The eventual goal said William Gallus a meteorologist at Iowa State university is warn-on-forecast.
or half-hour of advanced warning Gallus told Livescience. Using tornado simulators Gallus and his colleagues are working on understanding how local topography affects the way a tornado might move
and strengthen. For example they've found that ridges cause tornadoes to deviate left as they climb up
or so away Gallus said causing damage far afield from the actual funnel cloud. 50 Amazing Tornado Facts Moore in particular has been hit by three violent tornadoes in less than 15 years:
but Gallus believes it's worth looking into the local landscape for possible influencing factors.
Gallus isn't the only researcher looking to get a hyper-local look at how tornadoes work.
but in Joplin doors and glass windows at either end of long halls were destroyed by debris creating a dangerous situation Gallus said.
You need reinforced masonry steel or composite materials instead of timber and enhanced connections between walls foundations and roofs
In their new study Uno and his team tested the radiocarbon dating technique on the tusks of two elephants that died in 2006 and 2008 as well as elephant and hippo teeth monkey hair and oryx horn.
A recent study conducted by researchers at Ohio State university has found that rice leaves and butterfly wings make use of some unique surface characteristics that promote self-cleaning.
and engineering graduate student Greg Bixler shows that rice leaves and butterfly wings combine the low drag of shark skin with the superhydrophobicity of the lotus leaf putting these surfaces at the top of the list of nature-made self-cleaners.
The idea to look at rice leaves and butterfly wings came to the investigators from observing these structures in their natural habitats.
We noticed that water droplets on rice leaves and butterfly wings roll off effortlessly and that each remains clean in their respective environment says Bhushan.
and lotus leaves rice leaves and butterfly wings have special properties that make them particularly resistant to fouling.
Like shark skin rice leaves and butterfly wings exhibited low drag and self-cleaning properties.
Both rice leaves and butterfly wings contain micro -and nano-sized features that repel and direct water in one direction says Bixler.
By showing that rice leaves and butterfly wings combine antifouling properties of some of nature's best self-cleaners Bhushan and Bixler have identified new surfaces that can be used as engineering inspiration for a wide range of industries plagued by biofouling.
We are investigating methods to fabricate rice leaf and butterfly wing-inspired films for applications requiring low drag self-cleaning
Bushan's study on rice leaves and butterfly wings was titled Bioinspired rice leaf and butterfly wing surface structures combining shark skin
#Harnessing The Power Of Peacocks To Make Colorful Images (ISNS)--The gloriously colored iridescent feathers of the male peacock aren't
As a peacock moves around its tail colors appear to change. That's because its iridescent feathers reflect different colors or wavelengths of light at different angles.
 But while peacocks use feathers Guo's team uses metals which interact with light in more complicated ways.
To simulate the peacock effect the Michigan researchers combined the techniques. They etched nanoscale grooves on a piece of glass with the same technology used to etch computer chips.
They can do this by following the grain of the ivory which shows which way the tusk grew.
which is the same one used to create the cloned sheep Dolly in 1996.5 Wild Stem Cell Discoveries
For example scientists can take a normal embryo from the uterus of one cow transplant it into another
and have a 60 percent chance of a normal calf being born. Transferring a cloned cow embryo into a cow uterus results in a healthy calf less than 10 percent of the time Cibelli told Livescience.
When you see that scenario whoever wants to move this into humans quickly I think it should be said criminal Cibelli.
So far Mitalipov and his colleagues have not been able to grow a cloned monkey fetus to term suggesting that primate reproduction may be even more complex than what is known from Dolly the sheep and other farm animals.
and generate no greenhouse gases. So what s theâ power source? Human muscles. These vehicles are powered by the students legs and sometimes arms.
and produce no greenhouse-gas emissions or toxins. The goal is to design and develop efficient sustainable and practical human-powered vehicles.
(4100 kilograms) of greenhouse-gas emissions would be avoided. If 5 percent of the U s. population were to switch from automobiles to human-powered vehicles for most of their trips the aggregate difference would be a reduction of 31 million tons (28 million metric tons) of greenhouse
gases and a savings of more than 3 billion gallons (11 billion liters) of gasoline. It is true that this represents a small fraction of total U s. greenhouse-gas emissions
but it is a significant tonnage nonetheless. Â Studies have shown that people who commute by bicycle live longer
In 2003 biologists brought back a Pyrenean ibex by making a clone of frozen tissues harvested from the last of these goats.
