Smart Water

A standalone desalinator needs 17 gallons of diesel fuel and 66.5 kilowatts of
electricity to make 1,000 gallons of freshwater, but now, the Solar Cube, (made
by Spectra Watermakers in California), churns out 1,500 gallons of drinking water
on just 22 kilowatts of its own solar and wind power. The innovation is a pump
that triples efficiency by recapturing hydraulic pressure during the filtering
process. Solar Cubes are now bringing freshwater to remote regions and places
short on infrastructure and electricity without paying the CO2 price – way cool.

Electric Asphalt

Rajib Mallick an engineer at Worcester Polytechnic Institute who studies the
effect of solar radiation on cities, has devised a way to harness heat from baking
blacktop and turn it into electricity. His system pumps water — an excellent heat
conductor — through a network of copper pipes embedded in asphalt. As the water
circulates, it pulls heat from the scorching surface and produces steam to drive a
turbine that cranks out electricity. Mallick is partnering with the University of

Massachusetts Dartmouth and the optics firm Novotech to install a full-scale system
beneath a 10,000-square-foot parking lot near Worcester, Massachusetts, next
summer. By supplying electricity to the adjacent buildings, he expects the $200,000
system to pay for itself in energy savings in a decade.

Plug-N-Play Cars

Zero to 60 mph in about nine seconds may sound sluggish, but it’s a breakthrough
for a zero-emissions, all-electric car that can travel up to 100 miles on a single
charge and hit speeds of 85 mph. That’s the claim of the i MiEV (for “Mitsubishi
Innovative motor Electric Vehicle”), a new plug-in four-door coupe. The i MiEV runs
on a pack of 22 lithium-ion batteries, but unlike other electric cars, including the
Chevy Volt and Tesla Roadster, the i MiEV doesn’t require a liquid cooling system to
avoid overheating. “Proprietary metals in the battery design let us do away with it,”
says Moe Durand, the communications manager for Mitsubishi Motors North America. This
makes the i MiEV lighter and more efficient, which — combined with a small, rear-
mounted electric motor — gives it plenty of zip and extended range. The company is
also developing a two-door i MiEV Sport with a planned top speed of 122 mph and a
124-mile range. Still a concept, the sportier version will have a rooftop
photovoltaic panel for extra power, heat-deflecting windows to save AC, and an
interior made from polymer-producing plants. Mitsubishi is now fleet-testing the
four-door in the U.S. and will sell a $28,000 model in Japan this summer.

source: Popular Science

If you are looking on how to break into the new green movement but are not sure on
how to start.  Well, the Mitchell Technical Institute is providing a training
course, it is located in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and it is offering a degree
in wind turbine technology.

They talked with utility providers and firms that are putting up the wind farms
and tried to determine what it is they need for a worker.  There probably are fewer
than two dozen such programs in the nation.

Starting next fall, students can choose between a one-year program that grants a
diploma to be a wind turbine technician and a two-year degree that qualifies them
for more advanced work.

If you wanted to get more into the electronics, the troubleshooting delivery,
and those types of things away from the pure mechanics of it, you would come back
for a second year. Along with several general education requirements that needed
to be completed, at the end of five semesters, an associated applied science degree
would be given.

For those construction companies who are installing the wind turbines, the one
year course may fit their needs. Students must complete a summer internship in
order to complete the curriculum requirements.

Should you be interested in teaching such a course, they are currently looking to
hire.

Mariah Power, the manufacturer of the Windspire®, a residential and commercial wind power appliance, was recognized in “Best of What’s New” in the green tech category by Popular Science in its December 2008 issue.

Windspire turbine

The Windspire is a 30-foot tall, propeller-free, vertical-axis wind turbine designed for harnessing wind power in urban, suburban and rural locations for both residential and commercial use. Each year, Popular Science reviews thousands of new products and innovations and chooses the top 100 winners across 11 categories for inclusion in its annual “Best of What’s New” issue, the best-read issue of the year. To win, a product or technology must represent a significant step forward in its category.

This award comes on the heels of the company’s announcement of its first volume manufacturing facility in Michigan that will be up and running next year, and the first multi-unit commercial installation of six Windspires at Devon Bank the first “green bank” in the Chicago, Illinois area.

Should you want one of these, the cost is approximately $5,000.00 plus $1000 for installation which only takes a couple of hours. This unit will generate 1.2 kW (1.2 kilowatt, or 1200 watts).

