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Written by Philip Proefrock on 04/09/12
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Fire fighting could take on an entirely new character with the rediscovery of a principle first noticed more than 200 years ago: electricity can stop flames.
Scientists do not yet fully understand how electricity stops fire. "The process by which it does this is complex, the researchers say, and is actually not really well understood (there are a lot of different things happening at once, apparently). But critically, it seems the carbon particles (soot) generated during combustion are easily charged, and once charged they respond to electric fields in strange ways that affect the stability of the flame. Shake that stability hard enough, and the flame collapses."
If an electrical field can extinguish the flames, it offers an easily transportable method for extinguishing fires on jet fighters and submarines (and DARPA is backing research on the process). Building materials and their contents may be able to be saved from both the fire and from the water damage that often occurs from fire fighting. The system could also help reduce the use of fire retardant gasses such as Halon, which is a potent ozone-depletion causing gas.
Electrical fire suppression also has the potential to be a very fast-acting system, which could also be a benefit for locations with especially sensitive contents. The effect also seems to be generated from a manageable level of power, which suggests that, in a few years, backpack sized gear may be available to fire fighters as an alternative to the hoses and foam sprayers.
image: Georg Andreas Böckler via Wikimedia Commons
hat tip to: @JaymiHeimbuch
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Written by Philip Proefrock on 14/09/12
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Green roofs are a familiar concept among high-performance building designers and other EcoGeeks, but what about a mobile green roof moving through a city? A project called Bus Roots takes the idea of green roofs and installs it on a bus. The project is the graduate thesis of NYU student Marco Antonio Castro Cosio. A mobile science lab called Bio Bus is the host for this project.
The Bus Roots project uses an extensive green roof system similar to that used for buildings and covers the 340 square feet (31.6 square meters) of bus roof with shallow trays of plants in growth media.
Bringing a mobile patch of plants through the city offers a list of potential benefits, including mitigation of heat island effect, CO2 absorbtion, oxygen production, and aesthetic value. For those of you in or around New York City and are planning to attend the MakerFaire at the end of September, the Bio Bus is scheduled to appear at that event, and you may be able to see it in person.
via: GetDowntown
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Written by Philip Proefrock on 16/11/12
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The eighth largest economy in the world has a new carbon cap-and-trade program in place. And no, it's not a country in Europe, it's the State of California, which this week auctioned the rights to emit 60 million tons of carbon dioxide.
The California Air Rights Board auction serves to set a price on the emission of a ton of CO2. Companies can decide whether to invest in cleaner, more efficient systems, or can choose to pay for the right to pollute. As noted in the Marketplace report, "We've been living in a world where there is no price on pollution," says Dan Kammen, a professor of energy policy at U.C. Berkeley. "It doesn't send the right signals. It doesn't reward innovators."
Absent such a system, industry has been free to exhaust CO2 into the atmosphere without regard to impact on others. Establishing a market for carbon emissions will begin to put a price on that right, and to allow the true costs of carbon emissions to be more accurately reflected in the economy.
The California Chamber of Commerce has filed a lawsuit to object to the auction, but the Air Rights Board believes that the auction will withstand legal challenge.
image: CC BY-SA 3.0 by Dori/Wikimedia Commons
via: Marketplace
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Written by Philip Proefrock on 09/10/12
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Last month there was a great deal of media attention paid to a study about organic food (Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives?: A Systematic Review), which was widely cited for concluding that "[there is no] evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods." But the study is more spin than significant science.
A critique of the study in the New York Times by columnist and food writer Mark Bittman points out the weaknesses and oversimplifications in the study that have been used to "debunk" organic food based on criteria that are significantly immaterial to the organic label.
Bittman says of the study, "[it] was like declaring guns no more dangerous than baseball bats when it comes to blunt-object head injuries. It was the equivalent of comparing milk and Elmer’s glue on the basis of whiteness. It did, in short, miss the point." The other half of the conclusion of the study, "Consumption of organic foods may reduce exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria," was much more overlooked.
Organic food has never been about some perception of super-food with extra nutritional value, except perhaps to those who don't understand organic in the first place. But this study was so narrow in its definitiion of "nutritious" (which was taken to mean "containing more vitamins") that, as Bittman points out, "you can claim that, based on nutrients, Frosted Flakes are a better choice than an apple."
The benefits of organic farming are numerous, and are far beyond relative comparison of the amount of some vitamin content. Not only are there potential individual benefits (the aforementioned reduced exposure to pesticide residue and so forth), but contributing to such broader environmental benefits as reduced pesticide use and more sustainable farming practices are also worthwhile goals.
image: CC BY-SA 3.0 by Ragesoss
via: NY Times (apologies; this may be behind their paywall)
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Written by Philip Proefrock on 11/12/12
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Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics have developed a method to break down old concrete debris into its constituents for better recycling and re-use of the material. The process, called electrodynamic fragmentation, uses very short pulses (less than 500 nanoseconds) of induced lightning to separate gravel from cement materials in concrete.
Concrete is a material with a mixed environmental pedigree. Although its workability and durability make it extremely useful for a lot of purposes, it also has several drawbacks. There are the environmental impacts from the production of concrete, and it is also a major component of the materials going into landfills, so this makes the idea of recycling concrete a compelling one.
At present, most concrete recycling is merely to crush it and use it for sub-base under roads. This is better than landfilling it, but is a downcycling of the material. With the new lightning process, the aggregates can be more readily salvaged and re-used in new concrete.
Production of new cement from the recovered, separated material would be the ultimate goal of concrete recycling, since the production of cement is one of the single most intensive sources of CO2 emissions at present. While this process does not accomplish that, it does lay the way for that kind of recycling to become a possibility.
image: CC BY-SA 2.0 by brewbooks
via: Gizmag
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