Why do galaxies rotate?

There are two levels I can use to explain this. First, I’ll use a more Newtonian model of the universe, as it is the simplest way of explaining it.

In a Newtonian universe the answer is pretty simple. To start with, anything that wasn’t orbiting around the super-massive black hole located in the center of the galaxy would simply fall in a straight line to the black hole. The reason why is the exact same reason why if you drop a pencil it will fall in a straight line to the Earth, which is likely the most dominant gravitational force nearby.

By contrast anything that is orbiting the black hole has what is called centrifugal force. Centrifugal force is why if you hold a weight and swing your arm in a circle the weight feels like it is pulling on your hand even when it is upside down. There is of course a very long and perfectly well reasoned explanation for why centrifugal force appears to disregard gravity, but that’s a post for another time.

To go back to galaxy, all of the objects that are orbiting the galaxy have centrifugal force. That force is constantly pushing on them in the opposite direction as the gravity of the black hole, thus allowing a stable or semi-stable orbit.

Now Isaac Newton was a brilliant man and all, but he still spent most of his life in the seventeenth century. Since we are all in the twenty-first century, things have gotten a good bit more complex. This will get kind of technical, so read at your own risk.

Albert Einstein was the first physicist to suggest that space-time could be non-uniform in density. He basically took Minkowski’s idea of space-time and added the (very important) concept of non-uniformity. What that means is that if you have on cubic meter of empty space (a complete vacuum), it is possible for half of it to be denser than the other half. This probably doesn’t make much sense. It isn’t that the other half has more “space” in it, because it is still half a cubic meter. It doesn’t have more “nothing” either, because a vacuum is a vacuum, that’s about as empty as it gets (though how empty a vacuum is highly debatable. But that is a post for another time). The best way to explain it is with the analogy of a graph. It would be like if you taped to half pages of graph paper together, where one half has four squares to an inch and the other half has five squares to an inch. You still have one sheet of graph paper, but half of it is denser.

If that didn’t make much sense to you, it only gets worse. Because using Einstein’s understanding of the universe, the objects in a galaxy don’t orbit. For that matter, the Earth also does not orbit. The reason why is simple: An orbit is a circle. According to Einstein, gravity only causes objects to travel in straight lines. Never circles or arches. This is probably contrary to everything you know about how anything from a solar system to a galaxy works. But fear not, for an explanation is ahead.

The concept of non-uniform density in space is the reason why something can look like it is traveling in a circle (like the Earth orbiting the sun) but really be traveling in a straight line.

Gravity, according to Einstein, doesn’t really pull on objects in the same way that Isaac Newton believed. Instead, the gravitational field condenses space itself. The stronger the gravity, the denser the space. Newton discovered this equation to calculate the gravitation force between two objects:

F = (G)(m1)(m2)/r^2

Where F is the gravitational force, m is the mass of the two objects in question, G is Newton’s constant, and r is the distance between the two objects. This explains why gravity has a much lesser effect over larger distances. Due to this, the closer you get to an object, the more its gravity condenses space.

Before I tie all of these concepts together I have one more thing to bring up: circles. Everybody loves them. One very important thing about circles is that the circumference of the innermost edge of the circle will always be less than the outermost edge. Now lets imagine we had a sharpie with a tip as big around as the diameter of the Earth. Now that’s a sharpie. If you use that sharpie to draw a circle, the innermost edge of that circle will be WAY smaller than the outermost edge. Therefore when the planet Earth is orbiting the sun, the innermost part of it is traveling less distance. Except for the fact that the innermost part is considerably closer to the sun, and therefore that space is denser. So it looks like it is traveling less distance, but because of how the sun is deforming and condensing space, the innermost part of the Earth and the outermost part of the Earth are traveling the same equivalent distance. Since both sides are traveling the same distance, the Earth isn’t moving in a circle at all, but instead a straight line. The illusion of circular movement is caused by our own inability to properly perceive space, but the math is pretty clear, and Relativity is fairly bulletproof.

References:

Leonard Susskind
Albert Einstein
Isaac Newton

Picture courtesy of criticalmass.uk.com

Now, charge your phone by simply holding it.........

LONDON: Next time your cellphone runs out of battery, you can charge it by just holding it in your hand, as scientists claim to have developed a new technology that turns body heat into electricity. Researchers say they have developed a way to turn body heat into electricity using nanotechnology to put tiny carbon tubes into miniscule plastic fibres and made them look like a fabric.
...
The 'Power Felt' can keep your phone going for up to 20% longer just through the power of touch, meaning simply holding one, or even sitting on it, could recharge the cell. The technology has been created by professor David Carroll of Wakeforest University's centre for nanotechnology and molecular materials in the US.

According to Carrol, it could be the first wave of inexpensive ways to produce electricity that were far more affordable than current renewables such as solar, which was being held back by the high cost.

Nadia~

Ninja!

We all think of a masked man in black clothes and a sword when we hear the word 'Ninja'. They are fascinating, fast, and deadly! But how much do you really know about Ninjas?

A ninja or shinobi was a covert agent or mercenary in feudal Japan who specialized in unorthodox warfare. The functions of the ninja included espionage, sabotage, infiltration, and assassination, and open combat in certain situations. Their covert methods of waging war contrasted the ninja with the samurai, who observed strict rules about honor and combat. The shinobi proper, a specially trained group of spies and mercenaries, appeared in the Sengoku or "warring states" period, in the 15th century, but antecedents may have existed in the 14th century, and possibly even in the 12th century (Heian or early Kamakura era).

By the time of the Meiji Restoration (1868), the tradition of the shinobi had become a topic of popular imagination and mystery in Japan. Ninja figured prominently in folklore and legend, and as a result it is often difficult to separate historical fact from myth. Some legendary abilities purported to be in the province of ninja training include invisibility, walking on water, and control over the natural elements. As a consequence, their perception in western popular culture in the 20th century was based more on such legend and folklore than on the historical spies of the Sengoku period.

Fun facts about Mickey Mouse!

The world’s most recognised cartoon character, Mickey Mouse, celebrates his birthday on November 18. How much do you really know about him?

