The potential for profit and environmental benefits are why so many automobile oil and energy companies are working on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as the transportation of the future Zhang said.
The team liberates the high-purity hydrogen under mild reaction conditions at 122 Degree fahrenheit and normal atmospheric pressure.
Paper substrates are better for the environment but have shown limited performance because of high surface roughness or porosity.
However cellulose nanomaterials made from wood are green renewable and sustainable. The substrates have a low surface roughness of only about two nanometers.
Our next steps will be to work toward improving the power conversion efficiency over 10 percent levels similar to solar cells fabricated on glass
Blake Grisham a post doctoral research associate working with Boal said in terms of wind farms companies already have been trying to do the right thing by staying away from known habitats.
we've been fortunate that the wind energy companies have identified these places as potential problems
A general decline shows that the ecosystem as a whole faces uncertainty and that other species may be affected in the future.
To the extent that fossil resources are used to generate electricity the report says that the successful implementation of carbon capture
but were unable to carry it out due to unfavorable regional weather conditions. They also ran a pilot test in Hungary with a related beetle pest that bores into oak trees.
#Scientists explore new technologies that remove atmospheric carbon dioxidein his Feb 12 State of the Union address President Obama singled out climate change as a top priority for his second administration.
The administration has taken a number of steps to meet those goals such as investing billions of dollars in wind solar and other carbon-neutral energy technologies.
Their findings are summarized in a report by Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP.
To achieve the targeted cuts we would need a scenario where by the middle of the century the global economy is transitioning from net positive to net negative CO2 emissions said report co-author Chris Field a professor of biology and of environmental Earth
One of the most promising net-negative technologies is BECCS or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.
and prevented from reentering the environment. The result is a net-negative reduction in atmospheric CO2.
But according to the GCEP report major technical and economic hurdles must be overcome such as the relative inefficiency of biomass fuels and the high cost of carbon capture and storage (CCS.
To meet ambitious climate targets a cost-effective policy would be to implement a carbon tax
We're going to be burning fossil fuels for many years to come said Field who also serves as director of the Carnegie Institution Department of Global Ecology at Stanford.
On the other hand biochar production that relies on forest ecosystems may result in a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions they cautioned.
However questions remain about the long-term effects of ethanol combustion on climate. The report also explored the possibility of sequestering carbon in the ocean with a particular focus on the problem of ocean acidification
Although the potential for CO2 sequestration in the ocean is associated large the risks to the marine environment need to be assessed adequately the authors concluded.
#Lack of energy an enemy to antibiotic-resistant microbesrice University researchers cured a strain of bacteria of its ability to resist an antibiotic in an experiment that has implications for a longstanding public health crisis. Rice environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez
The researchers'results reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental science and Technology are the latest in a long effort to understand the environmental aspects of antibiotic resistance which threatens decades of progress in fighting disease.
The propagation of antibiotic resistance has been perceived as a medical or microbiology-related problem Alvarez said.
But what many people miss is that it is also an environmental pollution problem. A lot of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria originate in animal agriculture where there is overuse misuse
Alvarez contended that confined animal feeding operations (CAFOS) are potential sources of environmental contamination by antibiotics
and E coli which carries resistant genes directly from animals through their feces into the environment.
whether in a person an animal or in the environment the weak microbes will die
So there is incentive to eliminate the resistance plasmid from bacteria in the environment as close to the source as possible.
If we can put an anaerobic barrier at the point where a lagoon drains into the environment we will essentially exert selective pressure for the loss of antibiotic-resistant genes
but it's enough to have bacteria notice a deficiency in their ability to obtain energy from the environment and feel the stress to dump resistant genes.
His study of the Haihe River in China funded by the Chinese government and published last year found tetracycline resistance genes are common in the environment there as well.
We tested water and river sediment and couldn't find a sample that didn't have said them he Our philosophy in environmental engineering is that an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of remediation Alvarez said.
Don't let them amplify in the environment. Stop them before they're released. And one easy way is to put up an anaerobic barrier.
