Making electricity from viruses

Sheets of Virus Generate Electricity when Squished
[Via Ars Technica]

Squishing a stack of virus sheets generates enough electricity to power a small liquid crystal display. With increased power output, these virus films might one day use the beating of your heart to power a pacemaker, the researchers behind them say.

Piezoelectric materials build up charge when pushed or squeezed. These materials may be familiar to you: they generate the spark in a gas lighter, and motors powered by such materials vibrate some cell phones. Piezoelectric materials made of metals or polymers require large inputs of energy to build up a charge. Bone, DNA, and protein fibers are weakly piezoelectric, but it’s hard to efficiently organize these materials on a large scale to yield electricity.

To handle this organizational issue, Seung-Wuk Lee, of the University of California in Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and his colleagues looked for a biomaterial that had intrinsic order and was easy to make. They settled on the M13 bacteriophage, a rod-shaped virus that only infects bacteria. One bacterium can produce one million copies of the virus within four hours, so starting material isn’t a problem. And the virus neatly arranges itself in stacked rows when spread on a surface.

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Pretty cool use. These viruses can only affect certain types of bacteria. Nothing to be afraid of.

I wonder if they ever will be made into something useful?

Melting from the bottom up

Warm Ocean Waters to Blame for Antarctic Ice Melt
[Via Discovery News - Top Stories]

When it comes to melting ice shelves in Antarctica, the danger comes from below, new research suggests.

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Using a satellite, the researchers have found an explanation for why some Antarctic glaciers are moving faster – the ice shelfs that have been holding them back are getting much thinner. This is due to warmer waters melting the ice shelfs from below.

Warmer water is reducing the thickness of the ice shelfs by meters every year. With less mass to hold back the glaciers, they speed up, All of this puts more freshwater into the ocean, resulting if rise sea levels.

What is scary is that the satellite that was used to produce this data was shut down in 2010. A replacement will not be up until at least 2016, assuming NASA has the money. We will be using aircraft until then. That sort of gap in data gathering is not good.

Capturing asteroids to change the world

Asteroid takeout—a one-billionaire mission to bring a 500-ton asteroid to Earth by 2025
[Via Ars Technica]

Visiting (and eventually mining) asteroids is viewed by space development advocates as an imperative stepping stone to making our way out into the solar system. One group of President Obama’s advisors, the Augustine Commission, counseled that a manned asteroid mission might bring the highest payoff per dollar spent in terms of science and essential skills for space exploration. A study was also commissioned to check the feasibility of bringing a small asteroid—on the order of 10,000kg—back to the International Space Station. It reported no showstoppers.

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The title is misleading in one fact – the asteroid will not be brought to earth orbit. It will be brought to lunar orbit where it can be mined.

The report is quite fun to read. Using a single Atlas 5 level launch vehicle or a couple of Delta IVs, the entire launch system could be put into Earth orbit. It would use a solar-electric propulsion system to move out past the moon’s orbit to the asteroid, examine and capture it, and then move the whole package into lunar orbit.

It would take about 10 years to complete the whole trip. At a cost of $2.6 billion.

The asteroid – which is mostly iron, nickel, water and a few other precious metals – can then be mined for material. Material that can be used to create more asteroid catchers.

To lift 500 tons of material into the same orbit would cost about $20 billion. This would produce the same material for $2.6 billion. About an 8-fold reduction in trying to move things to the moon from Earth.

Further work could result in a 20-fold reduction.

And that’s not all.

Because once mining is set up around the moon, all sorts of possibilities come into existence. It becomes cheaper to produce material for space from here rather than the Earth.

NASA is already looking at putting a manned outpost on the far side of the moon. The moon has some worthwhile things to mine, such as nuclear fuels like Helium-3, as well as rare earth metals . What it does not have is a lot of iron and nickel for building things.

Combine both – mining on the moon for fuel and high tech materials, and asteroid mining for building materials/water – and we might have almost everything to expand to Mars and outward.

Using a nuclear reactor, ion engines could get us from the moon to Mars in perhaps 39 days, instead of the year or so by normal means from Earth. In fact, these engines could get us beyond Mars, perhaps taking only 3 years to get to Jupiter.

And since the nuclear power is produced from the moon, there is little worry of an accident releasing radioactivity into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Having a manned mining presence near the moon would serve as a tremendously cheap way to get to Mars, instead of trying to do it all from Earth. We have the technology today to do this.

The cost to get started is minimal. Do we have the will?