1. Mickey became an instant hit on November 18, 1928 with the release of ‘Steamboat Willie’, the first ever cartoon with synchronised sound. At that time, most other studios were still producing silent films while Disney adopted sound and raised the standard.
2. Walt originally wanted to call Mickey ‘Mortimer Mouse’, and it was changed to ‘Mickey Mouse’ when Walt’s wife Lillian said she felt that ‘Mortimer’ sounded too pompous and suggested another name that personified the qualities of fun and humbleness.
3. In ‘Opry House’, a video short released on March 28, 1929, Mickey started wearing white gloves. He went on to wear them in most of his subsequent appearances until today.
4. Mickey became the first cartoon character to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on November 18, 1978, in honour of his 50th anniversary. The star is located on 6925 Hollywood Boulevard.
5. Disney’s product licensing business began in 1929, when Walt Disney accepted a deal with a stationery company for the right to imprint Mickey Mouse on school writing tablets. This later turned into what is now known as Disney Consumer Products, a multi-billion dollar business.
6. One of the most iconic Mickey Mouse products of all time is the Mickey Mouse wrist watch. The first one was produced by the Ingersoll-Waterbury company in 1933, and it was sold for USD2.95. The company presented Walt Disney with the 25-millionth Mickey Mouse watch in 1957.
7. The creation of Mickey Mouse earned Walt Disney an honorary Academy Award in 1932.
8. Mickey was given his own entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1934.
9. Mickey appeared in colour for the first time in ‘The Band Concert’, which premiered on February 23, 1935.
10. Mickey appeared in black and white for the last time in ‘Mickey’s Kangaroo’, which actually premiered about two months after the first colour one!
11. Mickey Mouse’s feature film debut in ‘Fantasia’ in 1940 as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice was one of his most famous roles ever. The film introduced stereophonic sound to motion pictures through a special sound system called Fantasound, and cost US$2.28 million to make.
12. In 1955, Mickey made his debut on television in The Mickey Mouse Club television show.
13. According to Walt Disney, Mickey and Minnie Mouse have never been married on screen. But, in 1933, during an interview with Film Pictorial, Walt said, “In private life, Mickey is married to Minnie... What it really amounts to is that Minnie is, for screen purposes, his leading lady.”
14. In designing and constructing a Disney theme park or adding the final touches to an attraction, Disney Imagineers subtly “hide” Mickey Mouse silhouettes in plain sight. It later became a tradition known as ‘Hidden Mickeys’.
15. One of Walt Disney’s most famous quotes about his accomplishments is: “I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing—that it was all started by a mouse.”
16.Mickey was born out of necessity when Walt discovered he had lost the rights to his previous character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. In 1932 a special Academy Award was given to Walt Disney for the creation of Mickey Mouse.
17.In 2004 Mickey and the Gang starred in two brand new feature-length animations released direct to video. The first title is ‘The Three Musketeers’, launched in August 2004, and the second is ‘Twice Upon a Christmas’, released in December 2004, featuring five all new stories. This was Mickey’s first ever 3D CGI (computer generated imagery) cartoon.
18.Mickey’s favourite sayings are “Oh Boy!”, “Gosh!”, “That sure is swell”, “Aw, gee…”, “See ya soon!”

Battery can charge itself, thanks to nanotech hack

Xue et al. / American Chemical Society

Researchers at Georgia Tech have created a hybrid lithium-ion battery that charges itself when pressure is applied to it. To prove it works, they put it on the bottom of a shoe.

A lithium-ion battery has been hacked to charge itself when it is flexed or compressed, a breakthrough that could lead to a class of small, portable electronics that stay charged without ever being plugged in.
To do it, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology removed the barrier that normally separates the two electrodes in a lithium-ion battery and replaced it with a nanotube film with piezoelectric properties.
Piezoelectric devices typically convert movement into electricity such as this electricity-generating backpack. In a totally separate second step, that electricity can then be converted into chemical energy, which is what happens when you charge a battery.
By placing the material between the battery electrodes, the mechanical energy is converted directly to chemical energy, completely bypassing the need to generate electricity at all.
“The device basically acts as a hybrid generator-battery unit, or in other words, a self-charging power cell,” Phys.org explains.
The hybrid battery was described in a recent issue of the journal Nano Letters.
To prove the concept, the team stuck one of their coin-size batteries on the bottom of a shoe. They found that walking could generate enough energy to charge the battery.
Next up for the team is scaling up the technology so that it can charge batteries with high a enough voltages to be useful for portable gadgets.
Source:The Verge, Phys.org

Robots get their own encyclopedia

Aldebaran

NAO robot takes on human-like qualities with free apps.

Robot enthusiasts Friday got a new source of information with RobotAppStore.com's launch of Robopedia, a Wikipedia-style encyclopedia.
The resource was driven by customer service requests for more information about apps that people had downloaded for their home robot projects. RobotAppStore.com's founder, Elad Inbar, said that more than 70 percent of their calls from customers were for more information. While today's offerings are modest, Inbar expects the Robopedia to grow.
More and more items are being added every day by our community," Inbar said in a statement. "Everyone has an opportunity to edit, or add items."
The topics cover the present and future of robots, including their components and concepts. It enables beginners and seasoned developers to learn about robotics' acronyms and terminology, as well as  read step-by-step application-development for numerous robots — vacuum cleaners and humanoids alike.
While a passion for robots can turn into a very expensive hobby, many of the apps in the Robot App Store are free. For instance, the NAO (pronouced "now") humanoid robot is not much bigger than an American Girls doll, but prices can exceed $10,000. Free apps can give your NAO the ability to catch a virtual fly and blow a kiss.
Source:NBCNEWS

Nimble-fingered robot could disarm bombs, put batteries in flashlight

Randy Montoya / Sandia National Laboratories

The Sandia Hand addresses challenges that have prevented widespread adoption of other robotic hands, including cost, durability, dexterity and modularity.

A robotic hand built at a government lab in New Mexico is manipulative enough to slot a AA battery into a flashlight and, perhaps, safely disarm roadside bombs.
Robotic hands are nothing new, but most approaches to mimicking the dexterity of humans cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Sandia Hand is expected to cost a mere $10,000.
The hand is modular, allowing fingers and other tools to be attached to the hand frame with magnets. Instead of a pinky-like finger, why not make it a screwdriver?
The modularity also makes the hand durable, according to Sandia National Laboratories. Should the hand be rammed into a wall with a force that might break a human finger, the robot digit is designed to pop off and fall to the ground.
“The robot can actually pick it up with the remaining fingers, move it into position and resocket the finger by itself,” Curt Salisbury, the principal investigator for the hand project, said in a news release.
In the video below, you can see the hand pick up objects including a rock, canteen and a phone. It also turns on and off a heavy duty flashlight and slots a battery into flashlight.

In the future, the hand may work autonomously, but for now it is manipulated with a control panel as seen in the video. It can also be controlled by a glove that reads the wearer’s hand posture and attempts to replicate it.
The project is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which envisions the technology used to disarm roadside bombs such as those encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan.
VIDEO:http://youtu.be/gDFBbCmlKHg
Source: Scientific American

New material could lead to thin, flexible, wall-sized TVs

Wang et al. / MIT

An optical-microscope image shows a complex integrated circuit, called a JK flip-flop circuit, a basic logic device, made on a piece of molybdenum disulfide by the MIT team.

Sheets of material commonly used as an industrial lubricant — just one-molecule thick — may usher in a new era of thin, flexible, and transparent electronics, according to a researcher at the forefront of the technology.
The material, molybdenum disulfide, is similar to wonder material graphene that researchers have been working with since 2004. Unlike graphene, the molybdenum disulfide has a property called a bandgap.
“A bandgap is the most important property for any material to be useful in electronic applications,” Tomás Palacios, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me Friday.
“A bandgap is the property that allows a transistor, which is basically a switch, to either let the current flow or stop.”
A working switch means researchers can use the one-molecule thick sheets of the material to build "a new generation of electronic circuits," Palacios added.
Examples of possible gadgets range from living room wall-sized TVs that sip electricity to cars or buildings covered in sensors. The material could be used to weave the antenna and other circuitry of a cellphone into clothing — meaning you could essentially wear your phone.
The material could even be applied to glass, producing displays on an office window or eyeglasses.
Asked if this was in line with the Google glasses concept generating buzz of late, Palacios said, "It would definitely help to implement that concept."
He is particularly excited about the potential of the material to serve as a supremely sensitive chemical sensor. Since the current flowing on the device is at the surface, anything that happens at the surface is going to affect the current.
"We are working on chemical sensors with molybdenum disulfide that should have much higher sensitivity than conventional sensors," he said. "They should allow us to detect single molecules of a given chemical component."
One could imagine that would be useful for anyone concerned about the spread or use of chemical weapons, for example.
Before any of this is possible, though, the researchers first need to be able to create the molybdenum disulfide sheets at a practical scale.
The team currently gets small pieces via what’s known as the Scotch tape method, in which an adhesive is pressed against a molybdenum disulfide crystal and peeled off carefully.
This sticks a few pieces of molybdenum disulfide to the adhesive, which is then pressed onto a piece of silicon.
"If we are very lucky, we will get a few flakes of molybdenum disulfide transferred from the scotch tape to the silicon wafer,” Palacios said. "And then we fabricate our devices."
The low-tech approach, he noted, is good for initial demonstrations of the material's potential, which is presented in a paper this month in the journal Nano Letters. 
A more efficient fabrication process is required for commercialization of these potential technologies.
Palacios and colleagues are working on one such method via a process known as chemical vapor deposition. Initial results, he said, will be announced shortly.
Source:NBCNEWS

