Algaeus lives! A modified Prius goes cross-country on fuel from algae

By David Biello in 60-Second Science Blog

You really can drive across country on algae and a 700-pound battery pack, or so proved the crew behind the documentary Fuel .

Embarking on September 8 and pulling into New York City today, just in time for the film's premiere, the Algaeus covered 3,750 miles.

"It got 147 miles-per-gallon in the city," says Fuel director Josh Tickell of the converted to plug-in Prius hybrid that he drove on a mix of battery power and algae fuel blended with conventional gasoline. The Algaeus did less well on the highway: 52 mpg, because of the lack of regenerative braking that recharges the battery, among other things.

The algae came from 22 acres of special ponds at Sapphire Energy's research and development facility in New Mexico, where local strains of the microscopic plant grow in vats of saltwater while being fed CO2 that would otherwise go into Coca-Cola and other fizzy drinks, according to Tim Zenk, a spokesman for Sapphire.

The company claims that its algae produce at least 30 percent by weight of oil and they delivered approximately five gallons of gasoline derived from their algal oil to prove it. Refined by Syntroleum in Louisiana, the algae gasoline behaved no differently in the car, according to the driving crew.

Of course, that's because the mix in the cylinder was roughly five percent algae-derived gasoline and 95 percent 91-octane premium gasoline. And with the addition of a second battery pack in the trunk, courtesy of Plug-In Conversions, the Algaeus could travel 25 miles on electricity alone (after six hours of charging).

In the 10-day journey, the crew did not manage to get rid of the new car smell, but they did manage to get some thumbs up—and break some speed limits—on the long trek. They also proved that algae fuel doesn't smell too much like a neglected swimming pool, although some of the unrefined oil can be redolent of the ocean, Zenk says.

"We really view it, not to sound grandiose, as an Apollo mission for algae and renewable fuel," says Fuel producer Rebecca Harrell, of the first cross-country trip on algae fuel and battery power.

Ultimately, the filmmakers hope to offer an insight into alternatives that are here today. After all Sapphire claims to get about 5,000 gallons of algal oil per acre of pond. The next step? Raising $1 billion to build a 10,000 barrel a day facility in New Mexico, Zenk says. "At that level, we can produce algal oil for $60 to $80 per barrel." Or roughly the cost of conventional oil today. And that might herald the real start of alternative fuels from algae.

Boy finds rare pink grasshopper

By Lori Bongiorno

Daniel Tate, an English schoolboy, was looking for grasshoppers at a wildlife event he attended with his great-grandfather last week.

But the 11-year old boy and his companions at Seaton Marshes Local Nature Reserve had no idea what a huge surprise they were in for. Tate saw something pink that he thought was a flower. But when it jumped he knew it was a grasshopper.

It turns out that it was an adult female common green grasshopper that just happened to be born pink.

Experts aren't sure what caused this mutation. Grasshoppers of different colors, including pink, are unusual but not unheard of according to experts. What makes this particular grasshopper so rare is the intensity of the pink, according to Fraser Rush, a nature reserves officer in Britain.

Most people find insects annoying, but they can certainly benefit people and the planet. Praying mantises, for example, eat ticks, mosquitoes, flies, beetles, and other pests. Fewer mosquitoes and ticks in your backyard translates into fewer applications of toxic bug repellents. Organic gardeners use praying mantises, common ladybugs, and other beneficial insects to control pests as an alternative to pesticides.

Check out Yahoo! Green on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Yahoo Green Picks

Found: Firm place to stand outside solar system

SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer

WASHINGTON – Astronomers have finally found a place outside our solar system where there's a firm place to stand — if only it weren't so broiling hot.

As scientists search the skies for life elsewhere, they have found more than 300 planets outside our solar system. But they all have been gas balls or can't be proven to be solid. Now a team of European astronomers has confirmed the first rocky extrasolar planet.

Scientists have long figured that if life begins on a planet, it needs a solid surface to rest on, so finding one elsewhere is a big deal.

"We basically live on a rock ourselves," said co-discoverer Artie Hatzes, director of the Thuringer observatory in Germany. "It's as close to something like the Earth that we've found so far. It's just a little too close to its sun."

So close that its surface temperature is more than 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, too toasty to sustain life. It circles its star in just 20 hours, zipping around at 466,000 mph. By comparison, Mercury, the planet nearest our sun, completes its solar orbit in 88 days.

"It's hot, they're calling it the lava planet," Hatzes said.

