Bad News for Geothermal Energy: Two Major Projects Bite the Dust | 80beats

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hole-in-groundDreams that major geothermal energy plants could power our future took a major hit last week, as worries over earthquakes and technical failures killed two ambitious projects in consecutive days. The two projects both hoped to harvest the heat of deeply buried bedrock by drilling down, fracturing the rock, and then circulating water through the fissures to produce steam that could drive turbines.

First, on Thursday, the $60 million plan to tap geothermal energy beneath Basel, Switzerland, died for good after a Swiss government study said it would cause millions of dollars in damage through earthquakes each year. The project, led by Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, was suspended in late 2006 after it generated earthquakes that did no bodily harm but caused about $9 million in mostly minor damage to homes and other structures. Mr. Häring is to go to trial next week on criminal charges stemming from the project [The New York Times].

The Swiss project required drilling more than 16,000 feet into the ground, and would have provided electricity to 10,000 homes. But the government’s report stated that the region could see as many as 170 earthquakes during the project’s 30-year lifespan, including 30 during just the first phase of drilling, though most would be minor.

The United States’ geothermal hopes suffered, too, as the AltaRock project located north of San Francisco announced on Friday that it will shut down, despite extensive financial support. In addition to a $6 million grant from the Energy Department, AltaRock had attracted some $30 million in venture capital from high-profile investors like Google, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers [The New York Times]. AltaRock broke drill bits while trying to tap deep rock, and annoyed and worried nearby California residents with its earthquake potential.

This certainly isn’t the end for geothermal power. Other attempts in Switzerland to tap the heat of the Earth’s crust to produce clean energy continue in zones that are less earthquake-prone. Engineers in Zurich started preliminary drilling last month to see if the area was suitable for such a geothermal project [AP]. Scientists say the Swiss government’s report shouldn’t be used to doom other projects, since it focused narrowly on Basel. Here in the United States, the Department of Energy has allocated $440 million just this year to geothermal projects and doesn’t plan to give up on the idea, especially because there are other methods that don’t require fracturing rock or drilling so deep.

Related Content:
80beats: Geothermal Energy Project May Have Caused an Earthquake
80beats: Geothermal Explosion Highlights a Downside of a Leading Alt-Energy Source
80beats: Google Invests in Energy from Hot Rocks Deep Underground
DISCOVER: The Great Forgotten Clean-Energy Source: Geothermal

Image: flickr/Hitchster


Verizon Waives $21,917 Monthly Bill Caused by 13 Year-Old Data Hog [Bills]

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Attention, teenagers of America: things cost money, even when plucked out of thin air. And attention parents of America: buy a data plan, already.

When Ted Estarija added his son to his cell phone plan, he probably wasn't expecting the adorable little scamp to download 1.4GB in a month. But these kids, that's they do! Anyway, in a show of uncustomary magnanimity, Verizon has forgiven all charges for the month, and Estarija the Younger has been cut off, so everything's back the way it should be. Except for the fact that apparently a kajillion percent (approximately) increase in data usage didn't send up any flags at Verizon as it was happening, which is pretty unfortunate customer relations. [AP via Consumerist]



Quadriplegic Man Gets a License to Control a Shotgun with his Mouth [Guns]

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Jamie Capp was paralyzed playing football in high school, robbing him of the ability to hunt. But now, after a two and a half year legal battle, he's obtained a hunting license.

Jamie is now able to hunt using a 12-gauge shotgun attached to a battery-powered machine operated via breathing tube.

For a quadriplegic, firing a shotgun requires help from a companion. In Mr Cap's case, a friend sets up the contraption, safety on, on Mr Cap's wheelchair and Mr Cap aims the shotgun by moving the toggle switch with his mouth. Once his partner releases the safety, Mr Cap fires by sipping on the breathing tube.

It's great that the technology exists to allow Jamie to continue to enjoy a hobby that he loved before his accident. [Telegraph via Geekologie]



Got Too Many Plastic Bags? Recycle Them Into Nanotubes | Discoblog

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plastic-bag-waste-webAn Argonne National Laboratory scientist thinks he has developed a better way to recycle a ubiquitous scourge of the environment—the plastic bag.

the plastic bag

New Scientist reports:

Waste plastic from “throwaway” carrier bags can be readily converted into carbon nanotubes. The chemist who developed the technique has even used the nanotubes to make lithium-ion batteries.

This is called “upcycling” – converting a waste product into something more valuable. Finding ways to upcycle waste could encourage more recycling…

The process isn’t cheap, however. It involves an expensive catalyst in cobalt acetate, which is not easily recovered, to convert the high or low-density polyethylene (HDPE and LDPE) into carbon nanotubes. But if the nanotubes are then used to make lithium-ion or lithium-air batteries, that might overcome this problem, since these batteries are already recycled at the end of their use to recover cobalt.