Inflatable robots are a breeze to move around

Engineers at iRobot are developing robots with inflatable parts as part of a program to increase the mobility of these machines for the military.

Robots with inflatable yet fully controllable parts? These new blow-up bots under development at iRobot are a breath of fresh air for fuel economy and mobility.

 VIDEO: http://youtu.be/b1gcwTXm7oE

Funded by the military’s futuristic research agency known by the acronym DARPA, the Boston-based robotics company recently showed a PackBot modified with an inflatable arm to the advanced technology association IEEE’s Automation blog.
“The AIRarm is lightweight, inexpensive and stows compactly,” the blog noted. “It’s inflated and deflated with an on-board pump, and uses actuators and strings to move its joints without embedded motors.”
Check out the video below to see it in action.

Inflatable parts have the advantage of major weight reductions. The regular PackBot arm weighs between 15 and 20 pounds. The AIRarm, as the inflatable appendage is called, weighs a tenth of that.
Less weight means the robot can roam longer on a single battery charge. Even though lightweight, the arm can still manipulate objects and lift at least five pounds of dead weight.
The Inflatable arm also adds flexibility to the arm. For example, a partially inflated arm could squeeze through a hole in the wall and then fully inflate to perform a task on the other side.
DARPA recently awarded iRobot a $650,000 contract to keep working on the inflatable technology under its Maximum Mobility and Manipulation program.
Source:IEEE Spectrum, Ars Technica

Robot learns to track itself and the world through a mirror

Justin Hart / Yale University

Nico examines himself and his surroundings in the mirror.

A robot at Yale has passed an important milestone of self-awareness by inferring information about the real world by observing it through a mirror. It's not quite WALL-E, but it's an notable step in the world of artificial intelligence.
Nico is an ongoing project at Yale's Social Robotics Lab that has been advancing slowly for years; development is currently being led by roboticist Justin Hart under the supervision of his doctoral advisor Brian Scassellati. The latest accomplishment is subtle but interesting, and certainly tricky. It has to do with how a mirror is perceived.
Many of us have been delighted when a pet fails to recognize itself in the mirror and bristles or barks, thinking that the mirror is in fact an extension of a room and there is another animal approaching through it. We understand, however, that it is a reflection, and we could determine, for example, where a lamp is relative to ourselves by looking at the mirror but not the lamp itself.
What Nico (or rather, its creators) has accomplished is this latter task: it looks in the mirror and it sees its hand, which it recognizes because it has a visual token attached. From here, it learns basic expectations of where to see its hand in normal space. Then it uses that information to build estimates of where other objects in the room are — all without looking around at the world itself.
Hart explained in an email to NBC News that this ability is far from common in animals, since it requires a certain level of understanding about what mirrors actually are:

What makes this exciting, in terms of self-awareness, is that the robot is able to use this knowledge that it has learned about itself in order to reason about a thing in its environment, the mirror, in a way that robots really haven't been able to do before.
His ultimate goal, he says, is to have the robot pass an iconic test first proposed in 1970 involving an animal (or in this case, a robot) recognizing changes to its appearance in a mirror. By noticing that a change has been made to its appearance by looking into a mirror, the subject shows conclusively that it understands that the image is not another animal, but itself.

Dan Leyzberg / Yale University

Hart posing with Nico.

Research along these lines could lead to improved robotic vision and motion systems that are not just mechanically aware of their position, but also understand the world in a more intuitive way. A sense of "self" and "other" is fundamental to humans' everyday interactions, and if robots are to work closely with people, they should be able to make similar distinctions.
The paper, "Mirror Perspective-Taking with a Humanoid Robot," was presented last month at the Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Toronto, Canada, and Hart expects to put Nico through the second mirror test in the next few months.
Source:NBC News Digital

Chocolate can help you live longer.

Chocolate has antioxidants that can protect you against heart disease. Dark chocolate has 8 times the amount of antioxidants than strawberries. The flavonoids help relax blood pressure by producing nitric oxide.

A small bar of dark chocolate every day can help lower your blood pressure and cholesterol. Chocolate also has serotonin which acts as an antidepressant.

Also, while chocolate has fat, most of the fat in chocolate does not impact your cholesterol. Chocolate is still high-calorie and high-fat, so you need to eat in moderation. You don't need more than about 3.5 ounces of chocolate to receive the benefits.

If you want to eat chocolate to improve your health, eat dark chocolate because it has the most antioxidants, don't eat too much of it, and don't eat it with milk. Milk can prevent your body from processing the antioxidants.

source: http://longevity.about.com/od/lifelongnutrition/p/chocolate.htm

World’s Highest Tennis Court

World’s Highest Tennis Court
Location: Burj Al Arab, Dubai

The world’s highest makeshift Tennis court stands atop the fourth highest and the only 7 stars hotel in the world, Burj Al Arab in Dubai. The tennis court is circular in shape ,and also doubles as a helipad, hovering 1000 feet above the Arabian gulf. In preparation for the Dubai Duty Free Men’s Open, On February 22, 2005, the Burj al Arab hosted Andre Agassi and Roger Federer to play a match on their helipad tennis court before heading to the $1 million championship. The tennis legends couldn’t resist the temptation to have a friendly ‘hit’ on the world’s most unique tennis court.

Burj Al Arab is the world’s most luxurious hotel, standing 321 meters high on a man made island, it was Designed by Tom Wright and completed in 1999. The hotel’s helipad, which is situated 211 meters high covers a surface area of 415 square metres.

Oraima Mountain, Venezuela

Mount Roraima (also known as Roraima Tepui or Cerro Roraima in Spanish, and Monte Roraima in Portuguese), is the highest of the Pakaraima chain of tepui plateau in South America. First described by the English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh in 1596, its 31 km² summit area is defended by 400m (1,300 ft) tall cliffs on all sides. The mountain includes the triple border point of Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana.

Mount Roraima lies on the Guiana Shield in the southeastern corner of Venezuela's 30,000 km² Canaima National Park forming the highest peak of Guyana's Highland Range. The tabletop mountains of the park are considered some of the oldest geological formations on Earth, dating back to some two billion years ago in the Precambrian Era.

Unbelievable Amazing Facts!

1. Did you know the largest fish evercaught was the Whale Shark? It was59ft long.
These fish can weigh up to 15 tons.
2. Did you know fishes cannot live inthe Dead Sea because the water has too much salt in it?

