Wind could power the entire world
Wind power may be the key to a clean energy revolution: a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science finds that wind power could provide for the entire world’s current and future energy needs.
To estimate the earth’s capacity for wind power, the researchers first sectioned the globe into areas of approximately 3,300 square kilometers (2,050 square miles) and surveyed local wind speeds every six hours. They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding “areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban,” according to the paper. They also included the possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines, but restricted them to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters.
Full Story: Mongabay.com
Really? The White Roof Solution.
We’ve come to expect that the “solutions” to Climate Change will be high tech–floating windmills, underwater generators, and nano solar in the Jules Verne/James Bond tradition–or at least high concept (carbon credit trading). But this week Energy Secretary and Nobel Prize winner Steve Chu is in Europe extolling the benefits of … white roofs. The concept is simple but the numbers he cites are massive: Making roofs and pavement more reflective could offset 44 billion tons of CO2, or the equivalent of taking all of the world’s cars off the road for 11 years. (While these numbers appear huge, there’s no mention of the time frame, so they’re not comparable to other numbers.)
Even so, these numbers are an interesting reflection of how much we’ve re-engineered the planet and climate already, and how we might start to mitigate that. Chu seems to want us to understand this as a category-jumper, working on climate in a different way than changing energy sources or sequestering carbon, and so he describes increasing the albedo (reflectivity) of buildings and pavements as “geo-engineering.”
Full Story@ The Atlantic
Plastic and fuel that grows on trees
Biofuels continue to steal the spotlight when it comes to the search for a renewable, environmentally friendly replacement for crude oil. While that’s understandable when considering the transport industry, but crude oil is also used in the production of conventional plastics and chemical products such as fertilizers and solvents. Now chemists have learned how to convert plant biomass directly into a chemical building block that can not only be used to produce fuel, but also plastics, polyester and industrial chemicals cheaply and efficiently.
Earlier work by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) saw the development of a process to convert glucose and fructose derived from cellulose, into a primary building block for fuel and polyesters known as hydroxymethylfurfural, or HMF. Although it is a fairly simple process to convert HMF into plastics or biofuel, it is seldom used because HMF is costly to make. Other researchers had previously converted fructose into HMF, but the PNNL research group made a series of improvements that raised the HMF output, and also made the HMF easier to extract.
Using a chemical and solvent known as an ionic liquid, the PNNL team was able to convert the simple sugars into HMF. The chemical, a metal chloride known as chromium chloride, converted sugar into highly pure HMF, but the team still needed to break down cellulose into simple sugars – a step they wanted to skip.
Marc Weber Tobias wants to teach the world how to break into military facilities
Tobias is laughing. And laughing. The effect is disconcerting. It’s a bwa-ha-ha kind of evil mastermind laugh—appropriate if you’ve just sacked Constantinople, checkmated Deep Blue, or handed Superman a Dixie cup of kryptonite Kool-Aid, but downright scary in a midtown Manhattan restaurant during the early-bird special.
Our fellow diners begin to stare. Tobias doesn’t notice and wouldn’t care anyway. He’s as rumpled and wild as a nerdy grizzly bear. His place mat is covered in diagrams and sketched floor plans and scribbled arrows. His laugh fits him like a tinfoil hat. It goes on for a solid 20 seconds.
But Tobias isn’t crazy. Far from it. He’s a professional lock breaker, a man obsessively—perhaps compulsively—dedicated to cracking physical security systems. He doesn’t play games, he rarely sees movies, he doesn’t attend to plants or pets or, currently, a girlfriend. Tobias hacks locks. Then he teaches the public how to hack them, too.
