#How To Make A More Environmentally Friendly Cowscientists around the world have worked on making buildings cars and light bulbs more environmentally friendly.
In a small pilot study the scientists found that the starches inside barley grains grown with too little water are different from starches found inside nicely-watered barley grains.
At the food truck in Austin ICE chef Michael Laiskonis a pastry chef by training had Watson select a Vietnamese-themed kebab dish that included apple as determined by an online poll from IBM.
Livestock account for 14.5%of human-induced greenhouse-gas emissions exceeding that from transportation notes the report.
Animals pull ploughs and carts and their manure fertilizes crops which supply postharvest residues to livestock.
#The Garbage Manin December 2001 American environmental activist Jim Puckett traveled to the town of Guiyu in southeast China to look for old computers.
When Puckett arrived one of the first things he saw was a man riding a bicycle stacked 15-feet high with computer keyboards.
In 2002 BAN produced a film about his trip called Exporting Harm: The High-tech Trashing of Asia.
In a world where people use 240000 plastic bags every 10 seconds where passengers on U s. airlines consume one million plastic cups every six hours where consumers in total discard
You want to see a car get shredded in 20 seconds? Biddle asks me as we gear up in hard hats
Among industrialized nations the U s. remains the only country without federal laws that mandate the domestic recycling of electronics and cars.
and fling old BMWS and Audis onto a conveyor belt that rises three stories toward the eight-foot-wide maw of the shredder.
Steam billows from the opening. There s a tremendous roar and two corrugated rollers grab the cars pancake them
and suck them into a 5000-horsepower hammer mill where 16 free-swinging 400-pound steel hammers spin 500 rpms around a rotor unleashing hell.
The Zerdirator can shred cars appliances and pretty much anything else. It can process 220 tons of material per hour.
and rock (people haul everything in their cars). Carus explains that within the hammer mill car parts ricochet
and collide until they are reduced to small chunks which drop through a sorting screen onto a conveyor belt.
He takes extended backpacking trips in the Sierras with his family and he tells his two kids:
We walk out of the intake bay and up two flights of stairs to a catwalk from
He then moved to the Bay Area to work for Dow chemical on plastic composites including ones for the new stealth bomber.
which spent five months traveling between New york and Belize looking for a place to dispose of 3168 tons of garbage.
They found investors and built a small pilot plant in Berkeley then a larger one in Richmond.
With no federal laws requiring the recycling of end-of-life vehicles or electronics or a law banning the offshore dumping of e-waste Biddle s source material was moving overseas.
and vehicles and recycle them responsibly Japan had laws mandating the large-scale collection and recycling of appliances.
Biddle s education on the dumping of e-waste in the developing world began in 2000 before Puckett had traveled even to Guiyu
Curious about why he couldn t get source material for his plant in Richmond Biddle traveled to China himself.
To learn more Biddle began traveling to places like Mumbai and Mexico city. There he spent time in some of the world s biggest dumps where hundreds of thousands of the world s poorest people deal crudely with the rest of the world s waste ometimes recycling it sometimes down-cycling it typically handling it in unsafe ways.
When most people think of wood architecture they imagine a balloon r rather a balloon frame the lightweight
and concrete to build high-rise structures that could climb far above the tallest balloon frames.
Clients believed that any wood structure would behave like a balloon frame with its structural weaknesses and vulnerability to fire.
and advances as his own idea that the oceanic wingless birds have lost their wings by gradual disuse.
Russian scientists have verified that several plants grown aboard the International Space station are safe to eat Russian news agency RIA Novosti reports.
And yes cosmonauts have given them a munch. We have gotten also experience with the astronauts and cosmonauts eating the fresh food they grow
and not having problems crop scientist Bruce Bugbee wrote to Popular Science in an email.
Bugbee is a professor at Utah State university and has worked on studies of food grown in space.
Space agencies hope the fresh vegetables will feed not only astronauts'bodies but their spirits as well. Caring for a plant every day provides vital psychological relief giving astronauts a small remembrance of Earth NASA project scientist Howard Levine told Modern Farmer in a 2013 feature about space veggies.
Produce in the International Space station grow in a greenhouse named Lada after the Russian goddess of spring.
Lada has removable root modules in which astronauts are able to grow several generations of crops before the modules'nutrients are used up.
