Because of more energy-efficient housing, appliances and gadgets, power usage is on track to decline in 2013 for the third year in a row, to its lowest point since 2001, even though our lives are more electrified.
~ Jonathan Fahey from, http://phys.org/news/2013-12-home-electricity-falling.html
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Government researchers have tagged 338 sharks with acoustic transmitters that monitor where the animals are. When a tagged shark is about half a mile away from a beach, it triggers a computer alert, which tweets out a message on the Surf Life Saving Western Australia Twitter feed. The tweet notes the shark’s size, breed and approximate location.
~ Alan Yu from, http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/01/01/258670211/more-than-300-sharks-in-australia-are-now-on-twitter
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Cinnamon comes from the bark of trees. It has long been considered a medicinal plant. There are several varieties, harvested from southern China to Southeast Asia. For years, there have been hints that adding cinnamon to your diet can help control blood sugar. And a recent spate of studies adds to the evidence that the effect is real.
~ Allison Aubrey from, http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/12/30/255778250/cinnamon-can-help-lower-blood-sugar-but-one-variety-may-be-best
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Scientists are just beginning to learn about how our decisions at the dinner table — or the drive-through — tweak our microbiome, that is, the communities of bacteria living in our bodies. But one thing is becoming clear: The critters hanging out in our intestine influence many aspects of our health, including weight, immunity and perhaps even behavior.
~ Michaeleen Doucleff from, http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/12/10/250007042/chowing-down-on-meat-and-dairy-alters-gut-bacteria-a-lot-and-quickly
Have you ever seen a copy of Gray’s Anatomy? (*sigh* No. It’s a book. The TV show is the rip-off.)
…also, Time Well Spent by Douglas Adams.
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The story of oil limits is one that crosses many disciplines. It is not an easy one to understand. Most of those who are writing about peak oil come from hard sciences such as geology, chemistry, and engineering. The following are several stumbling blocks to figuring out the full story that I have encountered. Needless to say, not all of those writing about peak oil have been tripped up by these issues, but it makes it difficult to understand the “real” story.
~ Gail Tverberg from, http://ourfiniteworld.com/2013/08/13/stumbling-blocks-to-figuring-out-the-real-oil-limits-story/
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detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball
~ Randall Munroe from, http://what-if.xkcd.com/73/
This does not end well.
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[T]he world’s poor people are starving and dying for lack of cheap energy today. Driving the price of energy up and denying loans for coal-fired power plants is depriving the poor of cheap energy today, on the basis that it may help their grandchildren in fifty years. That is criminal madness. The result of any policy that increases energy prices is more pain and suffering. Rich people living in industrialized nations should be ashamed of proposing such an inhumane way to fight the dangers of CO2, regardless of whether those dangers are imaginary or real.
~ Willis Eschenbach from, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/21/double-the-burn-rate-scotty
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The reason it’s hard to get to orbit isn’t that space is high up. It’s hard to get to orbit because you have to go so fast.
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The speed you need to stay in orbit is about 8 kilometers per second. Only a fraction of a rocket’s energy is used to lift up out of the atmosphere; the vast majority of it is used to gain orbital (sideways) speed.
~ Randall Munroe from, http://what-if.xkcd.com/58/
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Even journalists get tripped up into thinking this is photo from the North Pole. At the real North Pole, history shows this to be a relatively common occurrence.
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You see while they were busy lecturing the faithful, they forgot the one teensy-eeensy little detail about the source of this photo. It is from camera on top of the sea ice, and sea ice isn’t static, it moves. In fact according to the University of Washington who manages and tracks these floating cameras and weather stations, while they started out near the North Pole, they aren’t anywhere close to it now.
~ Anthony Watts from, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/29/al-gores-reality-minions-think-the-north-pole-is-melting-except-thats-not-a-photo-of-the-north-pole/
Al Gore’s “Reality Minions” think the North Pole is melting – except that’s NOT a photo of the North Pole.
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There is considerable evidence that we are already reaching the situation where governments are encountering financial distress of the type shown in Figure 18. With wages being depressing in recent years (Figure 16), it is difficult to collect as much taxes as required. At the same time, expenses are elevated to handle the many issues that arise (such as payments to the unemployed, subsidies for alternative energy, and the higher costs of road repairs due to higher asphalt costs). The big gap between revenue and expense makes it hard to fix our current financial predicament, and increases the likelihood of political problems.
~ Gail Tverberg from, http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9901
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…if you manage to bust a fuel element, the best outcome is that huge amounts of radioactivity escape into the air and blow over Japan, just like before. The worst outcome is when two of these things get too close, perhaps because in pulling one out it breaks and falls against another one in the tank. Because then you suddenly have lots of fission, a lot of heat, a meltdown, possibly a big blast like before, and the destruction of the entire cooling pond. Or else the water boils off and the whole thing catches fire.
~ From, http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines/alert-fukushima-worse-than-chernobyl-now-in-crisis
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For decades, science fiction writers and various space scientists have pointed out that asteroids offer a huge untapped source of valuable resources. Bringing just a small portion of this back to Earth could be a game changer for our planet.
~ from, http://www.technologyreview.com/view/518046/new-class-of-easily-retrievable-asteroids-discovered/
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We can see that PPUE for most regions peaked around 2000. The big exceptions being Canada in 1992 and Europe and Africa in the mid 2000s. What this means for the majority of the world is that in little over ten years the average number of barrels of oil a single rig produces has almost halved. Put another way oil companies have had to double the number of rigs in operation just to maintain oil production at 2000 levels. This is the very definition of drilling faster just to stay still.
~ Andrew McKay from, http://www.theoildrum.com/node/10026
One way to gauge the cost/effort of producing oil is via Production Per Unit Effort (PPUE).
“Peak oil” is not simply about the quantity of oil being produced; it is about the cost/effort of producing oil. For most of the history of petroleum production, the cost/effort was decreasing or steady. But now the cost/effort is increasing; That’s an inflection of the second derivative of the cost/effort versus production relationship.
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Specifically, they found that when bees are exposed to the enzyme p-coumaric, their immune system appears stronger—it turns on detoxification genes. P-coumaric is found in pollen walls, not nectar, and makes its way into honey inadvertently via sticking to the legs of bees as they visit flowers. Similarly, the team discovered other compounds found in poplar sap that appear to do much the same thing. It all together adds up to a diet that helps bees fight off toxins, the researchers report. Taking away the honey to sell it, and feeding the bees high-fructose corn syrup instead, they claim, compromises their immune systems, making them more vulnerable to the toxins that are meant to kill other bugs.
~ Bob Yirka from, http://phys.org/news/2013-04-high-fructose-corn-syrup-tied-worldwide.html
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