Saving Fuel on the Farm by Making Hay

  

A new look at crop rotation could cut energy use for agriculture

Mason Inman

for National Geographic News

Conventional grain-growing methods require large amounts of fossil fuel. Researchers say that a more complex crop rotation could be the energy-saving answer. Photograph by John Stanmeyer, VII/National Geographic

How much fuel went into producing the food on your plate? Chances are, it was a lot more energy than you will ever get out of eating that meal.

By some estimates, it takes about 10 calories of fossil fuels to get each calorie of food from farm to fork in the American food system.  But it doesn’t have to be that way, according to a study published Monday in the May/June edition of Agronomy Journal.

Farmers can slash their fossil fuel use, while still growing bumper crops and turning a profit—all with the help of a little more crop rotation, concluded the team of researchers from Iowa State University after a six-year study.

In tests on a research farm in Iowa, the team mixed oats, alfalfa, and other crops into the rotation along with corn and soybeans, the two mainstays of the U.S. Corn Belt. Read More

Fossil Feathers Behind Breakthrough

Photograph by Jakob Vinther

In the Beijing Museum of Natural History, the team behind the new study in Science, co-led by Yale University's Jakob Vinther, found an Anchiornis skeleton (pictured) preserved in an ochre-colored slab of mudstone.

With fossilized "protofeathers" bursting from the bones in every direction—and faint evidence of dark and light markings—the fossil was an ideal target for researchers seeking prehistoric melanosomes,pigment-bearing organelles within feathers.

The microscopic particles were first found preserved in a fossil—in this case, a prehistoric bird—by Vinther and his team in 2008. The particles had previously been interpreted in fossils as bacteria.

In modern birds, different types of melanosomes are known to produce different colors in feathers. Eumelanosomes are rodlike and are associated with the colors black and gray. Phaeomelanosomes are round and produce colors ranging from reddish brown to yellow. A lack of melanosomes makes white.

 http://news.nationalgeographic.com

Settlement Talks Pick Up Ahead of BP Oil Spill Trial

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Some experts have estimated potential civil and criminal liabilities for the Gulf of Mexico explosion, battled by fireboats in April 2010, at $40 billion.

NEW ORLEANS — Nearly two years after the oil rig explosion that killed 11 people and spilled millions of barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the myriad plaintiffs suing BP and other companies over the disaster are about to get their day in court.

Or not.

With the start of the high-profile trial set for next Monday, and the specter of potential liability that some experts have estimated at $40 billion, BP and other defendants are stepping up negotiations to end the litigation before Judge Carl J. Barbier of Federal District Court picks up his gavel.

“We are ready to settle, if we can do so on fair and reasonable terms,” Robert Dudley, BP’s chief executive, said this month during a conference call about the company’s earnings. “But we are preparing vigorously for trial.”

Charges from hundreds of civil cases from plaintiffs that include the United States government, state and local governments, and individuals and businesses have been consolidated in a federal courtroom here. Along with BP, defendants include Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig; Halliburton, the company that poured the concrete that lined the well; and Cameron International, which made the industry fail-safe device known as a blowout preventer.

Numerous reports have identified errors and problems that contributed to the largest oil spill in United States history, including a faulty concrete job, poor decisions leading up to the blast and the failure of the blowout preventer’s rams and blades to stop the oil.

Several attorneys familiar with the negotiations said settlement talks had intensified in recent weeks. On Friday, Moex Offshore became the first company among the defendants to settle with the government. Moex, which owned 10 percent of the well but did not have a role in operating it, agreed to pay $90 million to federal and state governments. The Department of Justice said the deal included $70 million in civil penalties, the most ever under the 1972 federal Clean Water Act — a record that is likely to be broken before long.

Some of the remaining obstacles to a larger settlement deal are among the defendant companies, rather than between them and the plaintiffs, and concern the amounts that the various parties would contribute toward the negotiated sum.

To many familiar with the case, there is little question that BP would be better off settling. “The incentives are very large for BP to get out,” said Edward F. Sherman, a law professor at Tulane University here.

Read More

Croc Fossil Found in Cave

© 2011 National Geographic; Original video produced by: Phillip Lehman, Dominican Republic Speleological Society and Aquavista Films

Croc Fossil Found in Cave

September 26, 2011—A skeleton of a possibly extinct crocodile is among several fossil surprises unearthed in freshwater caves of the Dominican Republic, paleontologists say.

BP Oil Spill Haunts Gulf Business Owners Almost Two Years After Disaster

By Allen Johnson Jr., Laurel Calkins and Margaret Cronin Fisk -

http://www.bloomberg.com

Clyde Perez on a shrimping boat in Greens Ditch, Louisiana. Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Oyster boats are docked after waterways where oysters are harvested were shut down due to the BP Plc Deepwater Horizon offshore oil well spill in Empire, Louisiana, U.S., on May 1, 2010. Photographer: Derick E. Hingle/Bloomberg

Louisiana oysterman Terrance M. Shelley was struggling to keep up with demand by New Orleans restaurants before BP Plc (BP/)’s Macondo well blew out in April 2010, crippling the processing plant he opened six months earlier.