3. A parrotfish makes its own sleeping bag to sleep in. It uses mucous (like spit)
to make a see-through bag all around it's body to protect it from attack by other
creatures in the ocean.
4. The pelican uses the funny looking pouch under its lower beak for catching fish.
It does this by swooshing into the water and scooping up as many fish as
possible.
5. The blue whale is the largest animal on earth. The heart of a blue whale is as
big as a car, and it's tongue is as long as an elephant.
6. Did you know pearls are found in oysters? The largest pearl ever found was 620
carats.
7. The heaviest fish ever caught was the OCEAN SUNFISH. It weighed 4,928 lbs.
8. The Blue Whale's whistle is the loudest noise made by an animal.
9. here are two kinds of elephants: the African that is taller and has larger ears
and the Indian that is small and has smaller ears.
10. Did you know there are two kinds of camels? One is the Arabian that lives in
Western Asia and Northern Africa. It has one hump. And the second kind is called
Bactrian which has two humps and lives in Mongolia and Chinese Turkistan.
11. The smallest bird in the world is the Hummingbird. It weighs 1oz.
12. The fastest human swimmer canswim at 6 miles per hour. The fastest mammal - the
dolphin - can swim up to 35 miles per hour.
13. The bird that can fly the fastest is called a White It can fly up to 95 miles
per hour.
14. Did you know fishes talk to each other? Some of them communicate by making noises
in their throats by rasping their teeth, others use their swim bladders to make
sounds.
15. The the oldest living thing on earth is 12,000 years old. It is the flowering shrubs called creosote bushes in the Mojave Desert.

Largest GOLD mines

 

Grasberg Gold Mine -- This Largest mine, which is in the Indonesian province of Papua, produced 2,025,000 ounces of gold annually.

Top 10 Biggest Gold Mines in the World

1. Grasberg Gold Mine=(Indonesia)

2. Muruntau Gold Mine=(Uzbekistan)
3. Carlin-Nevada Complex=(U.S. state of Nevada)
4. Yanacocha Gold Mine=(Peru)
5. Goldstrike (Betze Post) Gold Mine=(Elko Nev)
6. Cortez Gold Mine=(Elko Nev)
7. Veladero Gold Mine=(Argentina)
8. Lagunas Norte Gold Mine=(Peru)
9. Lihir Gold Mine=(Guineau)
10. Super Pit/Kalgoorlie=(Australia)

Health Benefits of Pomegranate/ Pomegranate Juice: The Top Ten

1. Antioxidants – These help to wrangle the hoards of free radicals in your system. Free radicals have an uneven number of electrons and like to balance themselves out by stealing from other molecules and cells in your body. These cells are oftentimes very important ones dealing with your DNA, and when they are destroyed, disease steps in. Pomegranate juice is an excellent source of antioxidants that work to help you stay disease-free.

2. Blood Thinner – Pomegranate juice helps your blood circulation, making it easier for blood to travel to your heart, brain, and the rest of your body.

3. Cancer Fighter – Pomegranate has been known to reduce and prohibit the growth of cancer cells and tumors in your body.

4. Digestion Aide – Pomegranate juice is a natural remedy for diarrhea, dysentery, and great number of other digestive problems.

5. Anemia Relief – With a high content of iron, pomegranate juice is a great home cure for anemia because it promotes higher levels of hemoglobin.

6. Anti-Inflammatory – Pomegranate juice has properties that help treat sufferers of arthritis. It can also help cure a cough or sore throat.

7. Neonatal Care – It has been proven that pomegranate juice ingested by pregnant women can help protect the neonatal brain.

8. Artery Protection – It helps keep plaque from building up in your arteries.

9. Cartilage Protection – It works to prevent the deterioration of cartilage in your body.

10. Cholesterol Reducer – Pomegranate juice is capable of lowering blood pressure by as much as 6% in daily drinkers.

Squishy Robots Change Color, Glow

There are robots inspired by earthworms, babies and fish. Now the cephalopods, in addition to inspiring octopus-like robot tentacles, gave a team of Harvard scientists the idea of a robot that was soft, squishy and changes colors.
Stephen Morin, a postdoctoral fellow in chemistry, designed the color-changing system. He used layers of silicone "skin," produced on a 3-D printer. The skin has channels in it that allow dyes to be pumped through. The robot itself is a four-legged device that moves when air is pumped into the limbs. Morin told Discovery News that he and his colleagues chose that method because compressed air is easy to work with. Making the robot out of silicone makes it cheaper.
NEWS: Octobot Could Save Your Life

"This characteristic presents the opportunity to make many robots, at low cost, so that you don’t feel bad about losing one," Morin said in an email.
Given the kinds of applications Morin envisions, cost is important. Search-and-rescue operations in a collapsed building, for instance, require a robot that can squeeze into tight spaces that rigid robots can't. The ability to change color means it can either squiggle by unnoticed or glow in the dark to light the way. Another use might be simulating surgery. "Devices could be made to look, feel, and 'act' like organs," Morin said. "If a training surgeon cut into the wrong place the device would 'bleed.'"

http://youtu.be/bC1WFU4G-WU

ANALYSIS: Bendy Bot Limbos to the Rescue
A dye that glows can be pumped through the channels, changing the device's color. Or the temperature of the dye can be cooled so that the robot can't be seen in infrared light -- like the kind used with night-vision goggles to see the heat that living bodies give off.
Details of the work were published the journal Science. The research was performed by the Whitesides Research Group and supported by the Department of Energy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

What’s the Hottest the Earth Has Ever Gotten?

Hot enough to boil oceans and vaporize rock. The highest terrestrial temperatures occurred more than four billion years ago, when a Mars-size proto-planet smashed into the Earth. (The debris from this collision formed our moon.) Within a millennium, the surface air temperature had dropped from a high of about 3,700°F down to 3,000°. Then the planet went into a period of slower cooling that lasted a few tens of millions of years. As the atmosphere thickened with heat-trapping water clouds and carbon dioxide and a shell of solid rock formed around the Earth’s core, conditions stabilized at 440°.
The warmest weather we’ve had in recent times—since mammals diverged from the tree of life—came about 55 million years ago, during a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. In just a few thousand years, global surface temperatures increased by 5° to 10°, with parts of North America experiencing a tropical climate and spring-like average temperatures in the Arctic.
Have a burning science question you'd like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com.

Recharged in Midair By Flying Battery-Drones, Electric Aircraft May Never Have to Land

Flying Batteries Drones serving as flying batteries could dock with an electric plane in flight, enabling the first transcontinental electric airplane journey. Flight of the Century

Instead of taking off with thunderous jet engines, future airplanes may soar into the air on battery packs, and jettison them like so much ballast once the juice has been drained. Then these batteries could be replaced in flight. Instead of refueling with flying tankers, electric planes would rendezvous with autonomous flying battery-drones.
This plan could enable an all-electric trip across the Atlantic, retracing Charles Lindbergh’s flight path. Later this month, aviation enthusiast Chip Yates — inventor of the Swigz Pro electric superbike — plans to test an electric plane at Inyokern Airport in Southern California.