But South korean biomedical engineer Insung Hwang hopes to find just a cell nucleus and produce a clone from it like Dolly the sheep.
Most species are going extinct in tropical forests Pimm said. Saving a species through de-extinction
when humans are burning forests and destroying native communities is a joke he said. Biologist David Ehrenfeld of Rutgers The State university of New jersey agrees de-extinction would impede conservation.
#Optical Technique Sorts Grapes for Wine Quality (ISNS) A team of German scientists has developed an automated process that sorts grapes into different levels of quality for winemaking.
While it's not ready for full-scale use for this year's harvest the scientists plan to have the Grape Sort technology ready by the fall of 2014.
The process relies on optical technology that recognizes the colors of individual grapes. Different colors correspond to different amounts of sugar in the grapes a basic criterion for their wine-making characteristics.
The technology has proved itself in preliminary tests on some of Germany's favorite home-grown varietals:
the grapes for white wines Riesling and Weisser Burgunder and those for the red wines Trollinger and Lemberger.
and insects such as beetles from the grapes a capability that some wineries already possess in other optical approaches.
Second the German technology goes beyond rival systems by distinguishing among different qualities of individual grapes.
and more objectively than manually sorting each individual grape a traditional but time-consuming method used by vintners.
Its high throughput allows us to harvest and select grapes which would not normally be worth harvesting he said.
In an experiment to compare optical grape-sorting with handpicking earlier this year Oberholster's team set up an optical sorter to exclude up to 10 percent of the berries on the basis of poor quality.
The German process uses a special conveying system to load de-stemmed grapes onto a belt that travels past a sorting module.
A high-speed line scan camera photographs the grapes as they pass. After the scan the system's software takes over.
Based on its analysis of the colors of individual items on the belt it controls air jets that blow bad grapes and detritus off the belt and sorts the remaining berries into grades for production of various qualities
In effect the software takes over the role of categorizing individual grapes from human experts. It does so more cheaply and consistently.
which allows us to sort the grapes based on different criteria Vieth said. When the grapes are scanned permanently by line-scan cameras the data stream is processed within tens of milliseconds.
The technology that the process uses to separate grapes of different wine-making characteristics remains secret.
However Vieth said we use color both visible and non-visible light and geometry features to separate the qualities.
When German vineyards wanted an automatic process for sorting their grapes Fraunhofer IOSB presented an obvious choice owing to its experience developing machines that sort tobacco minerals foods and more.
and Ingenierubã ro Waidelich of Tubingen worked on the mechanical tasks such as de-stemming the grapes and some of the electrical processes.
and developing sorting systems we lacked knowledge of grapes Vieth said. So the team incorporated experts from Geisenheim University s Grape Breeding Institute an institution that offers higher degrees in winemaking and dates back to 1872.
The university is related responsible for everything to wine growing selecting the grapes for the tests performing all the laboratory analysis
and making wine out of the selected grapes Vieth said. University viticulture experts will also put the resulting wines through taste tests.
This story was provided by Inside Science News Service. A former science editor of Newsweek Peter Gwynne is a freelance science writer based in Sandwich Massachusetts i
#Precision farming Gains Global Foothold (Op-Ed) Lloyd Treinish leads the environmental science team in the Industry Solutions Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research center.
A co-developer of IBM's Deep Thunder precision agriculture system he contributed this article to Livescience's Expert Voices:
Unfortunately about half of the world's food is consumed never due to inefficiencies in the harvesting storage and delivery of crops.
and tomorrow's agribusinesses need to embrace smarter farming methods. Fortunately the technology to do so is available and working right now.
Fueling better farming is a practice known as precision agriculture which uses extensive data from a farmer's field
While collecting real-time data on weather soil health of crops and air quality is important as is the availability of equipment
Precision agriculture can help farmers from Brunei to Brazil pinpoint the best time for harvesting to mitigate crop damage and loss;
Those and other smarter farming methods including techniques used early in the growing cycle are reducing weather-related crop damage by as much as 25 percent in some areas ensuring that fewer crops are wasted
Precision agriculture helps address that problem by improving weather forecasting and modeling and localizing it even within a particular farm.
