Technology Trends

Several companies around the world are experimenting with wind-assisted ships, which would reduce fuel consumption at a time where fuel can represent up to 60 percent of the running costs of operating a ship. But another goal is to reduce pollution: the toxic emission volume of the world trade fleet is roughly equivalent to the U.S. one today. In “The new age of sail,” New Scientist describes a ship that will be partially pulled by a high-tech kite flying at an altitude of up to 500 meters where winds are more stable than at sea level. The German designers, who tested a prototype last year, estimate that such a hybrid sailing ship would see a 50 percent reduction of its fuel consumption. Danish and Japanese companies are also designing wind-assisted ships. Read more…

So let’s look at this ship — partially — pulled by a kite.

For several weeks last summer, a team of German engineers sailed back and forth across the Baltic Sea playing with a large inflatable kite. The engineers, from the Hamburg company SkySails, were testing the potential of high-tech kites to pull a ship across the ocean by hitching a ride on winds high above the waves.

But will such a ship be more efficient than today’s ships?

Last year’s trials in the Baltic, aboard an 8-metre model of a cargo vessel, were mostly carried out in unfavourable conditions of weak and variable winds. Nevertheless, they showed that the SkySails kite can generate 1 to 1.15 kilowatts for every square metre of aerofoil. “In favourable winds it would generate a lot more thrust,” says Stephan Wrage, founder of the company. The kite is designed to be retrofitted to ships of almost any size, but SkySail’s largest version, with an area of 2000 to 5000 square metres, will generate propulsive power equivalent to a large ship’s engine, he says.

And of course, this will contribute to reduce fuel operating costs.

For its part, the Danish company of naval architects Knud E. Hansen started another kind of wind-assisted ship back in 1995. You’ll find more details by reading the “Modern Windship Phase II” section on this page.

The company confirms the SkySails’s findings about fuel savings.

Where the weather/wind conditions are reasonable - e.g. on Atlantic routes - fuel savings of about 27% can be achieved. On routes where the superior internal volume capacity of the WindShip can be properly utilised, 50% fuel savings are possible.

And here is what New Scientist adds about the Danish effort.

Could this signal a sea change for sail? “It will now be profitable both environmentally and economically to build the windship,” says Anders Carlberg of Knud E. Hansen. Other new sailing ship projects are already in the works, one in Germany and one in Japan. Carlberg and his team estimate that full-scale trials of their design will start within three years.

It is not just the oil price that has moved in the windships’ favour. The Danish team is confident that it will be able to design a more efficient vessel. Jesper Kanstrup, Knud E. Hansen’s senior naval architect, says that the original designs concentrated on minimising the amount of space the engine and sails took up to maximise cargo space. “They weren’t designed for fuel economy.”

Will these wind-assisted ships be part of the future of sea commerce? I really don’t know. What do you think about these projects?

Sources: Mick Hamer, New Scientist Print Edition, February 26, 2005; and various websites

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A surprising new study from NASA reveals that a new trend about the evolution of phytoplankton in our oceans is emerging. Instead of declining globally by 6 percent between the 1980s and 1990s, phytoplankton levels are now growing, by more than 4 percent between 1998 and 2003. But according to the data gathered by NASA satellites, this evolution is not uniform. The increase is by far larger near the coasts, where the ocean floor is less than 200 meters and where phytoplankton levels grew by more than 10 percent in the last 5 years. At a moment where everyone is concerned by the global warming effect, this is very good news because one of the things phytoplankton does is absorbing carbon dioxide.

Let’s start our today’s story with more details about the importance of phytoplankton.

The tiny ocean plants help regulate our atmosphere and the health of our oceans. Phytoplankton produce half of the oxygen generated by plants on Earth. They also can soften the impacts of climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas. In addition, phytoplankton serve as the base of the ocean food chain, so their abundance determines the overall health of ocean ecosystems.

Now, what are the results of this new study from NASA?

The researchers used NASA satellite data from 1998 to 2003 to show that phytoplankton amounts have increased globally by more than 4 percent. These increases have mainly occurred along the coasts. No significant changes were seen in phytoplankton concentrations within the global open oceans, but phytoplankton levels declined in areas near the center of the oceans, the mid-ocean gyres.

The above images don’t really show it, but ocean colors also have changed.

Mid-ocean gyres are “ocean deserts”, which can only support low amounts of phytoplankton. When viewed by satellite, these phytoplankton-deprived regions look deep-blue, while in aquatic regions where plant life thrives, the water appears greener.

“The ocean deserts are getting bluer and the coasts are getting greener,” said Watson Gregg, an oceanographer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, Md. “The study suggests there may be changes occurring in the biology of the oceans, especially in the coast regions.”

This evolution is so recent that the researchers are cautious before giving conclusions.

“We don’t know the causes of these coastal increases,” said Gregg. “The trends could indicate improved health of the ecosystems as a whole, or they could be a sign of nutrient stress.” Causes of nutrient stress include land run-off that deposits agricultural fertilizers and other nutrients in the oceans. The run-off can promote large algal blooms that can deplete the water of oxygen.

For more technical information, this study has been published on February 8, 2005 by Geophysical Research Letters under the title “Recent trends in global ocean chlorophyll.” Here is a link to the abstract.

A 6-year time series of remotely-sensed global ocean chlorophyll was evaluated using linear regression analysis to assess recent trends. Global ocean chlorophyll has increased 4.1% (P < 0.05). Most of the increase has occurred in coastal regions, defined as bottom depth < 200 m, where an increase of 10.4% was observed. The main contributors to the increase were the Patagonian Shelf, Bering Sea, and the eastern Pacific, southwest African, and Somalian coasts. Although the global open ocean exhibited no significant change, 4 of the 5 mid-ocean gyres (Atlantic and Pacific) showed declines in chlorophyll over the 6 years. In all but the North Atlantic gyre, these were associated with significant increases in sea surface temperature in at least one season. These results suggest that changes are occurring in the biology of the global oceans.

