blown out to sea on the prevailing winds.

The ocean has received many radiological blows over the decades. From 1946 to 1994, when the practice was banned, governments around the globe dumped many thousands of drums of radioactive waste into the abyss, as well as reactors and derelict submarines.

Scientists estimate the dumping in total involved about four million curies of radioactive materials, with the Soviet Union doing a vast majority of the disposal. Decay has lowered the level of that radiological threat over the decades, even as the rotting of drums and barrels has raised the risk of environmental contamination.

At a nuclear dump site near the Farallon Islands off San Francisco, surveys have revealed many fractured drums and evidence that some radioactive materials have spread to sea life. The Environmental Protection Agency found that sponges bore “readily measurable” amounts of plutonium 239 and plutonium 240 — types of man-made radioactive materials that seldom exist in nature. The former has a half-life of 24,360 years, and the latter 6,560 years.

Studies Say Natural Gas Has Its Own Environmental Problems

original article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/business/energy-environment/12gas.html

snippets:

Natural gas, with its reputation as a linchpin in the effort to wean the nation off dirtier fossil fuels and reduce global warming, may not be as clean over all as its proponents say....

The problem, the studies suggest, is that planet-warming methane, the chief component of natural gas, is escaping into the atmosphere in far larger quantities than previously thought, with as much as 7.9 percent of it puffing out from shale gas wells, intentionally vented or flared, or seeping from loose pipe fittings along gas distribution lines. This offsets natural gas’s most important advantage as an energy source: it burns cleaner than other fossil fuels and releases lower carbon dioxide emissions.

“These are huge numbers,” he said. “That the industry would let what amounts to trillions of cubic feet of gas get away from us doesn’t make any sense. That’s not the business that we’re in.”

Methane leaks have long been a concern because while methane dissipates in the atmosphere more quickly than carbon dioxide, it is far more efficient at trapping heat. Recent evidence has suggested that the amount of leakage has been underestimated. A report in January by the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica, for example, noted that the Environmental Protection Agency had recently doubled its estimates for the amount of methane that is vented or lost from natural gas distribution lines.

The study combined these emissions with studies of other methane losses along the processing and distribution cycle to arrive at an estimated total methane loss range from 3.6 to 7.9 percent for the shale gas industry.

When all is factored together, Mr. Howarth and his colleagues conclude that the greenhouse gas footprint of shale gas can be as much as 20 percent greater than, and perhaps twice as high as, coal per unit of energy.

Mr. Hawkins also said that too little was known about just how much methane was being lost and vented, and that studies like Mr. Howarth’s, while needed, relied on too slim a data set to be considered the final word.

“This is a huge and growing industry, and we just don’t have the information we need to make sure that this resource is being developed as cleanly as it can be,” Mr. Hawkins said.

Bill Gates Bets On Next-Gen Nuclear

original article:

http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/24/nuclear-power-innovation-technology-ecotech-bill-gates.html

snippets:

Bill Gates announced his plans to fund a viable, next-generation nuclear technology called a traveling-wave reactor.

Traveling-wave reactors have been discussed for decades as a cheaper and safer alternative to typical fission reactors, but until now the supercomputers required to make such technology possible were simply not affordable.

The prototype developed by TerraPower will rely upon Microsoft's supercomputing prowess and a whole lot of computer hardware--1,024 Xeon core processors assembled on 128 blade servers offering "over 1,000 times the computational ability as a desktop computer."

Instead of requiring enriched uranium, it can burn depleted uranium and other low-grade radioactive fuel stocks. It can also burn them for a long, long time. With this new reactor, a long-term reaction is created in which the waste from breeding the fuel is recombined to create more fuel inside the reactor. Theoretically, a nuclear reactor could operate for 100 years without changing the fuel rods, and the resultant waste would be much less radioactive than the waste of our modern-day reactors.

Even if Gates' billions combined with Toshiba's know-how does result in a full-scale industrial version of the traveling-wave reactor, it will be 10 years before one is constructed. The construction process itself will take five years.