WASHINGTON (AP) — An international team of scientists says it's figured out how to
slow global warming in the short run and prevent millions of deaths from dirty air:
Stop focusing so much on carbon dioxide.
They say the key is to reduce emissions of two powerful and fast-acting causes of
global warming — methane and soot.
Carbon dioxide is the chief greenhouse gas and the one world leaders have spent the
most time talking about controlling. Scientists say carbon dioxide from fossil fuels
like coal and oil is a bigger overall cause of globalwarming, but reducing methane
and soot offers quicker fixes.
Project to Pour Water into Volcano to Make Power Geothermal energy developers plan to pump 24 million gallons of water into the side of a dormant volcano in Central Oregon this summer to demonstrate new technology they hope will give a boost to a green energy sector that has yet to live up to its promise. They hope the water comes back to the surface fast enough and hot enough to create cheap, clean electricity that isn't dependent on sunny skies or stiff breezes — without shaking the earth and rattling the nerves of nearby residents. Renewable energy has been held back by cheap natural gas, weak demand for power and waning political concern over global warming. Efforts to use the earth's heat to generate power, known as geothermal energy, have been further hampered by technical problems and worries that tapping it can cause earthquakes. Even so, the federal government, Google and other investors are interested enough to bet $43 million on the Oregon project. They are helping AltaRock Energy, Inc. of Seattle and Davenport Newberry Holdings LLC of Stamford, Conn., demonstrate whether the next level in geothermal power development can work on the flanks of Newberrry Volcano, located about 20 miles south of Bend, Ore.
At TEDxYYC Kirk Sorensen shows us the liquid fuel thorium reactor -- a way to produce energy that is safer, cleaner and more efficient than current nuclear power.
Time Masker Cloaks Entire Event It's one thing to make an object invisible, like Harry Potter's mythical cloak. But scientists have made an entire event impossible to see. They have invented a time masker. Think of it as an art heist that takes place before your eyes and surveillance cameras. You don't see the thief strolling into the museum, taking the painting down or walking away, but he did. It's not just that the thief is invisible — his whole activity is. What scientists at Cornell University did was on a much smaller scale, both in terms of events and time. It happened so quickly that it's not even a blink of an eye. Their time cloak lasts an incredibly tiny fraction of a fraction of a second. They hid an event for 40 trillionths of a second, according to a study appearing in the journal Nature. We see events happening as light from them reaches our eyes. Usually it's a continuous flow of light. In the new research, however, scientists were able to interrupt that flow for just an instant.
An outburst from the sun late Sunday night is bathing Earth in the most powerful solar-radiation storm in six years. The radiation storm is the first act of an event that will crescendo Tuesday, when the brunt of the outburst – called a coronal-mass ejection – arrives at Earth. It could trigger a disturbance of Earth's magnetic field, leading to voltage swings in long-distance power transmission lines as well as the appearance of the northern lights as far south as New York. The current radiation storm – rated an S3, or strong, on a scale of 1 to 5 – could damage satellite hardware and present an increased risk of radiation exposure to passengers flying at high altitudes across polar routes, say space-weather specialists. These risks, however, are expected to be manageable. The outburst, which occurred at 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time Sunday, marks the second major solar eruption in three days.
Meteorologists can see a busy hurricane season brewing months ahead, but until now
there has been no such crystal ball for tornadoes, which are much smaller and more
volatile. This information gap took on new urgency after tornadoes in 2011 killed
more than 550 people, more than in the previous 10 years combined, including a devastating
outbreak in April that racked up $5 billion in insured losses. Now, a new study of
short-term climate trends offers the first framework for predicting tornado activity
up to a month out with current technology, and possibly further out as climate models
improve, giving communities a chance to plan.
The study may also eventually open a window on the question of whether tornadoes
are growing more frequent due to long-term climate warming.