This is a major discovery in the field of trying to find life elsewhere in the universe, said outside expert Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution. It was the buzz of a conference on finding an Earth-like planet outside our solar system, held in Barcelona, Spain, where the discovery was presented Wednesday morning. The find is also being published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The planet is called Corot-7b. It was first discovered earlier this year. European scientists then watched it dozens of times to measure its density to prove that it is rocky like Earth. It's in our general neighborhood, circling a star in the winter sky about 500 light-years away. Each light-year is about 6 trillion miles.

Four planets in our solar system are rocky: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

In addition, the planet is about as close to Earth in size as any other planet found outside our solar system. Its radius is only one-and-a-half times bigger than Earth's and it has a mass about five times the Earth's.

Now that another rocky planet has been found so close to its own star, it gives scientists more confidence that they'll find more Earth-like planets farther away, where the conditions could be more favorable to life, Boss said.

"The evidence is becoming overwhelming that we live in a crowded universe," Boss said.
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On the Net:
European Southern Observatory: http://www.eso.org/

PHOTO CREDIT: This image provided by the European Southern Observatory Wednesday Sept. 16, 2009 shows an artist rendition of the first rocky extrasolar planet called Corot-7b. European astronomers confirmed the first rocky extrasolar planet Wednesday. According to scientists the planet is so close to it's sun that its surface temperature is more than 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, too toasty to sustain life. It circles its star in just 20 hours, zipping around at 466,000 mph. By comparison, Mercury, the planet nearest our sun, completes its solar orbit in 88 days.(AP Photo/ESO) -- MANDATORY CREDIT --

KCMetropolis.org Debut

Times, they are a-changing
By Diane Thompson

This everyman, or more aptly put, everywoman, story takes place in an unnamed small Midwestern town outside of "The Cities" in Minnesota during 1969-70. It is a tale of personal and national growth and of discovery told through the lives of Pastor Gunderson, played by Barry Williams (a.k.a Greg Brady), and the four ladies who run the church kitchen.

Click here to read full review.

Source: KCMetropolis.org

Chris Garver, Ruthless & Toothless - Speed Drawing a Samurai

This is SICK! : )

Ruthless & Toothless

And Like the Phoenix, It is Reborn!

September 9th, 2009 9:46 AM by Phil Plait in Astronomy, Cool stuff, NASA, Pretty pictures

After a long and nervous wait for those of us stuck on Earth, the world’s most famous observatory is back on the job! Behold!

Woot!

That’s NGC 6217, a spiral galaxy as seen by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, a workhorse detector on Hubble that went on the fritz in January 2007. But when the STS-125 brought the Space Shuttle Atlantis to Hubble, it also carried two new cameras and the tools to fix two older, busted ones, including ACS. After a daring series of repairs and upgrades, Hubble is now back up to speed.

This ACS image is gorgeous. NGC 6217 is relatively close by, at a distance of roughly 80 million light years (note that some early press said it was 6 million light years away, which is incorrect.

The gas and stars in the middle form an exquisite rectangular bar across the core due to complicated gravitational interactions, and you can easily pick out huge numbers of glowing pink star forming areas, where stars are being born in prodigious quantities. And even from this vast distance — 800 quintillion kilometers (500 quintillion miles) — Hubble can still pick out individual stars in the spiral arms. These are the biggest, baddest, and brightest ones, the stars that will someday explode as monstrous supernovae… and you can rest assured astronomers will be using Hubble or its successors to observe them when they do.

But there’s more! Click here to read full post.

SOURCE: DiscoverMagazine.com

Photo credit: Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

The Real Sea Monsters: On the Hunt for Rogue Waves

Scientists hope a better understanding of when, where and how mammoth oceanic waves form can someday help ships steer clear of danger

By Lynne Peeples

A near-vertical wall of water in what had been an otherwise placid sea shocked all on board the ocean liner Teutonic—including the crew—on that Sunday in February, more than a century ago."

It was about 9 o'clock, and [First Officer Bartlett], as he walked the bridge, had not the slightest premonition of the impending danger. The wave came over the bow from nobody seems to know where, and broke in all its fury," reported The New York Times on March 1, 1901: "Many of the passengers were inclined to believe that the wave was the result of volcanic phenomena, or a tidal wave. These opinions were the exception, however, for had the sea been of the tidal order Bartlett would have seen it coming." The volcano theory was just as unlikely: "Absurd, absurd," one of the Teutonic's officers told the Times. "It was a giant sea, and there is no doubt of that."