Sources: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center news release, via EurekAlert!, March 3, 2005; and various websites

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In “Life on the Scales,” Science News recently wrote that some simple mathematical equations, known as quarter-power scaling laws, can explain the metabolic rates of living organisms. For example, “an animal’s metabolic rate appears to be proportional to mass to the 3/4 power.” And this “3/4-power law appears to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude.” The ecologists, physicists and chemists behind this research are now successfully applying this equation to plants, fish, full ecosystems and even biology and genetics, by adding a new key parameter: temperature. Please read this fascinating article for many more details and references. But save some time to read another long article, “Ecology’s Big, Hot Idea,” published by PLoS Biology, which states that “the way life uses energy is a unifying principle for ecology in the same way that genetics underpins evolutionary biology.” Read more…

The Science News article starts with a simple observation. Although a mouse has a shorter life than an elephant, both clock approximately the same number of heartbeats during their lives. Simply, their metabolisms are different. Now, let’s go back several decades ago.

Scientists have long known that most biological rates appear to bear a simple mathematical relationship to an animal’s size: They are proportional to the animal’s mass raised to a power that is a multiple of 1/4. These relationships are known as quarter-power scaling laws. For instance, an animal’s metabolic rate appears to be proportional to mass to the 3/4 power, and its heart rate is proportional to mass to the –1/4 power.

In subsequent decades, biologists have found that the 3/4-power law appears to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude.

But nobody had an explanation for this scaling law – until 1997.

The beginnings of an explanation came in 1997, when ecologist James Brown of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, physicist Geoffrey West of Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory, and Brian Enquist, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, described metabolic scaling in mammals and birds in terms of the geometry of their circulatory systems. It turns out, West says, that Rubner was on the right track in comparing surface area with volume, but that an animal’s metabolic rate is determined not by how efficiently it dissipates heat through its skin but by how efficiently it delivers fuel to its cells.

The idea, West says, is that a space-filling surface scales as if it were a volume, not an area. If you double each of the dimensions of your laundry machine, he observes, then the amount of linens you can fit into it scales up by 2³, not 2². Thus, an animal’s effective surface area scales as if it were a three-dimensional, not a two-dimensional, structure.

This law also can be applied to plants, fish, or even cancer growth rates — providing you add a new parameter: temperature.

In 2001, after James Gillooly, a specialist in body temperature, joined Brown at the University of New Mexico, the researchers and their collaborators presented their master equation, which incorporates the effects of size and temperature. An organism’s metabolism, they proposed, is proportional to its mass to the 3/4 power times a function in which body temperature appears in the exponent.

When the researchers filter out the effects of body temperature, most species adhere closely to quarter-power laws for a wide range of properties, including not only life span but also population growth rates. The team is now applying its master equation to more life processes — such as cancer growth rates and the amount of time animals sleep.

Now, it’s time for two key quotes [which don't appear in bold characters in the original article.]

“We’ve found that despite the incredible diversity of life, from a tomato plant to an amoeba to a salmon, once you correct for size and temperature, many of these rates and times are remarkably similar,” says Gillooly.

“Metabolic rate is, in our view, the fundamental biological rate,” Gillooly says. There is a universal biological clock, he says, “but it ticks in units of energy, not units of time.”

Then the researchers applied their master equation to ecosystems such as forests, and even to evolutionary biology, trying to answer this question: “Why do the fossil record and genetic data often give different estimates of when certain species diverged?”

When the researchers use their master equation to correct for the effects of size and temperature, the genetic estimates of divergence times — including those of rats and mice — line up well with the fossil record, says Allen, one of the paper’s coauthors.

As I wrote in the introduction, don’t miss this other paper by John Whitfield in PLoS Biology on a similar subject, “Ecology’s Big, Hot Idea.” Here are the two first paragraphs.

Life is complicated. It comes in all sorts of shapes, sizes, places, and combinations, and has evolved a dizzying variety of solutions to the problem of carrying on living. Yet look inside a cell and life takes on, if not simplicity, then at least a certain uniformity — a genetic system based around nucleic acids, for example, and a common set of chemical reactions for turning food into fuel. And looked at in broad swathes, life shows striking generalities and patterns. Every mammal’s heart will beat about one billion times in its lifetime. Both within and between species, the density of a population declines in a regular way as the size of individuals increases. And the number of species in all environments declines as you move from the equator towards the poles.

Wouldn’t it be good if there were a simple theory that used life’s shared fundamentals to explain its large-scale regularities, via its diversity of individuals? In the past few years, a team of ecologists and physicists have come up with just such a theory. At its heart is metabolism: the way life uses energy is, they claim, a unifying principle for ecology in the same way that genetics underpins evolutionary biology. They believe that energy use, in the form of metabolic rate, can be understood from the first principles of physics, and that metabolic rate can explain growth, development, population dynamics, molecular evolution, the flux of chemicals through the environment, and patterns of species diversity — to name a few.

If you don’t have enough time today, print the two articles I mentioned and read them next weekend. I promise you will not waste your time.

Sources: Erica Klarreich, Science News, Vol. 167, No. 7, p. 106, February 12, 2005; John Whitfield, PLoS Biology, Vol. 2, Issue 12, December 14, 2004

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I’m often impressed by some scientists’ ideas. But today, I’m a little bit worried, as researchers have genetically modified a common plant, the Indian mustard, to absorb more selenium, a toxic heavy metal found in soils polluted by irrigation wastewater. The transgenic plants were four times more efficient at swallowing selenium than natural ones in a contaminated area of California’s Central Valley, according to articles from Nature and Wired News. These field tests are only experiments, but the researchers also want to add genes to other plants to remove different toxic materials from soils, such as mercury. What would happen if such transgenic plants filled with dangerous chemicals start to crossbreed with natural ones? Or if an insect eats these plants before being eaten itself in the natural food chain, leading to some selenium in our food? Read more and tell me what you think…

Let’s start with the good news from the Nature article.