Getting the bags to a recycling facility in the first place may be a hurdle as well. As the picture above shows, asking the public to put forth any effort sometimes seems to be asking too much.

Related Content:
80beats: How to Make a Battery Out of Office Paper & Nanotubes
DISCOVER: The World’s Largest Garbage Dump: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Discoblog: Prison for Plastic? Indian City Initiates Harsh Penalties for Using Plastic Bags
Discoblog: It’s In the Bag! Teenager Wins Science Fair, Solves Massive Environmental Problem
DISCOVER: 9 Ways Carbon Nanotubes Just Might Rock the World

Image: flickr / Sam Felder

Spiderman’s Bats | The Loom

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This spring I blogged about some marvelous videos made by scientists at Brown University in their quest to understand how bats manage to be bats. Turning your hands into membrane-lined wings makes for some awkward trade-offs. Moving around on the ground, for example, gets to be a special challenge. Bats have not simply evolved a single solution to these trade-offs, however. Instead, they’ve explored lots of different compromises. While many bats can only creep awkwardly on the ground, for example, vampire bats can actually gallop.

IMG_6162Today one of the Brown scientists, Dan Riskin (who has just set up a lab at City College in New York), published a new study on another extraordinary solution to being a bat. Most bats are well-adapted to roosting by hanging upside-down from long claws. But that is not a universal rule. A few bats have evolved a Spiderman strategy.

These bats have pads on their wrists and ankles that they clamp onto surfaces. The sucker-footed bat of Madagascar (Myzopoda aurita), for example, roosts on the inner wall of a rolled-up leaf, its head pointed up instead of the usual down.

The Spiderman strategy has evolved many times in animals. Many insects and spiders can cling to walls, as can frogs and gecko lizards. Mammals–not so much. It’s true that many mammals have pads on their hands and feet that add friction to their grip. But sucker-footed bats are among the few mammal species that can really stick to vertical surfaces.

Last year, Riskin and Paul Racey of the University of Aberdeen went to Madagascar to figure out how sucker-footed bats manage this feat. They filmed the bats climbing sheets of glass and brass. As the bats climbed, the scientists tried to drag and pull them around to measure the forces they generated. They came to a surprising conclusion:

The sucker-footed bats of Madagascar, despite their common name, do not actually suck at all.


Suction works in a distinctive way. If you pull a suction cup away from the surface it’s attached to, the cup will strongly resist your efforts. But you can drag the cup along the surface with much less force. When Riskin and Racey tested the bats, they found that the animals could easily be pulled off a surface. Dragging the bats, however, required much more force. In fact, they calculated that a single wrist pad is so strong that it could hold the weight of eight bats.


But there’s one important caveat to the strength of the bat pads. Riskin and Racey measured strong forces when they pulled down on the bats. But when they pushed the bats upwards on a surface, the pads peeled off right away.

These results indicate that a sucker-footed bat sticks to a leaf by gluing its wrists and ankles to it. Riskin and Racey observed that the pads glistened with some kind of fluid. If they tried to dry the pads off, they got wet again before long. It’s possible that this fluid serves as the glue.

While glue (or, more technically, wet adhesion) may be useful for sticking to surfaces, it poses a challenge of its own: once stuck, a bat needs a way to get unstuck. It appears that sucker-footed bats produce a fluid that’s just sticky enough to keep them clamped to the side of a leaf. But they can peel away easily from one end. This technique may explain why sucker-footed bats defy the heads-down rule among roosting bats. If they tried to hold onto a leaf with their heads pointed down, they’d slide off.

The sucker-footed bats were not the only bats to evolve the Spiderman strategy. In Central and South America, there are four species of disk-winged bats (Thyroptera) that can also cling to leaves with pads. Riskin studied disk-winged bats in graduate school and demonstrated that they can form a seal with the disks on the leaves. In other words, they really do suck. Combined with his latest results, the lesson is clear: there’s more than one way to mimic Spiderman when you’re a bat.

Reference: Daniel K. Riskin and Paul A. Racey, “How do sucker-footed bats hold on, and why do they roost head-up?” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, in press.


Cylinder Pressurization and Temperature

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2 cylinders are available with me. Both are interconnected through hose and control valve.

First cylinder contains helium gas at 300bar at ambient temperature.

Second cylinder is empty.

Now I am pressurizing the second cylinder form the first cylinder by o

Why We All Need to Calm Down About the "Real Google Phone" [Android]

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If you've seen the internet (or Giz) this weekend, you've heard about it: the "real Google phone" that "changes everything." But before we get carried away, a counterpoint: Google isn't magic. And the Nexus One isn't a game-changer. Not yet.

