Could Bacteria-Filled Balloons Stop the Spread of the Sahara?

Nearly a year ago a “Great Green Wall” of trees was proposed to run across the entire southern border of the Sahara desert in an attempt to stop expanding desertification. At the TED Global conference in Oxford, England, architect Magnus Larsson proposes another, more solid, idea to stop the spread of the Sahara: Using bacteria-filled balloons to turn the dunes into a 6000km-long desert-break.

TED’s pretty good at getting video up from their presentations, but at the time of this writing it wasn’t yet available, so the BBC summary will have to do:

Bacterium Would Solidify Dunes Into Stone
Larsson proposes literally solidifying dunes, turning them into sandstone. This would be done not by thousands of years of normal geologic processes, but more quickly by flooding it with a bacterium commonly found in wetlands, Bacillus pasteurii. Larsson says that the bacterium, “is a microorganism which chemically produces calcite – a kind of natural cement.”

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/07/could-bacteria-filled-balloons-stop-spread-sahara-magnus-larsson.php

Winning Design Concept Connects Folding Scooters, Electric Buses, and Bike Trees

The Future City Mobility competition enticed designers to envision how London’s transportation could look in 2030. Marten Wallgren, a Swede studying at the Royal College of Art, along with three cohorts, took the SeymourPowell award for their concept dubbed London Garden. The scheme incorporates a network of electric buses, taxis, and scooter-bikes, all of which interconnect to make London Garden a car-free zone.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/07/winning-design-concept-connects-folding-scooters-electric-buses-and-bike-trees_.php?dcitc=th_rss

Giant Blobs Of Oil Washing Up On Texas Beaches

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas — Gooey oil blobs as big as basketballs have been washing up on the sandy beaches of South Padre Island in Texas, officials said Thursday.

The Texas General Land Office said it doesn’t know what is causing the tar-like blobs, but authorities were working to clean up the popular tourist destination. Beaches have not been closed.

Crews “scooped out a bunch of tar balls on the beach,” agency spokesman Jim Suydam told The Associated Press. “We’re doing analysis of the currents to track it back to the source as well as collecting some of the tar balls for chemical analysis to see where it came from.”

At least seven 55-gallon drums of oil have been removed since Wednesday morning after tourists began calling in reports of seeing blobs of oil on the beach, Suydam said.

“We don’t know the source. We suspect it’s coming from south of the border,” he said. Texas authorities are in the process of contacting Mexican officials for help pinpointing the contamination, he said.

The spill was first reported at the mouth of the Rio Grande when what appeared to be fresh crude oil began washing ashore. The tar balls affected about one mile of beach from the mouth of the Rio Grande to the town of South Padre Island.

“We are working to quickly clean this up and will take any steps necessary to protect South Padre Island beaches, as well as the South Bay Coastal Preserve,” General Land Office Commissioner Jerry Patterson said in a statement.

South Padre Island, located on the tip of southern Texas, is an internationally known beach destination that is bordered by the Gulf of Mexico and Laguna Madre Bay.

Though the beaches remain open, state officials want people to stay away from the oil blobs. Baby oil can be used to wash the skin if contact with the oil occurs, they said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/23/giant-blobs-of-oil-washin_n_243897.html

Ancient Maya Practiced Forest Conservation 3,000 Years Ago

Temple 1 was built second, in 682 to 734 A.D., possibly completed after Jasaw Chan K’awiil’s death. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Cincinnati)

As published in the July issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, paleoethnobotanist David Lentz of the University of Cincinnati has concluded that not only did the Maya people practice forest management, but when they abandoned their forest conservation practices it was to the detriment of the entire Maya culture.

“From our research we have learned that the Maya were deliberately conserving forest resources,” says David Lentz, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Cincinnati and executive director of the Cincinnati Center for Field Studies. “Their deliberate conservation practices can be observed in the wood they used for construction and this observation is reinforced by the pollen record.”

The UC team is the first North American team allowed to work at the Tikal site core in northern Guatemala in more than 40 years. The UC team is unique in other ways as well. Whereas previous archaeological excavations reflected an interest in culture history, particularly of the elites, researchers’ interests are different in the 21st century.

“Forty years ago the emphasis was on what king built what palace, who slew whom and who is portrayed on what stelae. It’s all about the rulers and their exploits,” says Lentz. “They didn’t look at the economy, agricultural practices, forest management or how the people and the culture functioned.”

And what the UC team has learned by studying these processes is that the Maya, at least initially, were practicing good forestry management.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090722150825.htm

Pacific-Ocean-Sized Explosion On Jupiter Highlights the Hawking “Asteroid” Theory

Update to:   http://thewere42.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/photo-jupiter-impact-creates-earth-size-blemish/

In further evidence that space itself is an action movie (or at least that God watches Michael Bay movies), an explosion the size of the Pacific ocean has scarred Jupiter.  Yes, the entire ocean.  The explosion occurred on July 19 when an asteroid slammed into the planet, and although Jupiter has no solid ground the gas can still get thick enough for things like “impacts” and “KABOOM” to happen.  