We knew a lot back in 1982

A blast from the past (if we knew now what we knew then)
[Via Hot Topic]

Peter Sinclair’s recent Climate Denial Crock of the Week is fascinating viewing. He has unearthed a video of a talk given by climate scientist Mike McCracken thirty years ago and asks him in a recent interview what he would say differently today. Very little has changed.

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Here is the video:

Thirty years of continuing research – a substantial amount by those seeking to disprove the ideas – have done little to dent the words McCracken spoke. In fact, increasing examination of Nature by a wider variety of procedures has enhanced not degraded these ideas.

The world is warming. The data produced over the last generation demonstrates that. To refuse to acknowledge that is the first hallmark of a denialist.

Because if all that data  we had before 1980 plus all the rest since can not convince someone that the world is warming, then their beliefs overwhelm their rationality.

Ongoing gas leak in North Sea

Elgin leak poses massive challenge
[Via BBC News]

An uncontrolled release of fossil fuel out in the ocean. An oil giant’s share price tumbling. A frantic search for techniques to shut off the leak. Sound familiar?

A visit to Aberdeen on Thursday prompted the question of parallels between Total’s struggle at its Elgin rig and BP’s battle with a blowout at its Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Let’s start with the leak itself. Total says it has identified the source: that gas from a deep reservoir is somehow flowing into a part of the underground well system.

The pipework is allowing the gas to reach the surface. And it is then venting into the air at deck-level on the rig.

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The gas has been leaking out of control for the last week or so. At a rate of about 12 million cubic feet a day.

And, like in the Gulf, there are no good options.

There is a gas flare burning 100 meters up and a gas cloud spreading out. Luckily the gas cloud has not reached the flare but no one wants to get close enough to try anything right now.

And it looks like the cause is similar to the BP oil spill – fossil fuel leaking out of the hole. They tried to kill the pressure with heavy mud but that did not work and the workers were evacuated.

In fact, the only way to be sure to stop it is also the same – drill a relief well. But that could leave the gas leaking for 3 months or more.

Gulf oil spill still affecting coral populations

Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill’s Effects on Deep-Water Corals
[Via NSF News]

Scientists are reporting new evidence that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has affected marine life in the Gulf of Mexico, this time species that live in dark ocean depths–deepwater corals.

The research used a range of underwater vehicles, including the submarine Alvin, to investigate the corals. The findings are published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The scientists used a method known as comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography to determine the source of the petroleum hydrocarbons found.

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Fingerprinting the hydrocarbons helps pinpoint where the oil came from – the Deepwater Horizon spill. And these corals at 4300 feet are suffering tremendously.

Now they can see how well the populations rebound.

You should listen to geologists when they say we have a problem

A CO2 Warning Etched in Stone and Sediment
[Via Dot Earth]

A comprehensive new review of research on episodes of carbon-driven disruption of ocean and climate conditions over the last 300 million years shows the power of a big pulse of carbon dioxide to profoundly affect the environment.

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Rocks, like nature, do not lie. Here we have someone who is a geologist providing the results seen in the rocks when carbon dioxide levels have risen.

He states we see the same sort of mudstone every time as the oceans take hundred of thousands of years to remove the carbon from the atmosphere. And every time this happens, there are also mass extinctions.

The Earth has already done the experiment. We do not need models to tell us the general outlines of what happens when carbon dioxide is dumped into the atmosphere.

Most life on Earth dies.

Unless the increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere stops, the same thing will happen. All our models tell us is whether it will be 50, 100 or 500 years.

It does not matter whether our death comes from higher temperatures or ocean acidification, it will come.

It will happen.

We have the tools and the technology to stop that from happening, all while keeping civilization and economies healthy.

Will we die because we are afraid? Will the biosphere die because some people may lose money?

I don’t plan on letting that happen.

Nathan Myhrvold demonstrates the T. Boone is off his rocker

Bombshell: ‘Substantial’ Drop in Projected Warming Requires ‘Rapid and Massive Deployment’ of Zero-Carbon Power Not Gas
[Via Climate Progress]

Another major study finds confirms natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere

A must-read new study by climatologist Ken Caldeira and tech guru Nathan Myhrvold (!) makes clear the world’s only plausible hope to avert catastrophic temperature rise this century is aggressive deployment of zero-carbon technologies and conservation.

The Institute of Physics news release explains:

… technologies that offer only modest reductions in greenhouse gases, such as the use of natural gas and perhaps carbon capture and storage, cannot substantially reduce climate risk in the next 100 years.

Delaying the rollout of the technologies is not an option however; the risks of environmental harm will be much greater in the second half of the century and beyond if we continue to rely on coal-based technologies.