Co-authors of the paper are Rice alumni Michal Rysz now an environmental engineer at GSI Environmental Inc. Houston;
William Mansfield a scientist at the EPA in Dallas; and John Fortner an assistant professor at Washington University St louis. Alvarez is the George R. Brown Professor and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Rice university. The original article was written by Mike Williams. Note:
This project is an example of the innovation that can be sparked in a research-park environment.
#Global natural gas boom alone wont slow climate changea new analysis of global energy use economics
and the climate shows that without new climate policies expanding the current bounty of inexpensive natural gas alone would not slow the growth of global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide over the long term according to a study appearing today in Nature.
Because natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal many people hoped the recent natural gas boom could help slow climate change
but also lower-emitting nuclear and renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar. Inexpensive natural gas would also accelerate economic growth
The effect is that abundant natural gas alone will do little to slow climate change said lead author Haewon Mcjeon an economist at the Department of energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
but greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow in the absence of climate policies that promote lower carbon energy sources.
Their computer models included not just energy use and production but also the broader economy and the climate system.
and climate and the way these different systems interact with one another. The groups each computed projections halfway into the century.
When we saw all five modeling teams reporting little difference in climate change we knew we were onto something.
Even at the lower end fugitive methane adds to climate change. The combined effect of the three the scientists found is that the global energy system could experience unprecedented changes in the growth of natural gas production
but without much reduction to projected climate change if new mitigation policies are not put in place to support the deployment of renewable energy technologies.
There's been some hope that slowing climate change could also be one of its benefits
the JGCRI a collaboration between PNNL and the University of Maryland BAECONOMICS the International Institute for Applied Systems analysis the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research the Centro Euromediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici
Based on over-the-air experiments in a range of indoor and outdoor operating environments we found that UHF-band multiuser MIMO compared favorably
just as accurately as we now can forecast the next day's weather. My vision is that just like you have fairly reasonable weather predictions today for
what is going to happen tomorrow that have evolved to be compared very accurate to where they started out in the 1940s
and that is because we can predict the weather with a large degree of confidence. When wildland fuel distribution
and the effects of climate change drive up the total acres burned nationwide and also the average size of each fire ballooning the number of on-call U s. Forest Service firefighters
what is going to dictate the fluid dynamics in the vicinity. In turn the fluid dynamics of the air and combustible hydrocarbons as fire progresses could point the way to where the fire will spread.
California's seasonal combination of Santa anna winds and rising temperatures both serve to dry the fuel for combustion and drive the fire's process once underway.
and how proximity and wind can influence their combustion characteristics. We light the shrub then figure out how much time it takes to burn out Dr. Mahalingam says.
what the wind's effects are. It turns out that for cases with no wind you really have to get the shrubs close together for one to affect the other.
Dahale A.;S. Padhi; B. Shotorban; S. Mahalingam Flame merging in two neighboring shrub fires Paper 070fr-0198 presented at the 8th U s. National Combustion Meeting Salt lake city UT May 19
The environment surrounding the atom-thick carbon material can influence its electronic performance according to researchers at Rice
For any future device designs using graphene we have to take into account the influence of the surroundings said Kono.
and seeds becoming long and leggy as they reach for the sky. That process begins with the phytochrome
This is a key piece of research that has demonstrated how effective bioacoustics techniques can be for providing ecological data.
While living in a space habitat is basically residing in a mechanized environment Hava says humans by their makeup still need to be around nature.
We also want the plants to be in the astronauts'environment so they can see them smell them
However the reduction in the numbers of stomatal pores decreases the ability of plants to cool their leaves during a heat wave via water evaporation.
and EPF2 could be used to engineer crop varieties which are better able to perform in the current and future high CO2 global climate where fresh water availability for agriculture is dwindling. â#The discoveries of these proteins
and CO2 levels continue to rise. â#oeat a time where the pressing issues of climate change and inherent agronomic consequences
and climate change modelersâ#says Engineer. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of California-San diego. The original article was written by Kim Mcdonald.
And because of the country's climate and geography irrigation is now widespread burdening rivers and groundwater supplies.
