Energy / Environment Archive
A scientist at Ohio University has developed a catalyst capable of extracting hydrogen from urine. That's right. Urine. Now you can fill one tank while draining another.
Garardine Botte claims the device uses significantly less energy than is needed to extract hydrogen from water and says it could power hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in the near future. Her electrolyzer uses a nickel-based electrode to extract hydrogen from urea (NH2)2CO, the main component in urine. Hydrogen is less tightly bound to the nitrogen in urea than to the oxygen in water, so the electrolyzer needs just 0.37 volts across the cell to oxidize the urea, according to Botte. That's less than half the amount of energy in an AA battery and considerably less than the 1.23 volts needed to split water.
One of hydrogen's biggest stumbling blocks to use as an alternative fuel is the amount of energy needed to produce it. And then there's the matter of distributing it. Botte says her gadget eliminates such problems because it's small enough to integrate into an automobile. Urine is also readily available -- your body produces two to three liters of it each day, and it is the most abundant form of waste on the planet. We could treat waste water while fueling our cars.
This is unfortunate. Whales are singularly majestic creatures -- and I suspect that if we fully understood how intelligent they are, we'd be even more uncomfortable with this than is already the case.It might sound like something out of a bad sci-fi film: whales sent into suicidal dashes toward the ocean's surface to escape the madness-inducing echo chamber that we humans have made of their sound-sensitive habitat. But since the Canary Islands stranding in 2002, similar necropsy results have turned up with a number of beached whales, and the deleterious effects of sonar and other human-generated sounds on ocean ecosystems have been firmly established.
As described in a 2005 report published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, "Sounding the Depths II: The Rising Toll of Sonar, Shipping and Industrial Ocean Noise on Marine Life," oceans that as recently as 100 years ago had been one vast, ongoing whale and piscine chorus have now essentially become senses-wilting miasmas of human-made noise. At a 2004 International Whaling Commission symposium, more than 100 scientists signed a statement asserting that the association between sonar and whale deaths "is very convincing and appears overwhelming."
My name is Andrew Amey, I'm a graduate student at MIT doing research on the potential of real-time, or dynamic, ridesharing. We've called our project MIT's Real-Time Rides project. I saw your article in the June 2009 edition of the Atlantic titled "How to End Traffic in Los Angeles" and thought I would contact you. It may surprise you, but the idea of "dynamic carpooling" is alive and well and other notable authors have dreamt up similar ideas to your own...Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, published a very similar idea on his blog a while back (http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/06/how_i_solved_th.html).Over the past year, myself and a small group at MIT have gathered data on the range of firms offering new, technology driven services much like the one you described. This past April, we held a workshop at MIT to discuss various ideas and major hurdles to be overcome. We had over 40 participants from 5 countries join us for the event. I encourage you to take a look at our website (http://www.realtimerides.org/), we have a reasonably complete database of rideshare providers including some very innovative services, background on ridesharing/carpooling, a list of resources, and presentations and outcomes from the April workshop.
One of the most alarming aspects of climate change is the existence of positive feedback loops. For example, as polar ice melts, less sunlight is reflected back into space, thus heating up the ocean and causing more ice to melt. Rinse and repeat. Another one: warming causes the permafrost in the Siberian tundra to melt, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, thus warming the earth and causing yet more tundra to melt.He quotes this Washington Monthly piece:
The world's forests are an enormous carbon sink, meaning they absorb massive quantities of carbon dioxide, through the processes of photosynthesis and respiration. In normal years the Amazon alone absorbs three billion tons of carbon, more than twice the quantity human beings produce by burning fossil fuels. But during the 2005 drought, this process was reversed, and the Amazon gave off two billion tons of carbon instead, creating an additional five billion tons of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. That's more than the total annual emissions of Europe and Japan combined.The drought was not evenly spread across the vast expanses of the Amazon, but in the worst affected areas there was severe dieback. Some trees stopped growing, others lost their leaves, and many of the fastest-growing trees and creepers died altogether. Perhaps more surprising, comparing exact measurements of tree diameter, wood density, and biomass against measurements taken in earlier years, Phillips and his colleagues found that even in places that seemed to emerge relatively unscathed--where the forest looked no different to the naked eye--there had been a loss of biomass. Rainforests, it seems, are more sensitive to drought than was previously understood.
exquisitur
Nuclear waste conjures up images of ultra-toxic green sludge, one spill away from poisoning the planet. In fact, all energy production generates waste, including some very dangerous wastes: not only carbon dioxide, but sulphur dioxide and coal slag. The waste from fossil fuels typically evanesces invisibly into the atmosphere, but that disappearance from view does not render it harmless. If anything, the very invisibility of fossil waste enhances its harm, by deluding us into imagining that what has vanished from sight has vanished from existence.The Atlantic has published various stories on the harms of nuclear energy -- and why it is essential to humankind's progress.
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed,--chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones... Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time--and long before that--God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools,--only Uncle Sam can do that.The excerpt is from "The American Forests," an 1897 essay by crusading naturalist John Muir. Although he wrote long after westward expansion fell and burned much of the country's woodlands, his advocacy helped spur President Theodore Roosevelt to launch a major conservation program, creating the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 and preserving millions of acres of American wilderness.
An ode to trees bring to mind two things for me: the Ents that Tolkien renders so beautifully in The Lord or the Rings, and the closest I've found to an earthly equivalent, the giant Sequoia and redwood forests of California. It is impossible to walk among those forests without feeling awe at proximity to creatures so magnificent in scale and ancient in age.
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