At that point the astronauts send the modules back to Earth for analysis. Biologists On earth examine the modules to see
if any harmful microbes have grown on them. They also check the modules and the plants'leaves for contaminants
which may come from the space station's environment. These are the same types of tests we routinely conduct on the food grown On earth Bugbee says.
Lada needs some repairs now RIA Novosti reports. Once those are done astronauts will plant it with rice tomatoes
and bell peppers none of which have been grown in space before. Rice has a special advantage: Its genome has been sequenced fully so scientists will be able to compare space rice with Earth rice to see
if space affects which genes the staple expresses RIA Novosti reports. Updated February 3: Added comments from Bruce Bugbee c
#Genetic Pesticides Could Target Individual Speciesif you use a neuro-poison it kills everything Subba Reddy Palli an entomologist at the University of Kentucky who is researching the technology
when it comes to flight. The Ancient greeks dreamed up Daedalus who fashioned wings for his son (which unfortunately worked a little too well.
Leonardo Da vinci sketched a human-powered ornithopter. But until recently inventors lacked the aerodynamics expertise to turn diagrams into mechanical versions of something as quotidian as a fly or a bee.
And engineers have developed the first flying insect-inspired vehicles opening the door to an entirely new class of machine:
Although insects and their relatives represent roughly 80 percent of the world s animal species ome 900000 known types he mechanics of their flight had long been an enigma.
Traditional fixed-wing aircraft rely on a steady flow of air over the wings. The same is true of helicopters and rotors.
But as the wings of insects flap back and forth the air around them is constantly changing.
And the stubby wings of bees and other insects lift far more weight than can be explained using conventional steady-state aerodynamics principles.
Engineers have developed the first insect-inspired vehicles opening the door to an entirely new class of machine:
the microdrone. Before scientists could understand flapping flight they first had to see it in the minutest of detail.
In the 1970s Torkel Weis-Fogh a Danish zoologist at the University of Cambridge used high-speed photography to analyze the exact wing motions of hovering insects and compare them to the insects morphological features.
From this he formulated a general theory of insect flight which included what he called the clap-and-fling effect.
When insect wings clap together and then peel apart between the up and down strokes the motion flings air away
This vortex creates the force necessary to lift the insect between wing flaps. Similar vortices might be generated by the angle
and rotation of the wings Weis-Fogh posited providing additional lift. Two decades later computational techniques caught up with theory and scientists began to apply these principles to manmade systems.
Working independently the researchers characterized the aerodynamics of flight with unprecedented specificity. Dickinson and electrical engineer Ron Fearing won a $2. 5-million DARPA grant in 1998 to apply these principles to a fly-size robot.
Flies have really complex wing trajectories. There are a whole bunch of subtle things that happen Wood says.
By the time Wood graduated in 2004 and opened his own lab at Harvard university he had helped pioneer a way to use extremely energy-efficient exotic materials to replicate the motion of a fly s wing;
and watched as the wings of his tiny creation began to vibrate lifting the robot into the air for several seconds.
sustained flight along a preprogrammed path. An e-mail with proof of that milestone arrived in his inbox at 3 a m. in the summer of 2012.
and demonstrating for the first time stable hovering and controlled flight maneuvers in an insect-scale vehicle. I didn t end up sleeping the rest of that night Wood says.
Wood has pioneered microscale robotic flight; other researchers have used flapping-wing dynamics to reduce the size of aerial vehicles capable of carrying payloads.
In 2011 California-based Aerovironment demoed its Nano Hummingbird. The aircraft has a 16.5-centimeter wingspan;
it can fly vertically and horizontally and hover in place against gusting wind. It weighs 19 grams ighter than some AA batteries ut it carries a camera communications systems and an energy source.
When wings flap at their most efficient frequency hich happens when air density wing speed and an organism s weight are balanced perfectly-hey create waves of vortices that merge and build.
The audible result is the hum of a hummingbird or buzz of a bee says Jayant Ratti Techject s president.
A flapping-wing drone utilizing resonance generates significant improvements in energy efficiency creating optimal lift with minimal effort.
After observing the fly at the bar the two engineers searched for someone with experience replicating insect flight.
By closely observing the positions of the flies body parts they could measure the exact flip and twist of wings and legs.
At that instant the wings froze. Every time the fly slammed into the window it reflexively surrendered to the crash momentum and fell.
