An interesting analysis of why global climate change could spell more snow for the USA. Lots of waffling ifs in there, but the basic idea is warmer global temp means more moisture in the air from the oceans, but 2 degrees increase in temp means that it still gets below freezing in the winter. Thus, more moisture to fall on you frozen. Pretty straightforward argument.
I’m a big proponent of non carbon emitting electricity generation, and a firm believer in using nuke power for base-load. One of the main reasons for that is that I don’t think that any reasonably grid could handle the ups and downs of going to a full grid of more traditional green power. Spain is working hard to change my mind. It looks like the windy weekend allowed them to provide 53% of their power from wind, pushing excess into reverse hydro and selling to their neighbors. Those numbers are impressive for a grid that wasn’t really designed for that kind of behavior. I still don’t believe in base-load wind, but this certainly makes it look like it can be a bigger chunk of the pie than I have been thinking before.
I loved the LiveJournal accounts of the mars rovers, but apparently nasa is doing official Twitter feeds of the LCROSS and the LRO.
I’m actually really enjoying it, but really, did they need to give them personalities of eighth grade kids? BFF? Please.
The first space hitchhiker ever was a small bat. Here is a tribute to you, brave, brave space bat.
I just looked at this humanity family tree and suddenly felt very small. All of recorded history is about two pixels wide on that chart. And what’s up with homo erectus? We can only dream about being around for that long.
Dude, these are totally awesome! Enough power for about 10,000 US homes for 7-10 years. And you just bury it, and it requires minimal monitoring and no maintenance. I wonder if it is an RTG? They don’t go too much into the details, but I bet that’s what it is. Those are totally safe and well understood. NASA has been using them for years. They cost $25M so assuming a 5 year maximally operative lifespan that’s only $500 per year which is less than I pay for electricity right now. Nice.
I am completely amazed. It took the US government dozens of attempts before we got to this stage. On the fourth attempt, SpaceX, a private corporation, made it to orbit. And they did it at a fraction of the cost of other companies. Yes, even including the failures. (Well, not including the payloads, but really, why do you put a payload on a new rocket?) The best thing about it is that the entire first stage is reusable. This means that they will have rapid turn around and the more launches they do the cheaper it gets. Now if only we weren’t about to enter a massive depression and have the US government go insolvent. We could cut ALL OF NASA and it would be less than 3% of this bailout. Oh well.
Good job SpaceX, sorry about the timing.
I’m not wasting time, I’m just practicing science. Wired’s article is interesting in that it points out some neat facts about what science is and isn’t. In particular, it brings up the problem I have a lot with biblical literalists. It isn’t about knowing the rules that govern the world, it is about the process of finding out those rules. It is about evolving and refining an idea to more closely match observations in the world, and throwing away ideas when they are shown to be incorrect. It isn’t about rote memorization of facts, much though your fifth grade teacher may have told you that.
Oh yeah, and T-2 days until the end of the world. For those who are actually concerned, the chances that the trinity test back in WWII would ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world were much higher. Nothing like that chain reaction had ever happened before on earth, whereas here much higher energy astronomical particles blast through the earth all the time. The only difference is that those happen in places where the scientists aren’t looking.
Cool, it looks like Fermilab managed to measure the characteristics of another Omega baryon. I used to work for a group that was trying to study isospin variants via combining accelerators rather than simply building larger ones. It was a clever idea and would have saved a fair amount of money to get similar science done, but this was the era of the super conducting super collider, so it was not to be. That was after all, the only high energy study on the horizon. And it never even got finished. Long story short, it warms my heart to see someone still working on extending the known set of isospin variants.
Also, I just recently discovered that they managed to fill out the rest of the elements in the current shell of the periodic table! I had no idea that anyone was working on that or that they had discovered so many more elements. I learned that from the excellent videos provided by the University of Nottingham.
IANAL, IJLS: “Once again probability proves itself willing to sneak into the back alley and service Drama as would a copper piece harlot.”
I have GOT to remember that for the next time something breaks the odds in real life. Something with a 10% chance of happening is really unlikely something with a one in a million chance is a sure thing. Just awesome.
Nasa’s lander sampled water on Mars results from last week show. I forgot to post this earlier. While not unexpected, it is still exciting to get the confirmation that, yes, water is in the dirt. People are making more of this than they should of course, but it is an exciting first step. Some of the making more of it comes in the form of articles being published and retracted. The latest news appears to be that peroxide may have been found in the ground. If true that would put the kibosh on any possible life. It also appears to get them the 90 day extension that they need to finish running the suite of tests that they sent up there. I mean really, how many millions to get this thing there and they have a couple delays and you are going to skimp out on the extra 90 days they need? At least they got it.
It looks like NASA has at least two more major press conferences coming up though, so who know what the verified results will actually be?
Branson has finally unveiled the mothership for his new space flight venture. That in and of itself isn’t so exciting, especially given the state of the economy and where I believe we are headed in the near future, however the technologies being improved for this venture are potentially extremely valuable. The lightweight banded composites, and more efficient lifting designs will certainly be useful as fuel becomes more and more expensive.
I will be much more excited when they have the Space Ship 2 ready to go.
The Atlantic has a great article on the background of the chevy Volt. It is a really great article and spends as much time talking about the politics and advertising behind it as it does the engineering. I really hope it does succeed and that GM is really able to back it and not wimp out like it did with the Saturn. GM and the US need this car to succeed.
