Technology Trends

Wi-Fi networks are becoming increasingly common, but the one deployed on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado, one of my preferred cities in the U.S., is unique. It is the only solar-powered wireless network in the U.S. according to internetnews.com. The first access points are now operational since July 15. This solar-powered network is composed of four dual units and needed only $10,000 to be deployed. And the company which developed this new kind of wireless access points, Lumin, is thinking to make portable and secure wireless networks in developing countries. Update (August 15, 2005): Jamais Cascio notes on WorldChanging that the Boulder’s solar wi-fi network is NOT the first one in the U.S.: for previous examples, check this entry at Daily Wireless.

Before going further, here is the official logo for this operation initiated by the Downtown Boulder Business Improvement District (BID) (Credit: BID).

You’ll find more details about this initiative by reading Surf for Free on the Bricks! and you’ll find other versions of the above logo on this informational flyer (PDF format, 2 pages, 569 KB).

Here are more details from internetnews.com about this project.

Lumin designed the units with more remote areas in mind, locations where there is little or no available power — obviously not the case in downtown Boulder. But the environmentally-friendly power source enticed the Pearl Street planners into becoming the first clients. The network cost $10,000 to deploy, but upkeep costs will essentially be nil. The rechargeable batteries need to be swapped out every so often, but the solar panels are built to run for 25-30 years.

Now, let’s look at the access points from Lumin.

Lumin’s first-generation product is the LightWave AP-1000 solar-powered access point, which comes in two models, single and dual. The Pearl Street deployment utilizes four dual units, each of which is located out of sight on a well-chosen rooftop, and features two hinged solar panels. (The single unit LightWave includes only one panel.) While each access point has a potential range of up to 30 miles, this deployment, which only covers a six-block area, required four APs due to the number of trees interfering with line-of-sight along the cobblestoned outdoor mall.

Below is a picture of one of these LightWave AP-1000 solar-powered wireless network access points mounted on a rock (Credit: Lumin LLC). And here is a link to a detailed description of the product.

I really like Boulder, but deploying solar-powered communication units there would not have been my first choice because of the weather which can be rainy or snowy. But the company says I’m wrong.

“The solar panels are so sophisticated that we can register a charge from the moon,” says Lumin co-founder Sally Lyon. “It’s a myth that it can only be used in the Southwest. In the complete, pitch black night is the only time when there’s no charge. On a cloudy day, it’s charging.”

“Even if you were in a complete snowstorm for a couple of days, you’ve still got a system running,” says Lyon. “The reality is, for all practical purposes, it’s a reliable system with an abundant energy source, and in the long term, it’s extremely cost-effective.”

And it can be exported too. After all, today’s company motto is “From Boulder To Baghdad.”

This first solar-powered wireless network went largely unnoticed outside Colorado. But several newspapers there mentioned it. Here are two links to articles from the Rocky Mountain News, “Solar WiFi: Boulder’s answer to surf and sun” and from the Denver Post, “16th St. Mall shopping for wireless.”

Sources: Naomi Graychase, internetnews.com, August 8, 2005, 2005; and various web sites

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It’s now commonly admitted that our appetite for fossil fuels is having a strong influence on the Earth’s climate — and our future. But what about the concentration of humans in urban areas? Today, 50% of the world’s population is living on about one percent of Earth’s surface. Can this extreme concentration lead to other effects on our climate and weather? In ‘Satellites and the city,’ NASA says that it can help to provide an answer. “Our research suggests that, using satellite data and enhanced models, we will be able to answer several critical questions about how urbanization may impact climate change 10, 25 or even 100 years from now,” says for example a NASA scientist from the Goddard Space Flight Center. But read more…

“More and more people live in cities. This means that cities will grow rapidly over the next several decades. Evidence continues to mount that cities affect the climate,” said J. Marshall Shepherd, Deputy Project Scientist of the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Shepherd and co-author Menglin Jin, a research scientist at the University of Maryland-College Park, suggest that satellite-observed urban information is extremely useful for advancing our ability to simulate urban effects in climate models. They go on further to propose that satellite data is the only feasible way to represent the expanse of global urban surfaces and related changes to the Earth’s surface, vegetation and aerosols.

Below are some images taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite (Credit for images and legends: NASA).

This shows the MODIS land cover classification in southeastern US (near Atlanta). Red color is for Urban Land Build-up (Copied from Jin and Shepherd 2005 with original image source from Michael King).

[And here you can see] the global distribution of fine aerosol optical thickness derived from MODIS measurements on the Terra platform for September 2000. The large values over Southeast Asia, India, Europe, and the United States reflect urban pollution. The large values in the Southern Hemisphere are due to biomass burning.

The two scientists think that urban landscapes are changing the physical processes of land surfaces, such as thermal conductivity, and also adding new characteristics to our land and our atmosphere.

Structures like the Empire State Building in New York City can change the basic wind flow in and around cities that can alter air quality, temperature, cloud distribution and precipitation patterns. It is increasingly evident that such atmospheric changes near cities can be captured by NASA satellites such as Aqua, Landsat, Terra, and the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM).

This research work has been published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in May 2005 (Vol. 86, No. 5, pp. 681–689). Strangely, no abstract is available, but here is a link to the full paper named “Inclusion of Urban Landscape in a Climate Model: How Can Satellite Data Help?” (PDF format, 9 pages, 701 KB).

For more recent references about this subject, you also should read “Urban Climate Modeling,” published by NASA on April 27, 2005.

Finally, I want to add one more paper to your reading list. Its title is “Urban aerosols and their variations with clouds and rainfall: A case study for New York and Houston” and here is a link to the full paper (PDF format, 12 pages, 701 KB).

