Last summer you announced new regulations that would double the average fuel economy standard for cars sold in this country
which was an achievement because most automakers agreed. But you kicked the can down the road.
A new standard of 54.5 miles per gallon is great but by 2025? Can't we do better than three presidential terms from now?
Are you willing to pay 2x the cost for power transportation and fuel? I don't understand why reversing the effects of the azolla event is seen as such a negative thing.
I'm driving around a vehicle which if I run in my garage with everything closed will kill me...
-consensus-on. htmlsimilar results shown from nasa http://climate. nasa. gov/scientific-consensussomething a little more recent http://www. guardian co uk/environment/2013/mar 27/climate-change-model
It's the latest publication from James Hansen NASA's fiery climate change scientist who is retiring on Wednesday after 46 years with the space agency.
and its lead author Pushker A. Kharecha of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
With his departure from NASA the climate research community loses one of its most vocal members
The safety of nuclear energy is equal to flying an airplane. On a typical day life is good
but when an airplane falls from the sky and you are in it it only ends in as a gigantic disaster.
Flying (at least flying in commercial airliners which the rest of your comment indicates you were talking about) is by far the safest mode of transportation.
Many times more people are killed per mile traveled in automobiles. Bicycling is about 10 times again more likely to get you killed.
Motorcycling is about three times again as dangerous as pedal cycling. We (mis) perceive the risk of airline travel
because every airliner crash becomes a major international news story. Meanwhile tens of thousands of auto (and cycle) deaths every year barely rate a mention in the local paper.
The same holds for nuclear power vs. other energy sources. The*real*risk of a nuclear power disaster is far less than the*(mis) perceived*risk.
and see that travel by almost any other mode of transportation is inherently more dangerous.@@Him:
and Fukushima. 3 mile island caused less extra radiation than you'd get from a cross-country flight.
and about as mature as your avatar. 1. A quick trip to wikipedia shows many many nuclear meltdowns and accidents such as Santa Susana in California and the Urals in Russia which spewed tons of radiation
over unsuspecting populations. 2. Comparing radiation received from an airplane flight to exposure to nuclear radiation
They travel long distances and will contaminate all regions on earth. www. abs-cbnnews. com/insights/04/01/11/nuclear-radiation-there-no-safe-dose4.
Not even U s. commercial aviation widely acknowledged as the safest form of travel can match that safety record.
I do agree with Anyicon's statement about comparison to air travel yes it's by all means the safest mode of travel out there
Tornadoes ice storms wildfires and drought now routinely overwhelm the nation's aging electrical infrastructure inflicting sweeping blackouts.
While Europe is building a massive Supergrid (much of it with DC lines) for it`s solar wind and bio energy transports.
And while Europe and China keep expanding high speed rail to more cities the US is only lowering investments in roads energy rails etc.
Maybe we don't have enough hybrid cars. As touched on by Cookiees453 the worst possible thing that could happen to any gridsmart
on monday I got a great Aston martin DB5 since getting a check for $9732 this-last/4 weeks and-more than ten k last-month. no doubt about it this really is the coolest work Ive had.
and driving a full car. Not even close. As an addition to mathew's comment:
Ford even work in one of Edison's labs before he started building cars. Edison was also a showman and a callous one at that:
A nearby supernova would have sent gamma rays flying in all directions. Those rays would have created high-energy particles in our atmosphere
Otherwise you may be horrified at how your car the airplane you may have flown in or the building you work in were designed.
I bought a gorgeous BMW 5-series after having made $7872 this-past/4 weeks
except for the poor time traveller that was trapped back then due to the EMP of that sucker...
and Pacific oceans transforming trade transportation and even wartime strategy. France began construction on the canal in the 1880s
Gorgas himself says that the Americans could have done no better than The french without the knowledge of the mosquito as a disease carrier.
The trains were screened and regulations put in force for the protection of the public health. A number of living stations for employees were arranged along the railroad
and every house was built well off the ground and screened. Now the real war against diseases was begun lakes
a hospital car was run with every train for the ill or the injured; medical and surgical service was skilled
Great commercial agricultural and industrial development immediately follows new and important lines of transportation; and in addition to the enormous investments of the United states government in the Zone private capital will flow into the country in a steady stream.