"Understanding how climate shapes tornado activity makes forecasts and projections
possible and allows us to look into the past and understand what happened," said
lead author Michael Tippett, a climate scientist at Columbia University's International
Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI).
Massive solar flare headed toward Earth, may spark celestial light show A long duration M-class flare began erupting on the sun at 8:42 AM ET on Thursday, January 19. The flare is shown in the above movie from the Solar Dynamics Observatory in a combination of light wavelengths. An earth-directed coronal mass ejection was associated with the solar flare. NASA's Space Weather Services estimates that it is traveling at over 630 miles per second and will reach Earth some time on Saturday, January 21, when strong geomagnetic storms are possible and viewers can be on the look out for increased aurora. The CME is expected to reach earth on Saturday morning. Early predictions suggested the possibility of strong geomagnetic disturbances, with intensified aurora (also known as Northern Lights) visible as far south as the central U.S. Link
FROM robotic slug-killers to dancing humanoids, there's
a lot of media buzz around robots. But the roboticists behind such ventures need
a serious reality check.
As a founder of iRobot Corporation, based in Bedford, Massachusetts, and CEO of robotics
start-up CyPhy Works, it's clear to me that merely engineering "cool" robots does
little to advance the field. If robotics is to succeed like computing, what matters
is making practical robots that do jobs well and affordably - factors that tend to
get lost as people fascinate over the latest autonomous party pieces.
The importance of focusing on practicality struck us during iRobot's formative years
in the 1990s, when we were engineering robots as toys, oil-well surveyors and commercial
cleaners for industry-leading firms. Why? Companies would only pay good money for
practical designs that performed reliably.
The Indo-Asian News Service
reported Saturday that a Russian scientist has published what he claims is evidence
of life on Venus, Earth’s nearest neighbor in the direction of the sun.
Leonid Ksanfomaliti, an astronomer based at the Space Research Institute of Russia’s
Academy of Sciences, analyzed photographs taken by a Russian landing probe during
a 1982 during a mission to explore the heavily acid-clouded planet.
Venus is roughly the same size as Earth, but it has a thick atmosphere dominated
by carbon dioxide. With an atmospheric pressure 92 times Earth’s, a waterless and
volcano-riddled surface and a surface temperature of 894 degrees, the planet has
never been considered a serious target of research into the possibility of extraterrestrial
life.
But in his article, published in the magazine Solar System Research, Ksanfomaliti
says the Russian photographs depict objects resembling a “disk,” a “black flap” and
a “scorpion.”
Scientists have developed a new way to create Terahertz waves (T-rays) that may one day lead to biomedical detective devices similar to the 'tricorder' scanner used in Star Trek Scientists have developed a new way to create electromagnetic Terahertz (THz) waves or T-rays -- the technology behind full-body security scanners. The researchers behind the study, published recently in the journal Nature Photonics, say their new stronger and more efficient continuous wave T-rays could be used to make better medical scanning gadgets and may one day lead to innovations similar to the 'tricorder' scanner used in Star Trek. Link
Mysterious 'Winged' Structure from Ancient Rome Discovered A recently discovered mysterious "winged" structure in England, which in the Roman period may have been used as a temple, presents a puzzle for archaeologists, who say the building has no known parallels. Built around 1,800 years ago, the structure was discovered in Norfolk, in eastern England, just to the south of the ancient town of Venta Icenorum. The structure has two wings radiating out from a rectangular room that in turn leads to a central room. "Generally speaking, [during] the Roman Empire people built within a fixed repertoire of architectural forms," said William Bowden, a professor at the University of Nottingham, who reported the find in the most recent edition of the Journal of Roman Archaeology. The investigation was carried out in conjunction with the Norfolk Archaeological and Historical Research Group. The winged shape of the building appears to be unique in the Roman Empire, with no other example known. "It's very unusual to find a building like this where you have no known parallels for it," Bowden told LiveScience. "What they were trying to achieve by using this design is really very difficult to say."