I’ve worked with many meteorologists during my life, but I’m not sure if they’re ready to include these minuscule urban lands into their climate models. Any thoughts?

Sources: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center news release, via EurekAlert!, July 21, 2005; and various web sites

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If you travel through Sweden this summer, don’t forget to try the first genetically modified (GM) beer in the world. According to CNN.com in this short article, the Kenth beer contains “corn that has been genetically modified to protect it against pests.” Sometimes, corn is named maize in Europe, and the brewer chose to use this unusual Bt maize to ’spice up’ his beer. Of course, his goal is to produce a great new beer, but he also wants to introduce new technologies that will be good for the environment without compromising the consumers’ health — I guess he based his assumptions on a ‘reasonable’ number of bottles on a very warm day… Anyway, GM food products have been approved by the European Union since April 2004 — if they’re properly labeled. So you might find this beer outside Sweden anytime soon. Read more…

First, here is a picture of this delightful new beer (Credit: Oesterlenbryggarna brewery in Osterlen, Sweden).

Now, here are some excerpts from the CNN article.

Master brewer Kenth Persson is aware that the use of GM ingredients is not to everyone’s taste and admits the brewery is taking a risk.

“But I think it’s very interesting to be doing a new thing and that is what brewers like me want to do,” he said. “We cannot do things in the same way as the big breweries like Carlsberg. We try to do things differently.”

You’ll find more details on BioteknikCentrum.com by reading this page, “The ordinary beer that’s out of the ordinary.”

The fact that one of the ingredients of this beer comes from a GM crop (maize) does not mean, however, that the beer has any characteristics that would not be found in a beer made with conventional maize. The grain looks exactly the same, it tastes exactly the same, and Bt maize is at least as safe and healthy as conventional maize.

Rather, the difference is in the small yellow maize kernals sown in a field in the Oderbruch region of Germany, beside the River Oder.

This is somewhat ironic as Germany is — with France — one of the European countries most strongly opposed to GM foods.

But now, let’s look at why this GM maize can be better for us.

This genetically modified Bt maize has been imbued with a new characteristic, enabling the crop to defend itself against the dreaded European corn borer moth. This vicious pest has had many maize growers tearing their hair in despair over the years.

In conventional maize growing, insecticide sprays are used to fight off the corn borer. Thanks to the Bt gene — which can be described as a self-defence gene — farmers no longer need to rely so heavily on insecticides. This of course benefits the environment.

Halting the spread of the corn borer moth also reduces the risk of fungal attacks. Fungi can produce poisonous substances (mycotoxins) at levels that create major problems for producers of both human foods and animal feeds. In conclusion, the Bt maize actually enables safer food products.

I don’t know if the above statement is true, but if you try this beer, drop me a note to tell me if it tastes good.

Finally, you also can read another version of the document mentioned above, but with more pictures: “The story of Sweden’s first GM-labelled food product” (PDF format, 7 pages, 162 KB).

Sources: Tom Hayes and Liz George, CNN.com, July 15, 2005; and various web sites

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Many people around the world are eating meat and enjoying it. But meat has a number of adverse effects on human health because of the use of drugs used to raise livestock or on the environment because of pollution from farm animal wastes. Now, scientists from the University of Maryland are proposing new techniques to grow edible meat in their labs on an industrial scale. “The idea of culturing meat is to create an edible product that tastes like cuts of beef, poultry, pork, lamb or fish and has the nutrients and texture of meat.” The researchers say that demand for meat is doubling every ten years in countries like India or China and say that with their techniques, “a single cell could theoretically produce the world’s annual meat supply.” Ready to learn more?

As an appetizer, here is the introduction of the University of Maryland news release.

Experiments for NASA space missions have shown that small amounts of edible meat can be created in a lab. But the technology that could grow chicken nuggets without the chicken, on a large scale, may not be just a science fiction fantasy.

Now, let’s go for the entree. Below is an illustration of the process leading to a perfectly healthy hamburger… (Credit: University of Maryland)

Here are the steps: 1. Scaffold-based cultured meat production: 1. Myoblasts in petri dish; 2. Porous collagen microspheres; 3. Myoblasts form myotubes on collagen microspheres; 4. Bioreactor; 5. Microwave; 6. Hamburger.

One of the techniques used to produce edible animal meat made of skeletal muscle tissue is scaffold-based and appropriate for producing processed meats, such as hamburger or sausage.

In scaffold-based techniques, embryonic myoblasts or adult skeletal muscle satellite cells are proliferated, attached to a scaffold or carrier, such as a collagen meshwork or microcarrier beads, and then perfused with a culture medium in a stationary or rotating bioreactor. By introducing a variety of environmental cues, these cells fuse into myotubes, which can then differentiate into myofibers. The resulting myofibers may then be harvested, cooked, and consumed as meat [as seen on the above image.]

After these technical explanations, let’s return to the University of Maryland news release.

Scientists know that a single muscle cell from a cow or chicken can be isolated and divided into thousands of new muscle cells. Experiments with fish tissue have created small amounts of in vitro meat in NASA experiments researching potential food products for long-term space travel, where storage is a problem.

“But that was a single experiment and was geared toward a special situation - space travel,” says Matheny. “We need a different approach for large scale production.”

Matheny’s team developed ideas for two techniques that have potential for large scale meat production. One is to grow the cells in large flat sheets on thin membranes. The sheets of meat would be grown and stretched, then removed from the membranes and stacked on top of one another to increase thickness.