And I don't mean to say that I don't understand what the Nexus One is, or what Google's trying to do. Nor am I saying that Google plan for the Nexus One—to offer a different type of cellphone buying experience than US customers are accustomed to, and to provide a model for future Android handset—is a particularly bad one. I'm saying that I don't get the hype: Google's Nexus one is an interesting experiment, not some kind of heroically disruptive Google coup, as many people, including us, have implied. Consider the facts:

It's an HTC Android handset. This means that on a material level, it's barely more of a Google phone than the G1—which Google passively oversaw—or the Motorola Droid—which Google actively helped design. And hey, people remember: Google still isn't a hardware company. Not even close.

The hardware isn't revolutionary. It's the third (at least) Snapdragon-powered Android phone we've heard about. It's got a 5-megapixel camera. It's got dual microphones, to help with noise reduction. It's fairly thin. These are nice features for a new phone, but they're more or less exactly what we'd expect HTC to be working on next.

It's pretty much running Android 2.0. People are talking a lot about how Google had full control over the Nexus One user experience, and how it's going to be unlike any other Android we've ever seen before. But we've seen other builds of 2.1, albiet covered in the Sense UI, leaked for the HTC Hero (spoiler: not that impressive), and combined with the early glimpses we've caught from spy shots, they give the feeling that 2.1 isn't much of a step up from 2.0, which is what the Droid ships with, which, mind you, Motorola doesn't seem to have touched almost at all. As far as I can tell, the Nexus One will have some pretty new UI flourishes, and maybe a few UX changes. Again: this is typical, paced progress, not a drastic overhaul.

The new business model isn't really new. Even the most breathless commentary on the Nexus One admits that what it means is more important than what's on its spec sheet. And yeah, it'll be the first phone marketed as the Google phone, and Google's sales strategy—to offer the device without contract first, and probably unlocked, with a (hardware limited—possibly just to T-Mobile, if you care about 3G) choice of carriers—is foreign to the US market. But it's far from unheard of—you can buy unlocked phones at Best Buy, for God's sake. Oh, and Nokia's been handling their US smartphone releases like this for years. It hasn't gone well.

Google doesn't have superpowers. Using their unmatched internet superpowers, Google can do more to convince the general public that an expensive, unsubsidized phone is a good idea than Nokia, whose marketing efforts have been wimpy and ineffective. But they can't do anything crazy, like give this thing away. They can sell it for cheap by relying on their own advertising network—or hell, their homepage—for advertising, as well as the massive press coverage they're already getting, and selling it at little to no profit. To be able to match carriers' prices, though, will be a stretch: A Verizon or a T-Mobile can absorb the cost of a phone in month-to-month fees and overage charges. What does Google have? Theoretical future Adsense revenue?

Even if what we see now is exactly what we're going to get, the Nexus One is something worth paying attention to—it will be a way for Google to demonstrate what their vision for Android is without carrier interference. They'll control the software experience on the phone; they'll control how it's updated; they'll control what software is and isn't allowed on it. And they could use it to convey an vision for Google Voice, in which Google supplies your number, your nonstandard calling rates and your texting allowance, while carriers simply supply a neutral, dumb and ultimately out-of-sight cellular connection. But even if that is what they're doing—we don't know!—the Nexus One is a first step. It'll be an early product to guide the progress of an industry, not the product that'll define it.

Whenever we talk about Google, we need to factor in a little windage. They're buzzy, they're huge, and they've thrown plenty of other industries curveballs before. This phone sits at the hype nexus (for lack of a better word) of Google Voice, Android, Google's online services and HTC. For now, to say that the Nexus One has somehow changed everything is to buy into these company's hype too earnestly, to ascribe to Google mystical qualities, and to take for granted a series of future actions that Google hasn't even hinted at fulfilling yet. Apple isn't the only company tech watchers recklessly project onto.

Or, to compress it to 140 characters or less: "The Google phone matters as much as Google makes it matter." For now, people, calm down.



Another Loss in the Science Newsroom | The Intersection

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Andrew Revkin, the climate ace, is leaving the New York Times. The trend towards fewer and fewer science journalists in the mainstream media continues….and meanwhile, as we’ve just seen, in their absence we get Fox News style phony balanced coverage and attempts to artificially create scientific “debates” where none actually exist.

The situation is grim out there for coverage of science…just when we most need that coverage to be functional and healthy.

Note: CJR has more on the Revkin departure (he took a buyout and will apparently continue blogging at Dot Earth) here.


Unicycle Built For Two: Cool Design and Sign of the Times [Bike]

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It's a neat-looking concept Corbin Dunn came up with, as far as cycling death-traps go. But in this economy, it's also practical for couples who'd rather not splurge on extravagances like a second wheel. UPDATED: Now with instructions and video!