#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.
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.
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.
#Mix of graphene nanoribbons, polymer has potential for cars, soda, beera discovery at Rice university aims to make vehicles that run on compressed natural gas more practical.
It might also prolong the shelf life of bottled beer and soda. The Rice lab of chemist James Tour has enhanced a polymer material to make it far more impermeable to pressurized gas
The combination could be a boon for an auto industry under pressure to market consumer cars that use cheaper natural gas.
This becomes increasingly important as automakers think about powering cars with natural gas. Metal tanks that can handle natural gas under pressure are often much heavier than the automakers would like.
He said the material could help to solve longstanding problems in food packaging too. Remember when you were a kid you'd get a balloon
and it would be wilted the next day? That's because gas molecules go through rubber or plastic Tour said.
Existing air quality regulations and trends in clean energy technology are expected to reduce the amount of harmful nitrogen oxides (NOX) emitted by coal plants and cars over time.
'The project was funded by the NASA Applied sciences Program through the Air Quality Applied sciences Team which is led by Jacob at Harvard
Study offers advice for owners of urban delivery truck fleetsfor owners of delivery truck fleets who may be trying to decide between electric
or diesel vehicles researchers at the Georgia Institute of technology are offering some advice: comparisons of the energy consumption greenhouse gas emissions and total cost of ownership for the medium-duty vehicles.
The advantages of electric versus diesel depend largely on how the trucks will be used--the frequency of stops
and average speeds--and the source of electricity for charging batteries. In city driving with frequent stops the electric trucks clearly outperform diesel vehicles.
On average in the United states electric urban delivery trucks use about 30 percent less total energy and emit about 40 percent less greenhouse gases than diesel trucks for about the same total cost taking into account both the purchase price
and the operating costs said Dong-Yeon Lee a Ph d. student in the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
and where the truck will be used. In urban delivery routes with lots of stop -and-start driving electric trucks are roughly 50 percent more efficient to operate than diesel trucks overall.
That makes them at least 20 percent less expensive than diesel-fueled trucks and reduces greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 50 percent.
Where they are stopped frequently and started the higher efficiency of the electric motor at low speeds
and the regenerative braking systems in electrical vehicles help provide better efficiency. However electric delivery trucks lose their advantage in suburban routes that involve fewer stops and higher average speed.
Electric vehicles have limited a daily range and top speed and without a lot of stops lose their regenerative braking advantage.
Electric vehicles can cost more than their diesel counterparts under certain conditions particularly if high-cost charging systems are used
if the battery must be replaced early or if they are used mainly for highway driving. The relative benefits of the electric vehicles the researchers found depend on vehicle efficiency associated with drive cycle diesel fuel price travel demand electric drive battery replacement
and price electricity generation and transmission efficiency electric truck recharging infrastructure and purchase price. The study findings were reported July 16 2013 in the journal Environmental science and Technology.
The research team took into account the sources of electricity used to charge the electric vehicles in evaluating greenhouse gas emissions.
Electricity produced from hydroelectric sources--more common in the northwest United states--dramatically reduced total greenhouse gas emissions for electric vehicles operated there.
Vehicles operated in states heavily dependent on coal for producing electricity showed higher emissions. In every state in the U s. electric trucks provided some reduction in greenhouse gas emissions with urban routes providing the most advantage.
In about half of the states the electric trucks cut greenhouse gas emissions by a third
or more compared to diesel vehicles. Wild cards in the study included the future costs of both diesel fuel
and electricity and the potential cost of replacing an electric truck's battery pack if it has a shorter-than-expected lifetime.
Lithium-ion battery packs are expected to last the lifetime of the trucks as much as 150000 miles for the drive cycles tested.
Technology advances make predicting the long-term price of electric trucks difficult said Valerie Thomas one of the study's co-authors and a professor in Georgia Tech's Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and School
of Public Policy. Battery price reductions down the road could have a large effect on the cost-competitiveness of electric trucks
while only diesel fuel prices could have a similarly large effect on the future cost-competitiveness of diesel trucks.