Yates is the founder of Flight of the Century, an ambitious project to fly an electric plane across the Atlantic Ocean by 2014. The team bought an airplane designed by aviation god Burt Rutan, a Long-EZ (call sign N158TG), and is in the process of converting it to an all-electric test vehicle. They’ve filed for a patent on their system, which is called Infinite Range Electric Flight (IREF).  Electric airplanes remain fairly impractical because of their weight and power limitations. To carry enough power to take off, an electric plane would need lots of batteries, which are prohibitively heavy. Solar-powered aircraft are more practical at this point, as evidenced by the series of flights this summer by the Solar Impulse aircraft. But dropping drained batteries would get rid of extra weight, according to Yates’ plan. And recharging in flight — as the military has done for decades — would enable the plane to fly unlimited distances.
It would work by deploying fleets of flying battery packs — basically drones full of batteries — to various ground or ocean stations. A human-piloted electric airplane would take off using these flyable battery packs, draining most of their energy just for takeoff. Then it would jettison them in flight, and the packs would autonomously fly (using a separate battery supply) down to the ground or ocean base. Or they could parachute down for recovery. There, they would recharge for future use. Meanwhile, a freshly charged battery pack would launch from the base station and tether to the human-piloted electric airplane. During this transition period, the electric airplane would use its own internal battery supply, according to the Flight of the Century project.
The team is already performing some runway tests, and plans to take off in the electric plane later this month.
[via LiveScience]

Electric Plane Prototype: This plane, designed by Burt Rutan, is being converted into an all-electric aircraft.  Flight of the Century

Courtesy:Popular Science

National Ignition Facility Cranks Laser Up to Record 500 Trillion Watts

The Preamplifier of the Laser Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

In California, at the ultra-powerful fusion laboratory of the National Ignition Facility, 192 laser beams have fired simultaneously, blasting their target -- a circle 2 millimeters in diameter -- with 500 trillion watts. That's 1,000 times more than the entire rest of the United States was using at the time. It is the highest-energy laser shot ever fired in real life, although some fictional lasers have exceeded the record.
The NIF's ultimate goal is to induce nuclear fusion in a highly compressed pellet of hydrogen, which will be held at the target point of the laser beams. The fusion reaction will generate energy, so we'll earn back our 500 terawatts with interest.

The Target of the Laser:  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Will Climate Change Make the Weather Too Extreme?

FYI Weather Everett Collection

Unpredictable extremes of weather could be a huge problem. Simon N. Gosling, a geographer at the University of Nottingham in England, and Robert E. Davis of the University of Virginia agree that hotter weather on average isn’t as dangerous as unexpected weather. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in April looked at how temperature fluctuations over a single summer affect mortality in vulnerable populations. Researchers found that a few months of rapidly changing conditions—with alternating spells of hotter and cooler weather—tend to produce more deaths, regardless of how hot it is overall. That’s especially true in parts of the country that aren’t accustomed to such rapid changes. “Variability is really important,” Gosling says, “and it has actually been overlooked quite a bit.”
Will climate change lead to more unexpected weather? It depends where you are. In Boston, for example, climate models suggest hotter weather over the next few decades while variation stays more or less the same. In Dallas, the average temperature may go up while the variability goes down (which might save lives). It’s hard to know for sure what will happen. “I don’t think as a community,” Davis says, “we understand why the variability changes from place to place.”
Have a burning science question you'd like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com.

Strategies for a Changing Planet: Farming

Wheat, rice and corn provide 60 percent of the world's calories -- here's how to prepare them for the future

Better Seeds David Arky

Climate change is already happening, and it's time to get ready. Here's how we could adjust our most basic needs--food, water, shelter--to survive.
The biggest challenge in preparing crops for climate change is knowing what to prepare them for. Even within agricultural regions, the effects of global warming will vary.

HELP WHEAT EVOLVE

Consider Kansas, the source of a fifth of America’s wheat. Parts of eastern Kansas are now 20 percent wetter than they were in 1900. Rainfall in western Kansas remains largely unchanged, and the region could become much drier over the next century. Meanwhile, short-term fluctuations are becoming more extreme. Last year, despite the long-term increase in rainfall in the area, the state placed every county in southeast Kansas under drought warning or drought emergency.
Stephen Jones, a professor of crop and soil sciences at Washington State University, says it’s possible to stabilize wheat yields against an increasingly capricious climate by developing new wheat strains—each one adapted to a specific hardship—and then planting as many of those varieties as possible. Jones searches for drought-, disease- and flood-tolerant wheat strains that were grown in Washington a century ago (and which fell out of favor because they didn’t consistently produce large yields) and breeds them with modern, high-yield varieties. Farmers sow the resulting seeds and, at the end of the season, collect the seeds from the best-performing plants to use for next year’s crop. In as little as eight years, this process creates new wheat strains. And in a 2010 test in Washington’s Douglas County, one of these new wheat strains outperformed all 59 competitors, including entries from genetic-engineering giants Monsanto and Syngenta.

BREED RICE WITH WEEDS

As carbon dioxide concentrations rise, so will rice yields—but the weeds that grow alongside rice plants, competing with them for water and nutrients, will grow ever faster, threatening the long-term sustainability of rice farming. The good news, says Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is that those weeds are so closely related to rice that breeding them together could yield new strains of rice tailored to a carbon-rich atmosphere.
Ziska’s group begins by studying weeds, looking for characteristics that are correlated with their ability to process CO₂ so efficiently. Next, they work with researchers at Cornell University to identify the genetic markers associated with those traits. The researchers will then breed weeds that carry those desirable genetic markers with modern, high-yield rice, producing strains of rice that can outcompete weeds as CO₂ levels rise.
Ziska can identify the traits he needs and carry out the necessary genetic screening in as little as 18 months, but the full plant-development process—which includes studying real-world variables ranging from the ideal spacing between rows to the insect-sensitivity of these new rice varieties—could take another 5 to 10 years. Eventually, Ziska says, a concerted effort to cross weeds with modern rice could increase yields by 20 to 40 percent.

REPLACE CORN

Large yields and high calorie content have made corn the most popular and most heavily subsidized crop in America. That’s an increasingly urgent problem. In 2010, corn production consumed nine million tons of fertilizer and led to greenhouse-gas emissions equivalent to 42 million tons of CO₂—and corn isn’t even something we can easily eat. “The digestibility of unprocessed corn to humans isn’t very high,” says Jerry Hatfield, a plant physiologist with the USDA. “We have to put it through processing of some sort, whether that happens in a factory or an animal.” Set those problems aside, and a deal-breaker remains: modern corn is more sensitive to heat than any other major crop, and attempts to create drought- and heat-resistant corn through genetic modification are still unproven. A recent study found that a 3.6°F increase in global temperatures could make corn prices twice as volatile.
All of which is why many experts advocate replacing corn with a portfolio of hardier, more nutritious and more efficient food sources. Wheat production generates less than half the fossil-fuel emissions of corn and returns 63 percent more protein. Other crops actually give back to the land. Chickpeas and peanuts contain twice as much protein as corn, and they increase the nutrient content of soil.
Maggie Koerth-Baker is the author of Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us.
Courtesy:Popular Science

Strategies for a Changing Planet: If All Else Fails...