At IBM we developed a precision agriculture weather-modeling service using Deep Thunder our Big data analytics technology for local customized high-resolution and rapid weather predictions.
With 70 percent of the world's freshwater supply already going to agriculture every drop counts.
Coupling predictive analytics and modeling techniques with other sophisticated farming methods can prove to be quite beneficial
For instance many farmers are now using methods like flow-through irrigation drip irrigation micro-sprinklers and more efficient use of groundwater to increase yields.
While the days of farmers using the divining rod to find water are passed long since many farmers especially in developing countries still rely too much on guesswork in making planting irrigation and harvesting decisions.
and celery paste and even tiny spaceships made of deep fried scallops. Novelty food suppliers have become early adopters of similar technology.
The netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific research (TNO) announced they ll build printers to reassemble pureed food to look like the original think 3d printed broccoli florets from pureed broccoli.
It could also answer the problem of methane emissions from agriculture. In 2011 Modern Meadow took up the challenge setting out to make ecological and economical leather and meat from bioprinters.
They cultured biopsied bovine cells to produce sheets of tissue eventually forming either meat or hide.
They predict cultured leather will be on the market in five years. Modern Meadow s CEO Andras Forgacs is a pioneer in the bioprinting field cofounding the tissue printing company Organovo (NYSE:
Live animals are used only to provide cells from which cell lines can be grown (though the blood of unborn cows is needed to culture most cells.
Printed meat may result in a debate akin to that on GMO foods. Certainly the public will want to know
or contaminate organic foods. It is reasonable to assume most will want to decide whether they eat oereal meat
which provides the most agriculturally important irrigation in the state of Kansas and is a key source of drinking water for the region.
If current irrigation trends continue unabated 69 percent of the available groundwater will be drained in the next five decades the researchers said in a study published online today (Aug 26) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
if we're able to save water today it will result in a substantial increase in the number of years that we will have irrigated agriculture in Kansas Steward said.
That's happening because of increased irrigation technology crop genetics and management strategies. But in some areas of the country's plains the properties of the groundwater and soil largely dictate the irrigation techniques Scanlon said.
In parts of Texas and Kansas the groundwater is brinier which means if some farmers employ more efficient irrigation techniques they will also be pumping up salty deposits that are washed not adequately away by rainfall.
This is a very nice study but we really need to address droughts and socioeconomic issues and other approaches to figure out the problem beyond the technical Scanlon said.
Or instead drone technicians might envision Congo forest eco-guards getting a closer and safer look at what appears be a group of well-armed ivory poachers near a salt lick.
The UAV returns on its own with photographic evidence that the sounds the eco-guard had heard were just a small band of hunter-gatherers who have the right to take from the forest.
UAV developers might even conceive of a squadron of drones with heat-sensing cameras flying across the vast plains of Central asia's Ustyurt Plateau searching for signs of saiga-antelope poachers.
and the DARPA Grand Challenge (autonomous systems) have hung all a carrot in front of the world's innovators.
It is not possible to ship certain types of food such as fresh vegetables and fruits that far or to store them for many months.
In fact very few foods remain viable over such durations without losing many of the characteristics that make them wholesome and nutritious.
In the near term before colonists can construct greenhouses they will have to use artificial light from LEDS for example to power their plants'photosynthesis. NASA has conducted plant-growth research in microgravity aboard the International Space station (ISS) and in the Long Duration Exposure
One section could house the crew and another the plants in experimental growing media such as simulated Mars soil or fluid for hydroponic gardening.
Soybeans provide basic proteins capable of sustaining human health. Greens sprouts and even seaweed may help create a balanced diet.
Indeed astronauts have grown successfully peas and mizuna lettuce in space along with carbohydrate staples like wheat and rice.
All would be likely choices as mainstay foods if they can thrive under Mars-like conditions.
Mars will lack direct sunlight and other sources of nutrients that people take for granted here On earth.
At least in the early years Red planet residents will not have access to fruits containing Vitamin c so they would have to rely on vitamins
All of the above-mentioned crops can grow hydroponically to conserve space and resources. Some experiments growing plants in simulated Martian soil have met also with success.
Fungi specifically mushrooms are excellent low-maintenance food sources that require little or no light.
Mushrooms provide essential nutrients including Vitamin d and Vitamin b-6. Easy to grow and harvest mushrooms are ingredients in many popular dishes.