And to take the bite out of any sticker shock, Congress passed legislation, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, H.R. 1424, that includes a new federal-level investment tax credit to help consumers purchase small wind turbines for home, farm, or business use. A few hours ago, President Bush signed the bill into law. Owners of small wind systems with 100 kilowatts (kW) of capacity and less can receive a credit for 30% of the total installed cost of the system, not to exceed $4,000. The credit will be available for equipment installed from today through December 31, 2016. For turbines used for homes, the credit is limited to the lesser of $1,000 per kW or $4,000 of capacity.

So, have a wind turbine installed and get a 30% tax break right away, plus (depending on your kwh rate), completely pay for itself in a couple of years.

Give this a try…. Internet Marketing Crash Course

For you futurists, geeks and of course, you greenies……… look at this!

Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science By Betsy Mason
A new crop of supercomputers is breaking down the petaflop speed barrier, pushing
high-performance computing into a new realm that could change science more profoundl
than at any time since Galileo, leading researchers say.

When the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was announced at the
international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely
managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors
broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations
per second, the first two computers to do so.

These computers aren’t just faster than those they pushed further down the list, they<!–more–>
will enable a new class of science that wasn’t possible before. As recently described in
Wired magazine, these massive number crunchers will push simulation to the forefront of
science.

Scientists will be able to run new and vastly more accurate models of complex phenomena:
Climate models will have dramatically higher resolution and accuracy, new materials for
efficient energy transmission will be developed and simulations of scramjet engines will
reach a new level of complexity.

“The scientific method has changed for the first time since Galileo invented the
telescope (in 1609),” said computer scientist Mark Seager of Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory.

Supercomputing has made huge advances over the last decade or so, gradually packing on
the ability to handle more and more data points in increasingly complex ways. It has
enabled scientists to test theories, design experiments and predict outcomes as never
before. But now, the new class of petaflop-scale machines is poised to bring about major
qualitative changes in the way science is done.

“The new capability allows you to do fundamentally new physics and tackle new problems,”
said Thomas Zacharia, who heads up computer science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
Tennessee, home of the second place Cray XT5 Jaguar supercomputer. “And it will
accelerate the transition from basic research to applied technology.”

Breaking the petaflop barrier, a feat that seemed astronomical just two years ago, won’t
just allow faster computations. These computers will enable entirely new types of science
that couldn’t have been done before. This new generation of petascale machines will move
scientific simulation beyond just supporting the two main branches of science, theory and
experimentation, and into the foreground. Instead of just hypotheses being tested with
experiments and observations, large-scale extrapolation and prediction of things we can’t
observe or that would be impractical for an experiment, will become central to many
scientific endeavors.

“It’s getting to the point where simulation is actually the third branch of science,”
Seager said. “We say that nature is always the arbiter of truth, but it turns out our
ability to observe nature is fundamentally limited.”

Source: Wired Science

This gives me goosebumps at just the thought of the potential!

Afsaneh Rabiei, Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at
North Carolina State University, has invented a space-age material so light and
strong that it could revolutionize everything from vehicle bumpers to armor to
biomedical devices.  A brand new material that can save energy and lives.

“Basically, it is a new material for all sorts of safety devices,” said Rabiei
Her invention isn’t the first metal foam, but she says it’s the strongest. The main weakness of
existing metal foams is the varying sizes of their cells – tiny pockets
of space inside the material. Instead, Rabiei used cells of standard sizes and
combined them with a metallic matrix to support the cell walls.

The National Science Foundation awarded her a CAREER award in 2003, and her goal
with the funding was to develop a light, strong material that could be used saving
lives and energy in the aerospace, medical, automotive and other industries

After five years of work – with a group of her students – she has the results.
With a car going approx. 28 mph, her metal foam absorbs the impact which
feels like an impact at 5 mph. Probably not for the folks inside the car but
the end result is what the experiment showed.

The steel of a bumper is 3 times heavier than the steel foam.  The automotive
industry should take a hard look at this invention.  Not only does it improve
safety but gas mileage as well due to the lightness of steel foam.

Rabiei sees plenty of uses for her invention, including in airplanes, boats, and structures that
need impact protection with maintaining low weight. It’s this high strength-to-density ratio -
defining a material that’s both strong and light – that
makes Rabiei’s foam unique.

Do you hear a standing ovation from me?  This kind of news is exciting!

*  Congratulations, Professor Rabiei!