Genetically modified Indian mustard plants have successfully cleaned up excessive selenium in a California field. This is the first field trial for a pollution-busting transgenic plant, and it proves that the technology can work outside the laboratory, say the researchers who carried out the test.

Farmland in certain parts of California is heavily irrigated, and the water dissolves selenium in shale found in the region. As the water evaporates on the surface soil, selenium is concentrated to levels that are toxic to plants. But Indian mustard (Brassica juncea) has a natural resistance to the element, and absorbs it as it takes in water through its roots.

To increase the level of absorption of selenium by the Indian mustard plants, the researchers, led by Norman Terry, a plant biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, added extra genes to the plant. And here are the first field test results.

The researchers created three different strains of the transgenic mustard plants, each producing different enzymes to soak up selenium, and tested them in selenium-contaminated soils alongside wild-type Indian mustard. [And] hey found that the transgenic plants could accumulate up to 4.3 times as much selenium as conventional, wild-type Indian mustard.

The transgenic plants showed up to 80% of the growth expected in uncontaminated soil, whereas the wild-type plants had their growth halved by the selenium. They were harvested after 45 days in the field, but the researchers expect that longer growth periods could remove more selenium, and estimate that the most effective plants removed about 4.4% of the element in the top 25 centimetres of soil.

The process known as phytoremediation, which uses natural plants to remove toxic materials from soil, is not new, and is cheaper than traditional methods, which imply to remove polluted soil some place before burying it elsewhere. But it takes a long time, so adding genes to speed the process is an attractive solution. But what about the long term ecological impact?

The possibility of the transgenic plants crossbreeding with food crops is a worry, admits Clayton Rugh, a plant biologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. “If you’re going to engineer a plant to take up high quantities of metals, you must ensure it doesn’t get into food crops,” he says. “They would have to be carefully contained with measures above and beyond those for genetically modified food crops,” he says.

Another source mentioned by Wired News also admits there are some dangers.

“We don’t know enough about the unintended effects of genetic engineering,” said Gurian-Sherman, senior scientist with the Center for Food Safety. The toxicity of plants can change, or a modified plant could interbreed with wild plants, he said. “What happens when an insect eats one of these plants, and then something else eats that insect?

On the contrary, Terry doesn’t seem concerned by the consequences of such experiments. Read carefully this quote from Nature.

In a useful spin-off, the Indian mustard plants could eventually be used as feed for cattle with insufficient selenium in their diet, says Terry. The team is now trying to boost the plants’ power even more. “We’d like to see increases in accumulation of 10 to 100 times that possible with wild-type plants,” says Terry. “This research is a great start.”

Let me summarize this. First, you add genes to a plant which will then easily absorb dangerous and toxic chemicals. Then you use these plants to feed cows. But why on earth a cow would need to ingest more selenium? And are you sure that you want this selenium in your plate?

I’m not an expert in this field, but these experiments look quite dangerous to me in the long term, especially if they become widespread.

By the way, the research work has been published by Environmental Science & Technology on February 1, 2005. Here is a link to the abstract of the paper called “Field Trial of Transgenic Indian Mustard Plants Shows Enhanced Phytoremediation of Selenium-Contaminated Sediment.”

Can we benefit from this or not? Please post your comments and tell me what you think.

Sources: Mark Peplow, Nature, February 11, 2005; Stephen Leahy, Wired News, February 12, 2005; and various websites

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At Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), researcher Jonathan Weiss, nicknamed the “light wizard,” uses inexpensive soda-straw-like glass tubes for solving a variety of sensing problems. His twelve patents cover areas such as detecting if a car battery is about to die or if dangerous chemical materials are about to escape from a landfill into groundwater. He also developed a sensor which can tell the difference between two liquids in a container. This could be used by oil companies which need to safely determine when to stop pumping oil from the ground before water invades a tank. This market represents about $750 million per year and these sensors should be available in two years according to an interesting story from the Albuquerque Tribune, “Bright Idea: Random chat leads to sensor pact.” Apparently, Weiss found an industrial partner for SNL on a flight between Albuquerque and New York. Read more…

Please read the SNL news release for details about the dead battery problem and the waste detection device through landfills. And let’s focus here on Weiss’s fiber optic sensor that uses light to tell the difference between two liquids in a container.

Imagine you’re in the oil business and you’ve pumped oil and water (just the way it increasingly comes out of the ground) into a holding tank. You want to retrieve only the oil floating atop the water so you can transport the least possible weight from the oil field to a refinery. How do you know — accurately, safely, and simply — when to stop pumping?

Here is the description of Weiss’s solution.

Take two five-foot-long optical fibers made of plastic. Mount them vertically in a tank that holds water with oil on top. Send light down one fiber, and then detect light carried back up by the second fiber. The strength of the detector’s signal depends on the height of the oil/water interface. If the tank is all water, the signal is very strong, and the pumping machine is instructed to stop pumping fluid; there is no oil left.

The Albuquerque Tribune gives more details on why this sensor will be built by Custom Electronics, a New York state company.

When physicists Jonathan Weiss and Allen Anderson, [from Custom Electronics,] met on an airplane, a business opportunity popped out of the quantum mist.

The two didn’t know each other before that flight a year ago, but now Weiss is a Sandia-employed consultant for Anderson’s company, which is working with the lab to license Weiss’ technology.