Our analysis provides a framework for understanding how such policies would benefit China's water use in the future said study co-author Denise Mauzerall professor of environmental engineering and international affairs.
Overall China may want to consider a targeted investment in agricultural research and development said lead author Carole Dalin a Princeton university Ph d. student studying environmental engineering.
but rainfall is limited and stores of underground water are diminishing. To fulfill high production demands water is drawn from underground reservoirs (aquifers) in the northern provinces
Our provincial-scale domestic analysis of the country's virtual water trade is key to guiding such policy planning said Dalin who is a former Princeton Environmental Institute Science Technology and Environmental Policy fellow.
--which also includes Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe the James S. Mcdonnell Distinguished University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
The researchers combined this information with water use across provinces--from both rainfall and irrigation sources--and determined how much water was transferred between provinces through food trade.
These numbers indicate that such provinces see little rainfall during the growing season and rely heavily on sometimes nonrenewable water resources such as groundwater.
and their exports lead to large national water savings for both rainfall and irrigation water.
#Carbon capture breakthrough: Recyclable material absorbs 82 percent of its weight in carbon dioxiderice University scientists have created an Earth-friendly way to separate carbon dioxide from natural gas at wellheads.
and enable the economic production of gas resources with higher carbon dioxide content that would be too costly to recover using current carbon capture technologies Tour said.
and other emissions it could well face new regulations Tour said noting the White house issued its latest National Climate Assessment last month and this week set new rules to cut carbon pollution from the nation
#Reducing emissions will be primary way to fight climate change, study findsforget about positioning giant mirrors in space to reduce the amount of sunlight being trapped in Earth's atmosphere
Those approaches to climate engineering aren't likely to be effective or practical in slowing global warming.
We found that climate engineering doesn't offer a perfect option said Daniela Cusack the study's lead author and an assistant professor of geography in UCLA's College of Letters and Science.
Still the study concluded some approaches to climate engineering are more promising than others and they should be used to augment efforts to reduce the 9 gigatons of carbon dioxide being released each year by human activity.
The first scholarly attempt to rank a wide range of approaches to minimizing climate change in terms of their feasibility cost-effectiveness risk public acceptance governability
and ethics the study appears in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
At stake the study emphasizes are the futures of food production our climate and water security.
and soil ecology teamed up with experts in oceanography political science sociology economics and ethics. Working under the auspices of the National Science Foundation the team spent two years evaluating more than 100 studies that addressed the various implications of climate engineering and their anticipated effects on greenhouse gases.
Ultimately the group focused its investigation on the five strategies that appear to hold the most promise:
and in the ocean storing carbon dioxide in a liquefied form in underground geological formations and wells increasing Earth's cloud cover and solar reflection.
Deforestation now is responsible for adding 1 gigaton of carbon each year to the atmosphere. Improving soil management is another biological means of carbon sequestration that holds considerable promise
The study's second most promising climate engineering strategy after carbon sequestration was carbon capture and storage particularly when the technique is used near where fuels are being refined.
Reducing the amount of sunlight that is heating up the atmosphere through measures such as artificially increasing Earth's cloud cover
But we really don't understand what would happen to the climate if we started making more clouds.
#Environmental strategies on livestock farms: Results obtained after evaluationthe Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and development (Neiker-Tecnalia) has coordinated the European BATFARM project
in order to reduce their environmental impact on the air water and soil. In this project a detailed study has been made of the technologies present on livestock farms belonging to various regions in the Atlantic Area.
but it poses numerous environmental problems like the emissions of polluting gases (ammonia nitrous oxide and methane) into the atmosphere and the polluting of soil and water by nitrates.