This is just one of the many anecdotal accounts in maritime history of waves upward of 30 meters devouring ships, even swallowing low-flying helicopters. But what sea captains and scientists have long believed to be true only gained widespread acceptance after the first digitally recorded rogue wave struck an oil rig in 1995. "The seamen tales about large waves eating their ships are correct," says Tim Janssen, an oceanographer at San Francisco State University. "This was proof to everybody else, and a treat for scientists. They suspected it, but to see it and have an observation is something else."Now that there is no longer a question of rogue waves' existence, other mysteries have arisen: How frequently do they occur? Just how do they come about? Are there areas or conditions where they are more likely? Janssen is among a growing group of researchers in search of answers to these questions, which could someday lead to safer seas.Rogue waves by the numbersBefore any answers could be attempted, scientists first had to characterize a rogue (or freak) wave. The widely accepted definition, according to Janssen, is a wave roughly three times the average height of its neighbors. This is a somewhat arbitrary cutoff. Really, he notes, they are just "unexpectedly large waves." The wave that swept onlookers off the coast in Acadia National Park in Maine on August 23 may not fit the former definition, for example, because background waves were already quite large due to Hurricane Bill, and rogues typically occur in the open ocean. Yet that wave has still been readily referred to as a "rogue".No one is certain yet just how frequently freak waves form; accurate numbers are extremely difficult to collect given the waves' rare and transient nature. With more sophisticated monitoring and modeling—and as first-hand accounts are taken more seriously—the waves' prevalence appears to be rising. "[Rogue waves] are all short-lived, and because ships are not everywhere, the probability that a ship encounters one is relatively small," says Daniel Solli, who studies the optical version of rogue waves at the University of California, Los Angeles. "But with increasing amounts of oceanic traffic in the future, the likelihood of encountering them is getting larger."Some areas seem to breed the waves more than others. Janssen and his colleagues recently used computer models to determine that regions where wave energy is strongly focused could be up to 10 times more likely to generate a freak wave. He speculates that approximately three of every 10,000 waves on the oceans achieve rogue status, yet in certain spots—like coastal inlets and river mouths—these extreme waves can make up three out of every 1,000 waves. A paper describing these results was published last month in the Journal of Physical Oceanography.Forming fearsome wavesVarious theories exist for how rogue waves form. The simplest suggests that small waves coalesce into much larger ones in an accumulative fashion—a faster one-meter wave catches up with a slower two-meter wave adding up to a three-meter wave, for example. Janssen and his colleagues build on this with a more complex, nonlinear model in their recent paper. Waves might actually "communicate—sometimes in a bad way—and produce more constructive interferences," Janssen explains. By communicating, he means exchanging energy. And because the conversations aren't necessarily balanced, he says, "Communication can get amplified enough that a high-intensity large wave develops." In other words, one burgeoning wave can actually soak up the energy of surrounding waves.Again, in those places where variations in water depths and currents focus wave energies, this line of communication can get especially busy. Janssen's models identified these rogue-prone zones. Certain conditions such as winds and wave dissipation, however, could not be included, limiting the simulation's predictive power.Meanwhile, Chin Wu, an environmental engineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison sees another likely scenario spurring the monster waves: "If a wave propagates from east to west, and the current moves west to east, then a wave starts to build up," says Wu, who studies wave–current interactions in a 15-meter pool. The wave basically climbs the current's wall, rising out of what appears to be nowhere. Rogue waves have in fact been more common in regions such as the east coast of South Africa where surface waves meet currents running in the opposite direction.

Focusing on forecastsThe only way to really know what is going on in the unpredictable oceans is to watch, Wu says. He acknowledges, however, that the investments in the instruments and time necessary for such fieldwork are immense. "We need to identify places where [rogue waves] are more likely to occur," he says, emphasizing the importance of numerical models—including the nontrivial accounting of wind and wave breaking—at this step, "and then focus on those areas."Focusing on an optical wave analogue may actually help scientists limit where they need to look. Light waves travel in optical fibers similarly to water waves traveling in the open ocean. "In optics we're dealing with a similar phenomenon, but doing experiments on the tabletop and acquiring data in only a fraction of a second," says U.C. Los Angeles's Solli. Although he doesn't suggest that optical experiments should replace ocean research, he suggests it could be a guide. Mapping light-wave conditions to the ocean could uncover parallel parameters that give rise to water waves. "Instead of looking for a needle in a haystack in the water, you could benefit from some beginning wisdom and narrow down the range," adds Solli, who co-authored a paper on optical rogue waves in the December 2007 edition of Nature. (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.)Janssen agrees with the need for more direct observations of ocean behavior. "We can make a theoretical prediction," he says. "But then we have to go out and see if nature agrees." If it does, the results "could provide a prediction scenario—made visible on maps—of hot spots that could change day to day," Janssen says. This could work much like tornado forecasting.Only two passengers were seriously hurt in the Teutonic incident—one suffered a broken jaw and the other a severed foot. They were fortunate. "Had it struck us later on in the day many passengers would have been promenading in the sunshine, without doubt," Officer Bartlett told the Times. "There is no telling how many of them would have been injured." Extreme waves do not always offer such merciful timing, however. Forecasts could be crucial in helping future ocean liners evade the voracious sea monsters.