“My co-worker and I ended up getting separated, and I ended up sitting next to Jonathan and his wife. He told me he was a physicist and I said, hey, I’m a physicist, too,” [said Anderson, the company's director of product development.]

The product could be ready in the next two years according to Anderson. He added that SNL found found a market potential between $250 million and $750 million for the device.

Weiss received a patent in February 2004 for this sensor. You can find technical details on this patent by visiting the United States Patent and Trademark Office and search for patent number 6,693,285.

Here is a direct link to this patent named “Fluorescent fluid interface position sensor.” And here is the abstract.

A new fluid interface position sensor has been developed, which is capable of optically determining the location of an interface between an upper fluid and a lower fluid, the upper fluid having a larger refractive index than a lower fluid. The sensor functions by measurement, of fluorescence excited by an optical pump beam which is confined within a fluorescent waveguide where that waveguide is in optical contact with the lower fluid, but escapes from the fluorescent waveguide where that waveguide is in optical contact with the upper fluid.

Sources: Sandia National Laboratories news release, January 11, 2005; Sue Vorenberg, The Albuquerque Tribune, January 24, 2005; and various websites

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The small town of Galena, Alaska, is tired to pay 28 cents/kwh for its electricity, three times the national average. Today, Galena “is powered by generators burning diesel that is barged in during the Yukon River’s ice-free months,” according to Reuters. But Toshiba, which designs a small nuclear reactor named 4S (for “Super Safe, Small, & Simple”), is offering a free reactor to the 700-person village, reports the New York Times (no reg. needed). Galena will only pay for operating costs, driving down the price of electricity to less than 10 cents/kwh. The 4S is a sodium-cooled fast spectrum reactor — a low-pressure, self-cooling reactor. It will generate power for 30 years before refueling and should be installed before 2010 providing an approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Read more…

Here is the status of the deal as told by Reuters.

Galena officials met with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. If the commission approves the plan, the reactor would be the first new one permitted in the United States since the early 1980s, according to an Alaska Public Radio Network report on Thursday.

Energy to power electricity is important to Galena. Winter temperatures can dip below minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 51 Celsius). Daylight is scarce because of the short days during the winter.

Galena is powered by generators burning diesel that is barged in during the Yukon River’s ice-free months. That is costly and carries its own environmental risks because diesel can spill.

Toshiba, which designs a new 10-megawatt nuclear reactor, offered to install one of these in the hope that other isolated towns will follow, explains the New York Times.

Toshiba offered Galena a free reactor if the town would pay the operating costs, estimated at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, about the national average for power. In December, the City Council voted unanimously to take it.

Galena looked at other sources of energy, such as coal, which pollutes, and solar power, but the sun is not very present at this kind of latitude. So it decided to take the nuclear path.

Here are some details about the 4S reactor.

Toshiba calls its design the 4S reactor, for “super-safe, small and simple.” It would be installed underground, and in case of cooling system failure, heat would be dissipated through the earth. There are no complicated control rods to move through the core to control the flow of neutrons that sustain the chain reaction; instead, the reactor uses reflector panels around the edge of the core. If the panels are removed, the density of neutrons becomes too low to sustain the chain reaction.

Is this really a Super-Safe nuclear reactor?

The design is described as inherently safe, but it does have one riskier feature: It uses liquid sodium, not water, to draw heat away from the core, so the heat can be used to make steam and then electricity.

Designers chose sodium so they could run the reactor about 200 degrees hotter than most power reactors, but still keep the coolant depressurized. (Water at that temperature would make steam at thousands of pounds of pressure a square inch.) The problem is that if sodium leaks, it burns.

Anyway, if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves it — which could cost millions of dollars to Toshiba — the 4S reactor could be installed by 2010. It will use uranium enriched to 20 percent and generate power for 30 years before needing to be disposed of and replaced.

If you’re really interested by this 4S reactor to be installed in Galena, you should read “Public Information and Outreach in Galena, Alaska,” a document prepared by the Washington, D.C., firm Shaw Pittman LLC (PDF format, 20 pages, 360 KB). The above images come from this document.

Sources: Reuters, February 3, 2005; Matthew L. Wald, The New York Times, via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 3, 2005; Shaw Pittman LLC, March 23, 2004

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The use of ocean waves energy is in its infancy today, but can lead to clean, affordable and renewable electrical power. Right now, it’s probably 15 years behind wind energy, but it has a vast potential. For example, experts estimate that 0.2 percent of the ocean’s untapped energy could power the entire world. And Oregon may lead future of wave energy with a project of the deployment of 200 buoys, each of them about 12 feet wide and 12 feet tall. These buoys, located off Reedsport, Oregon, could be installed for an estimated initial cost of $5 million and would produce 50 megawatts, enough to power the business district of downtown Portland. But Oregon is not the only state looking at wave energy technology. Other coastal states and several other countries are also searching to produce clean electricity from ocean waves. Read more…

Let’s start with some quotes from the leading researchers about wave energy at Oregon State University (OSU).

“The world’s oceans are an extremely promising source of clean energy,” said Annette von Jouanne, an OSU professor of electrical engineering. “The technology is still in experimental stages, but we’ve made enough progress in the past couple years that it’s time to start planning a working research and demonstration facility.

“The development of wave energy right now is probably 15-20 years behind wind energy, which is just now starting to achieve some optimal production technologies,” said Alan Wallace, the co-principal investigator at OSU on these projects, and a professor of electrical engineering.

“And just like wind energy, these systems will be more expensive at first, and then the cost will come down and become very competitive,” Wallace said. “But this is really groundbreaking research that can be of enormous value to society, and it’s amazing all of the people who want to get involved.”

So what’s the goal of the current OSU project?