The Jupiter impact event is another big red line underscoring Stephen Hawking’s theory that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets. We have observed, Hawking pointed out in his lecture Life in the Universe, the collision of a comet, Schumacher-Levi, with Jupiter (below), which produced a series of enormous fireballs, plumes many thousands of kilometers high, hot “bubbles” of gas in the atmosphere, and large dark “scars” on the atmosphere which had lifetimes on the order of weeks. The  July 19th event is a weak second place, but still totally awesome (and awesome if projected to a planet called Earth).

One of the most interesting things about the explosion is that it was detected by an amateur astronomer.  We might have a lot of super-slick space-searching sensors, but there’s still a hell of a lot more space to watch than we have equipment to watch it – which is why Australian hobbyist Anthony Wesley was the first to see it.  The information spread online, and Berkeley astronomer changed his plans for pre-booked time on the Hawaiian Keck II telescope, abandoning his planet-hunting to get a closer look.  A much cooler use of internet communications than tweeting about sandwiches.

The resulting scar on the surface of Jupiter shows up as a dark patch in visible light, but a very bright spot in infrared, caused by a radical rearrangement of gases in the region of the detonation.  The bright spot will also allow scientists to examine the motion of gases in Jupiter’s atmosphere, test theories developed during past impacts, and generally think “Wow, this stuff we do is pretty awesome, isn’t it?”

Many more tools will soon be brought to bear on this huge planetary event.  Hubble will be getting in on the action, bringing its brand-new wide angle camera to bear, while Berkeley will be bringing laser guide stars to bear (artificial star-signals created in the atmosphere by laser beam, allowing the use of adaptive optic telescopes which can correct for the atmosphere’s effects on light).  So even the tools being used to look at this are awesome.

As Stephen Hawking says, the general consensus is that any comet or asteroid greater than 20 kilometers in diameter that strikes the Earth will result in the complete annihilation of complex life – animals and higher plants. (The asteroid Vesta, for example, one of the destinations of the Dawn Mission, is the size of Arizona).

But back to Professor Hawking, he of black-hole radiation fame: How many times in our galaxy alone has life finally evolved to the equivalent of our planets and animals on some far distant planet, only to be utterly destroyed by an impact? Galactic history suggests it might be a common occurrence. Our cold comfort comes from the adjective “galactic” -that’s a hugely different time perspective that our biblical three score and ten.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/pacificoceansized-explosion-on-jupiter-reinforces-the-hawking-asteroid-theory.html

Firing Up the Blue Brain -”We Are 10 Years Away From a Functional Artifical Human Brain”

“It’s a new brain. The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions, complex cognitive functions. It was so successful an evolution from mouse to man it expanded about a thousand fold in terms of the numbers of units to produce this almost frightening organ. It is evolving at an enormous speed.”

Henry Markram, Director, Project Blue Brain.

Excellent news for fans of computer technology, neuroscience, and people who think that humans telling the machines what to do is totally backwards.  Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, says we are ten years away from a functional artificial human brain. The Blue Brain project was launched in 2005 and aims to reverse engineer the mammalian brain from laboratory data.

We reported on the attempts of the Swiss Mind Brain Institute to simulate the neocortical column of the rat last year using an IBM Blue Gene machine with 10,000 processors, and they’ve announced success of the first phase of their project. 

“We cannot keep on doing animal experiments forever,” Markram told the audience at the TED Global Conference at Oxford, England. “There are two billion people on the planet affected by mental disorder,” he told the audience. The project may give insights into new treatments.”

They’ve successfully simulated the neocortical column of a rat – only a fraction of a full brain, but they proved that you don’t get to do world-shattering research when you settle for second-best by choosing one of the most complicated and vital pieces of any mammalian cortex.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/firing-up-the-blue-brain-.html

US States to Harvest Clean Energy From Highways

Roads are teeming with possibilities for clean energy generation–they could be lined with small wind turbines, accompanied by solar arrays, even generate energy from speed bumps. And as this potential is growing in recognition, a number of states have jumped on board with some fascinating projects designed to harvest clean energy from their roadways.

According to Green Inc,

A few states are already dabbling in roadside energy production. Last year, Oregon began a “solar highway” demonstration project with a 104-kilowatt ground-mounted solar array situated at the interchange of Interstates 5 and 205. The array powers about a third of the lights on the interchange. Massachusetts recently announced a plan to install a utility-scale wind turbine – big enough to power 400 households – on land adjacent to the Massachusetts Turnpike’s Blandford Rest Area.

And states with thousands of miles of roads through relatively barren land (read: California) stand to reap huge benefits by harvesting energy from roads–and entrepreneurs have taken note.

Researchers and designers are also toying with ways to generate power along roads, including the use of piezoelectric materials, energy producing speed bumps and integrating wind turbines into road barriers.

Even solar powered studs that light up at night to improve road safety, though they won’t be generating any energy to send to the grid, are ideas worthy projects. 

While some of these ideas are dubious at best (see Lloyd’s takedown of piezoelectric roads for proof), many offer intriguing possibilities for expanding the potential of the clean energy world. And companies stand to reap the benefits if they can capitalize on this potential.