The other method would be to grow the muscle cells on small three-dimensional beads that stretch with small changes in temperature. The mature cells could then be harvested and turned into a processed meat, like nuggets or hamburgers.

The first research paper about future industrial production of cultured meat was published as a commentary by Tissue Engineering in its June 29, 2005 issue under the name “Commentary: In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production.” Here is a link to this paper (PDF format, 4 pages, 50 KB).

But this commentary was based on a longer paper, also named “In vitro cultured meat production,” and written in 2004. Here is a link to this full paper (PDF format, 27 pages, 290 KB). The illustration above and its legend come from this paper.

Now, Matheny has now decided to join New Harvest, “a nonprofit research organization working to develop new meat substitutes, including cultured meat — meat produced in vitro, in a cell culture, rather than from an animal.”

So when will we eat ‘cultured’ meat? I guess that many organizations around the world will carefully look at this kind of solution before approving or refusing it.

I’ m not sure to feel comfortable with this idea of ‘cultured’ meat. Please tell me if you’re ready for a synthetic steak.

Sources: University of Maryland news release, July 6, 2005; and various web sites

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• Agriculture
  
  
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Like every year, this is the season for the Shell Eco-Marathon annual fuel-economy competition. Last week, the hydrogen-powered Swiss PAC-Car II broke a new record, using 1.02 gram of hydrogen to finish the race. This is the equivalent of 5,385 kilometers per liter of gasoline. For users of other units, this translates to a whopping 15,210 miles per British gallon or 12,670 miles per U.S. gallon. And this week, the British Ech2o car will attempt to break this record. Its designers say that this car, also hydrogen-powered, “can travel on less electricity than it takes to power a light bulb.” It will be driven by a 13-year old experienced go-kart driver.” Read more…

Let’s start with the PAC-Car II, designed at ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich). After breaking the world record for fuel efficiency, ETH Zürich published this news release on June 28, 2005.

ETH Zurich set itself a goal to construct a vehicle that used as little fuel as possible and provided the highest possible fuel efficiency. So they gave the so-called PAC-Car a fuel cell that produces electrical energy from hydrogen and drives two electric motors. The only “emission” from PAC-Car is pure water. The car is lightweight, weighing in at only about 30 kilograms.

And, PAC-Car has now achieved its goal: it finished the course at the Shell Eco-Marathon taking place on the Michelin test track at Ladoux, France, using only 1.02 grams of hydrogen. This converts to about 5385 kilometres per litre of petrol, a new world record in economical fuel consumption. This means that PAC-Car would only use eight litres to drive around the globe.

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Below is an image of the PAC-Car II in Zürich on May 10, 2005 (Credit: ETH Zürich). And here is a link to a larger version (2.37 MB).

And this is a picture of the PAC-Car II during the Shell Eco-marathon in Nogaro on May 21, 2005 (Credit: ETH Zürich) with a link to a larger version (418 KB).

You’ll find tons of other photographs in the different galleries available from this page.

And for more information, please visit this technical section.

The following paragraphs come from the Aerodynamics page.

PAC-Car II is equipped with 3 wheels; the single rear wheel is powered and steered, and the front wheels have a camber angle of -8°.

This solution allows the reduction of the frontal surface area because the room needed to steer the wheels is not needed. Some experiments on a test bench have shown that this camber angle does not provide too much rolling resistance.

[Note: for those of you not familiar with the notion of "camber," here is an explanation provided by the Ford Motor Company in this glossary: "Camber is the relative tilt of the wheels, usually slightly inward at the top edge, as viewed from the front of the vehicle. Camber is set to optimize handling and tire wear Front and rear wheels must also be aligned with respect to each other."]

You’ll find also more details about the fuel cell system on the Powertrain and Control page.

The fuel cell, a by-product of the PowerPac project, is of the PEM type (Proton Exchange Membrane) and benefits from an embedded auto humidifying area specially designed by PSI. The stack efficiency is exceptional, close to 70%.

Now, let’s move to the British challenger, described by CNN on July 5, 2005, in a short article, “Eco-car more efficient than light bulb.”

The Ech2o car is built by the BOC Group, a British gas firm, which issued a news release on July 4, 2005.

The BOC Ech2o has been designed with a simple goal to demonstrate fuel efficiency. But unlike most other eco-marathon vehicles that run on petrol or diesel, the BOC Ech2o’s driving force comes from electricity, created in a hydrogen fuel cell.

The car could travel around the world on less than the equivalent of two gallons of petrol, using 25 watts — a fraction of the power a light bulb uses.

It could also be the most efficient vehicle ever to move on wheels and, as its only emission is water, the car heralds a new age of clean virtually silent road travel, according to experts.

And why did the company choose such a young driver to try to break this fuel efficiency world record?

The BOC Ech2o car, driven by Jack Dex, 13, of Southam College, Warwickshire, will attempt to break the world fuel efficiency record of over 10,000 miles per gallon next week, during the Shell Eco Marathon at Rockingham Raceway in the Midlands.

The youngster was chosen because he is small and light enough to control the vehicle, without weighing it down — and because of his experience as a junior TKM Kart driver.

Will he break the record? Check the news near the end of the week.

Sources: Various news releases and web sites

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What would happen if all U.S. current vehicles — powered by fossil fuels — were converted to hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles? In this article, Nature writes that a very detailed study from Stanford University reveals that up to 6,400 lives could be saved each year. Besides saving lives, this also may significantly improve air quality, health, and climate. After looking at several ways to produce hydrogen, the scientists have concluded that wind is the most promising means of generating hydrogen. It’s even cheaper if some hidden costs to produce gasoline are taken into account: gasoline’s true cost in March 2005, for example, was $2.35 to $3.99 per gallon, which exceeds the estimated mean cost of hydrogen from wind ($2.16 equivalent per gallon of gasoline). Now the researchers are calling for an ‘Apollo Program’ for hydrogen energy. Read more…

Let’s start with some short excerpts from the Nature article.