The fungi could grow in compost created using waste material from other agricultural processes as well as sanitary waste.
when converting vegetable mass into protein as pigs and five times as efficient as cattle. In addition the husbandry associated with raising grasshoppers is compared relatively simple to that needed for cattle chickens
or hogs and their rapid reproduction rate and short life cycle allows a stable and continuous harvest.
Finally it would be much easier to transport insects to Mars than to send large animals.
While the exact forms that agriculture would take on Mars are still very much an unknown at least one thing is clear:
#The Natural Way to Keep Fruit Fresh and Stop the Rot (Op-Ed) This article was published originally at The Conversation.
But new technology that prolongs the life of fresh fruit and vegetables can help minimise this huge amount of waste.
It is a sad irony that we waste so much food especially fruit and vegetables but still fail to feed the world s ever increasing population.
Clearly our ability to produce larger quantities of fruit and vegetables is not the only guarantee for global food security.
We need to start minimising the amount of food that is produced and then lost. Loss happens when food is spilt in transit
or spoilt from heavy bruising or wilting. It is unplanned the result of an agricultural process gone wrong or technical limitations in storage infrastructure packaging or marketing.
A key way to minimise the amount of food lost is through postharvest technology which can help make food last longer without losing nutrients.
We should make sure postharvest techniques are environmentally friendly and of course nontoxic to humans when applied to food.
The use of natural biodegradable products as an alternative to synthetic chemicals has shown remarkable improvements in maintaining fruit quality
It has been shown to significantly maintain papaya fruit when applied to it. In combination with Gum arabic (hardened sap obtained from the acacia tree) it can also delay the ripening of bananas.
Gum arabic can also be used on its own to enhance the shelf life and postharvest quality of tomatoes.
Cinnamon oil is another natural product that has been shown to delay postharvest rotting in bananas and extending their storage life for up to 28 days.
Our research at the Centre of Excellence for Postharvest Biotechnology at Nottingham University s Malaysia Campus is making these natural products into nano-forms or submicron particles to control postharvest diseases.
This technology has so far been used to delay ripening in tomatoes and enhance their phenolic content as well as extending the life of dragon fruit for up to 28 days.
These are just a few examples with many more being developed to improve the quality and shelf life of fresh fruit to help stop it going to waste.
The way that fresh food is packaged is crucial to how long it can last. Synthetic chemicals are used currently to control postharvest diseases
but consumers worry about the chemical residues they leave on fruit their environmental impact and the potential for pathogens to become resistant to them.
Our research is a response to this developing more environmentally friendly and non-chemical approaches.
This includes packing food in containers that modify the atmosphere to prevent decay hot water treatment
Once proper postharvest technologies are used efficiently food losses can be minimised and the problem of food insecurity alleviated.
We believe that developing postharvest management techniques using natural products is the way forward especially
Asgar Ali receives funding from the Ministry of Agriculture Malaysia. This article was published originally on The Conversation.
#Forging Biodegradable Plastic From Methane and Plant Waste Molly Morse is chief executive officer of Mango Materials Inc. This article was prepared by the U s. National Science Foundation for the American Institute of Chemical Engineers
What if we could reduce greenhouse gas emissions while replacing up to 30 percent of the world's plastics with a biodegradable substitute?
Scientists at Stanford university and a Palo alto Calif.-based start-up company called Mango Materials have come up with a new way to make PHA from waste methane gas.
And with funding from the U s. National Science Foundation Mango Materials is advancing the process toward commercialization.
and to accept a carbon source of corn-based sugar. The microorganisms feed on the plant-derived sugars and produce PHA.
Mango Materials'process uses bacteria grown in fermenters to transform methane and oxygen along with added nutrients (to supply excess carbon) into PHA.
or with additives Mango Materials has identified a range of applications. We are focused currently on applications where biodegradability is key says Molly Morse CEO at Mango Materials.
However we're open to all sorts of applications and are eager to bring PHA bioplastics to market.
whereas Mango Materials uses waste methane which is considerably less expensive than sugar. By using methane gas as the feedstock we can significantly drive down costs of production Morse says.
This stands in contrast to the processes many biotech companies use that require high-purity genetically engineered cultures says Allison Pieja Director of Technology at Mango Materials.