The OSU engineers say that a buoy about 12 feet wide and 12 feet tall, rolling up and down in the ocean swells could produce 250 kilowatts per unit — a modest-sized network of about 200 such buoys could power the business district of downtown Portland. And the winter, the period of highest wave energy electrical production, also coincides with peak electricity demands in the Pacific Northwest.

“One of the other extremely promising possibilities with wave energy is the ability to scale these systems either up or down in size, whatever you need to fit the electrical demand,” von Jouanne said. “Small systems could even be used with individual boats at anchor to generate their own electricity.”

But, as says the Oregonian (reference below), Oregon is not alone.

Several other nations are looking at wave energy technology, including Japan, Australia, China, Sweden, India, Portugal, Ireland and Norway. In addition to Oregon, other coastal states looking into wave power include Maine, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Hawaii and California.

[And] AquaEnergy Group in Washington state has proposed a wave energy pilot plant that will use buoys about three miles off the Olympic Peninsula to generate electricity.

You’ll find more information about this project by following these links:

• Waves power future
  By Mary Ann Albright, Corvallis Gazette-Times, Oregon, February 5, 2005
  
• Electrical experts plot ways to use waves’ potential
  By Richard L. Hill, The Oregonian, February 2, 2005
  
• The O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory at OSU
  
• The Motor Systems Resource Facility (MSRF) at OSU
  
• The prototype buoys of the AquaEnergy Group Ltd.

Sources: David Stauth, Oregon State University news release, via EurekAlert!, February 2, 2005; and various other websites

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Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley Lab are using nanotechnology to learn how to clean up environmental contaminants like nuclear waste. They are also using supercomputers and state-of-the-art imaging to predict how quickly pollutants react with minerals in soils and aquifers. This article from the Daily Californian says they are studying kinetics, or rates, of reactions which occur at the earth’s surface using a nanoscale approach. They started to look at the reactions that take place at the pore scale and plan to expand their scope from nanometers to meters in the months to come. This research has implications for transport of contaminants, especially of radioactive materials, but also for oil or ore recovery. Read more…

Here is the introduction of the Daily Californian article.

Nanotechnology, normally used for work with the crystal structures of silicone chips and pure oxides, is being used for something a little more dirty at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, like learning how to clean up environmental contaminants like nuclear waste.

Researchers Glenn Waychunas and Carl Steefel are using techniques that allow them to study the environment at the nanoscale as part of the new Center for Environmental Kinetics Analysis (CEKA) program, based at Pennsylvania State University.

The goal of the program is to gain insight into the kinetics, or rates, of reactions that occur at the earth’s surface using a nanoscale approach that better models what happens in the real world as opposed to in the lab.

The CEKA program uses a multidisciplinary approach and includes chemists, geochemists, biochemists, soil scientists and engineers.

[For their part,] Waychunas and Steefel are working on the reactions that take place on the pore scale, like the flow of water through the minerals in an aquifer.

“What has been left out is determining rates at the pore scale, we’re measuring rates at different scales to see how biogeochemical and microbial reactions scale up,” Steefel said.

What will be the impact of this program, which has received $6.7 million from the NSF?

This can have implications for transport of contaminants, especially of radioactive materials. Researchers seek to determine reaction rates to determine how long it would take for a plume of pollutant to spread through different mineral substrates.

The next scale is supercomputer modeling, according to Waychunas. “This will model chemical reactions and integrate fluid flow through pore structures, using more complicated fluids and soils. Then we’ll apply them to real systems, like the Yucca Mountains, natural aquifers, oil recovery, ore recovery, and natural gas,” Waychunas said.

For more information, you can read “Taking a Peek At Our Environmental Future,” published by Berkeley Lab View, and from which I extracted the above photograph. Here are more details about Steefel’s work.

Steefel, also a geochemist in the Earth Sciences Division, will also start small and then try to go big. First, he wants to gain a mechanistic understanding of the processes that control biogeochemical reaction rates in porous material by focusing on a single pore. In a common scenario, there may be a reactive mineral on one side of a pore and biofilm on the other side. How do they communicate? To answer this question, Steefel and several other scientists will conduct reactive flow experiments using single-pore microfluidic devices. They’ll also monitor how fluid reacts with porous samples using imaging technology with a spatial resolution of about 30 nanometers, such as the Advanced Light Source’s scanning transmission x-ray microscope (STXM). They will probably begin with a calcium carbonate mineral that has been studied extensively — but never at the pore scale — and observe the rate at which a slightly acidic solution reacts with the mineral as it flows through.

Next, this pore-by-pore data will be used to develop supercomputer-derived models that depict the rates of these reactions in a much larger sample of porous material.

Here is his conclusion.

“The idea of scaling kinetics is a frontier issue, but that’s what this project is about,” says Steefel. “If we develop a mechanistic understanding of reactive transport at several scales, then we can devise predictive models for bioremediation, chemical weathering, and carbon sequestration. And only through the convergence of modeling, supercomputers, synchrotron techniques, and advanced microfluidic reactors is this possible.”

Sources: Francesca Hopkins, The Daily Californian, January 19, 2005; Dan Krotz, Berkeley Lab View, November 12, 2004; and various websites

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Once again, I’m amazed by the creativity of scientists. Researchers at Cornell University have made a brilliant and environmentally friendly discovery: plastics made from orange peel and a greenhouse gas. By adding a zinc catalyst to a mix of citrus fruits, such as oranges, and carbon dioxide, they found a way to make a new polymer called polylimonene carbonate, very similar to polystyrene, a petroleum-based plastic. This is a double whammy: it will reduce existing carbon dioxide, almost certainly responsible for the global warming effect, while reducing future emissions. Of course, time will pass between this discovery and its practical applications. But ultimately, this will greatly beneficial to all of us. Read more…

A Cornell University research group has made a sweet and environmentally beneficial discovery — how to make plastics from citrus fruits, such as oranges, [which contain limonene oxide ]and carbon dioxide.