If all the nation’s vehicles were powered by hydrogen fuel cells rather than fossil fuels, the drop in pollutants that cause asthma, respiratory problems and other potentially life-threatening conditions could reduce deaths by over 6,000 a year. So says a study in Science conducted by Mark Jacobson and colleagues at Stanford University, California.

The work challenges a common objection to working towards a ‘hydrogen economy’, in which hydrogen replaces oil as the main fuel source. Many people argue that because hydrogen will probably be generated by burning fossil fuels, a hydrogen system is no better for our planet than oil. Both produce the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, although at different points in the cycle of fuel production and use.

However, the problem with the internal combustion engine is not just its carbon dioxide emissions. It also produces poisonous carbon monoxide, smog-inducing nitrogen oxides, and ozone, an eye and respiratory irritant. Worst of all, it creates microscopic soot particles that cause a host of health risks and affect climate.

The research work has been published by Science on June 24, 2005 under the name “Cleaning the Air and Improving Health with Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles.” Here is a link to the abstract.

Converting all U.S. onroad vehicles to hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (HFCVs) may improve air quality, health, and climate significantly, whether the hydrogen is produced by steam reforming of natural gas, wind electrolysis, or coal gasification. Most benefits would result from eliminating current vehicle exhaust. Wind and natural gas HFCVs offer the greatest potential health benefits and could save 3700 to 6400 U.S. lives annually. Wind HFCVs should benefit climate most. An all-HFCV fleet would hardly affect tropospheric water vapor concentrations. Conversion to coal HFCVs may improve health but would damage climate more than fossil/electric hybrids. The real cost of hydrogen from wind electrolysis may be below that of U.S. gasoline.

Jacobson has put a copy of the Science article on Stanford’s servers. Here is a link to the article (PDF format, 5 pages, 462 KB).

This research work was also commented by the Stanford Report in this article where Jacobson says that an ‘Apollo Program’ for hydrogen energy is needed.

The Science study compared emissions that would be produced in five cases — if all vehicles on the road were powered by 1) conventional internal-combustion engines, 2) a combination of electricity and internal combustion of gasoline, as in hybrid vehicles, 3) hydrogen generated from wind electrolysis, 4) hydrogen generated from natural gas and 5) hydrogen generated from coal gasification.

After concluding that wind is the most promising means of generating hydrogen, the study compares the cost of a gallon of gasoline with that of a gallon of hydrogen generated by wind electrolysis.

The cost of making hydrogen from wind is $1.12 to $3.20 per gallon of gasoline or diesel equivalent ($3 to $7.40 per kilogram of molecular hydrogen)—on par with the current price of gas. But gasoline has a hidden cost of 29 cents to $ 1.80 per gallon in societal costs such as reduced health, lost productivity, hospitalization and death, as well as cleanup of polluted sites. So gasoline’s true cost in March 2005, for example, was $2.35 to $3.99 per gallon, which exceeds the estimated mean cost of hydrogen from wind ($2.16 equivalent per gallon of gasoline).

Jacobson calls for a two-step plan, generating electricity from wind and producing hydrogen using wind-generated electricity.

While wind subsidies are on the order of $100 million per year, Jacobson said, other energy sources hog subsidies of $15 to $20 billion. He advocates supporting the infrastructure needed for wind production of hydrogen to a level similar to the $20 billion recently proposed for a new natural gas pipeline from the continental United States to Alaska.

What do you think? Will Jacobson’s ‘Apollo Program’ be ever launched? Please post your thoughts below.

Sources: Philip Ball, Nature, June 23, 2005; and various web sites

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Nanoscientists and food industry specialists are meeting right now at Nano4Food 2005, a conference held in Wageningen, The Netherlands, on June 20-21. They will discuss how nanotechnology can help food processing companies to improve the safety and quality of their products by using nanosensors and diagnostic machines. But, in this article, FoodProductionDaily.com writes that there is another subject on the agenda. New kinds of foods, embedded with nanoparticles, could one day deliver their contents in our bodies, such as medicines or nutrients. So far, food companies are only investigating, and no product has been released yet. But technology is almost ready for these companies to sell you interactive drinks you can play with, changing colors or textures. Read more…

Let’s start with a financial forecast from an analyst — who certainly never ate nanofood. And don’t forget to read this again in 2010!

The nanofood market is expected to rise from $2.6bn today to $7bn next year and to $20.4bn in 2010 according to a study by consultant Helmut Kaiser.

Please notice that ‘nanofood market’ doesn’t mean edible food. And this brings us back to how nanotechnology can be used for food safety.

On the processing line nanotechnology can be used to create tiny sensors and diagnostic machines that can help ensure food does not leave the factory with contaminants. Such nanodevices can also help processors detect harmful microbes and determine the shelf life for their foods. Such fine scale detection could help food processors make strategic decisions, such as the best transportation method for their products and storage methods, said Frans Kampers [, the program manager of bio-nanotechnology at Wageningen University.]

“The use of nanotechnology to ensure the quality of a food product has obvious benefits for consumers,” he said. However, such robotic nanosensors and detectors are still being developed in food processing and research laboratories. Kampers forecasts that the first such machines will appear on the food production line within four years.

On the other hand, incorporating nanoparticles in our food is an entirely different story.

