How Enormous Batteries Could Safeguard The Power Grid

Big battery: Wind turbines charge these large-scale batteries in Luverne, Minn., while the wind blows. If the breeze calms, the batteries keep power flowing into the utility grid. (Courtesy of XCel Energy)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Since sunlight and wind can be unreliable, renewable utilities install big backups.

One evening in late February 2008, the famously steady winds of west Texas began to wane until, at last, hundreds of giant wind turbines were becalmed – their enormous blades slowed or stilled.

In just three hours, grid operators at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas watched wind power output fall by 1,400 megawatts – power needed to supply roughly 600,000 homes. Following emergency procedures, a blackout was avoided by quickly cutting power to several industrial customers.

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Giant Laser Experiment Powers Up

From BBC:

The US has finished constructing a huge physics experiment aimed at recreating conditions at the heart of our Sun.

The US National Ignition Facility is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear fusion, a process that could offer abundant clean energy.

The lab will kick-start the reaction by focusing 192 giant laser beams on a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel.

To work, it must show that more energy can be extracted from the process than is required to initiate it.

Professor Mike Dunne, who leads a European venture that is also pursuing nuclear fusion with lasers, told BBC News that if NIF was successful, it would be a "seismic event".

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Volcanoes Spawn Mini-Cyclones, Then Lightning "Sheaths"

A waterspout forms offshore from an erupting Kilauea volcano vent in Kilauea, Hawaii. A March 2009 study revealed a newfound link between two of nature's most violent phenomena that could explain how volcanic ash clouds can generate lightning and tornado-like dust devils and waterspouts. Photograph by Steve and Donna O'Meara

From National Geographic:

A newfound link between two of nature's most violent phenomena could explain how volcanic ash clouds can generate bolts of lightning and tornado-like dust devils and waterspouts.

Scientists have long known that tornadoes are the products of colossal columns of spinning air—mesocyclones—inside large storm clouds.

A new study suggests mesocyclones can also form in the ash plumes of volcanic eruptions.

Under certain circumstances, these volcanic mesocyclones can aid in lightning production and create tornado-like structures that corkscrew toward the Earth, said study team member Pinaki Chakraborty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Cosmonaut Grumbles About Space Bureaucracy

Image top: The International Space Station, the largest scientific
cooperative program in history Credit: NASA

From Yahoo News/AP:

MOSCOW – Squabbles on Earth over how cosmonauts and astronauts divide up the space station's food, water, toilets and other facilities are hurting the crew's morale and complicating work in space, a veteran Russian cosmonaut said, according to an interview published Monday.

Gennady Padalka told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper as saying space officials from Russia, the United States and other countries require cosmonauts and astronauts to eat their own food and follow stringent rules on access to other facilities, like toilets.

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New Portable Energy Source Utilizes Microbes To Turn Electricity Directly To Methane

This photo shows Bruce E. Logan, Shaoan Cheng and Defeng Xing with a microbial cell that produces methane directly from electricity. (Credit: Bruce Logan's Lab, Penn State)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2009) — A tiny microbe can take electricity and directly convert carbon dioxide and water to methane, producing a portable energy source with a potentially neutral carbon footprint, according to a team of Penn State engineers.

"We were studying making hydrogen in microbial electrolysis cells and we kept getting all this methane," said Bruce E. Logan, Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering, Penn State. "We may now understand why."

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Mysterious East Coast Boom Was Falling Russian Rocket

A look at Russia's Soyuz rocket stages. Credit: SPACE.com Graphic.

From Live Science:

The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.

"I'm pretty convinced that what these folks saw was the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched the crew up to the space station," said Geoff Chester of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

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Nathan Wolfe: Did We Mention This Guy Was Brilliant?

From Popsci.com:

PopSci "Brilliant 10" alum takes the TED stage to talk about his groundbreaking work as a virus hunter; see the video!

When it comes to viruses, especially the serious kind that can make you bleed from your eye sockets and wipe out entire villages, most people naturally prefer to keep their distance. Not Nathan Wolfe. The 39-year-old epidemiologist has spent the past 10 years hunting them down in the jungles of Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. By collecting thousands of blood samples from wild animals and the people who live in close contact with them, Wolfe and his team have uncovered new viruses related to HIV and smallpox. He's even documented how these animal-borne killers leap to humans, with blood serving as a vector in transmitting viruses from slaughtered animals to hunters.

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A (Radioactive) Cut in the Earth That Will Not Stay Closed

DANGEROUS ELEMENT: The uranium for the original atomic bombs came from a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Shinkolobwe. ©ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/DAVID FREUND

From Scientific American:

Tom Zoellner's book Uranium explores how a historic mine in Africa poses an existential threat in this excerpt.