Limonene is a carbon-based compound produced in more than 300 plant species. In oranges it makes up about 95 percent of the oil in the peel.

In industry, explains Geoffrey Coates, a Cornell professor of chemistry and chemical biology, the orange peel oil is extracted for various uses, such as giving household cleaners their citrus scent. The oil can be oxidized to create limonene oxide. This is the reactive compound that Coates and his collaborators used as a building block.

The other building block they used was carbon dioxide (CO₂), an atmospheric gas that has been rising steadily over the past century and a half — due largely to the combustion of fossil fuels — becoming an environmentally harmful greenhouse gas.

By using their catalyst to combine the limonene oxide and CO₂, the Coates group produced a novel polymer — called polylimonene carbonate — that has many of the characteristics of polystyrene, a petroleum-based plastic currently used to make many disposable plastic products.

The above diagram shows the very simple process of making polymers by adding a catalyst to a mix of limonene oxide and carbon dioxide (Credit: Cornell University)

And here is Coates’s conclusion.

“Almost every plastic out there, from the polyester in clothing to the plastics used for food packaging and electronics, goes back to the use of petroleum as a building block,” Coates observes. “If you can get away from using oil and instead use readily abundant, renewable and cheap resources, then that’s something we need to investigate. What’s exciting about this work is that from completely renewable resources, we were able to make a plastic with very nice qualities.”

The research work has been published by the Journal of the American Chemical Society (Vol. 126, No. 37, September 22, 2004, Pages 11404-11405, Link).

Here is a direct link to the abstract of this paper called “Alternating Copolymerization of Limonene Oxide and Carbon Dioxide.”

For more information, you can check these pages about Geoffrey Coates and his research group.

Here is what Coates says about his research on polymers created from renewable resources, and more specifically about the copolymerization of CO₂ and epoxides.

Carbon dioxide is an ideal synthetic feedstock since it is abundant, inexpensive, nontoxic, and nonflammable. Although it is estimated that Nature uses CO₂ to make over 200 billion tons of glucose by photosynthesis each year, synthetic chemists have had embarrassing little success in developing efficient catalytic processes that exploit this attractive raw material. There has been considerable recent interest in the development of catalysts for the alternating copolymerization of carbon dioxide with epoxides to produce aliphatic polycarbonates. Due to the low cost and accessibility of the monomers and the attractive properties of polycarbonates, the development of new, efficient initiators for this polymerization process is a significant scientific goal. We have recently discovered a new class of well-defined, highly active zinc-based catalysts that copolymerize carbon dioxide and epoxides under exceptionally mild conditions. These catalysts are remarkable since they are several orders of magnitude more active than the current commercial catalysts.

Let’s hope that this discovery quickly leaves the lab…

Sources: Sarah Davidson, Cornell University news release, January 17, 2005; and various websites

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Scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) are now counting the animals in their Bronx zoo with the help of a satellite orbiting 280 miles above the Earth — and New York. In this news release, they say they’re so pleased with the results that they plan to count wildlife populations in remote locations in other parts of the world. In the months to come, they’ll count “elephants and giraffes in Tanzania, flamingos in South America, and elk, bison and antelope in Wyoming.” They add that you need a “trained eye” to spot the animals, and believe me, it’s true. They released images which look like a bunch of messy pixels to my “untrained eyes.” But read more…

The keyword in the legend above is “trained eye.” Personally, I don’t really spot a giraffe in this satellite image. And you, can you find the giraffe in this larger image?

Here is the introduction of the WCS news release.

Scientists with the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) have recently been counting their zoo animals from a lofty perch: namely, outer space. Using high-tech cameras fixed to an orbiting satellite 280 miles overhead, a WCS scientific team tallied some of the zoo’s own animal collection to see if satellites can help count wildlife populations in remote locations throughout the world.

The WCS team is currently analyzing high-tech maps produced by the satellite, which orbited the zoo last Wednesday, Nov. 10th. So far, everything from giraffes to Thomson’s gazelles have been spotted with startling clarity. If the technology proves accurate, WCS is hopeful that it can be used to monitor endangered wildlife populations that live in hard-to-reach locations.

You’ll find other details in this NASA news release, a slightly rephrased version of the WCS one, but which contains pictures, such as the one above.

Using cameras fixed to an orbiting satellite 450 kilometers (280 miles) overhead, WCS scientists say that they will be able to take high resolution photographs of specific areas to determine the wildlife composition within that area. They will then compare images from different dates to see changes, either population growth or decline, over time. The satellite, called Quickbird, is owned by DigitalGlobe, a private company.

Launched in 2001, QuickBird is still one of the only commercial remote sensing satellites capable of gathering sub-meter resolution. Its subsystem captures 0.61-meter-resolution panchromatic imagery, and 2.4-meter multi-spectral imagery. It will produce 11 x 11-km snapshots to 11 x 225-km strip maps. [These details come from this page at Kodak website.]

For more information about this satellite, you can check the QuickBird Specifications and some QuickBird Satellite Images.

Sources: Wildlife Conservation Society news release, via EurekAlert!, November 17, 2004; NASA news release, January 17, 2005; and various websites

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Robotics news are dominated these days by the $100 Robosapien toy or by the latest version of Honda’s ASIMO, that you will never been able to buy, even if you put a cool US$1 million on the table. But other recent news are worth mentioning. In Florida, according to the Miami Herald (free subscription), a small company is developing a robotic arm for surgeons which could save the healthcare industry $15 billion a year. And did you know that solar-powered autonomous underwater robots are now monitoring the waters of Lake George, N.Y.? On the other coast, PARC’s pliable ‘polybots’ will reconfigure themselves to act independently on earthquake scenes or in space. And in New Zealand, robot experts are creating servants of the future able to serve us the drink we want. Elsewhere, in Korea, the government wants to deploy two-legged networked robots in post offices later this year. In a long interview to the Korea Times, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Raj Reddy says the network-based robot is a great idea. Read more…

Please read all the articles linked above for more informatio. Below are only essential excerpts and pictures.