Researchers generally refer to nanofoods as being embedded with either “soft particles”, those using common biological materials or with “hard particles”, made up of non-organic substances.

“Soft particles” might be harmless to us, because our bodies can recognize them. But what about these “hard particles”?

Here the work is more speculative as the body is not used to ingesting and processing such substances, even if they are so tiny. As they are so tiny, nanoparticles exhibit different chemical behaviour than would normally be found in larger masses of material. Quantum mechanics, the behaviour of particles and surfaces at the microscopic level, comes into play.

“We do not really know exactly how these nanoparticles go through different routes in the body and where they end up,” said Kampers. “We need more research about the effects on food and on the body.”

So will we soon eat nanofoods? A long article from the Observer, U.K., about the cutting edge of food technology, published in May 2004, already mentioned that “food technologists are dreaming up ever new ways of feeding us — and the future is any colour you want.” Here is a selected quote.

Manuel Marquez-Sanchez [, a scientist at Kraft Foods,] has big hopes for nanotechnology. By manipulating ingredients at the nano level, and storing them in ‘nanocapsules’, he believes that Kraft will be able to devise such treats as an interactive, customisable drink. ‘The idea is that everyone buys the same drink, but you’ll be able to decide its colour, flavour, concentration and texture,’ he explains enthusiastically. ‘Once you have a technology to design nanocapsules, based on food-grade materials, you can offer products that put the consumer in control.’ Although the industry, one presumes, will wish to retain control of everything from labelling requirements and costs to the degree of prior safety testing.

So what do you think? Are you really ready for nanofood or not?

Sources: Ahmed ElAmin, FoodProductionDaily.com, June 17, 2005; and various web sites

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Thanks to a program called YourAir, thousands of people suffering from asthma and other breathing problems, and living in Central London will soon be able to be alerted of peaks of pollution by text messages sent to their cell phones. This program, which soon will be extended to other areas in London, has been developed with the help of the European Space Agency (ESA). Currently, YourAir uses air quality forecasts provided by satellites as well as information coming from local traffic roads. But it should soon incorporate more European regional data, as it becomes obvious to ESA researchers that a peak of pollution in London might have originated in the Ruhr Valley in Germany — or even in Italy. Read more…

As an example of what peaks of air pollution can look like, below is a picture showing the nitrogen dioxide concentrations over the city of London during a high-pollution event that occurred on November 15, 2000 (Credit: ESA).

But here is a better illustration, with this animation (in Macromedia Flash format).

Now, let’s get back to the YourAir service.

Around a thousand asthma sufferers and other vulnerable individuals in Croydon should soon receive text message warnings to their mobile phones before elevated air pollution days, with additional patients in other London boroughs receiving the service later on.

The YourAir service predicts levels of the pollutants nitrogen dioxide, ozone and airborne particles — exposure to which can harm people with asthma, lung and heart problems, and in the very highest concentrations can harm otherwise healthy people.

Even if current results are pretty accurate — about 90% — there are still ways for improvements, especially by incorporating other European regional data.

Regional air quality information is important because not all the pollution affecting a city actually originates there. Depending on the weather, studies show that up to half the air pollution found in some European cities might have come from elsewhere in the continent — the Ruhr in Germany for instance, or as far away as Italy’s Po Valley.

“With air pollution arising, its distribution drops off steeply away from major roads or other sources because it mixes vertically as well as horizontally,” explained Iarla Kilbane-Dawe of Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants (CERC). “On most days the air rises, taking the pollution with it — as high as 800 metres in the winter, or two kilometres in the summer. So within an hour or so of rush hour the concentrated pollution can waft away.”

The YourAir service is being developed by different organizations through ESA, and trying to find more information is like peeling an onion. It is part of the PROMOTE project, intended to deliver atmospheric information to support informed decision making in this field and improve quality of life.

And PROMOTE is itself part of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES), a joint initiative between ESA and the European Union.

And to finish to peel the onion, where is the European Union going today? No one seems to know.

Sources: ESA news release, June 16, 2005; and various web sites

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• ESA
  


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Making diesel-like liquid from carbohydrates found in plants has been done before by fermenting glucose into ethanol added to gasoline. But this process was inefficient and expensive because the ethanol needed to be separated from water at the end of the fermentation process. Now, a team of chemists at University of Wisconsin-Madison has found a new way to create green diesel from plants which avoids this costly separating phase. Nature adds that this fuel born from carbohydrates could be clean and easy. And this plant-derived fuel can use existing infrastructures for distribution, which is not the case for hydrogen. But don’t rush to your gas station today. Even if this new way to produce green diesel is promising, there are still some challenges to overcome before it becomes commercially available. Read more…

Here is a short description of this new process, provided by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering researchers have discovered a new way to make a diesel-like liquid fuel from carbohydrates commonly found in plants.

Professor James Dumesic and colleagues [have built] a four-phase catalytic reactor in which corn and other biomass-derived carbohydrates can be converted to sulfur-free liquid alkanes resulting in an ideal additive for diesel transportation fuel.

Nature gives additional details.

A magnesium-based catalyst then knits these molecules together to create the longer carbon chains required for diesel fuel. Adding more pressurized hydrogen, and removing any remaining oxygen atoms with a platinum catalyst, delivers the finished fuel.

Below is a diagram showing the four-phase catalytic processing (Credit: University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering).

This other diagram illustrates the conversion of carbohydrates to a diesel fuel additive (Credit: University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering).

Both of these images come from the headlines news for June 2, 2005 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering.

According to the University, this process is very energy-efficient compared with the production of ethanol.