One of the most potentially dangerous places in the world is called Shinkolobwe, the name of a now-destroyed village in central Africa which took its name from a thorny fruit resembling an apple. After boiling, the outside of the fruit cools quickly but the inside is like a sponge. It retains hot water for a long time. Squeezing it results in a burn.

The word is also local slang for a man who is easygoing on the surface but becomes angry when provoked.

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The Tech Behind 3D's Big Revival

Left: James Cameron on the set of his 3D epic Avatar. Right: An NFL Films cameraman captures last season’s San Diego—Oakland game using a stereo­scopic camera rig built by 3ality. (Photograph by Associated Press)

From Popular Mechanics:

3D has been around for a century, but only now are we seeing 3D in Super Bowl ads and in big Hollywood 3D releases like Coraline and Monsters vs. Aliens. So what has convinced Hollywood that 3D is finally ready for its closeup? The short answer is that technology has finally caught up with the concept.

Hollywood is buzzing about 3D. Dreamworks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg has compared it to the introduction of color. Director James Cameron delayed the release of his stereoscopic epic Avatar in part to give theaters more time to convert to 3D capability. A dozen or more stereoscopic films will be released in 2009, and more than 30 movies are in production. But stereoscopic films are not a revolutionary concept; in fact, audiences have been paying for them since The Power of Love in 1922. The golden age of 3D was in the 1950s, with a brief resurgence in the 1980s. Each time experts heralded the format as the next big thing in filmmaking, and each time, the surge quietly subsided.

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Solar Activity And Climate Change: New Sun-Watching Satellite To Monitor Sunlight Fluctuations

During periods of peak activity (front three images) sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections are more common, and the sun emits slightly more energy than during periods of low activity (back images). The amount of energy that strikes Earth's atmosphere -- called total solar irradiance (TSI) -- fluctuates by about 0.1 percent over the course of the sun's 11-year cycle, even though the soft X-ray wavelengths shown in this image vary by much greater amounts. (Credit: Steele Hill, SOHO, NASA/ESA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 29, 2009) — During the Maunder Minimum, a period of diminished solar activity between 1645 and 1715, sunspots were rare on the face of the sun, sometimes disappearing entirely for months to years. At the same time, Earth experienced a bitter cold period known as the "Little Ice Age."

Were the events connected? Scientists cannot say for sure, but it's quite likely. Slowdowns in solar activity -- evidenced by reductions in sunspot numbers -- are known to coincide with decreases in the amount of energy discharged by the sun. During the Little Ice Age, though, few would have thought to track total solar irradiance (TSI), the amount of solar energy striking Earth's upper atmosphere. In fact, the scientific instrument needed to make such measurements -- a spaceborne radiometer -- was still three centuries into the future.

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Perfect Running Pace Revealed

The kinematics of walking (left) and running are quite different. © Nature

From Live Science:

Most regular runners can tell you when they reach that perfect equilibrium of speed and comfort. The legs are loose, the heart is pumping and it feels like you could run at this pace forever.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison now have an explanation for this state of running nirvana, and we can thank our ancestors and some evolutionary biology for it.

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Scientists Map The Brain, Gene By Gene

"The brain is details on top of details on top of details." — Michael Hawrylycz
Photo: David Clugston

From Wired Magazine:

The human brain is surprisingly bloody. I've worked in neuroscience labs, and I'm used to seeing brains that are stored in glass jars filled with formaldehyde, the preserved tissue a lifeless gray. But this brain—removed from a warm body just a few hours ago—looks bruised, its folds stained purple. Blood drips from the severed stem, forming puddles on the stainless steel table.

I'm in the dissection room of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, and the scientist next to me is in a hurry: His specimen—this fragile cortex—is falling apart. Dying, the gray matter turns acidic and begins to eat away at itself; nucleic acids unravel, cell membranes dissolve. He takes a thin, sterilized knife and slices into the tissue with disconcerting ease. I'm reminded of Jell-O and guillotines and the meat counter at the supermarket. He saws repeatedly until the brain is reduced to a series of thin slabs, which are then photographed and rushed to a freezer. All that remains is a pool of blood, like the scene of a crime.

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Leaving Computers On Overnight = $2.8 Billion A Year

Vice President Gore's Office

From Yahoo Tech:

Admittedly I don't think much about it at all. I leave my laptop running overnight because I know it'll take five minutes or more to get things going in the morning -- not just booting up, but launching the various apps I start the day with, downloading my overnight email, filtering out the spam, and otherwise "getting settled."

But all the power wasted while computers are sitting idle overnight adds up, and one study has finally tried to measure it. The tally: An estimated $2.8 billion wasted on excess energy costs each year in the U.S. alone.

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My Comment: I think it is more than that. I have 3 computers in my office. I have always left them on 24 hours. About 6 months ago I started to shut them down when I was no longer working with them. My electricity bill has dropped appreciably since then.