Those are the bombshell conclusions from “Greenhouse gases, climate change and the transition from coal to low-carbon electricity,” in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters.

Many decades may pass before a transition from coal-based electricity to alternative generation technologies yields substantial temperature benefits. Panels above show the temperature increases predicted to occur during a 40-yr transition of 1 TWe of generating capacity. Warming resulting from continued coal use with no alternative technology sets an upper bound (solid black lines), and the temperature increase predicted to occur even if coal were replaced by idealized conservation with zero CO2 emissions (dashed lines) represents a lower bound. The colored bands represent the range of warming outcomes spanned by high and low life-cycle estimates for the energy technologies illustrated: (A) natural gas, (B) coal with carbon capture and storage, (C) hydroelectric, (D) solar thermal, (E) nuclear, (F) solar photovoltaic and (G) wind.

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Natural gas is the least helpful transitional energy approach, in contrast to what T. Boone Pickens recommends. And he never looked at the pollution effects of fracking here.

The best approaches use no-carbon for their production. Solar and wind make great approaches. The worry with nuclear is not only the fact that we have to deal with waste but also because the amount of nuclear fule to use in limited and may only last a couple of decades before we run out. Even if we could build safe nuclear power plants fast enough, we would be in an energy crunch pretty soon.

Solar and wind seem the place to go. Both have the problem with their intermittent nature. But space-based solar power could mitigate this and also help leverage us into space, something that could open up an age of abundance here.

Look at that – 20 years after we start and we could be down to a zero-carbon society. We just need the will. And we will create a world that is better off in almost every way than today.

Not much hope for Southern drought in latest forecast

Image of the Day: U.S. in for a Dry Spring Season
[Via Climate Central - News, Blogs & Features]

 

 

 

The NOAA Climate Prediction Center released its drought outlook for February — April 30 and the outlook is not good for much of the southern and western U.S. Shown in this color-coded map, much of the bottom half of the U.S. will experience persistent or intensifying drought conditions. The lower than normal snow pack throughout the Dakotas and Minnesota will also create drought conditions in these areas — a welcomed reprieve from last year’s record Missouri and Mississippi River floods, but bad news for farmers in the Plains. Only small parts of Oregon and Washington are expected to improve from their current drought conditions. There is still no relief in sight for Texas, which has been plagued by its worst drought in history for more than a year now.

Credit: NOAA

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We are transitioning  away from a La Niña and potentially towards an El Niño. This may help eventually but not in the near term. The South and Southwest will still see little relief, if the forecast holds.

Creation of clouds by humans seen from space

Image of the Day: Like Ghostly Vapors Across the Pacific
[Via Climate Central - News, Blogs & Features]

 

 

As cargo ships steam across the ocean, the tiny aerosol particles in their exhaust act as seeds around which moisture in the atmosphere can condense. Occasionally this results in ship tracks becoming visible in cloud imagery, some of which are 1,000 miles long.

Credit: NOAA

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Nice demonstration that human endeavors create natural products that are visible from space. Anyone watching the Earth would easily know it is inhabited because of these clouds.

Best TED talk so far in 2012

We have heard from Paul Gilding that fear has to be our motivator. But that has been used for 30 years with little success.

And we have heard from T. Boone Pickens that fracking is the best way forward, the environmental and climate effects be damned.

Both are simply rehashes of approaches already used and found to have only transitory usefulness. People stop being afraid and natural gas has to be a transition to something specific, not to some far away endpoint.

Peter Diamandid presents the bet response – let’s leverage the huge innovation already occurring to find solutions. People we least expect will be the most important. 3 Billion new minds will be connected to the rest of us in 8 years, all ready adding to the reservoir of talent we already have.

It is incorrect to see that we are living totally in a world of falling resources. We are on the cusp of being more sustainable than ever.

Population comes under control when you educate people, particularly women.

We worry about energy but space-based solar power would provide what we need. But it requires a lot of raw materials – natural resources we are running out of.

Some of these materials can be found on the moon. Iron, aluminum and titanium could be extracted and used. And the rare earth elements we require in most of our technologies will also be found there.

Near-earth asteroids can potential be a problem if they hit us. So why not mine them? A single asteroid can have more iron,  platinum, gold and silver than exist on the Earth today.

These technologies will also provide us with more water than we need. The driving force into space will necessitate an expansion of our population into new frontiers, removing much of the pressures on the Earth today.

Titan could be a source of the organic molecules we rely on for the generation of plastics, fertilizer, etc.