About 67 percent of the energy required to make ethanol is consumed in fermenting and distilling corn. As a result, ethanol production creates 1.1 units of energy for every unit of energy consumed. In the UW-Madison process, the desired alkanes spontaneously separate from water. No additional heating or distillation is required. The result is the creation of 2.2 units of energy for every unit of energy consumed in energy production.

So will we buy soon such fuels at our gas stations? Here are some answers from Nature.

If all goes according to plan, Dumesic estimates one could grow enough plants in the United States to power a significant percentage of the country’s vehicles.

The next challenge is to work out how to extract the all-important carbohydrates from plant matter. The chemists used a pure carbohydrate supply in their tests, and Dumesic says that plants may have to undergo extensive processing to remove unwanted chemicals.

The research work has been published by Science under the title “Production of Liquid Alkanes by Aqueous-Phase Processing of Biomass-Derived Carbohydrates” (Vol. 308, Issue 5727, Pages 1446-1450, June 3, 2005). Here is a link to the abstract (Free registration required).

Sources: University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering news release, June 2, 2005; Mark Peplow, Nature, June 2, 2005; and various websites

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In January 2005, a world’s premiere took place in a farm near Princeton, Minnesota. The event went largely unnoticed, except by the Princeton Union-Eagle in “Hydrogen fuel cell project at Princeton farm called world’s first.” Now, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture is celebrating the first hydrogen fuel cell powered by cow manure. The Haubenschild farm already was producing electricity from its cows, by using methane gas as the vehicle. But now, the farmers wanted to know if hydrogen fuel cells could produce enough electricity to power a farm and dubbed their effort the “cow power.” Read more…

Now, let’s go back to January 27, 2005 with the Princeton Union-Eagle.

Neither the public nor the cows likely knew why Haubenschild and two men from the University of Minnesota and a man from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture were celebrating last Friday with a cake and some champagne in a utility room on that farm.

What happened on Jan. 27, and what last Friday’s celebration was about, was that common cow manure was turned into electricity via a hydrogen fuel cell at the farm. The fuel cell stands about six foot high, is about the same length across and is at least a yard deep.

Phil Goodrich, the University of Minnesota principal investigator in the hydrogen fuel cell project at the Haubenschild farm, last Friday backed the assertion that this was a world’s first. The project was to see if running methane gas produced from cow manure into a hydrogen fuel cell could make electricity.

Now, let’s see the full process, from the cows to methane gas, and from hydeogen to electricity.

About five years ago Haubenschild and his two sons had already supplied the means of getting the methane production started at the farm. They completed a project with the help of the state to set up an anaerobic digester to turn cow manure at the farm into methane gas.

To make a long story short of how the chemical reactions take place, hydrogen that was in the methane is freed up inside the fuel cell. Hydrogen and oxygen end up on opposite sides of a series of plates coated with a proprietary 3M chemical.

Rich Huelskamp, the U of M technician handling the mechanical part of the project, explained that a voltage difference between the sides of the plates is created, causing electrons to flow. The electron flow is the electricity.

Now, do these hydrogen fuel cells produce enough electricity to power a farm? Here is the answer from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.

University of Minnesota researchers have been able to run the fuel cell on biogas intermittently and are working towards running the fuel cell on biogas continually. The fuel cell is a proton electron membrane (PEM) and produces 5 kilowatts of electrical power. A fuel cell of this size is ideal for research purposes but not large enough to power the dairy or produce electricity for sale.

The farmer himself seems to disagree, according to the Princeton Union-Eagle.

Haubenschild said farmers like him can’t afford to subsidize consumers to buy energy from renewable sources by selling it for less than it cost to produce. He said it costs 5.1 cents per kilowatt hour to produce electricity from the fuel cell and Great River Energy will buy the surplus electricity from the fuel cell for four cents per KWH.

So will there be enough electricity for sale or not? Anyway, the farmers have even more ambitious projects.

Now Haubenschild is betting that perhaps the public could get interested in one of the newest waves in energy research — the hydrogen fuel cell. He even envisions selling tanks of the hydrogen fuel to gas stations where the public could buy the containers and hook them onto cars and trucks equipped with hydrogen fuel cells.

For more information about the previous innovations done at the Haubenschild Farms, you should visit this page about the Haubenschild Farms Digester, which contains links to other papers.

Finally, here is a link to Phil Goodrich’s current research about Advancing Utilization of Manure Methane Digester Electrical Generation.

Sources: Joel Stottrup, Princeton Union-Eagle, February 14, 2005; and various websites

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The GLOBCOVER project, started by the European Space Agency (ESA), has a very simple goal. It will create the most detailed portrait of the Earth’s land surface with a resolution three times sharper than any previous satellite map. The image acquisition will be done throughout 2005 and use the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument of the Envisat environmental satellite. To create this sharp map, the GLOBCOVER project will analyze about 20 terabytes of data gathered by the European satellite. When it’s completed, the GLOBCOVER map will have numerous uses, “including plotting worldwide land use trends, studying natural and managed ecosystems and modelling climate change extent and impacts.” Read more…

Let’s start with a couple of images.

You can download larger versions of the above pictures here.

And here are some more details about the GLOBCOVER project picked from the ESA news release.

It will be a unique depiction of the face of our planet in 2005, broken down into more than 20 separate land cover classes. The completed GLOBCOVER map will have numerous uses, including plotting worldwide land use trends, studying natural and managed ecosystems and modelling climate change extent and impacts.

Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument is being systematically used in Full Resolution Mode for the project, acquiring images with a spatial resolution of 300 metres, with an average 150 minutes of acquisitions occurring daily.