SOURCE: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

PHOTO SOURCE: BIG, BAD WAVE: A monster rogue wave approaches a merchant ship in the Bay of Biscay, an arm of the Atlantic Ocean bordered by the coasts of northwestern Spain and southwestern France.NOAA'S NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE COLLECTION

...forgive the spacing....or lack thereof...not sure what's up with Blogger.

Happy Birthday Bird!

"There was one thing he wanted to do. He didn’t worry about anything else -- as long as he could play that horn." - Jay McShann







At age eleven, he had just begun to play the saxophone. At age twenty he was leading a revolution in modern jazz music. At thirty-four, he was dead from years of drug and alcohol use. Today, Charlie "Yardbird" Parker is considered one of the great musical innovators of the 20th century. A father of bebop, he influenced generations of musicians, and sparked the fire of one of the most important and successful American artistic movements.

Born in 1920 in Kansas City, Kansas, Charlie Parker grew up just across the river in Kansas City, Missouri. By age twelve he was playing in the high school marching band and in local dance hall combos. It was then that he first heard the new sounds of jazz. Hanging around the Kansas City clubs, the young Parker went to hear every new musician to pass through. Some of his earliest idols were Jimmy Dorsey, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, and Louis Armstrong.

As a teenager he married his childhood sweetheart, Rebecca Parker Davis. Living in Kansas City, they had a child, but as Kansas City declined as a center for jazz, Parker longed to leave his hometown for New York. So, just around age twenty, Parker sold his horn, left his family, and hopped on a train to New York, where he was destined to change the face of American music forever.

In New York, Parker had difficulty finding work at first, but playing with Jay McShann’s band he began to develop his fiercely original solo style. Within a short while he was the talk of the town and Dizzy Gillespie and other members of the Earl Hines band convinced Hines to hire him. Gillespie and Parker became close friends and collaborators. Of the time Gillespie recalled, "New York is the place, and both of us blossomed." Leaving Hines, the two moved on to Billy Eckstine’s band, where they were able to expand their range of experimentation.

The seeds of modern jazz, or "bebop," as the new style came to be called, were also being sown by now legendary pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, drummers Kenny Clark and Max Roach, and trumpeter Miles Davis. All were frequent Parker collaborators on recordings and in the lively 52nd Street clubs that were the jazz center of the mid-1940s. Beyond his amazing technical capacity, Parker was able to invent a more complex and individual music by disregarding the four- and eight-bar standards of jazz and creating solos that were both fluid and harsh.

Though the experiments of jazz were being heard worldwide, in the United States much of the popular media ignored the music and concentrated on the culture -- the berets, horn-rimmed glasses, goatees, and language that characterized the bebop style. Jazz critic Leonard Feather noted, "There was no serious attention paid to Charlie Parker as a great creative musician ... in any of the media. It was just horrifying how really miserably he was treated. And this goes for the way Dizzy Gillespie was treated -- and everybody." Due in part to dissatisfaction with the amount of critical attention he was receiving and in part to his years of on and off drug use, Parker slipped into serious addiction. On a two-year tour of California, his drinking and drug addiction worsened, and for six months he was in a Los Angeles rehabilitation center.

It was not until his tour of Europe that Parker began to receive the attention he deserved. Visiting Paris in 1949, Parker was greeted with an almost cult status. His European trips also encouraged him to expand his musical arrangements, including backing strings for both touring and recording. However, as continuing personal and creative pressures mounted, he went into a tailspin: drinking, behaving erratically, and even being banned from "Birdland," the legendary 52nd Street club named in his honor. Throughout this time, however, one thing remained intact -- Parker’s playing continued to exhibit the same technical genius and emotional investment that had made him great.

In 1954, while working again in California, Parker learned of the death of his two-year-old daughter, and went into further decline. He separated from his then common-law wife, Chan Parker, and was reduced to playing in dives. The cheap red wine he had become addicted to was exacerbating his stomach ulcers, and he even once attempted suicide. On March 9, 1955, while visiting his friend, the "jazz baroness" Nica de Koenigswarter, Charlie Parker died. The coroner cited pneumonia as the cause, and estimated Parker’s age at fifty-five or sixty. He was only thirty-four. Though Parker was a titan among jazz musicians of the time, it would take the country at large years to learn that for a short while in the 1940s and 1950s one of the most profoundly original American musicians had walked among them virtually unrecognized.

Source: American Masters

Fun Fact

The discovery of the sunken Titanic on September 1, 1985, was made around one o'clock in the morning -- close to the same time the Titanic is believed to have sunk.