Directive on the adopting of Best Available Techniquesin connection with the environmental problems involved in livestock production the EU 2010/75/EC Directive also known as the IED (Industrial Emissions Directive) seeks to regulate all forms of emission into the atmosphere water
or 750 sows) and makes the obtaining of comprehensive environmental authorisation compulsory. The Directive proposes adopting Best Available Techniques (BAT)
nchez said the technology consists of a motherboard embedded computer systems (for specific functions) a graphical interface for monitoring variables such as humidity temperature wind speed
#Cool climate, clean planet: Research suggests cooling action will clean airever-rising greenhouse gas emissions
and the potential need to deploy untested and expensive climate engineering technologies are just two of the many bits of bad news in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's new report on Mitigation
of Climate Change released on 13 april. But there's good news hidden in the bad. If we take action to cool the planet we can also expect the added benefit of cleaner air particularly in China says Professor Edgar Hertwich from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Hertwich director of NTNU's Industrial Ecology program was one of four lead authors of the IPCC report from Norway along with his Industrial Ecology colleague Professor Daniel Beat MÃ ller.
And as an industrial ecologist like Hertwich will tell you price is everything in determining the kinds of choices we will make to either protect the planet's climate
As head of NTNU's Industrial Ecology program and with all of his public contributions to efforts like the IPCC Hertwich's mission is to help people clearly see the costs
A menu for actionin its own words the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change.
Created by the United nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World meteorological organization (WMO) in 1988 the group has released four assessment reports that present ever more sobering appraisals of
what humankind is doing to the climate by burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Working group III whose report was released on 13 april has been charged with studying options for mitigating the negative impacts of climate change.
Urgent need to cut emissionsalthough Hertwich is relentlessly upbeat about our ability to tackle climate change he is
environment on plant traitslet's say plant scientists want to develop new lines of corn that will better tolerate long stretches of hot dry weather.
How can they precisely assess the performance of those new plants in different environmental conditions? Field tests can provide some answers.
But how can plant scientists get a true picture of a plant's growth and traits under a wide variety of controlled environmental conditions?
Hundreds of the chips-in-mini-greenhouses can grow thousands of plants at the same time each greenhouse providing different environmental conditions.
and create biochar a highly porous charcoal said project principal investigator Karl Linden professor of environmental engineering.
Linden is working closely with project co-investigators Professor R. Scott Summers of environmental engineering and Professor Alan Weimer chemical and biological engineering and a team of postdoctoral fellows professionals
and solar energy work environmental engineers for waste treatment and stabilization mechanical engineers to build actuators and moving parts and electrical engineers to design control systems Linden said.
#Lignin breakthroughs serve as GPS for plant researchresearchers at North carolina State university have developed the equivalent of GPS directions for future plant scientists to understand how plants adapt to the environment
The research offers new perspective on evolutionary biology microbiology and the production of natural gas and may shed light on climate change agriculture and human health.
By looking at this one mechanism that was studied not previously we will be able to develop new basic information that potentially has broad impact on contemporary issues ranging from climate change to obesity said Biswarup Mukhopadhyay an associate professor of biochemistry at the Virginia Tech
or volcanoes where environmental conditions mimic those that existed on the early Earth. They found that the protein thioredoxin which plays a major role in contemporary photosynthesis could repair many of the organism's proteins damaged by oxygen.
The research team investigated adaptive radiation--the explosive evolution of species into new ecological niches powered by natural selection--of New world Leaf-nosed bats.
Solar and wind energy fluctuate dramatically when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow
and we have no good way of storing enough of it to supply the grid for long said Wyss Institute Founding Director Don Ingber M d. Ph d
As the authors point out adaptive radiations that is the explosive evolution of species into new ecological niches have generated much of the biological diversity seen in the world today.
Some form or function helps an animal to perform better in its environment but it can be hard to demonstrate exactly what that form
Beta-agonists, the environment and cattle fatiguein agricultural production maintaining a level of excellence that includes environmental sustainability animal welfare
We will see smarter neighborhoods. Neighborhoods, said Bartlett, are a great place to gain momentum for
what we need to do at a city level. When you can study buildings in the context of a neighborhood.
Neighborhoods mimic living systems. For example, IBM is involved in a project in Boston's Backbay to help the neighborhood implement smart grid technology that electronically monitors
and analyzes power consumption. With the carbon matching system in place in this neighborhood, traffic patterns can be broken down,
and other sources of carbon can be traced. According to Bartlett, this system helped IBM identify carbon in unexpected places
like in methane leaks from utilities. When you can have this type of project in the neighborhood,
he said, you can then redesign a green corridor there. It can be a blueprint for the larger city level.
providing a more dynamic interpretation of the surroundings, and apps can help them contribute, said Bartlett.