Let’s start with the robotic arm from Z-KAT.

The new firm is using technology licensed from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. ”This is what they call haptic robotics,” says Ferre. ”It is a human interactive tool,” so that the surgeon holding the arm has the touch and feel just as if her own fingers were holding the instrument.

The key is that the small arm can do a knee replacement with an inch-long incision, compared with cuts of 7 to 12 inches for traditional surgery.

The arm, trademarked as Tactical Guidance System, must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which Ferre expects to happen fairly quickly because the FDA has already given approval to a more basic version of the arm.

Now, let’s look at what Rensselaer researchers are doing with solar underwater robots.

A collaborative group of researchers are conducting experiments with underwater robots at Rensselaer’s Darrin Fresh Water Institute (DFWI) on Lake George, N.Y., as part of the RiverNet project, an NSF-funded initiative. The group is working to develop a network of distributed sensing devices and water-monitoring robots, including solar-powered autonomous underwater vehicles (SAUVs), for detection of chemical and biological trends that may guide the management and improvement of water quality.

[Additional note: you'll find all the details about the experiments done between October 17 and 22, 2004 here.]

PARC’s modular reconfigurable robots, or polybots are an entirely different story. Sometimes, they’re called morphing or mutating robots, but why would you use these reconfigurable robots?

“The problem with a conventional robot is you spend a lot of money building this one robot that does one task very well,” says Craig Eldershaw, [a research engineer at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center).] “A modular robot can change its shape to adapt to a particular job. To wash dishes, it needs small delicate arms and fingers. For gardening, it could have a couple big strong arms to hold a shovel and big treads to move through mud.”

That kind of robotic domestic help is as much as three decades away, he acknowledges. But experimental search-and-rescue bots could be deployed in earthquake- or bomb-racked buildings within the next few years, he says.

Morphing robots also could become space explorers.

PARC recently took on a long-term NASA contract to develop a robotic arm that could move around the outside of a next-generation space shuttle freely and convert itself into several arms or a claw if the need arises. “Think in-space construction or assembly,” Mr. Eldershaw says. “Any time you can prevent someone having to go out into space in a suit you’ve won a lot of friends at NASA.”

Mark Yim, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who set up the modular robotics research group at PARC after completing his doctorate at Stanford, is leading a team that has taken on a NASA contract to build a morphing Mars explorer. To demonstrate the robot’s ability to assist with human life support, the experimental robot will be given the task of growing and nurturing a small plant inside a sealed environmental chamber.

It’s time to move to another continent, and to robots willing to serve us our favorite cocktails — maybe not this year — but in a foreseenable future.

“(In) 15 years’ time, I’d estimate something like this would serve drinks,” says Australian Tribotix robotics and electronics company engineering manager Steve Mitchell, putting a humanoid-shaped robot through its paces, literally. They’ll be that common.”

He remote-controls the 30cm-tallrobot and fascinated conference-goers cluster, watching it walk, bend forward and backward and move its arms, legs, torso and head independently. It can also slide skiing-style and perform acrobatics such as headstands.

Meanwhile, Korea is introducing a competitor with Honda’s Asimo. The 1.2-meter-tall KHR-3, which weighs roughly 55 kilograms, can walk by using 41 built-in motors and numerous joints and can also shake hands or lift objects with its five-fingered hands.

Korea’s officials also think they’re fast catching Japanese in robotics.

“In order to understand the humanoid development, we must split two facets of the mechanics and intelligence. Mechanically, we lag behind Japan 2-3 years, but we are almost on par with the country in intelligence,” a project manager said.

These robots will be introduced next year in five different projects, three for home usage and two for post offices.

To conclude this long post, I just want to say I was disappointed by the Korea Times’s interview of Raj Reddy, a person I really respect. His interview looks like a press release, very different from what you can read in a recent effort he made for promoting $250 computing devices for developing countries.

Sources: John Dorschner, The Miami Herald, December 6, 2004; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, December 6, 2004; Janet Rae-Dupree, Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal, December 10, 2004; Lee Matthews, Manawatu Standard, New Zealand, December 10, 2004; Kim Tae-gyu, The Korea Times, November 23 and December 19, 2004; Byron Spice, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 20, 2004

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Observations from several satellites launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) and other organizations have been gathered to produce the most detailed heat map of the Mediterranean. With a resolution of two square kilometers for an area of about 3 million square kilometers, an equivalent ground-based map would have needed almost 1.5 million thermometers put into the water. This ESA news release adds that sea surface temperature (SST) is an important variable for weather forecasting and for checking the rate of global warming. In fact, as water takes longer than air to warm up or cool down, the top layer of our oceans is basically acting as a reservoir of heat. Did you know that “the top two meters of ocean alone store all the equivalent energy contained in the atmosphere?” I didn’t, so read more…

Before going further, let’s look at this best-ever Mediterranean heat map.

This ultra high-resolution sea surface temperature map of the Mediterranean could only have been made with satellites. Any equivalent ground-based map would need almost a million and a half thermometers placed into the water simultaneously, one for every two square kilometres of sea.

This most detailed ever heat map of all 2 965 500 square kilometres of the Mediterranean, the world’s largest inland sea is being updated on a daily basis as part of ESA’s Medspiration project.

With sea surface temperature (SST) an important variable for weather forecasting and increasingly seen as a key indicator of climate change, the idea behind Medspiration is to combine data from multiple satellite systems to produce a robust set of sea surface data for assimilation into ocean forecasting models of the waters around Europe and also the whole of the Atlantic Ocean.