We have an abundance of resources. We just need to make some changes in ourselves to reach an abundant and sustainable future.

It will be amazing how fast we achieve this.

“The level of deception by the WSJ authors and others like them is absolutely astonishing to me.”

Bickmore on the WSJ response
[Via RealClimate]

Guest commentary from Barry Bickmore (repost)

The Wall Street Journal posted yet another op-ed by 16 scientists and engineers, which even include a few climate scientists(!!!). Here is the editor’s note to explain the context.

Editor’s Note: The authors of the following letter, listed below, are also the signatories of“No Need to Panic About Global Warming,” an op-ed that appeared in the Journal on January 27. This letter responds to criticisms of the op-ed made by Kevin Trenberth and 37 others in a letter published Feb. 1, and by Robert Byer of the American Physical Society in a letter published Feb. 6.

A relative sent me the article, asking for my thoughts on it. Here’s what I said in response.

Hi [Name Removed],

I don’t have time to do a full reply, but I’ll take apart a few of their main points.

1. The WSJ authors’ main point is that if the data doesn’t conform to predictions, the theory is “falsified”. They claim to show that global mean temperature data hasn’t conformed to climate model predictions, and so the models are falsified.
2. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But let’s look at the graph. They have a temperature plot, which wiggles all over the place, and then they have 4 straight lines that are supposed to represent the model predictions. The line for the IPCC First Assessment Report is clearly way off, but back in 1990 the climate models didn’t include important things like ocean circulation, so that’s hardly surprising. The lines for the next 3 IPCC reports are very similar to one another, though. What the authors don’t tell you is that the lines they plot are really just the average long-term slopes of a bunch of different models. The individual models actually predict that the temperature will go up and down for a few years at a time, but the long-term slope (30 years or more) will be about what those straight lines say. Given that these lines are supposed to be average, long-term slopes, take a look at the temperature data and try to estimate whether the overall slope of the data is similar to the slopes of those three lines (from the 1995, 2001, and 2007 IPCC reports). If you were to calculate the slope of the data WITH error bars, the model predictions would very likely be in that range.

 


Comparison of the spread of actual IPCC projections (2007) with observations of annual mean temperatures

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Cherrypicking data. Misusing graphs. Lack of proper error bars. Misunderstanding of statistics. Misleading rhetoric.

Are these the tools of legitimate scientists working to uncover the secrets of the world around us? Or are they closer to unethical lawyerly tricks to convince people?

Again and again, denialists use the same things when they publish. They chose the set of data that best fits their narrative – even though there are 3 major sets to choose from, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.  They ignore error bars or statistics and use arbitrary start dates – trying to make the published data much more definite than real scientists feel comfortable with.

They make rhetorical appeals to things that have no scientific basis – there is a conspiracy. Of course, they themselves participate in no conspiracy. They are only publishing in the WSJ out of their own personal ethics. I wonder who is funding most of them?

The fact that the publishing requirements for the WSJ and a respectable journal are light years apart never enters into their pleas. The fact is that their arguments do not hold up under scientific review so publishing in the WSJ is all they have.

They do not care about affecting scientific change at all. They care about social change. They deny the science because its consequences interferes too much with their social views.

They just cover up their denialism in scientific terms. But the science they espouse just does not stand up to any real scientific scrutiny.

That is why deception is required and not too surprisingly the Wall Street Journal agrees.

I will add Bickmore’s blog to my newsfeed,thogh. Enjoyable read.

Real scientists giving background on real science

by cliff1066™

NOAA Video Town Hall Series on the Climate Change Challenge
[Via Age of Engagement | Big Think]

This week, NOAA’s Climate Service and Climate Watch magazine launched a video short course and lecture series featuring a diversity of world class experts explaining the major scientific, social, and ethical challenges related to climate change. I was honored to be able to contribute to the series with a lecture focused on new directions for climate change communication and public engagement.

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The videos present a great Climate Change 101. It may take some time but the material I have seen is great.

The first one on the history of the science is very helpful. It provides a nice view of the starts and stops of climate science as it tried to create a modern view of our world. He really brings out the personalities involved in creating our current understanding of the science behind climate change – an understanding that goes back to 1938.

And the last one on communication is also useful.

Lying with data

Fun With Charts, Fox News Edition
[Via Daring Fireball]

Almost comically shameless.

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Here is the graph used on FOX News.

See the source – AAA Fuel Gauge report. Here is the graph from the AAA:

Very different looking curves. Cherrypicking data points is one of the ways people lie with data. FOX could easily have made a similar point by using all the data.