It’s become almost a reflex to bash aviation’s role in climate change. Passenger
planes are big, they emit stuff into the atmosphere, so they must be bad. It’s
true, but it’s not quite that simple.

Last week, climate and atmospheric scientists from the US and Europe presented
research to a group of aviation types gathered at the Royal Society of London.
Much of their focus was on nitrogen oxide (NOx), and what they found is that
simply dismissing NOx as just another nasty greenhouse gas is not only bad
science, but could also be unwise policy.

Keith Shine, a professor from Reading University, says that while there’s a
great deal of research being conducted on the role of NOx in climate change,
nothing is conclusive at this point, in part because the gas seems to both
harm and help. “NOx has some particularly slippery issues we have to grapple
with,” he says. “It is a very reactive gas in the atmosphere and has different
impacts.”

One of those impacts is the formation of ozone, which facilitates growth in CO2
by preventing its absorption by plants. But NOx only leads to ozone formation
in the troposphere (the lower part of the atmosphere). Once you get above 20km,
into the stratosphere, NOx actually causes ozone depletion. As an added bonus,
NOx leads to creation of hydroxyl, which acts as a sort of detergent that cleans
many pollutants out of the atmosphere and and helps destroy methane, another bad
news greenhouse gas. “The discovery in recent years of the effect of the OH
molecule as a detergent chemical has been a pleasant surprise to the scientific
community,” Shine says.

He says that at this point it’s hard to know if there is a net impact one way
or the other. “It turns out that by emitting on greenhouse gas into the atmosphere
we are also partly destroying another. To add complexity to the subject, methane
is one of the most important molecules that leads to ozone formation. So NOx is
creating more ozone but also destroying methane, leading to less ozone.”

And it’s even trickier than that. The effects of NOx depend not just on the
altitude at which they are released, but also on the geographical region. “With
COx it doesn’t matter where the emissions take place,” Shine says. Whether it be
the North Pole or the tropics, the impact is the same.” But this isn’t the case
for NOx, which seems to have a bigger impact at the equator.

It’s pretty complicated stuff, and Shine is the first to admit that although
the science is getting better there’s still a lot to figure out. When asked
what advice he’d give policy makers with regards to aviation and the climate
based on what we know so far, he urges them to stay focused on one just one
thing. “If the worry is about climate change over a 50 or 100 year period….
in my view the only thing we should be concerned with is CO2 emissions.”

Source:  Dave Demerjian

Here are some interesting facts about what food help parts of the body
that you may or may not know.

A sliced Carrot looks like the human eye. The pupil, iris and radiating
lines look just like the human eye… and YES, science now shows carrots
greatly enhance blood flow to and function of the eyes.

A Tomato has four chambers and is red. The heart has four chambers and
is red. All of the research shows tomatoes are loaded with lycopine and
are indeed pure heart and blood food.

Grapes hang in a cluster that has the shape of the heart. Each grape
looks like a blood cell and all of the research today shows grapes are
also profound heart and blood vitalizing food.

A Walnut looks like a little brain, a left and right hemisphere, upper
cerebrums and lower cerebell ums.  Even the wrinkles or folds on the
nut are just like the neo-cortex. We now know walnuts help develop more
than three (3) dozen neuron-transmitters for brain function.

Kidney Beans actually heal and help maintain kidney function and yes,
they look exactly like the human kidneys.

Celery, Bok Choy, Rhubarb and many more look just like bones. These
foods specifically target bone strength. Bones are 23% sodium and these
foods are 23% sodium. If you don’t have enough sodium in your diet, the
body pulls it from the bones, thus making them weak. These foods
replenish the skeletal needs of the body.

Avocadoes, Eggplant and Pears target the health and function of the
womb and cervix of the female – they look just like these organs.
Today’s research shows that when a woman eats one avocado a week,
it balances hormones, sheds unwanted birth weight, and prevents
cervical cancers. And how profound is this?  It takes exactly nine
(9) months to grow an avocado from blossom to ripened fruit. There
are over 14,000 photolytic chemical constituents of nutrition in each
one of these foods (modern science has only studied and named about
141 of them).

Figs are full of seeds and hang in twos when they grow. Figs increase
the mobility of male sperm and increase the numbers of Sperm as well
to overcome male sterility.

Sweet Potatoes look like the pancreas and actually balance the glycemic
index of diabetics.

Olives assist the health and function of the ovaries.

