Your Car Is Killing You
And I don’t just mean from the global warming emissions. Car crashes account for millions of people killed and injured every year. More than most wars, more than terrorist attacks, more than many well known medical illnesses, so why don’t we have a war on cars?
What Is Wrong With Texas? Or Why Science Is Important For Your Future
Seems the many efforts by school boards in Texas to get creationism taught in schools is paying off…
(via)
Every single thing about this world is moving towards a society in which, to be successful, you need to well versed in science. Doctors, computer techs, wind turbine designers, solar panel installers, smart grid designers, farmers, road planners, architects, you name it the jobs of the future demand a fundamental understanding of science. Teaching your children to believe in drivel is verging on child abuse, as it dooms the poor kid to a future of less chances and harder struggles. If told “taking this pill will make it harder for your child to find a job in the future” no parents would give them that pill, but they think nothing of filling their child’s head full of outright lies, and flim flam.
When 30% (!!) of the people in Texas think dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time and over half reject Evolution through natural selection (one of, if not the most well documented bits of science we have)…we have problems. Do you want these people operating on you, do you want them working on your car, do you want them building your house.
Maybe they think prayer will cure your appendicitis, or maybe they think Jesus will hold your home up in a strong wind, or maybe the holy ghost will fix your muffler. You might think I am being silly, but really when you start rejecting one aspect of science because it disagrees with your holy book, what is to stop you from doing it with other things?
I recently read about religious extremists in some middle eastern countries prohibiting women from buying cucumbers, because they were “too evocative of the male form.” Basically saying that their holy book says A so you can’t do B. This is the direct result of a lack of scientific thinking. If you allow holy books to be your guide in everything you end up with things like Witch Hunts, the Taliban, and theocracies.
When I see people standing up and saying “the Bible says you can’t do xyz” I worry about where this bit of thinking leads. There is no “reason” we should listed to these people, they literally (in fact it is an important part of their world view) feel that they should base their life around the words in a book. Not because the words have been shown to be valid, but because they are in this particular book.
While there are lessons in holy books that are worth following, we know they are worth it because have critically evaluated them and found them to be worth something. We understand it is bad to kill people because it destroys the society that we all depend on for food and shelter, not because some burning bush told us to. Not only is it possible to have morals without a holy book, it is vital that we do.
Imagine if people only refrained from killing people because it was written in a certain book, if someone with enough “holy clout” came along and said “we are changing this bit about not killing people to exclude…women” (or Jews, or black people, or whites or left handed people…), then all the mindless automatons would rush out and start the slaughter. Without a built in critical thinking engine running on science whoever controls the holy book controls the world.
Science is unlike religion because it has no holy book. Science is about discovering the wonders and secrets of nature. It also doesn’t assume we are perfect. People make mistakes in science all the time. The nice thing is that using science and its principles it is possible to test if someone is right or wrong and if wrong correct that bit. This is an important point, things in science can be proven false. Holy teachings cant be tested, in fact if you try to you are often labeled a heretic and bad things happen to heretics. Science is not science if it can’t be tested.
Think for a moment about every moment of your day, from the time you get up, to the minute you fall asleep. I would challenge you to find a single solitary moment of your day that has not been, either improved dramatically, or effected deeply by science. I would be willing to wager large sums of money that you will not be able to find one single thing about your life that is not affected by the advances made in science over the last 200+ years.
Science has created the modern world we live in, for better or worse we are here now because of science. Do we really want to go back to the days when shamans, witch doctors, and holy men ruled the planet? When demons haunted the night, and life and death were based on the proclamations and divination? I think not.
MIT Scientists Figure Out New Way To Create Electricity
A team of scientists at MIT have discovered a previously unknown phenomenon that can cause powerful waves of energy to shoot through minuscule wires known as carbon nanotubes. The discovery could lead to a new way of producing electricity, the researchers say. This is pretty rare, human beings really enjoy using electricity and have been working diligently for a long time to figure out ways to produce it. The last time I read about a truly new way of producing electricity was when some Canadians figured out how to create electricity by shoving water through very tiny holes in glass.
The phenomenon, described as thermopower waves, “opens up a new area of energy research, which is rare,” says Michael Strano, MIT’s Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, who was the senior author of a paper describing the new findings that appeared in Nature Materials on March 7. The lead author was Wonjoon Choi, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering.
Like a collection of flotsam propelled along the surface by waves traveling across the ocean, it turns out that a thermal wave — a moving pulse of heat — traveling along a microscopic wire can drive electrons along, creating an electrical current.
The key ingredient in the recipe is carbon nanotubes — submicroscopic hollow tubes made of a chicken-wire-like lattice of carbon atoms. These tubes, just a few billionths of a meter (nanometers) in diameter, are part of a family of novel carbon molecules, including buckyballs and graphene sheets, that have been the subject of intensive worldwide research over the last two decades.
A previously unknown phenomenon
In the new experiments, each of these electrically and thermally conductive nanotubes was coated with a layer of a reactive fuel that can produce heat by decomposing. This fuel was then ignited at one end of the nanotube using either a laser beam or a high-voltage spark, and the result was a fast-moving thermal wave traveling along the length of the carbon nanotube like a flame speeding along the length of a lit fuse. Heat from the fuel goes into the nanotube, where it travels thousands of times faster than in the fuel itself. As the heat feeds back to the fuel coating, a thermal wave is created that is guided along the nanotube. With a temperature of 3,000 kelvins, this ring of heat speeds along the tube 10,000 times faster than the normal spread of this chemical reaction. The heating produced by that combustion, it turns out, also pushes electrons along the tube, creating a substantial electrical current.