Wonder why they did not? Probably because it is always so much easier to make a rhetorical point if one picks only a portion of the data. Using all of them just makes things too complex, I guess.

But by connecting the points, they imply that intermediate positions fall along the curve, which they do not.

A bar chart would have been slightly more honest. Like this:

Then someone with the sound off would not get a different impression of the data. But then notice the Y-axis. It does not start at 0, in order to highlight the ‘huge’ change. Here is the graph starting at 0 so you can see the relative changes:

A much better representation of the data as it properly provides the context for the changes.

It just does not make the emotional rhetorical point FOX wanted to make. It was easier for them to mislead their viewers.

And for even more, let’s look at the long-term historical prices:

Wow, by FOX’s logic Bush was responsible for the largest gas prices in our history. And, if you want to give Obama the blame, then you must also give him credit for lowering the gas prices in 2011.

Except, as I discuss below, I do not think the President or his policies can do anything put a short-term fix on a long-term problem.

Let’s look even further back:

And here is one going back to the 20s (the slight differences in the absolute prices seen come from the different years chosen to adjust inflation to)

From the whole set of data, you can see that there has been a decrease in average price from 1920 until about 2000 (the Iraq I war being a huge blip). Yet, since about 2000, there has been a significant change , with a distinct upward trend.

Guess what? This fits timewise with the data I showed yesterday – starting about 2000, the price of oil shifted to a different state. Since then the price of oil no longer correlates well to production. The price of oil is no longer dependent on oil production. Its price varies independent of oil production rates.

I suspect that – as we can no longer increase oil production to meet demand – that speculation on the spot markets and increasing demand have a  much greater effect on gas prices than anything a President can do. While doing something legislatively might drop the price for a bit , it does nothing to change the underlying trend which will eventually catch up.

Putting a bandaid on the problem – blame Obama – will not change things. It will only result in gangrene later on.

We need to be brave and amputate our dependence on oil. Until we do, the underlying problem will not be fixed.

But it was easier for FOX just to mislead with a graph and blame Obama. Political expediency must be more important than actually informing.

Gasoline price increases due to production defects, not legislation

I wrote about this last month but it bears repeating – we have hit a production ceiling with an inability to increase global oil production to anywhere near the amounts needed to meet demand.

The pricing now is inelastic, meaning that prices are volatile (due to speculators) and increasing due to demand.

We found all the oil that can produce $1 a gallon gas. Also the $2 and $3. The $4 is the best we can do. Soon it’ll be just the $5.

Here is a figure from the Nature letter talking about this that displays this ceiling and the price volatility.

You can see the huge volatility in prices as we hit the production ceiling. But the very interesting aspect is the ‘phase change’ that occurred as we hit this ceiling.

Normally one might think that increasing price would drive increasing production –  oil that was not worth producing at $20 a barrel might at $40. Thus an increase in production levels.

Before 2004, the price and production levels stayed along a narrow range –  increasing prices had a nice linear relationship with increasing production.

Now look what happened after 2004 – increasing prices have little effect on oil production. The price can be $40 or it can be $120. There no longer seems to be any relationship or, rather the line is now straight up and down.

Oil prices do not appear to be connected any longer with oil production. They are connected much more to speculation, the same sort of speculation that destroyed our financial markets will find another way to destroy our economies.

What Obama does or what the GOP does will have no effect. Unless we can increase global oil  production substantially, we will  be stuck here. No political policy will change this.

The world needs an extra 22 million barrels a day of oil to keep meeting demand – rough increasing production by a third.

Oil from tar sands in Canada and Argentina would only add at most 6 billion barrels a day by 2035. No one has any idea where the rest of the oil can come from because proven reserves do not support that level of added production. New fields may magically appear but that is not likely and any oil will not arrive in any reasonable timeframe.

There will not be a quick fix. Gas prices will be very volatile due to external difficulties. Anyone promising substantially lower gas prices by more drilling in the US is simply wrong.

In the last two years  something not seen in the previous 30 was observed – substantial increases in the production of oil in the US. Yep, Obama has not been a hinderance to oil production in the US and has actually presided over the first increase in US oil production since Reagan, reversing a 25 year decline.

But, this added production is only 600,000 barrels more a day. Far below the levels needed.

We will not produce our way out of this. Different legislation will not do anything to stop this.  Gasoline prices will continue to be high and volatile due to the inability to affect global oil production.

And we will continue to deal with this until either the production ceiling is lifted or we find new energy sources.