Honeybees are disappearing. Watch this video to learn about how bees communicate with each other through their special dances, and how they are disappearing.
I’m glad to see that the CTA is trying out serial hybrid busses. While cars are really too small to use current technology in, busses are large enough that the different drive train makes sense. A similar system has been in use by trains for years. The addition of a moderating battery and regenerative braking turns the diesel electric drive train into a true serial hybrid. The advantage of this over a standard hybrid is that you only have one drive-train and the gas powered engine can always run at optimal efficiency since it is just running a generator. This also means no more busses idling downtown for a half hour at a time.
The detritus of the “Faster, Cheaper, Better” (pick any two) Nasa methodology was picked up and modified for the Phoenix mission. Because of that this was a fairly risky mission. However it appears that NASA managed to land a powered legged lander on Mars for the first time since the 70s. It appears that everything worked as expected, the legs are on the ground, the solar arrays are deployed, and pictures are coming back home. I’m only sad no rover. At least there are still two running about elsewhere on the planet.
From the ground to your car has a number of steps. Drilling, shipping (or flowing through pipelines), and refining. The drilling and shipping is normally done by the big oil companies who are making a pretty good profit right about now. Prices go up profit margins go up and all that. Of course as oil gets harder to get out of the ground, the price of drilling goes up, but over all the oil companies are doing ok. I am always trying to figure out why gas is so cheap though. If $20/barrel oil = $1/gal gas, you would think that $100/barrel would be $5 gas (modulo additives and sunk costs, like the refineries themselves).
Turns out the refineries are sort of taking some of that cost. I assume this is a what the market will bear situation, but it is interesting to note that independent refineries in the US are tanking in the stock market. Turns out their profit margin is way down. They rely on a heavy difference between the cost of oil and the cost of gasoline (the “crack” price) in order to maintain good cash flow to do maintenance and general operations on existing refineries. Not only that, but they also rely on that extra cash to make efficiency improvements. Unfortunately that crack price has dropped to record lows. One of the reasons that gas prices aren’t $5 yet is that the independent refineries are taking it on the chin. Unfortunately this also means that newer more modern and efficient refineries are not being built. As we learn to wean ourselves from oil we also need to be learning how to use what remains with the utmost efficiency. Right now it looks like the refining process may be one of the bottlenecks there.
On the plus side, they finally finished sequencing Trichoderma reesei and most Americans think that the world is running out of oil. Wow. I really didn’t expect that result at all.
If you think that we can retrofit our society to exist without oil, the refinery shut down in Scotland provides an educational example. The refinery shutdown has reduced fuel availability, thus stopping work on the large wind farm that is being constructed in Scotland. If we haven’t made good progress to a oil free system before oil becomes truly constricted we might not be able to build that alternative system.
Rather, the cost of converting will be larger than we are really willing to pay in human terms.
I’ve never been a big Edison fan. I’m more of a Tesla guy myself, but I think that is because I always root for the hard working underdog. I’ve lately been reading a couple of things from Edison though that make me appreciate his vision a lot more. Check this quote out from 1910:
Some day some fellow will invent a way of concentrating and storing up sunshine to use instead of this old, absurd Prometheus scheme of fire. I’ll do the trick myself if some one else doesn’t get at it. Why, that is all there is about my work in electricity–you know, I never claimed to have invented electricity–that is a campaign lie–nail it!
Sunshine is spread out thin and so is electricity. Perhaps they are the same, but we will take that up later. Now the trick was, you see, to concentrate the juice and liberate it as you needed it. The old-fashioned way inaugurated by Jove, of letting it off in a clap of thunder, is dangerous, disconcerting and wasteful. It doesn’t fetch up anywhere. My task was to subdivide the current and use it in a great number of little lights, and to do this I had to store it. And we haven’t really found out how to store it yet and let it off real easy-like and cheap. Why, we have just begun to commence to get ready to find out about electricity. This scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick to think of–it is so wasteful. It is just the old, foolish Prometheus idea, and the father of Prometheus was a baboon.
When we learn how to store electricity, we will cease being apes ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans. You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power. Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy.
Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property.
There must surely come a time when heat and power will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered by natural forces. Electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen, for it can not be destroyed.
Now, I am not sure but that my new storage-battery is the thing. I’d tell you about that, but I don’t want to bore you…
I love this quote on a number of levels. First, Edison was a Darwinian in 1910. (Or maybe that was just a metaphor.) Second, he is willing to slam on his own inventions. “The scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick.” I love that. Even just when generators are being invented he saw that burning resources was not the way to go. And such a simple metaphor, we burn up wood and coal as renters burn up the front fence. HA! That is great. (Of course he doesn’t mention another alternative to burning fuel which had been running since the previous decade.)
Still there is some vision there. Maybe the next book I read will be about Edison.
According to Crain’s (dead tree version, no link) Illinois landfill (unused) capacity is currently 1 billion cubic yards. My building generates 2 cubic yards a week, or about 100 a year. In 2006, Illinois landfills accepted 54.9 million cubic yards. That means my building generates .00002% of the waste in the state of Illinois. Interestingly Illinois recyclers report that they diverted 32.4 million cubic yards from the landfills. What does this all mean? Without recycling we have an excess of landfill of 11 years of garbage production, with recycling it is 19 years. It works!
Also, I recently discovered that “97.5% of structural steel beams and plates were recycled.[25] Other steel construction elements such as reinforcement bars are recycled at a rate of about 65%. (wiki)” Now if only we can make it so cost effective for other materials.
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