The estimate is that up to 20 terabytes of imagery will be needed to mosaic together the final worldwide GLOBCOVER map — an amount of data equivalent to the contents of 20 million books. The image acquisition strategy is based around regional climate patterns to minimise cloud or snow cover. Multiple acquisitions are planned for some regions to account for seasonal variations in land cover.

For more information about the GLOBCOVER project, please click here or there.

Sources: European Space Agency, May 5, 2005; and various websites

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In a very interesting article appearing in the May issue of Technology Review, “Environmental Heresies,” Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog writes that the environmental movement should — and maybe will — reverse its opinion on several controversial subjects. He says that environmentalists should be more opened and look at different eyes to issues such as population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power. Will Brand be heard — or be anathematized by other environmentalists? Time will tell. However, you should read his arguments, even if you’re not part of a so-called ‘green’ movement. Read more…

I don’t want to summarize the whole article and here I just want to focus on nuclear energy. But before, and even I don’t want to enter a debate about genetically modified crops, here is a short — and surprising — quote of what Brand thinks about them.

GM crops are more efficient, giving higher yield on less land with less use of pesticides and herbicides. That’s why the Amish, the most technology-suspicious group in America (and the best farmers), have enthusiastically adopted GM crops.

Now, let’s look at the issues of climate change and the global warming effect caused by our appetite for energy currently mostly satisfied by burning fossil fuels. Can a catastrophe be avoided? Here are some excerpts of Brand’s thoughts.

First, what alternative sources of energy are available today?

Everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize energy production. Kyoto accords, radical conservation in energy transmission and use, wind energy, solar energy, passive solar, hydroelectric energy, biomass, the whole gamut. But add them all up and it’s still only a fraction of enough. Massive carbon “sequestration” (extraction) from the atmosphere, perhaps via biotech, is a widely held hope, but it’s just a hope. The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power.

Nuclear plants are certainly atmospherically clean, but are they safe?

Nuclear certainly has problems — accidents, waste storage, high construction costs, and the possible use of its fuel in weapons. It also has advantages besides the overwhelming one of being atmospherically clean. The industry is mature, with a half-century of experience and ever improved engineering behind it. Problematic early reactors like the ones at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl can be supplanted by new, smaller-scale, meltdown-proof reactors like the ones that use the pebble-bed design. Nuclear power plants are very high yield, with low-cost fuel.

Brand also looks at the problem of storing radioactive waste and offers an innovative solution, even if I don’t see it today as being easily implemented.

The storage of radioactive waste is a surmountable problem. Many reactors now have fields of dry-storage casks nearby. Those casks are transportable. It would be prudent to move them into well-guarded centralized locations. Many nations address the waste storage problem by reprocessing their spent fuel, but that has the side effect of producing material that can be used in weapons. One solution would be a global supplier of reactor fuel, which takes back spent fuel from customers around the world for reprocessing. That’s the kind of idea that can go from “Impractical!” to “Necessary!” in a season, depending on world events.

So is nuclear energy in our future? Maybe yes, maybe not.

Nuclear could go either way. It would take only one more Chernobyl-type event in Russia’s older reactors (all too possible, given the poor state of oversight there) to make the nuclear taboo permanent, to the great detriment of the world’s atmospheric health. Everything depends on getting new and better nuclear technology designed and built.

Finally, after reading Brand’s article and/or these excerpts about nuclear energy, do you think that environmentalists will one day embrace the idea of nuclear plants? Please post your comments below.

Sources: Stewart Brand, for Technology Review, May 2005; Wikipedia website

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Ocean-diving gliders have a large autonomy, mainly because they don’t have propellers. And they are used to gather oceanographic data such as temperature or salinity at a fraction of the cost of research vessels. Several Seagliders built at the University of Washington (UW) just broke endurance records. Two of these Seagliders, which are 1.8 m long and weigh 52 kg, were launched last September between California and Hawaii and reached the island of Kauai after 191 days in a trip of 1,860 miles. Both Seagliders did more than 500 dives down to 1,000 m during their trips. When a Seaglider reaches the surface, where it stays for only five minutes, it determines its position via GPS, uploads its data and downloads its new instructions via satellite. Meanwhile, two other Seagliders are still somewhere in the Labrador Sea for more than 193 days now and have yet to be retrieved. Read more…

Here are the facts about these Seagliders.

Two ocean-diving gliders built at the University of Washington were retrieved late last month near the Hawaiian island of Kauai after setting a world record by traveling a quarter of the way across the Pacific Ocean. Two other UW gliders, awaiting retrieval from the Labrador Sea, have set another world endurance record with a deployment of 193 days as of early April.

The Seagliders used in the Pacific Ocean were deployed in the water mid-way between California and Hawaii last September. They traveled the Pacific for 191 days, covering 1,860 miles. During that time one made 599 dives and the other 559.

And here are more details about how the Seagliders work.

A Seaglider can dive from the surface down 3,300 feet and back up every 3 to 9 hours. It remains at the surface 5 minutes to transmit ocean data that it has collected, relay its position and receive instructions via the Iridium satellite phone network, before diving again. It travels at half a knot, driven not by a spinning propeller but by buoyancy control: a hydraulic system moves oil in and out of an external rubber bladder to force the glider up or down through the ocean. Moving its battery pack causes it to pitch its nose up or down or roll its wings to change compass heading.

And what are they used for?