But why is this so important to precisely measure sea surface temperatures?

The temperature of the surface of the ocean is an important physical property that strongly influences the transfer of heat energy, momentum, water vapour and gases between the ocean and the atmosphere.

And because water takes a long time to warm up or cool down the sea surface functions as an enormous reservoir of heat: the top two metres of ocean alone store all the equivalent energy contained in the atmosphere.

The whole of their waters store more than a thousand times this same value — climatologists sometimes refer to the oceans as the ‘memory’ of the Earth’s climate, and measuring SST on a long-term basis is the most reliable way to establish the rate of global warming.

Please read the full ESA’s news release for more details and references, but for your viewing pleasure, here is another great picture from the Atlantic ocean taken with one of the instruments of ESA’s Envisat.

Sources: European Space Agency news release, December 15, 2004

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Researchers from the Netherlands, France and Portugal are working together on a European Union research project called H-Alpha Solar. And they have developed very thin flexible solar panels that can be woven into fabrics, reports the Scotsman in this article. In about three years, you’ll be able to wear jackets that will recharge your phones while you walk. Or you’ll become a very happy camper under a tent covered with flexible films of solar modules. No more batteries to carry! And there are even more good news. This will not empty your wallet. This technology is cheap, about $2 per watt. Read more… UPDATE (December 17, 2004): An alert reader named Julien posted a comment about this entry. A company based in Switzerland, Flexcell, is already selling flexible, custom-designed solar cells and modules. So you don’t have to wait for three years to buy some.

The Scotsman decided to start its article with a touch of humor.

Mobile phone users left talking to themselves when their battery runs out in the middle of a call could soon see an end to their frustration as scientists perfect a way to recharge electrical equipment while on the move.

Researchers are investigating ways flexible solar panels can be sewn into clothing and other textiles so electrical equipment can be recharged without being connected to a mains supply.

According to the New Scientist magazine, the project could soon lead to a tent whose flysheet charges batteries all day so campers can have light all night, or a roll-out plastic sheet which powers cells to operate a DVD player.

The European Union research project called H-Alpha Solar is at the origin of this technology.

For more information about the H-Alpha Solar project, you can read this EUROPA press release about “European research on photovoltaics and biomass” or this presentation named “H-Alpha Solar: Thin film, silicon based, plastic foil Solar Modules”(PDF format, 12 pages, 1.18 MB). Below are some pictures extracted from this presentation.

Now, let’s return to the Scotsman for some more details about the technology.

Gerrit Kroesen, a physicist at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, who led the development team, said: “This technology will be a lot easier to handle than the old glass solar panels.”

His team has made its solar cells flexible simply by making them very thin, but the advance has also involved a degree of compromise in their ability to produce electricity efficiently. While cutting-edge solar panels now operate at an efficiency of about 20 per cent, the new flexible cells are only 7 per cent efficient. However, the manufacturers believe that the reduction in the generating capacity is worth accepting for a cell they believe will be more useful and robust.

So you’ll wear jackets with solar panels in three years. But will this be expensive? Not at all, according to the researchers.

A projected full-scale manufacturing plant would produce panels at a cost of under £1 per watt (about $1.94 or 1.45 euro). As such, an A4 sized panel sewn into the back of a jacket and costing less than £7 (about $13 or 10 euros)would charge a mobile phone during a summer stroll in the countryside. Provided mobile users kept within range of the transmitting masts that relay a call to the networks, phones would never again be out of action.

Is this good or bad? You’ll decide.

Sources: James Reynolds, The Scotsman, December 16, 2004; and various web sites

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I bet most of you have never heard about Argo, an ambitious scientific project about the observation of our oceans. This project is endorsed by 18 countries and just reached a milestone: there are today more than 1,500 robotic floats reporting about salinity changes or predicting El Niño events, among other ones. This news release from the University of California at San Diego says that the Argo floats, which are autonomous ocean-traveling robots programmed to sink more than a mile below the ocean surface, are helping scientists all over the world to look at the future of our whole planet. And in 2007, when the deployment is completed, 3,000 underwater robots will help us to better understand the changes in our climate. Read more…

Even in a press release, you can find some real facts.

Researchers with the international Argo program announced they have reached the point where 1,500 ocean-traveling float instruments — half the target 3,000-float array — are now operating. This marks an important milestone in the program’s mission to capture valuable data around the globe.

The Argo floats, which are robotically programmed to record and transmit data, are uniquely positioned to provide important information about climate and weather phenomena. Other applications of Argo information include: ocean heat storage and climate change; ocean salinity changes due to rainfall; ocean-driven events such as El Niño; impacts of ocean temperature on fisheries and regional ecosystems; interactions between the ocean and monsoons; and how the oceans drive hurricanes and typhoons.

If your screen as enough pixels, you should see above a cross section of one float (left) (Credit: Southampton Oceanographic Centre) and one of the three models of floats, the PROVOR, shortly before recovery by the Japanese coastguard vessel Takuyo (right) (Credit: Scripps/UCSD Argo information). You can find many more pictures in this picture gallery on the Scripps/UCSD Argo information site.

The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, (NOAA), provides additional information and pictures in this story.

“This was just a dream back in 1998,” said Conrad C. Lautenbacher, a NOAA administrator. “Today, the dream is a reality and these devices prove that a global network of robotic instruments can provide the information we need to enhance our understanding of climate, weather and our oceans.”

And if you like acronyms, you’ll appreciate this quote.

Argo is a major contributor to the World Climate Research Programme’s Climate Variability and Predictability Experiment (CLIVAR) project and to the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE). The Argo array is part of the Global Climate Observing System/Global Ocean Observing System (GCOS/GOOS).

Sources: University of California,San Diego, news release, November 30, 2004; and various websites

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