Another Volcano In Alaska Erupts?

From Watts Up With That?:

(h/t to Ron de Haan) This time it appears to be Mount Gareloi, something big is going on there seismically. The webicorder is going nuts.

Update: I double checked the webicorder to see if it was still operating, and it appears to be. Still no word on the AVO website about the status of Gareloi.

UPDATE2: About an hour after I posted this, seeing nothing from AVO, I decided to call them. They answered right away and were quite surprised that anyone was watching. The scientist there said “we don’t see anything unusual on our trace” but when I pointed out the webicorder trace below, she said “ah yes it’s a noisy signal, I was looking at our internal trace, not the public one”. She also confirmed my initial speculation listed in the CAVEAT below that it was a windstorm, as evidenced by the gradual onset and lack of transients.

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The (Real!) Science Behind Lie to Me

As the foremost deception expert in the country, Dr. Cal Lightman (Tim Roth) knows when someone is lying. He oversees The Lightman Group, a private agency hired to expose the truth behind the lies in the new series Lie to Me. (Photograph by Mike Yarish/FOX)

From Popular Mechanics:

In Lie to Me, Tim Roth plays Dr. Cal Lightman, a deception consultant and expert. But Lightman doesn't rely on some futuristic mind-reading tricks cooked up by TV writers. Instead, his character is based on clinical psychologist Paul Ekman, a leading expert on lie detection. PM's Digital Hollywood asked Ekman how well his life and research translate to the small screen, delving into the science behind Fox's latest drama.

If Fox's Fringe is full of junk science (including people who walk through walls and communicate with the dead), then Lie to Me, the network's newest law enforcement-themed drama, is just the opposite.

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Rise Of Sea Levels Is 'The Greatest Lie Ever Told'

From The Telegraph:

The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story, writes Christopher Booker.

If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

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20 Years Later: Exxon Valdez Spill Lingers

Exxon Valdez

From ScienCentral:

Just after midnight on this day in 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez crashed against a reef off the coast of Alaska. Within six or so hours of the incident, nearly 10.8 million gallons of crude oil had spilled into the surrounding waters of the Prince Island Sound. Within a few days, that oil had spread 90 miles from the accident site. And now, two decades later, the after effects of the Valdez spill linger.

Oil and Water

In 1989, America consumed over 252 billion gallons of oil. Compared to that number, the 10.8 million gallons that was dumped from the Valdez and into Prince Island Sound seems insignificant. In fact, the Exxon Valdez spill was by no means the largest spill in history. It wasn’t even the tenth largest.

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Airborne Dust Reduction Plays Larger Than Expected Role In Determining Atlantic Temperature

A dust storm off the coast of Morocco was imaged by NASA's MODIS Aqua meteorological satellite on March 12, 2009. A new study by UW-Madison researcher Amato Evan shows that variability of African dust storms and tropical volcanic eruptions can account for 70 percent of the warming North Atlantic Ocean temperatures observed during the past three decades. Since warmer water is a key ingredient in hurricane formation and intensity, dust and other airborne particles will play a critical role in developing a better understanding of these storms in a changing climate. (Credit: Photo: courtesy Amato Evan)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2009) — The recent warming trend in the Atlantic Ocean is largely due to reductions in airborne dust and volcanic emissions during the past 30 years, according to a new study.

Since 1980, the tropical North Atlantic has been warming by an average of a quarter-degree Celsius (a half-degree Fahrenheit) per decade. Though this number sounds small, it can translate to big impacts on hurricanes, which thrive on warmer water, says Amato Evan, a researcher with the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies and lead author of the new study. For example, the ocean temperature difference between 1994, a quiet hurricane year, and 2005's record-breaking year of storms, was just one degree Fahrenheit.

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The World's Biggest Laser Powers Up

Fusion central: 192 lasers will shoot through openings in this spherical chamber, focusing near the tip of the cone projecting from the right. A worker in a service module can be seen at the left. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Department of Energy

From Technology Review:

Now complete, the National Ignition Facility could soon create controlled fusion using lasers.

The most energetic laser system in the world, designed to produce nuclear fusion--the same reaction that powers the sun--is up and running. Within two to three years, scientists expect to be creating fusion reactions that release more energy than it takes to produce them. If they're successful, it will be the first time this has been done in a controlled way--in a lab rather than a nuclear bomb, that is--and could eventually lead to fusion power plants.

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How Cell Towers Work

From Gizmodo:

I recently visited a cell site shared by Clearwire and two other unnamed carriers—without frying my nuts. We've all driven past them so many times, but have you ever actually wondered how they work?

How They Work
Whether it's handling simple phone calls or 12Mbps WiMax data, cell sites are organized with more or less the same flow:

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