The researchers decided to study electric trucks in urban delivery applications because vehicles in these applications tend to travel the same routes each day spend significant amounts of time in stop
-and-start operation and return at the end of each day to a central location where they can be charged.
The comparison involved a 2011 Smith Newton electric truck powered by a 120 kw electric motor
and a 2006 Freightliner truck powered by a Cummins diesel engine. The two trucks had approximately the same gross vehicle weight curb weight and payload.
The comparison controlled for improvements in diesel efficiency between 2006 and 2011. The researchers were surprised to find that the electric truck had cost advantages over the diesel vehicle under some conditions.
They had expected that costs would always be higher for the electric vehicle especially since the purchase price of the electric truck studied was higher than the diesel truck
--and other models of electric trucks would have larger cost differentials. Over the life of the truck there are many situations in
which the total cost of operating an electric vehicle is less than operating a diesel vehicle noted Marilyn Brown another co-author and a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Public Policy.
Our expectation was that the electric vehicle would provide environmental benefits but at a cost.
We found that particularly in urban settings and in locations with relatively low greenhouse gas emissions from electricity electric delivery trucks both save money
and have environmental benefits. Depending on what happens with vehicle and fuel costs the advantages could swing even farther in the direction of electric vehicles.
The relative benefit of electric trucks over diesel counterparts could be much more significant than one might expect said Lee.
If the electric truck is deployed in the right drive or duty cycle application fleet operators could enjoy higher returns on investment while saving energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Georgia Institute of technology. The original article was written by John Toon.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference e
#First look at complete sorghum genome may usher in new uses for food and fuelalthough sorghum lines underwent adaptation to be grown in temperate climates decades ago a University of Illinois researcher said he
and his team have completed the first comprehensive genomic analysis of the molecular changes behind that adaptation.
Patrick Brown an assistant professor in plant breeding and genetics said having a complete characterization of the locations (loci) affecting specific traits will speed up the adaptation of sorghum and other related grasses to new production
systems for both food and fuel. Brown is working on the project through the Energy Biosciences Institute at the U of
I hoping to use the sorghum findings as a launching pad for working with complex genomes of other feedstocks.
The EBI provided the startup funding for the study. To adapt the drought-resistant tropical sorghum to temperate climates Brown explained that sorghum lines were converted over the years by selecting
and crossing exotic lines with temperate-adapted lines to create lines that were photoperiod-insensitive for early maturity as well as shorter plants that could be harvested machine.
Nokia also provided reliability via dedicated service vans that traveled to rural Indian villages to fix broken phones.
If a microentrepreneur has say a small cart they don't have a lot of capital to risk
Rudimentary silicon memories made in the Tour lab are now aboard the International Space station where they are being tested for their ability to hold a pattern
The Boeing Corp. and the Air force Office of Scientific research funded the work. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Rice university.
and strengthening components--potentially a television screen that rolls up like a poster or ultrastrong composites that could replace carbon fiber.
Our results will help develop ways to use this new material in atomically thin electronics that will become integral components of a whole new generation of revolutionary products such as flexible solar cells that conform to the body of a car.
and dangerous metals like mercury chromium and arsenic said Pavlo Bohutskyi an environmental engineering doctoral student and leader of this team.
It can even serve as a high-density hydrogen storage carrier that could solve problems related to hydrogen storage and distribution.
For example some nanoparticles are used as the drug delivery vehicle. We can make nanogumbos that are both the drug
and the drug delivery vehicle he said. Warner cited as one example a newly developed nanogumbos material with a provisional patent application filed that his team at LSU foresees as a lead in possible development of new anticancer drugs.
Dead fish sometimes wash up onto beaches with a negative impact on recreational activities and tourism.
Joan B. Rose1 Phd Michigan State university Department of Fisheries and Wildlife 480 Wilson Road Natural resources Bldg Rm 13 East Lansing MI 48824
In this talk we discuss the drivers affecting water sustainability and potential solutions including: adapting to a changing water world direct and indirect potable water reuse resilient water infrastructure and more holistic management of the water cycle.
Research needs to steward ecologically responsible nanotechnology will also be discussed. Confronting the water challenge: Dow technologies increase the flow1.
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