Category Archives: science

World Oceans Day : theBlu

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzkJYgjsOno[/youtube]

Inspired by the Oceans, theBlu is a socially-connected, global interactive app. Each time you participate, your interactions and connections impact the flow of life in theBlu and everyone’s experience of it.

TheBlu is created and curated Academy Award-winning leaders and world-class artists and developers – we call them Makers. Each time you purchase beautiful species and habitats to add to the globally-connected Ocean, you support oceanic conservation.

Once you install theBlu app, you can:

Explore and experience a beautiful online 3D underwater world as easily as browsing the Web.

Connect and interact with your friends via Facebook and go diving together in theBlu.

Have fun learning about the Oceans because theBlu is both entertaining and educational.

Support oceanic conservation each time you purchase 3D species and habitat art work.

Solar Hair Panels from Nepal

A schoolboy from Nepal has come up with a recession-busting new solar panel which replaces the silicon component with human hair. Milan Karki, an 18-year-old student from the region of Khotang, devised the idea after discovering that hair pigment Melanin acts as an energy converter.

Each panel, which is around 15 inches square, produces 9 Volts (18 Watts) of energy, and costs $38 to make. This, it has to be said, is mainly due to the price of the raw materials: half a kilo of human hair costs around 25¢ in Nepal. Karki is hoping to commercialize his invention, which can charge a cellphone or power batteries to provide an evening’s worth of light, and eventually mass produce it.

“First I wanted to provide electricity for my home, then my village,” says Karki, who was inspired by British physicist Stephen Hawking. “Now I am thinking for the whole world. We have begun the long walk to save the planet.” (Source)

Desert Manufacturing

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/25401444[/vimeo]

Solar-sintering aims to raise questions about the future of manufacturing and triggers dreams of the full utilisation of the production potential of the world’s most efficient energy resource – the sun. Whilst not providing definitive answers, this experiment aims to provide a point of departure for fresh thinking. :Read on:

GM Virus Solar Cells?

MIT reported on Monday that researchers have a used genetically modified virus to produce structures that improve solar-cell efficiency by about one-third.

MIT researchers said they have found a way to make significant improvements to the power-conversion efficiency of solar cells by using a tiny virus to perform detailed assembly work at the microscopic level.

Sunlight hits a light-harvesting material in a solar cell, which releases electrons that can produce an electric current.

The research of this new study is based on findings that carbon nanotubes can enhance the efficiency of electron collection from a solar cell’s surface.

.:redorbit.com->

Frogs Going Extinct?

Apparently, it ain’t easy being green.  This has less to do with “green” and more to do with the fact that we unanimously like frogs here at MNP.

It is the greatest mass extinction since the dinosaurs. Population by population, species by species, amphibians are vanishing off the face of the Earth. Despite international alarm and a decade and a half of scientists scrambling for answers, the steady hemorrhaging of amphibians continues like a leaky faucet that cannot be fixed or a wound that will not heal. Large scale die-offs of frogs around the world have prompted scientists to take desperate measures to try to save those frogs they can, even bathing frogs in Clorox solutions and keeping them in Tupperware boxes under carefully controlled conditions to prevent the spread of a deadly fungus. Will it ever be safe to return the frogs back to the ecosystem from which they were taken? [Original Source]

North Pacific Trash Gyre?

Recent events – including my own brewing exploits – have forced me to reconsider how much trash/pollution that we dump into the ocean on a daily basis. I mean, just today I drank 4 cans of soda, ate two meals out of Styrofoam containers (with three sets of plastic silverware and a stack of napkins). One you start to add things together, it’s a pretty staggering picture how much trash an average North American produces, just living a normal life. Now imagine that you actually produce something useful to society in any way, and you start to enter into a quagmire of epic proportions. I mean, I brew my own beer, which has got to be environmentally friendly in some way. However, in brewing, the cleaner your materials are the less chance you have of your beer being infected by wild yeasts. That, generally, ends up in a few teaspoons of iodine dissolved in a few gallons of water being dumped down the drain. Epic, mostly because it’s pretty clear that if and when we destroy our environment, the picnic’s over. Everything adds up.

Rant ended, I saw this article over at The Oyster’s Garter about the supposed “North Pacific Trash Gyre,” which is what it sounds like: a huge floating pile of Trash in the Pacific. Because our earth is some 75% water, it’s not a big deal that you don’t particularly notice this “trash gyre,” an effing whirpool of muck south of Cali, but it damn sure is a big deal that it’s there. And it’s the size of Texas.

The Pacific is not big enough, however, to hide all the plastic crap that comes pouring off North American and Asia. Many of the broken flipflops, lost plastic bags, abandoned waterbottles, and so forth collect in the North Pacific Gyre, which is essentially a big slow gentle whirlpool. But instead of sucking the trash down, it just collects at the center, forming a floating trash heap the size of Texas. LINK

Although the articles I quoted are old, The Oyster’s Garter, apparently run by a Miriam Goldstein, is probably the best continuing blog I’ve read on this subject in my short week of research.  Another article over there deals with the lack of images relevant to the story:

To really get a sense of how much plastic is in there, you have to do a trawl, which entails dragging a net with a bucket on the end behind your boat. Here’s a photo of a bongo trawl taken off of southern California. (Credit: Barbeau Lab, SIO) And here’s a photo of what a normal bongo trawl should produce – lots of zooplankton, a few invertebrates, and the occasional small fish.

Now, contrast this with the results of a trawl from the North Pacific Gyre. Here’s the bongo net being hauled up – see how the ocean looks normal? But the contents – plastic, plastic, and more plastic.* (Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation).  When all that plastic collects somewhere, you get beaches like this one in the NW Hawaiian Islands. LINK.

One dude was so struck by (what basically amounts to) the huge pile o’ shit in the ocean that he went on to found an organization dedicated to studying this situation.  Some of their pictures are used in this post.  You can find their page here: http://www.algalita.org/

The Botany of Desire

I was flipping through the channels the other week- that’s a lie-my home TV is just usually on PBS- and I saw this “Botany of Desire” program. It’s based on a book by Michael Pollan (he should win an aptonym), the dude who wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma amongst other titles, which are all highly recommended reads, for those of you who need to be told to read a book now and then.

The Botany of Desire mainly deals with four plants [canibus, tulip, potato, and apple] and how they’ve domesticated humankind over their existence. Even more than that, Botany is an exploration into how animals and plants coexist, enable, and even manipulate each other on a macro scale.

Anyway, I was excited to watch this program, and not just because it passed the time on the stationary bike (or because of the orange and green nuggies in the preview). I think you’ll like it if you give it a few minutes of attention. Don’t ya just love PBS? Support them, my ninjas, please.

Click here to watch the Full Length Program