Combustion waves — like this pulse of heat hurtling along a wire — “have been studied mathematically for more than 100 years,” Strano says, but he was the first to predict that such waves could be guided by a nanotube or nanowire and that this wave of heat could push an electrical current along that wire.
In the group’s initial experiments, Strano says, when they wired up the carbon nanotubes with their fuel coating in order to study the reaction, “lo and behold, we were really surprised by the size of the resulting voltage peak” that propagated along the wire.
After further development, the system now puts out energy, in proportion to its weight, about 100 times greater than an equivalent weight of lithium-ion battery.
The amount of power released, he says, is much greater than that predicted by thermoelectric calculations. While many semiconductor materials can produce an electric potential when heated, through something called the Seebeck effect, that effect is very weak in carbon. “There’s something else happening here,” he says. “We call it electron entrainment, since part of the current appears to scale with wave velocity.”
The thermal wave, he explains, appears to be entraining the electrical charge carriers (either electrons or electron holes) just as an ocean wave can pick up and carry a collection of debris along the surface. This important property is responsible for the high power produced by the system, Strano says.
Exploring possible applications
Because this is such a new discovery, he says, it’s hard to predict exactly what the practical applications will be. But he suggests that one possible application would be in enabling new kinds of ultra-small electronic devices — for example, devices the size of grains of rice, perhaps with sensors or treatment devices that could be injected into the body. Or it could lead to “environmental sensors that could be scattered like dust in the air,” he says.
In theory, he says, such devices could maintain their power indefinitely until used, unlike batteries whose charges leak away gradually as they sit unused. And while the individual nanowires are tiny, Strano suggests that they could be made in large arrays to supply significant amounts of power for larger devices.
The researchers also plan to pursue another aspect of their theory: that by using different kinds of reactive materials for the coating, the wave front could oscillate, thus producing an alternating current. That would open up a variety of possibilities, Strano says, because alternating current is the basis for radio waves such as cell phone transmissions, but present energy-storage systems all produce direct current. “Our theory predicted these oscillations before we began to observe them in our data,” he says.
Also, the present versions of the system have low efficiency, because a great deal of power is being given off as heat and light. The team plans to work on improving that
Might I Suggest You Compost?
The most amazing fact from this is that we could feel the world three times over by just the food that the USA and the EU waste…
The Methane Bomb Is About To Explode
This could actually be pretty bad…A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov.
The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is starting to leak large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.
“The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans,” said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF’s International Arctic Research Center. “Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.”
Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material (which contains carbon) stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under anaerobic conditions, gradually releases methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. It is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova’s research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source, releasing 7 teragrams of methane yearly, which is as much as is emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons.
“Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already,” she said. “If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger.”
Shakhova notes that the Earth’s geological record indicates that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods. Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, she said. Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a relative frontier in methane studies. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters (164 feet) or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth’s history. During the Earth’s coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the Earth warms and sea level rises, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature.
“It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen,” Shakhova said. “Nobody considered this huge area.”
“This study is a testament to sustained, careful observations and to international cooperation in research,” said Henrietta Edmonds of the National Science Foundation, which partially funded the study. “The Arctic is a difficult place to get to and to work in, but it is important that we do so in order to understand its role in global climate and its response and contribution to ongoing environmental change. It is important to understand the size of the reservoir–the amount of trapped methane that potentially could be released–as well as the processes that have kept it “trapped” and those that control the release. Work like this helps us to understand and document these processes.”
Earlier studies in Siberia focused on methane escaping from thawing terrestrial permafrost. Semiletov’s work during the 1990s showed, among other things, that the amount of methane being emitted from terrestrial sources decreased at higher latitudes. But those studies stopped at the coast. Starting in the fall of 2003, Shakhova, Semiletov and the rest of their team took the studies offshore. From 2003 through 2008, they took annual research cruises throughout the shelf and sampled seawater at various depths and the air 10 meters above the ocean. In September 2006, they flew a helicopter over the same area, taking air samples at up to 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) in the atmosphere. In April 2007, they conducted a winter expedition on the sea ice.
They found that more than 80 percent of the deep water and more than 50 percent of surface water had methane levels more than eight times that of normal seawater. In some areas, the saturation levels reached more than 250 times that of background levels in the summer and 1,400 times higher in the winter. They found corresponding results in the air directly above the ocean surface. Methane levels were elevated overall and the seascape was dotted with more than 100 hotspots. This, combined with winter expedition results that found methane gas trapped under and in the sea ice, showed the team that the methane was not only being dissolved in the water, it was bubbling out into the atmosphere.
These findings were further confirmed when Shakhova and her colleagues sampled methane levels at higher elevations. Methane levels throughout the Arctic are usually 8 to 10 percent higher than the global baseline. When they flew over the shelf, they found methane at levels another 5 to 10 percent higher than the already elevated Arctic levels.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, in addition to holding large stores of frozen methane, is more of a concern because it is so shallow. In deep water, methane gas oxidizes into carbon dioxide before it reaches the surface. In the shallows of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, methane simply doesn’t have enough time to oxidize, which means more of it escapes into the atmosphere. That, combined with the sheer amount of methane in the region, could add a previously uncalculated variable to climate models.
“The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to 3 to 4 times,” Shakhova said. “The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict.”
Shakhova, Semiletov and collaborators from 12 institutions in five countries plan to continue their studies in the region, tracking the source of the methane emissions and drilling into the seafloor in an effort to estimate how much methane is stored there.
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