When it's 115 degrees in March, it might take a Hail Mary of a solution to help us

Desperate Measures Bombarding the stratosphere with aerosol-packed artillery shells could either lower the temperature of the planet—or destroy it. Graham Murdoch

Climate change is already happening, and it's time to get ready. Here's how we could adjust our most basic needs--food, water, shelter--to survive.
It’s impossible to predict the exact speed and severity with which climate change will unfold, but one thing is clear: if we take no preventive action, eventually we’ll be tempted to take desperate action. And over the decades, as the effects of climate change grow increasingly severe, the amount of risk humankind is willing to bear will increase.
In the next decade, as Dust Bowl–like conditions afflict the American West and it becomes ever more difficult to dismiss the drought as a temporary glitch, low-risk methods for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will start to look attractive. The most benign scheme would be to plant more trees. In 1976, physicist Freeman Dyson proposed planting a tree farm the size of Australia to offset the fossil-fuel emissions of the day. By 2009, NASA climate modelers and biologist Leonard Ornstein estimated that both the Australian outback and the Sahara would have to be transformed into forest to remove meaningful quantities of carbon dioxide. They proposed irrigating both deserts with desalinated seawater and planting them with eucalyptus forests, which could remove as much as 12 billion tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere every year—about a third of the total global emissions in 2010. Nuclear power plants could generate carbon-free electricity for the network of reverse-osmosis desalination plants. This world-historical landscaping project would carry risks. An afforested Sahara could provide a breeding ground for swarms of crop-destroying locusts and flocks of disease-carrying birds. Because Saharan dust may help suppress Atlantic cyclone formation, the scheme could strengthen hurricanes. The biggest problem, however, may be the $1-trillion-plus annual cost.
A cheaper method would be ocean fertilization—dumping iron dust into the sea to stimulate the growth of CO₂-breathing phytoplankton. Over the past two decades, scientists have conducted more than a dozen small-scale trials to confirm that iron seeding does indeed stimulate the growth of phytoplankton. Yet ocean fertilization could devastate aquatic life; iron seeding could unintentionally stimulate the growth of algal varieties that are toxic to fish, or create oxygen-depleted dead zones. And it might not even remove all that much CO₂. Researchers with Britain’s Royal Society estimated that even a massive global ocean-fertilization program might reduce atmospheric carbon concentrations by only 10 parts per million, which would have no impact on global temperatures.

Wonder Wall: Damming the Bering Sea could allow Arctic sea ice to refreeze. It could also disrupt vital ocean currents.  Graham Murdoch

When things get worse—when rising seas and worsening storms conspire to flood energy facilities, subway systems and millions of homes in the U.S. alone, and when the Arctic experiences an ice-free season that grows longer every year—schemes for reflecting the sun’s radiation away from Earth may start to look appealing. Some of these plans call for preserving our existing sun-reflecting assets. In 2008, for example, the Dutch science writer Rolf Schuttenhelm proposed building a 180-mile dam across the Bering Sea to prevent warmer, saltier Pacific Ocean water from flowing toward the North Pole, thereby allowing the Arctic ice cap to refreeze. The restored ice would reflect solar energy back into space and help cool the planet.
Other plans involve shielding the Earth from above. In 1989, James Early, a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, suggested parking a 1,200-mile-wide space shade at the first Lagrangian point (L₁, a gravitationally fixed point between the Earth and the sun), where it would block 2 percent of the sun’s radiation. Since then, scientists have updated Early’s plan. In 2006, for example, University of Arizona astronomer Robert Angel proposed sending 16 trillion two-foot-wide mirrors (via 20 million rocket launches) to L₁, where they would collectively form a 62,000-mile-long shade.
Even if implemented perfectly, sun-blocking schemes could cause persistent drought for billions of people.If humanity holds off even longer, until millions of people are short of food and water—­or if it turns out that all previous efforts to stop the warming have been too feeble—the most attractive contingency plan will be the only one that nature has proven to work. In 1991, when Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, spewed some 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, the average global temperature dropped by 1°F over the next year. Hence the term “Pinatubo option,” which refers to the process of enshrouding the planet in aerosol particles that reflect sunlight and thus cool the Earth.
Even if it were possible to activate an actual volcano, the cooling effect from a single eruption would be short-lived and impossible to control. Instead, most advocates favor mechanical aerosol-delivery methods. Researchers on a British government–funded project called SPICE (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering) have proposed using stadium-size balloons, tethered to oceangoing ships using 12-mile-long hoses, to deliver sulfate particles into the stratosphere. More-dramatic plans call for dispatching flotillas of Navy warships to fire particle-packed artillery shells into the sky. In 1992, a U.S. government-funded committee calculated that firing five million metric tons of aluminum oxide into the atmosphere every year would require 35 10-barrel gun batteries operating 250 days a year at a cost of $100 billion. Particles tend to fall from the stratosphere after two or three years, so the scheme would have to be conducted continuously, in perpetuity. It would also require unprecedented cooperation among China, the European Union and the U.S.
Even if the project were administered perfectly, the side effects of the Pinatubo option—or, for that matter, of any other solar-radiation-management scheme—could be severe. The sudden drop in temperatures could result in less evaporating water entering the hydrological cycle, which could disrupt the monsoon seasons in India, China and the African Sahel, triggering a drought affecting billions of people. But humankind would have little choice but to endure the side effects. If the sun-blocking machine were to stop, temperatures would quickly rebound. At that stage, the side effects of solar-radiation management would seem manageable compared with the alternative—temperatures rising high enough that melting permafrost releases billions of tons of methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times as strong as carbon dioxide, pushing the climate into a state of no return.
Damon Tabor is a writer in Brooklyn.
Courtesy:Popular Science 