Then its wings flapped again propelling the insect into a controlled hover. It can hit
and recover in two or three wing beats which is phenomenal Vaneck says. There is no manmade system that can do that.
and the wings needed to be controlled independently. So they designed a shell for a quadrotor that incorporated shock absorbers ubber dampers in between sections made from carbon fiber and plastic.
in order to mimic the alternating wing speed that provides four-winged insects with exceptional control. When the vehicle is blown out of position
or clips an obstacle its computer detects the discrepancy between its current position and its programmed flight path
and an autopilot reflexively kicks in to recover stability. Last February the engineers sent their drone called the Instanteye to Fort Benning near Columbus Georgia for its annual Army Expeditionary Warrior experiments where an infantry platoon used it to help complete a set of assigned missions.
Guiler and Vaneck aim to replace the propellers on their quadrotor with flapping wings. The Instanteye is far better at recovering from wind gusts
but its propellers can still get tangled in branches or power lines. We wanted to bring something to the field fast Guiler says.
But what we discovered was flapping-wing birds and insects are suited perfectly for environments where you have dynamic obstructions he trees are moving the branches are moving.
Today he runs a lab at the University of Washington and works with advanced imaging systems to study insect flight.
Dickinson has gone also beyond analyzing flight; he s using electrodes to record the activity of neurons in insects brains.
He links them to a flight-simulation system and presents them with visual stimuli picture of a predator for instance hat cause them to react.
The british Forces have begun recently using a microdrone a hand-launched helicopter called the Black Hornet to scout for insurgents in Afghanistan.
and adaptation of other delicious species. One of the study's co-authors Allen Van Deynze has been working with peppers for about 20 years.
Van Deynze studies hot peppers in part because he enjoys eating them. This new genetic data reveals in more detail the titular spicy taste of the hot pepper.
and we even know the gene that could turn it on and off Van Deynze tells Popular Science.
and signal the direction of their flight by using information that is based purely on the polarized-light pattern of the sky the study reads.
Study used satellite photos the gold standard in climate change Cavanaugh an expert in remote sensing turned to photographs of Florida's Atlantic coast taken by NASA's Landsat 5
--whether the flow of information in a communications network traffic flow in a transportation system or fluid flow in hydraulics. Reducing edge connectivity's edgehowever while a great deal of research has been carried out in mathematics to solve problems associated with edge connectivity there has been relatively little success in answering questions about vertex connectivity.
For instance freezing and thawing cause air bubbles to form in the plant's internal water transport system.
Other plants such as birches and poplars also protect themselves by having narrower water transport cells
Similarly species with narrow water transport cells acquired a finer circulatory system well before they confronted cold climates.
and expand its forests even as its cities and population balloon. Because China's supersized global role makes each domestic decision a world event Liu shows how China's efforts to sustain forests influences other countries
and nature and that it is imperative to tackle the drivers of climate change namely greenhouse gases.
#Contraception program effectively manages bison populationthe wild bison roaming Catalina Island are a major attraction for the nearly 1 million tourists who visit the Channel Island's most popular destination every year.
our scientists undertake in fulfilling our commitment to being responsible stewards of the land and the Island's resources said Ann Muscat Catalina Island Conservancy president and chief executive officer.
Louis G. Hector Jr. a researcher from the Chemical sciences and Materials Systems Laboratory at General motors Research and development Center;
This is important for the design of novel cellulose-based materials as other research groups are considering them for a huge variety of applications ranging from electronics and medical devices to structural components for the automotive civil and aerospace industries.
and transport services needed for industrial livestock production and the felling of forests to grow crops for animal feed.
**For this purpose climatic drivers of horn growth were disentangled from the effects of animal age and the individual year of harvesting.
and trains school employees to administer the drug in an emergency. Additionally the bill provides civil-liability protection for those who administer epinephrine in an emergency.
#Ethanol blends carry hidden riskblending more ethanol into fuel to cut air pollution from vehicles carries a hidden risk that toxic
The Rice study detailed this week in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental science and Technology emerges as the Environmental protection agency (EPA) prepares technical guidance for higher ratios of ethanol in fuels.
and gasoline intended for flex-fuel vehicles could increase the generation of methane. Ethanol and gasoline separate into distinct plumes as they spread underground from the site of a spill.
and very often in less than 10 years said Michiel van Breugel postdoctoral fellow at STRI
Perhaps the most extensive of its kind in the tropics van Breugel's study suggests that forests subjected to regular human disturbance may undergo profound long-lasting tree biodiversity loss.
and reproduces said van Breugel. The research was conducted on the Smithsonian's 700-hectare Panama canal Watershed Experiment a long-term research site designed to quantify ecosystem services provided by different land uses.