He called this environmental crowd sourcing, or the ability of a citizen to use their smartphone to alert the city to building issues,
 Just as smarter buildings and smarter neighborhoods are the building blocks of smarter cities people are as well.
Why would you conserve water in the urban environment when the farmers are flooding the fields?
They're so pressed in their economic model that environmental concern is not impactful to them.
Ecosystem needs--lakes and rivers need a certain amount of water for them to survive.
This is the first perfect storm I've seen for water technology. SP: Because fracking uses a lot of water
And just like the neighborhood barista, the robot remembers what they like. Everything else I consume in life I want variation,
an artificially-controlled indoor environment that provides lighting, mineral nutrients and water--but not much else.
What's the advantage of an indoor growing environment over outdoors? Some of the things that indoor growing environments don't have are pests, molds and infections.
You can restrict a lot of that with a closed environment and reduce your crop failure, which also means higher yields.
And by going vertical you can grow a lot more crops without having to take up so many acres of land.
and now having the ability utilize technology that effectively reuses resources like water instead of letting it go to waste by flushing it down a storm drain.
So it's more about perfecting the indoor growing environment. What's kind of reactions do you get from people regarding the idea of allowing customers to wheel around their weed supply?
The old way of doing it was getting pot from your dealer down the street who maybe got it from a source that grew it in a relatively unsavory environment like a garage where you're dealing with chemicals, molds, mice.
Giving them the marijuana from a sterilized environment like our trailers is a huge benefit to this industry.
Why cities are on the cutting edge of environmentalism Climate change: it's time for the health sector to get involved Earthquake could threaten California water supply Invention may lead to greener power plants Accidental environmentalist designs furniture from invasive species
dry weather that wormed its way into the Northeast during July. Truth be told, though, we lose at least some plants every summer to the opposite problem:
These companies, Cyber-Rain and ET Water, have released both recently cloud services that provide guidance about
Cyber-Rain's application, called XCI Cloud, works in conjunction with the company's controller technologies to help residential users better control watering.
Cyber-Rain claims that the system investment might be covered in certain places by water utility rebate programs.
Said Cyber-Rain CEO Diana Schulz: What we are providing is smart irrigation in the palm of your hand.
along with weather conditions and landscape profiles to figure out when you should or shouldn't water your yard.
Environmental impact? Local leadership? DC: I don't really think I can prioritize them, but from a dollar standpoint, the volatility for energy today is a real strain for us.
you can't do that with wind. We really look at this as substantial technology--Â technology that is economically manageable today without government handouts
Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth,
Clean energy technologies can positively impact the environment the same way that automobiles did. Not that cars don't produce smog,
of course--but the major environmental pollution problem at the turn of the century was the millions of pounds of manure in city streets produced by horses used for transport.
At the time, gasoline-powered vehicles provided clean streets, Chu said. Now we have another environmental problem,
he said of pollution and greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. It may not be quite as visible or an assault on our senses as horse manure
hypothesizing that cloning might offer a technological solution to environmental crises. It's an idea that
I imagine could sound ingeniously appealing to certain people with some overly optimistic views about the environment or technology (paging Bjorn Lomborg and Ray Kurzweil!).
when it comes to the environment, economists too often meet Oscar wilde's description of a cynic:
Bereft of good role models and the ecological interactions they would have had naturally, organisms cloned back from the dead will be only a shadow of their ancestors.
It goes without saying that Mulligan's idea also ignores the actual services that various ecosystems render to us humans refreshing the air, cleaning water, reducing pests, and so on.
and freeze'em approach--was primarily a way to preserve the genome heritage of vanishing ecosystems, not the biodiversity itself.
and the march of planetary climate change. Maybe the way to think about Mulligan's idea is like satirist Jonathan swift's A Modest Proposal from 1729, in
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011