For coolness factor, I'd put this tandem unicycle somewhere between Bi-Cycle tandem bike and the Face-to-Face, while for pure crazy it's just shy of the Uno bike in single-wheel formation. Unfortunately, Corbin forgot to save his "great post about the construction details," so you're on your own for now building a tandem unicycle for you and your sweetheart. I'm pretty sure that step one was "lose all rational sense of physical limitations," so feel free to get a head start on that until the full instruction list is up.

UPDATE: Full instructions, if you've got sufficient wild abandon, can be found here. [Corbin's Treehouse via LikeCool via OhGizmo!]



Current Sensing

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Sir,we are working on Induction Motor Protection.Current Rating of Motor is 8 A.We have decided to use sensor LA-25P.We are trying to take the data sensed directly

on PC through PC Card.Is the sensor OK???

Apologies to Jim from JimonLight! [Apology]

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We posted our feature on Christmas Lights yesterday and the writer, the talented but inexperienced Chris Jacob used Jim Hutchison's piece as a source for some of his writing. But he didn't attribute clearly enough! We had the idea for the story, coincidentally, without knowing of Jim's fine work. And when it came time to research ours, his was some of the best source material to be found.

Chris's piece had multiple sources, but a quarter of the research did come from Jim's piece. In this sort of situation, we require not only an inline link to the source, but a full mention in the body as well as at the end of the post. This was not done on the first published version.

Chris—and Wilson, Jason and I—should have been more careful in reviewing his work and his research to make sure that Jim's website was clearly labeled, and Jim mentioned as an expert on Christmas lights referenced in the story.

Chris has updated the story and I'm going to talk to Jim about this later and apologize over the phone.

Again, I'm sorry for not more clearly mentioning where some of the information in this piece came from! To Jim and to our readers.



A Few More Nexus One Google Phone Details [Rumor]

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The WSJ follows up their original story, adding things we heard, like that Google might partner with a carrier eventually and that they talked to Verizon and T-Mobile about it. The price is still elusive.

Which is what matters at this point, really. The WSJ continues to insist it'll be sold "directly to consumers" (emphasis mine) and Google will "market" it, so let's assume it isn't just a dev or template phone, but a genuine consumer play. Even with Google's enormous weight, a $600—or even $400—unlocked phone does face some harsh realities, even if it does send a strong kind message as The Google Phone. If Google subsidizes it themselves, though, making it actually affordable in a "we just want everybody to use the internet (and therefore, Google)" kind of play, it'd be as huge as everybody panting about it says it would be. If not, well, you know.

Sprint saying they'd support this business model is interesting, BTW—my guess at this point, is that Verizon said no because it likes being deeply involved in, and tied to, the phones on its network. In Verizon's world, it's all about the network, not the phones, so it's easy to see where being reduced to a mere contract service wouldn't sit well with its sense of self.

Still curious, though, are these two bits, that "Google focused more on designing a phone in the past year, one person familiar with its efforts said, as the company battled to get some partners to accept its software" and that "Google designed virtually the entire software experience behind the phone, from the applications that run on it to the look and feel of each screen, they added." 'Cause, uh, haven't they designed the experience and applications on every stock Android phone? And it's weirder still, cause Engadget's close-up photos show 2.1, which, on the face of it, looks a whole lot like 2.0, just with a few new interface elements (more desktops displayed using a webOS card-like interface above, and 3D flourishes). The only thing "more Google-y" is that it comes with Goggles by default. So, um, "huh," I say to the WSJ.

We keep hearing first quarter of next year is when Google's loosing this thing, so even if Google's brilliant plan—a sekrit phone in the hands of a thousand people—holds tight, we'll know soon enough what's really going on here. [WSJ, Engadget]



World’s First Power Plant Using Osmosis To Generate Power Opened in Norway [Energy]

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If a failed Russian missile launch hadn't been confirmed as the instigator for those mysterious sky spirals, we would've seriously looked at this osmotic power plant in Norway as the potential source.

Statkraft, the company leading this project, has built a small-scale operation near Oslo in Norway, but hopes that it'll have a commercial plant built by 2015, which could generate power for 10 per cent of the country. If osmotic power plants were adopted throughout the world, Statkraft claims up to 1,600 - 1,700 terawatt hours could be generated, which is around half the energy that comes out of the EU currently.

Osmosis, if you cast your mind back to science class, is when a solution in water passes naturally through a semi-permeable membrane separating the weaker solution from the strong.

In this particular Norwegian case, the membrane has been made from polyester, polysulfone and polyamide, and while some of the energy harnessed keeps the pumps ticking over, the rest of it powers a turbine—although currently, only one watt per square meter is being produced. It's believed that they'd need to generate five watts to make it worth its while, so it looks like it's back to the drawing boards for Statkraft for now. Wonder if they're related to the plastic cheese manufacturers? [Economist]