The temperature, salinity and oxygen data gathered by the Seagliders will help the North Pacific Acoustics Laboratory scientists better understand acoustic propagation — how sound is affected as it moves through the ocean. Acoustics can be used to probe such things as long-term ocean temperature changes and climate variability, and the role of internal waves in ocean mixing, says Bruce Howe, oceanographer with the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory.

Gliders also could be used to monitor changes in the world’s oceans because of storms, such as hurricanes, and other natural events, such as El Niño. Sonar and other sensing devices mounted on gliders may one day routinely scan harbors and seaports for explosive mines or detect divers in areas where they don’t belong.

For more information, you should visit the Seaglider home page. You’ll find its specifications, an image gallery and animations (in QuickTime format).

Sources: University of Washington news release, April 5, 2005; and various websites

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Do you want to use an economical and environmentally friendly biofuel? Just grow grass. Burning grass pellets will produce an energy-efficient biofuel, according to Jerry Cherney, a professor of agriculture at Cornell University. In this news release, “Grass as Fuel,” he says “Burning grass pellets makes sense; after all, it takes 70 days to grow a crop of grass for pellets, but it takes 70 million years to make fossil fuels.” Unfortunately, there is anything like a grass political lobby in Washington, so he might not be heard. But with current oil prices, more and more people will be tempted to use cheaper — and cleaner — sources of energy. Read more…

Here is the introduction of the Cornell University news release.

Grow grass, not for fun but for fuel. Burning grass for energy has been a well-accepted technology in Europe for decades. But not in the United States.

Yet burning grass pellets as a biofuel is economical, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly and sustainable, says a Cornell University forage crop expert.

This alternative fuel easily could be produced and pelleted by farmers and burned in modified stoves built to burn wood pellets or corn, says Jerry Cherney, the E.V. Baker Professor of Agriculture. Burning grass pellets hasn’t caught on in the United States, however, Cherney says, primarily because Washington has made no effort to support the technology with subsidies or research dollars.

Why is it important for environment?

Burning grass pellets makes sense; after all, it takes 70 days to grow a crop of grass for pellets, but it takes 70 million years to make fossil fuels,” says Cherney, who notes that a grass-for-fuel crop could help supplement farmers’ incomes.

Cherney points out that grass biofuel pellets are much better for the environment because they emit up to 90 percent less greenhouse gases than oil, coal and natural gas do. Furthermore, he says, grass is perennial, does not require fertilization and can be grown on marginal farmland.

Cherney recently presented his conclusions about grass biofuel at the Greenhouse Gases & Carbon Sequestration in Agriculture and Forestry conference, held March 21-24 in Baltimore.

You can find the abstract of his talk, “Grass Bioenergy in the Northeastern USA,” on this page. Just scroll a little bit or search for Cherney on the page.

If you’re interested in this subject, here is a link to the July 2004 issue of the “Dairy & Field Crops digest” (PDF format, 12 pages, 728KB). The article “Grass Management for Forage or Biofuel?” appears on pages 7 and 8.

In this article, Cherney argues that “grass is converted to useable heat at over 80% efficiency, with an energy output:input ratio exceeding 10:1, compared to other bioenergy sources with typicalsystem energy output:input ratios around 1:1.”

The cost-effectiveness of pelletized grass as a fuel results from:

• efficient use of low cost marginal farmland for solar energy collection
  
• minimal fossil fuel input use in field production and energy conversion
  
• minimal biomass quality upgrading which limits energy loss from the feedstock
  
• efficient combustion in advanced yet modestly priced and simple to use devices
  
• replacement of expensive high-grade energyforms in space and water heating

Cherney is convincing, but it’s hard to help him while living in Paris.

Sources: Cornell University News Service, March 31, 2005; and various websites

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Two months ago, I told you that the Wildlife Conservation Society was planning to count elephants from space. So I was very intrigued by a very short article from the Inquirer, “Elephants text their location.” This teasing story said that when elephants start to approach their fields, the farmers are alerted by SMS in time to politely ask the elephants to move over and save their crops. The whole story is told on the Save the Elephants (STE) site. In fact, these conservationists are putting GSM/GPS collars around elephants in some areas of Kenya. And the collared elephants are sending SMS messages directly to farmers’ phones. You can even track individual elephants on the Web — if you’re an authorized user. But read more…

Here is the first paragraph of the Inquirer article.

A reliable source informs the INQ that conservationists in Kenya have been fitting elephants with mini mobile phones. The phone gives away the elephant’s location via a text (SMS) message.

Because the Inquirer was short on facts, let’s start with some pictures coming from the Save the Elephants website.

Here is a link to a project progress report (June 2004, PDF format, 12 pages, 899 KB) from which the above pictures have been extracted.

One of the goals of this project which started in February 2004 was to “develop state-of-the-art miniaturised radio-collars using GSM mobile phone technology, for monitoring endangered wildlife.”

Here are some more details about the project.

The new GPS-GSM tags are lighter, cheaper and last longer, and enable the advantages of GPS tracking to be spread to other species which have previously been excluded due to the bulk and weight of current GPS collars. David Gachuche (STE’s software engineer) has designed the Animal Tracking System which will allow users to access the system over the internet, using a standard web browser and view the most current locations of collared animals in (near) real-time [and other ways.]

All these different access points are all fed by the same spatial database that is automatically updated when the GPS-GSM tag sends a message, via Short Message Service (SMS), indicating the latest GPS position of the animal.

And here is one of the first conclusions of this experiment.

Our elephant tracking has already shown that there are certain crucial corridors that need to be left open so that elephants can reach their feeding grounds.

For more information, please visit the STE website.

Sources: Tony Dennis, The Inquirer, March 15, 2005; and Save the Elephants website

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