As an added environmental benefit the process sequesters methane a potent greenhouse gas and provides an economic incentive for methane capture at facilities such as landfills wastewater treatment plants and dairy farms.
This estimate is based on Mango Materials'internal calculations using its own rates and yields. Mango Materials has vetted this technology
and achieved excellent yields at the laboratory scale. Field studies have shown that the methane-consuming cultures grow just as well on waste biogas
Learning from Trees is a classic on biomimetics. Mattheck s lifelong love affair with trees has led to many important innovations in engineering design.
One of these considers the junction where the branch of a tree meets the trunk.
Mattheck said the curvature around this junction was designed very cleverly to minimise the concentration of stress that occurs
He suggested that the tree was sensitive to stress and so as it grew would deliberately place material in such a way as to minimise stress.
He developed a computer programme to simulate tree growth and the result was a fantastic reduction in stress concentration allowing for more slender components.
and actually look at trees I don t think Mattheck is right. I don t think trees are doing
what he thinks they are doing and proving it would be quite difficult. But of course it doesn t matter
A new landmark study in the journal Science found that the U s. Environmental protection agency's (EPA) inventory of greenhouse gases is undercounting total U s. methane emissions by roughly 50 percent.
that's equal to 6. 4 billion pounds or as much as the weight of 1. 4 million new Ford F150 pickup trucks.
In the years immediately after it's released methane is a potent greenhouse gas. It causes 86 times as much global warming over a 20-year period as carbon dioxide the single largest contributor to climate change.
According to our analysis at Energy Innovation the methane missing from the EPA's inventory in terms of the contribution to global warming over a 20-year time period would be equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of 252 coal power plants.
At the same time that the scientific community is finding evidence that methane is being undercounted the newly released draft version of the U s. EPA's national greenhouse-gas emission inventory presents data showing that methane emissions from natural gas
The EPA greenhouse gas inventory uses data from bottom up studies to develop emission factors for different components of the entire natural gas system from production (extraction from the ground) to processing transmission and distribution.
and pedaled it down dirt paths through the forests and they even mounted it onto a boat to collect images of a section of the Rio Negro the Amazon's largest tributary Google explained on one of its Outreach pages.
The teams then amalgamated more than 2000 still images to create 360-degree panoramas of the Amazon jungle.
Those data are collected periodically by trained forest community members and once it reaches FAS headquarters in Manaus Brazil can be grouped
After the implementation of the community forest ODK monitoring program and the Street view for the Amazon FAS launched a new Web-based platform called Bolsa Floresta Platform to serve as an interactive tool where Bolsa Floresta
the Amazon forest and the culture of its local population Salviati told Livescience. Smartphones tablets and chimps On the other side of the world the Jane Goodall Institute an ape-conservation organization founded by renowned chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall is leading a similar effort.
and cloud technology to help monitor African forests said Lilian Pintea JGI's vice president of conservation science.
and the forests and take photos documenting the most important threats Pintea explained. The villagers also document the presence of more than 20 species with a focus on chimpanzees for instance
if the forest monitors see an animal or its tracks they take photos with their smartphones he said.
so they can monitor forests and habitats Pintea said. Through this data-collection process the JGI has identified previously unknown threats to chimpanzees.
Even in the first few weeks of a forest villager getting his smartphone he reported this trap designed to capture a live primate we think either a baboon
In the future Pintea hopes to use imagery of the region gathered over the years to track changes in the forests over time.
Eyes on the Forest Other endangered species like the tiger are threatened also by poaching and habitat destruction.
and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry captured images of 12 tigers in Sumatra in an area that was set for deforestation.
along with a coalition of nongovernmental organizations called Eyes on the Forest worked with Google to build a catalog of maps detailing the changes in the region over time including shifts in the forest cover;
and floral diversity according to a statement from Eyes on the Forest. Through this effort the organizations hope to illustrate how deforestation in Sumatra fueled by demand for products like palm oil
and its forest-dwelling creatures. It will also allow consumers to make informed decisions on the products they buy as the map can show where a pulp
and paper company is clear-cutting trees Carter Roberts president and CEO of WWF said in a statement.
and then gradually the forests will come back and with them tiger populations. Elephant tracks Despite many efforts to curb elephant poaching including a 1989 agreement among CITES (Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna
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