Van Breugel and colleagues had two questions in mind: First can secondary forests recover their original diversity through natural succession in the long-term?
In the long term we might see a distinct shift in the functional composition of human-altered landscapes said van Breugel.
That has increased global food transportation which makes up 15 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions.
since 1980sless than 20 miles from the site where melting ice exposed the 5000-year-old body of Ãzi the Iceman scientists have discovered new and compelling evidence that the Italian Alps are warming at an unprecedented rate.
Unless stringent mitigation action in transport and other end-use sectors is implemented almost immediately the only way to still achieve the 2 degree target will be to rely on carbon dioxide removal technologies such as bioenergy with CCS.
and can be used readily by current transportation systems while the other renewable technologies would require electric or hydrogen vehicles and infrastructure in order to power transportation.
Additional findings from the EMF-27 projectthe EMF27 project is a global model comparison exercise that includes a worldwide consortium of research institutes
In one of the studies IIASA researchers David Mccollum and Volker Krey showed that electrification of the transport system would free up limited
and therefore valuable supplies of biomass across the globe by reducing the need for biofuels Based on our analysis this freeing up of biomass is one of the key system-wide consequences of electrifying transport says Mccollum.
This was confirmed by a recent study by the Institute for Environmental sciences Landau. According to the study the level of fungicides measured in surface waters is often much higher than the level predicted by the current calculation model used in the approval process.
The Institute for Environmental sciences Landau already proved last year that there is no statistical or even apparent correlation between theory and practice for insecticides.
and animal life in surface waters nor do they predict properly the level of fungicide concentrations actually found later in surface waters explains Prof Dr. Ralf Schulz of the Institute for Environmental sciences Landau of the University of Koblenz-Landau.
The above story is provided based on materials by Universitã¤t Koblenz-Landau. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
The only way charge carriers can move around is in the long direction Kono said. The researchers previously used this fact to demonstrate that aligned carbon nanotubes act as an excellent terahertz polarizer with performance better than commercial polarizers based on metallic grids.
or to dope semiconducting nanotubes to add free carriers would make the tubes highly tunable for terahertz frequencies Kono said.
The couple collected these insects during several trips to southern South america in order to document their rapid spread do genetic analyses
and examine the parasites which accompany them as stowaways in the bumblebee intestines. The findings show that the European buff-tailed bumblebee spread southwards from central Chile along the Andes at a rate of around 200 kilometres a year--faster than the ecologists would ever have expected.
#Feeding by tourists compromises health of already-endangered iguanas, study findsfeeding wildlife is an increasingly common tourist activity
as a result of being fed by tourists. Charles Knapp Phd of the John G. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and colleagues compared the differences in physiological values
and endoparasitic infection rates between northern Bahamian rock iguanas inhabiting tourist-visited islands and those living on non-tourist-visited islands.
They took blood and faecal samples from both male and female iguanas over two research trips in 2010 and 2012.
The Bahamian rock iguana is among the world's most endangered lizards due to habitat loss introduced mammals illegal hunting threats related to increased tourism and smuggling for the illicit pet trade.
They are listed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species While the two groups of iguanas did not differ in body condition indicators for dietary nutrition differed.
Both male and female iguanas from the islands frequently visited by tourists showed notably different levels of glucose potassium and uric acid.
Male iguanas from the tourist areas differed in levels of calcium cholesterol cobalt copper magnesium packed cell volume selenium and triglycide concentrations.
Meanwhile female iguanas from tourist areas differed significantly in ionized calcium. Among both males and females from tourist areas there was a 100%endoparasitic infection rate.
Tourist-fed iguanas also displayed atypical loose faeces. Dr Knapp says Both sexes on visited islands consume food distributed by tourists
although male iguanas are more aggressive when feeding and eat more provisioned food. Consequently they may be impacted more by provisioning with unnatural foods
which could explain the greater suite of significant physiological differences in males between populations. Iguanas on visited islands predominantly eat grapes that are provided by tour operators on a daily basis. The higher concentrations of glucose found in tourist-fed iguanas may be a result of being fed too many sugary fruits such as grapes.