The private company Green Roadway is particularly interested in developing clean energy technology for the states:

The project’s patent portfolio includes specifications for small wind turbines – 25 feet high or less – powered by both natural wind and the “dirty wind” generated by passing cars and trucks. Another patent covers the deployment of millions of tiny turbines an inch in length or less that could be attached to median guardrails, road signs or noise-barrier walls.

But such innovation won’t come cheap:

A state-by-state auction of their intellectual property portfolio will take place this Friday, with minimum reserve bids that range from $125,000 for South Dakota to $1.5 million for California.

Whether states choose to buy these specific roadside clean energy projects remains to be seen–but merely the fact that more governments are seeking such innovative ways to generate renewable energy is encouraging.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/07/clean-energy-roads.php

EU sets new ecodesign rules for freezers, TVs

Reuters, 22 July 2009 – The European Commission on Wednesday targeted industrial motors, television sets, refrigerators and other appliances with new eco-design rules aimed at improving energy efficiency.

The Commission said four eco-design regulations that included circulators, found in buildings’ boiler or heating systems, and freezers will save about 190 Terrawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year by 2020 if fully implemented.

This is comparable to the combined annual electricity consumption of Sweden and Austria, the Commission said.

“It will save impressive amounts of electricity, CO2 emissions and electricity costs, while creating jobs,” EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said in a statement.

The EU has pledged to cut carbon dioxide emissions to a fifth below 1990 levels by 2020.

These new rules follow a raft of other regulations, introduced by the EU executive to curb the environmental impact of consumerism in the bloc by supporting eco-friendly products, innovation and technology.

The Commission hopes to save 135 TWh of electricity per year by 2020 with new energy performance requirements for most of the electric motors used in industrial applications.

The rules will foster the use of “variable speed drives” adjusting the motor output to the actual needs, instead of operating always at full capacity, the Commission said.

The Commission said regulation on circulators will shift the market to “intelligent” high efficiency circulators capable of adjusting their performance to the needs of the heating system, while that on televisions and refrigerators/freezers will leave only efficient products on the market.

http://www.wbcsd.org/plugins/DocSearch/details.asp?type=DocDet&ObjectId=MzUxNDI

New Solar Panel Goes Straight To AC

The electricity that comes out of a photovoltaic panel is always DC.  Since our buildings tend to use AC electricity, that means that a standard part of every PV solar installation is installing a big inverter to take the DC input from the panels and produce an AC output which is identical to what’s coming from the local power line.

It’s possible, though, to build small inverters (aptly named microinverters) directly into each solar cell or module; instead of feeding all the electricity through a single, large inverter, you feed small streams of electricity through many small inverters.  

Startup GreenRay Solar is getting funding to develop this kind of technology, so that one day a homeowner can buy a solar panel and pretty much install it him/herself.  Right now, you usually have to be a licensed electrician to do the electrical work needed to install conventional panels.  But GreenRay’s panels would be a lot simpler, because they bypass the inverter step.  It still might not be as easy as plugging in an appliance, but it would bring PV installation down a couple notches, within the reach of aspiring DIY-ers.

To answer the unasked question – yes, these solar panels will cost more money.  But, as GreenRay will tell you, microinverters offer additional benefits.  For example, if part of the panel is blocked, it will not affect the other parts.  And, if you are the kind of person who wants to carefully monitor your system’s performance, the microinverter panels will give you more precise and detailed information.  

However, as more and more electric devices require that electricity converted back to DC, and as PV electricity becomes more prevalent, one might wonder why we don’t begin to design DC houses from the start.

http://www.ecogeek.org/component/content/article/2867

UPDATE 3-H1N1 flu shots ready in months, winter a risk-WHO

* Virus could mutate and cause more severe effects in winter

* WHO seeks vaccine doses for poor-country health workers

(Adds U.S. and European vaccine regulation steps)

By Laura MacInnis and Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA, July 24 (Reuters) – Vaccines should be ready within months for H1N1 flu, which could mutate and become more severe in winter, the World Health Organisation said on Friday.

About 800 people have died from the newly-discovered “swine flu” virus that has spread to some 160 countries worldwide, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said.

“For the moment we haven’t seen any changes in the behaviour of the virus. What we are seeing still is a geographic expansion across countries,” Hartl said, warning that while its symptoms are now mainly mild, the virus could morph as it circulates.

“We do have to be aware that there could be changes and we have to be prepared for those,” he said.

At least 50 governments have placed orders or are negotiating with drugs companies to secure supplies of vaccines against the H1N1 strain, which are still being developed and tested. [ID:nN16442908]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is helping companies design ways to quickly test experimental versions of H1N1 shots, and the European Medicines Agency said it aimed to approve H1N1 vaccines before the start of the northern hemisphere winter, the traditional “flu season” in Europe. [ID:nLO128743]

Germany has ordered 50 million vaccine doses it hopes to get by the end of September, but authorities there stressed infections so far had been mild, “like a light wave of flu”.

http://www.reuters.com/article/BIOTRX/idUSLO6472720090724