Oranges, Grapefruits, and other Citrus fruits look just like the mammary
glands of the female and actually assist the health of the breasts and
the movement of lymph in and out of the breasts.

Onions look like the body’s cells. Today’s research shows onions help
clear waste materials from all of the body cells. They even produce
tears which wash the epithelial layers of the eyes. A working companion,
Garlic, also helps eliminate waste materials and dangerous free radicals
from the body.

Protecting our environment in some ways is akin to saving an endangered species. For
instance, it’s really not a good idea to try to feed raw meat to a snow leopard from
your bare hand. Maybe I’m a little sensitive because I live in Tornado Alley, but
this guy, well never mind let me just tell you….

A former NASCAR driver in Charlotte, N.C. has spent tons of money building a car
called Tornado Attack, to drive head long into a tornado in the name of stupid, I
mean science. He says of the car, “Tornado Attack was designed to attack tornadoes,
that’s why it’s an attack. And we hunt tornadoes, we don’t chase them. We hunt
tornadoes in an effort to extract the information, find out what they’re telling us,
then I’m still going to give it to the scientific community and let them decide what
it’s really saying, cause I’m not a meterologist.” Duh!!

What they will extract is what’s left of you, Danger Boy.

The body is a triple layer of 14 gauge steel capable of taking an 8 inch tree at
140 mph. – Ok, how about a steel tower coming at you say, at 300 mph?

It has 8 cameras, doppler radar, laptops, weather rockets and video rockets. And
one nit-wit to operate it all in the middle of a F3.

A transparent polymer called M10, capable of resisting a 32 caliber bullet covers
the wheel wells, wind shield, windows, and a sun-roof. So he can have a good view of
the vortex as it sucks his dumb butt through the bullet proof glass.

A hydralic system lowers the car and seals it to the ground in one second
The sides, half way down flare out about an inch which in his words will, “create down
force, which some of the wind goes up, the rest will go down which helps use Mother
Nature’s force against her.”  Yeah, Einstein, let’s see who gets Mother Nature’s
force used against them.

Let’s face it, he’s not doing this for the science nor the concern for future victims.
It’s the thrill. He’s an adrenalin junky. Which is absolutely fine! But, don’t be
blowin’ smoke about it. If he was truely concerned for either, he would have used
the money spent on building the Bat Mobile, donated it to legitimate research programs
to improve the early warning system and/or actual tornado victims funds and still had
enough money left to buy a rocket, strap it to his butt and jump the Grand Canyon.

It’s time to put out the hummingbird feeders!  These
little birds are the most fun to watch.  They are very
territorial, fight each other, buzz you if you are in
the area of the feeder and race around.

Have found that to fill the feeder, you need red food
coloring and/or a red feeder.  To fill, use a 50 to 50
ratio of water and sugar.  Fill it up and hang it high
as the cats love to catch one to eat.

Things don’t seem so bad when they start dive bombing
you.  These creatures are pure science in motion.  To
see their wings beating as fast as they do, with a
little body… absolutely amazing.

So, if you want some excitement sitting outside of your
home, hang a hummingbird feeder and enjoy!

I’ve been watching this show lately on the Science Channel
called Invention Nation. These 3 guys are on a road trip
around the whole country in a green commuter bus converted
to run on used vegetable oil. I wonder if the exhaust has
that french fry smell? … ok, Im sorry.

Anyway, these guys run around visiting ordinary people
making their ingenious dreams and ideas a reality.
All green..all great..all steps in the right direction.

Completely off the grid homes in New Mexico made from used
tires and recycled scrap.

A man who converts gas powered cars and trucks to electric
power.

Two young women in New York who is tapping into the free
energy created by revolving doors.

A company in Colorado developing cheaper, more efficient
solar cells.

And on and on..

Just in this country!

I’d like to see these boys jump in a vegetable oil
converted jet, take off around the world and see
what everybody else is doing. Because this is
exactly what it’s going to take. Face it, We’re all not
going to wake up in the morning and suddenly be living
in a Star Trek utopia, Scotty.

Its going to be be one diverse step at at time. By one
ordinary enlightened person at a time. Scattered all over
this planet, there are more of us than we imagined, everyday
people, going green, inventing, creating, sharing ideas. All
with a common goal:

Protecting the ONLY home we’ve got. Because as for as living
conditions are concerned, the rest of the neighborhood sucks,
especially for us humans. I don’t think most of the animals
would be too crazy about it either.