An overabundance of grapes in those iguanas'diets could also explain the excessive diarrhea observed during the study.
Both male and female iguanas from the tourist areas showed notably lower levels of potassium than the non-visited iguanas.
The male tourist-fed iguanas have raised cholesterol concentrations which may indicate the introduction of meat to their diet.
Similarly the higher uric acid levels in male and female iguanas could be the result of animal protein such as ground beef being fed to iguanas by tourists.
Furthermore food provisioning by tourists on beaches has encouraged the iguanas to spend disproportionate amounts of time foraging in the area rather than further in the island resulting in higher levels of marine life being ingested.
as a result of tourist-feeding can be endangered beneficial for species they warn that unnaturally high densities and excessive reliance on tourists for food may prove problematic
if food supplementation is discontinued for any reason. Further plant community dynamics can be disrupted by changed feeding patterns in the iguanas.
Dr Knapp says The complete restriction of feeding by tourists may not be a realistic option.
and stakeholders to identify tactics that mitigate the impacts of current tourism practices without compromising an important economic activity.
In addition undergraduate and graduate students from CU-Boulder regularly travel to Madagascar to conduct research under Sauther including students from CU's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program
#Fruit pest targeted by genomic researchthe spotted wing drosophila a major pest that targets berries and cherries and other fruits in the United states Canada and Europe is itself being targeted thanks to groundbreaking genome sequencing at the University of California Davis
if ready-to-be shipped fruit contains spotted wing drosophila larvae. The UC Davis team included the Joanna Chiu lab
They collaborated with Walton and spotted wing drosophila project leader Linda Brewer of OSU; Ernest Lee from the American Museum of Natural history;
and in reducing sediment flow from agricultural lands into our watersheds notes Carlton Owen president and CEO of the Endowment.
Walking from the back of a packed parking lot at the mall and scouring stores for the perfect gift provides good exercise.
Propagating and exchanging of endangered speciesthe researchers from Bochum collected 320 individuals from 145 Podocarpaceae species on field trips to South america Southeast asia Australia New caledonia and Fiji.
Second corn borer moths travel farther before mating which increases the chances of potentially resistant insects mating with non-resistant ones that have not been exposed to Bt proteins;
and drivers of that distribution so that conservation actions can be targeted in the most effective way
and hydrology) and human impacts (distance from roads agriculture forest loss and density of forest edge)
It was a long hard road to a sequenced arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus. In 2006 shortly after the DOE JGI sequenced the first tree genome Populus trichocarpa it became apparent that it took a village (of other organisms) to raise a poplar tree.
These discoveries are very important to better understand the birthplace of The buddha said Ram Kumar Shrestha Nepal's minister of culture tourism and civil aviation.
and exhibited extensive collinearity across the gene space species-specific genes involved in stress tolerance such as ion transport ATPASE activity transcript factor activity
and found some genes involved in ion transport and homeostasis such as Nhad1 KUP3 and NCL were distinctly upregulated under salt stress.
The study was supported by the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs with additional support from the Oregon National aeronautics and space administration (NASA) Space Grant Consortium.
Researchers received funding from the National Science Foundation and Wake Forest's Center for Energy Environment and Sustainabilitydrones Deliver a Bird's eye Viewone of the researchers'robots a copter drone relies on eight small propeller units
and is capable of flying at 15 mph for up to 20 minutes at a time. It can be equipped with either a conventional visible light
Their second robot resembles a small airplane. Launched like a javelin it uses a single electric motor
and propeller to fly up to 50 mph for over an hour. We can map much more territory with the plane
because it can fly three times farther Messinger said. The drawback is that it can't carry the fancier sensors we use on the copter.
Rather than relying on a human operator the drones fly autonomously using global positioning data compass coordinates and onboard stabilization systems.
which generates the flight plan and sends it to the aircraft Messinger said. It is then as simple as launching it flipping a switch
and waiting for it to finish. Drone Data Provides New Insightto date data about the forest canopy composed of 390 billion trees is hard to come by.
The only other alternative is to rent out a helicopter which is far too expensive for any kind of continuous observation.
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