Strategies for a Changing Planet: Water

The amount of water on Earth is fixed, but everything else is changing fast

Pale Blue Dot All the water on Earth would fill a sphere that was just 860 miles in diameter. Jack Cook/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Climate change is already happening, and it's time to get ready. Here's how we could adjust our most basic needs--food, water, shelter--to survive.
If you combined all of the water in the planet’s ice caps, glaciers, rivers, lakes, aquifers and oceans, it would fill a sphere 860 miles in diameter. That volume, some 366 million trillion gallons, hasn’t changed in millennia, nor will it change in the foreseeable future. What will change, as the planet becomes hotter and more crowded, is where this water appears and in what stage of the hydrologic cycle. And those changes will present us with many oddly conflicting challenges.
Even as rising sea levels threaten coastal cities, for instance, reduced ice cover on Lake Erie—as winter weather starts later and ends earlier—will allow more water to evaporate, lowering the surface level of the lake by as much as six feet in the next 70 years and making shipping difficult. Already Lake Mead is dropping so quickly, as a result of increased evaporation and reduced inflow, that the Hoover Dam could quit generating electricity by 2024—a potential disaster for the 1.3 million people who rely on its power.
Climate change will make dry places drier, wet places wetter, and storms more intense. Heavy rainfall in mountainous areas will cause landslides, debris flows and flash flooding. Seasonal monsoons may start sooner and last longer, and those monster storms will increasingly reduce crop yields and sluice contaminants into waterways and soil. They’ll also wreak havoc in urbanized areas, shifting soil, cracking pipes and overwhelming wastewater-treatment plants, backing up disease-causing sewage into homes, streets and waterways that provide drinking water. The Army Corps of Engineers reports that flooding around the world claims the lives of about 25,000 people and causes economic losses of as much as $60 billion annually.
* * * How will we adapt? For thousands of years we have built levees, dams and ditches. This is the “hard” approach, and it will continue to play an important role. Today engineers are moving or elevating roadways and other crucial infrastructure away from coastlines and flood-prone rivers. They’re enlarging storm drains and floodwalls, and armoring wastewater-treatment plants against rising water. In Chicago, they are excavating two of the largest catch basins the world has ever seen, which together will prevent 15 billion gallons of polluted runoff from entering waterways.
But more recently, a softer approach, one that relies more on policy and behavioral shifts than concrete and dynamite, has come to the fore. Cities are upgrading building codes to require greater structural resiliency, developing better warning systems so people can evacuate sooner, or simply buying out property owners and restricting development in bottomlands. In both the developed and the developing world, planners are adopting “ecosystem-based” responses to flooding that include restoring wetlands, planting native vegetation to buffer the worst impacts of floods, reconnecting rivers with their flood plains, and paying landowners to preserve forests as a way to protect water quantity and quality.
Climate change will make dry places drier, wet places wetter, and
storms more intense.Communities challenged with too little water, meanwhile, are finding “new” supplies through conservation and efficiency schemes that feature better metering and smarter pricing of water, restrictions on outdoor water use, retrofitting with water-miserly appliances and fixtures, and reusing “gray water” (from showers and washing machines) to irrigate gardens. Orange County, California, is capturing sewage flow, microfiltering and purifying the watery part, and injecting it back underground to mingle with freshwater before it’s drawn into taps. Los Angeles and other cities are considering similar systems.
Instead of overpumping their groundwater—a practice that has in many places significantly lowered water tables, dried up wetlands and pulled saltwater into aquifers used for drinking—scores of municipalities are augmenting their freshwater supplies by capturing rain on roofs and in swales, and private developers are replacing asphalt with permeable pavement, which funnels rainwater to underground cisterns for use in landscaping and toilets. Instead of whisking seasonal floods down concrete rivers to the sea, utilities are diverting this bounty into earthen basins, recharging aquifers they can later tap.
* * * As the consequences of climate change become more severe, the hard approach will become increasingly tempting. China is forging ahead with a $62-billion project to pump nearly a tenth of the nation’s water from its wet south to its dry north. Elsewhere, entrepreneurs are eager to tow icebergs from the Arctic to warmer climes, to build pipelines that connect the Pacific Northwest to Los Angeles, or to haul millions of gallons of freshwater from the same region to arid cities across the ocean in 230-foot-long fabric tubes connected by the world’s strongest zipper.
The Army Corps of Engineers, in the 1950s, proposed what remains perhaps the most audacious transfer scheme of all. By diverting the flow of Alaskan rivers through Canada and down to the lower 48 states, the North American Water and Power Alliance would double the amount of freshwater available to farmers and growing cities in the west. The scheme fell out of political favor but was later adopted and tweaked by Lyndon LaRouche, the once-perennial presidential candidate. Legal, political, economic, social and environmental considerations aside, the plan is highly complex and, if history is any guide, would precipitate more problems than it solved. (An overview on LaRouche’s website says it “signifies a change in the organization of the planet as a whole.”)
LaRouche’s plan is loopy, but humans have, in fact, already reorganized the planet’s hydrological regimes by mainlining carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We can try to cope by moving water around, changing it from salty to fresh, or conjuring it from thin air using chemical reactions. These manipulations will become more difficult as we hit economic and physical limits. But with smart management, cooperation and planning, we can find a way to live within these limits and to share the planet’s water equitably with people and with nature.
Elizabeth Royte is the author of Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It.
Courtsey:Popular Science

Strategies for a Changing Planet: Food

It won't be easy, but there are ways to make the food production math add up

Calorie Calculus David Arky

Climate change is already happening, and it's time to get ready. Here's how we could adjust our most basic needs--food, water, shelter--to survive.
The calculus of human sustenance is simple: to feed the planet’s seven billion people, farmers must generate at least 12 trillion calories’ worth of food every day. And even as the world’s growing population demands ever more of those calories, climate change is making them harder to produce. How can science change the equation?

ADD SEEDS

Farmers will need drought-resistant, flood-resistant, heat-resistant, frost-resistant and insect-resistant crops that they can grow in saltier soils and an atmosphere filled with more carbon dioxide and ozone. Researchers are developing seeds that can do all of those things, and genetic modification will play an important role in their work [see “. . . By Making Better Seeds”]. But no single company should have a corner on the world’s seeds, so countries must revisit their patent laws and enforce strict limits on transnational seed corporations that seek to monopolize the world’s genetic resources.

DIVIDE THE LAND

Climate change will alter farmland in a variety of ways. One recent study concluded that high-latitude regions in China, Russia and the U.S. may gain arable land while tropical and subtropical regions in South America, Africa, Europe and India lose out. Global trade agreements will become an increasingly important way to ensure the equitable distribution of the global food supply. No matter where the land, responsible stewardship will require greater use of cover crops, nitrogen-fixing crops and peripheral plantings that work to deter insects and rodents, and thereby lessen the need for pesticides and other man-made poisons.

MULTIPLY WATER

The key to getting more food from less water will be to make that water do more work. Farmers will have to better harvest rainwater, reuse wastewater, trade trough and sprinkler irrigation for more-efficient underground drip lines, and use GPS monitoring to get precise crop-per-drop measurements.

SUBTRACT MEAT AND BIOFUEL

A growing global middle class is demanding more meat, but it takes an extraordinary amount of fuel, fertilizer, pesticide and water to create the relatively few calories that meat delivers. At the same time, nearly half the corn produced in the U.S. enters the “biofuel cycle,” which also draws on many other food crops, from soybeans to coconuts. Biofuels are no more efficient at delivering energy to engines than cows are at delivering energy to stomachs. Humans must stop competing with their own animals and machines for calories.

BALANCE THE BOOKS

Scarcity, or even the perception of scarcity, is increasing the price of the world’s food supplies. Among the greatest threats to future food security are the bubbles and spikes in the price of wheat and other globally traded commodities. The derivatives markets in food futures should be used in the way they were intended—as risk-management tools for those in the food business, not as a speculative shortcut to riches. The solution: transnational rules that limit the role banks can play in global food futures markets.
Frederick Kaufman is the author of Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food.
Courtesy:Popular Science

Strategies for a Changing Planet: Shelter

Climate change will drive people to urban areas, and smarter cities will be needed to shelter them

Smarter Cities The LO2P won first prize in the 2011 Skyscraper Competition, sponsored by design journal eVolo. The Flat Tower won second prize in the same competition. Bryan Christie

Climate change is already happening, and it's time to get ready. Here's how we could adjust our most basic needs--food, water, shelter--to survive.
The world’s population will top nine billion by 2060. Because of climate-change-induced environmental degradation, scientists project that tens of millions of people will move into today’s small and medium-size cities. To prepare for the influx, says Dennis Frenchman, an architect and professor of urban planning at MIT, city designers must make decisions today to mitigate the migration of tomorrow. And those decisions should focus on making systems more efficient.
Transportation networks need to be rethought to limit congestion. Politicians should offer incentives to manufacturing firms to relocate to city centers to decrease the number of commuters. Power generation and food production should become local, too; reducing transmission and transportation costs would keep prices lower. Further, Frenchman says, single-purpose-use spaces like shopping centers and housing developments should be swapped for mixed-use neighborhoods that contain homes, medical offices, stores, schools and offices. With essential services packed into one relatively small area, even the densest city would feel more like a small town.

