Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/26/hiriko-the-mit-backed-spanish-folding-ev-that-wants-to-make/
Hiriko: The MIT-backed, Spanish 'folding' EV that wants to make cities bigger originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/5879076/26-national-parks-that-are-no-longer-national-parks
The US National Park Service extends from the Badlands of North Dakota to Biscayne Bay, Florida. But did you know it used to cover more?
"Six percent of all the national parks that have ever been created have been dropped," Geographer Bob Janiskee told National Geographic. "During the sixties, seventies, and eighties, there was a period of tremendous growth, but it gets lost in the shuffle that parks also get abolished or decommissioned."
Some sites, like Mackinac National Park and the Lewis and Clark Cavern National Monument, were transferred from the national register to the care of their host states in cost-saving moves by the Feds. Others, like Mar-a-Lago National Historic Site or the National Visitor Center at Union Station in D.C. were either sold off to private interests or simply declared a wash.
Janiskee has assembled profiles on each of the 26 "gone and mostly forgotten" national parks at National Parks Traveler. [National Geographic]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5878644/experimental-magnetic-soap-might-clean-up-massive-oil-spills
If you spill millions of gallons of oil all over, say, the Gulf of Mexico, no amount of OxiClean is going to help. You need something industrial strength, and researchers are looking at magnetic soap as a potential solution.
Soaps, also known as surfactants, can be problematic when used on a large scale because their chemical properties inherently cause them to interact with lipids and other molecules they encounter. This allows them to alter (aka clean) the intended substance, but can have a detrimental impact on other components of an environment.
In an attempt to create more targeted soap, scientists at the University of Bristol are testing the magnetic properties of water when combined with iron rich salts. Using solutions similar to fabric softener and other cleaners, the team added iron to create soap with metallic properties.
Tests showed that the new metallic substance could move through oil and against gravity to reach a magnet held at the top of a test tube. The scientists even confirmed that, as a result of its magnetic qualities, the substance was forming clumps like a traditional soap.
Potential uses for metallic soaps are huge because their chemical properties can be manipulated with magnets. Traditional cleaners depend on factors like temperature and pH that are difficult to control in a life size setting. If they can be mass produced, this new generation of soaps will radically change the negative impact of industrial cleaners on the environment. [University of Bristol via PhysOrg]
Photo: mbtphotos/Shutterstock
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/5878366/who-needs-gas-when-you-can-run-your-car-on-seaweed
Some folks bang on about biofuels being the future of car fuels. In reality, though, they're expensive, and that's largely because they're a pain in the ass to make. The solution might be seaweed.
Think about it, and being able to use seaweed to make biofuel would be great: it grows underwater so wouldn't get in the way of growing crops; it grows like stink without any fertilizer or irrigation; and — here comes some science — its structure, or more accurately a lack of lignin-a complex sugars, should make the process of breaking it down fairly rapid.
Only, the sugars in seaweed are mighty tricky to convert into ethanol. "The form of the sugar inside the seaweed is very exotic," Yasuo Yoshikuni from Bio Architecture Lab told Scientific American. "There is no industrial microbe to break down alginate and convert it into fuels and chemical compounds."
But now, workling with the University of Washington in Seattle, Bio Architecture Lab has developed a microbe capable of digesting seaweed and converting into ethanol, reports Scientific American. Based on the far-from-friendly bacterium Escherichia coli, it can turn the sugars in edible seaweeds into fuel. The reaction evens happens at a relatively low 25 Celsius, meaning it doesn't need much energy input to work.
So, what about yields? Well, an analysis from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (pdf) seems to suggests that the US could produce 1 per cent of the gas it currently uses by growing seaweed in slightly less than 1 percent of its territorial waters. So, it's not going to supply all our fuel, but it might lend a helping hand. [Scientific American; Image: Foilman]
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Source: http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-technology-seaweed-renewable-fuels-chemicals.html
A team of scientists from Bio Architecture Lab (BAL), has developed breakthrough technology that expands the feedstocks for advanced biofuels and renewable chemicals production to include seaweed (macroalgae). The team engineered a microbe to extract the all the major sugars in seaweed and convert them into renewable fuels and chemicals, thus making seaweed a cost-effective, renewable source of biomass.---
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Figure 1. Wind energy (dark green) is barely visible in a graph of US energy consumption by source. Based on EIA data.
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5876091/want-to-see-every-tree-in-america
We may sing about purple mountains and amber grains, but one of America's most vital resources is its vast amount of carbon-catching, oxygen-spewing trees. Now, after six years of effort, NASA knows how many we've got.
Josef Kellndorfer and Wayne Walker of Woods Hole Research Center worked in conjunction with the National Geological Survey and US Forest Service to catalog a mix of data gleaned from space-based radar, satellite sensors, computer models, and old-fashioned tree counting. The map above shows the total amount of woody biomass in the USA. It's displayed at a 30 meter resolution, where every four pixels constitutes an acre and every ten represents a hectare. [NASA Earth Observatory via Business Insider via Geekosystem]
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