COMMUNITY-SHARED ELECTRIC CARS

Lots of people, each with a private car, means lots of traffic, pollution and wasted space in the form of parking lots. The designers of the MIT Media Lab prototype CityCar say communal microcars will alleviate crowded roads. The two-seat, all-electric CityCar is best used for point-to-point trips within a few-mile radius. When not in use, the car folds up and stacks together with other CityCars.

NEIGHBORHOOD NUKES

Power lines can lose up to 425 kilowatts per mile of cable. To reduce loss and keep energy prices lower, cities must integrate power generation into neighborhoods. One possible power source is a microsize nuclear power plant, such as GE Hitachi’s PRISM. The PRISM’s reactors would use recycled nuclear fuel to generate 300 megawatts—enough to supply 240,000 homes.

HYPEREFFICIENT HOUSING

As more people crowd into cities, average apartment size will decrease, probably to about 300 square feet, Frenchman says. To make such a small area feel less cramped, every space in the home must be multifunctional. For example, furniture could fold out of walls, and windows made from transparent OLEDs, like ones that Samsung first demonstrated in 2010, would serve as a TV or could be made opaque on command to reduce cooling costs.

REALLY LOCAL EATS

To keep food-transportation costs down, engineers should construct vertical farms, such as the ones proposed by Columbia University public-health professor emeritus Dickson Despommier, that could provide fresh produce and fish to local neighborhoods. Apartment residents will grow personal gardens on the facade of their buildings with pre-seeded panels plugged into built-in wall slots, says Kent Larson, an architect at the MIT Media Lab.

ALL-IN-ONE RECYCLING

Recycling will limit material waste, but the process is energy-intensive. In the LO2P Recycling Center, envisioned by designers Gael Brule and Julien Combes, a turbine harnesses wind power to run a recycling plant in the building, while carbon dioxide from the plant reacts with calcium to become lime in the LO2P’s mineralization baths. Calera Corporation in California developed the process and today uses the lime to make cement.

MULTIFUNCTIONAL BUILDINGS

The mixed-use concept is the basis for architect Paul-Eric Schirr-Bonnans’s Flat Tower. In addition to having offices, recreation areas and a rail transit hub, the Flat Tower could house 40,000 people. Schirr-Bonnans says that the conventional skyscraper model—a tower surrounded by green space—leads to the isolation of communities from one another. A greenbelt area under the building would encourage communities to interact.

Strategies for a Changing Planet: Awareness

Already Happening Nick Jacques

Climate change is already happening, and it's time to get ready. Here's how we could adjust our most basic needs--food, water, shelter--to survive.
There is no longer any question of preventing climate change. Some 98 percent of working climate scientists agree that the atmosphere is already warming in response to human greenhouse-gas emissions, and the most recent research suggests that we are on a path toward what were once considered “worst case” scenarios.
How much warmer must it get before things really go to hell? “Climate sensitivity” remains a subject of intense investigation, and what counts as hellish is a matter of judgment, but United Nations climate negotiators have settled on a goal to limit atmospheric carbon dioxide to 450 parts per million, which would cause the global mean temperature to peak no more than 3.6°F above preindustrial levels. If it gets much hotter than that, we will most likely be confronted by levels of drought and severe storms for which humanity has no precedent. That sounds bad enough—and indeed, postindustrial temperatures have already risen by as much as 1.6°—but there’s increasing reason to believe, as James Hansen and many other climate scientists do, that severe effects will arrive well below 450 ppm, and possibly below today’s level of 396 ppm. Danger is much closer than we thought.
We will almost certainly blow past 3.6° in any case. One recent study found that the average global temperature would rise another 3.2° by the end of the century even if human carbon emissions dropped to zero tomorrow, a scenario that is, of course, extremely unlikely. Simply limiting the temperature rise to twice the “safe” level would require heroic, sustained global effort, a level of ambition that appears nowhere in evidence. And if humanity does nothing to restrain climate pollution, the trajectory it’s on right now could carry the rise to as much as 10° within the century.
We no longer have a choice about whether to confront major changes already in the works. By the end of this century, sea levels will rise, drought will spread, and millions of animals, human and otherwise, will be driven from their homes. Scientists call the process of preparing for these changes “adaptation,” but a more apt term can be found in the tech world: ruggedizing. Greater extremes require tougher, more resilient societies.
* * * In 2009, researchers from the University of Oxford, the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Center organized a conference on what a change of 7.2° or greater might look like—oddly, one of the first concerted scientific examinations of the impacts of temperatures that high. Here are some of the results: 7.2°, which could conceivably arrive as early as 2060, would mean a planet that was hotter than at any time in the past 10 million years. By 2100, sea levels would rise by as much as six feet, leaving hundreds of millions of the world’s coast-dwellers homeless, even as huge swaths of the ocean itself became “dead zones.” Glaciers and coral reefs would largely vanish from the planet.
It may be possible to weather this onslaught if we begin preparing now, by building low-carbon, high-density cities away from the coasts, radically improving the efficiency of water and energy systems, boosting local and global emergency-response capacities, and adjusting to a less consumption- and waste-oriented lifestyle. But although humans are an ingenious species, some changes simply exceed any realistic capacity for adaptation. The real threat, the existential threat, is that climate change will gain so much momentum that humanity loses what remaining power it has to slow or stop it, even by reducing carbon emissions to zero. If change becomes self-sustaining, our children and grandchildren will inherit an atmosphere irreversibly out of control, with inexorably rising temperatures that could, according to one recent study, render half of Earth’s currently occupied land uninhabitable—literally too hot to bear—by 2300.
Given the risks humans pose to the planet, we might someday leave Earth simply to conserve it.These are only scenarios spit out by climate models; there’s no way to predict exactly what will happen. It might be tempting to seize on uncertainty as reason to wait and see. Why prepare if we don’t know exactly what we’re preparing for? But the uncertainties in the science of climate impacts—and they are legion—make the future more perilous, not less. Things look bad, and if there’s a chance they could turn out better than expected, there’s also a chance they could turn out worse. Out on the “long tail” of the probability curve, there are small but not insignificant chances for damages that are, for all practical purposes, unlimited. For instance, if several of the world’s major land-based ice sheets melt, we could see a 40-foot rise in sea levels within centuries.
These are stark and discomfiting findings. Above all, they suggest that global temperature should be held as low as is still possible, at virtually any cost. But they also make clear that some changes are inevitable. We no longer have a choice between mitigating climate change and adapting to climate change. We must do both.
* * * When we talk about adaptation, we often imagine accommodating a specific new set of conditions; a temperate place gets too hot, a cold place gets temperate, so we move our farms around and get on with it. But we simply do not know, and most likely will not for some time, what particular temperature we are bound for, or whether there will ever again be a stable temperature. It is not a specific set of conditions but uncertainty itself to which we must adapt.
Even as we remain flexible, we will have to think and work on a very large scale. Major infrastructure projects—highways, dams, levies, electrical transmission lines, trains and subways—represent investments meant to pay off over generations. The New York City subway system is more than 100 years old. Today there’s a nontrivial chance that much of Manhattan will be under water in 100 years. How do we invest in the future when it has become so cloudy and threatening? As the stories in this series report, scientists and engineers already have many excellent (and some less than excellent) answers. It can be done. But the time to do it is now.
David Roberts is a senior staff writer for Grist.org. He lives in Seattle.
Courtsey:popular science