“Demand was exploding” until then, said Shelley, 60, whose family has 18,000 acres of oyster reefs.

The state closed the reefs because of contamination from the Gulf of Mexico spill. Shelley’s business dried up as customers and wholesalers shunned Gulf seafood.

Shelley is among thousands of coastal residents, business people and property owners who will be affected by a trial starting Feb. 27 in New Orleans federal court to determine who must compensate spill victims. The spill spewed more than 4.1 million barrels of crude over 87 days into the Gulf, whose $3 billion fishing industry provides one-third of all seafood consumed in the U.S., the plaintiffs said in court papers.

At the peak of the disaster, in June 2010, 40 percent of Gulf waters were closed to commercial and recreational fishing, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

Gulf Coast seafood restaurants took the brunt of the disruption, which cut supply chains and chased away customers afraid of contamination. The blow fell hardest on Louisiana, much of which a panel of judges said in 2010 was closest to the “geographic and psychological center of gravity” of the spill.

Read More

True-Color Dinosaur Pictures: First Full-Body Rendering

Dino-pecker?

Illustration by National Geographic

For the first time, scientists have decoded the full-body color patterns of a dinosaur—the 155-million-year-old Anchiornis huxleyi (pictured)—a new study in the journal Science says. (Read in-depth coverage.)

That may sound familiar, given last week's announcement of the first scientifically verified dinosaur color scheme.

But the previous research, published in Nature, had found pigments only on a few isolated parts of dinosaurs (see pictures)—and had used less rigorous methods for assigning colors to the fossilized, filament-like "protofeathers" found on some dinosaur specimens, say authors of the new report.

—Chris Sloan, National Geographic magazine senior editor

Dinosaur True Colors Revealed for First Time

"Dino fuzz" pigment discovery in feathers may strengthen dinosaur-bird link.



























Sinosauropteryx is the first fossil dinosaur to have its color scientifically established.

Illustration courtesy James Robins

Chris Sloan

National Geographic magazine paleontology editor, for National Geographic News


Pigments have been found in fossil dinosaurs for the first time, a new study says.

The discovery may prove once and for all that dinosaurs' hairlike filaments—sometimes called dino fuzz—are related to bird feathers, paleontologists announced today. (Pictures: Dinosaur True Colors Revealed by Feather Find.)

The finding may also open up a new world of prehistoric color, illuminating the role of color in dinosaur behavior and allowing the first accurately colored dinosaur re-creations, according to the study team, led by Fucheng Zhang of China's Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology.

The team identified fossilized melanosomes—pigment-bearing organelles—in the feathers and filament-like "protofeathers" of fossil birds and dinosaurs from northeastern China.

Found in the feathers of living birds, the nano-size packets of pigment—a hundred melanosomes can fit across a human hair—were first reported in fossil bird feathers in 2008.

Breaking Fuel From the Rock

Geologists long knew there was natural gas in the Marcellus shale formation, but thought it impossible to unlock. But producers in the last decade learned to mine this huge resource by drilling horizontally to reach a large surface area, then fracturing the rock with high-pressure water, sand, and lubricant chemicals.

View Interactive Here

Invention Nation: Revolving Door Generator

Two engineers are working on a way to save all the lost energy wasted when people push though the thousands of revolving doors in New York City.


http://science.discovery.com

U.S. Oil Fields Stage “Great Revival,” But No Easing Gas Prices

Mason Inman

For National Geographic News

Rigs like this one near Stanley, North Dakota, are an increasingly familiar sight in some parts of the United States, where the pace of oil drilling is at a 25-year high.  Photograph by Karen Bleier, AFP/Getty Images

The United States has long been seen as a nation in its twilight as an oil producer, facing a relentless decline that began when President Richard Nixon was in the White House. He and every president since pledged to halt the U.S. slide into greater dependence on foreign oil, but the trend seemed irreversible—until now. Forty-one years later, U.S. oil production is on the rise.

U.S. oil fields yielded an estimated 5.68 million barrels per day in 2011—their highest output since 2003, thanks largely to a surge of new production from shale oil that lies beneath the Great Plains. The rush so far is centered in North Dakota, where oil production has quadrupled since 2005, but drilling is set to spread across the prairie and beyond.

Read More

Invention Nation: Algae Biofuel

Scientists are working on a way to make biodiesel from algae in Norfolk, Virginia.


http://science.discovery.com

Eoraptor Mating Crasher

Dinosaur Revolution





http://dsc.discovery.com

Earth 2050: Fueling The Future

The world has close to one billion cars, and the number will double by 2050. That is going to create a huge demand for energy. How do we reduce the amount of carbon emissions we generate? Are there alternatives to petroleum gasoline?




http://dsc.discovery.com

Evolution's Winners

Dinosaur Revolution: The New Dinosaurs




http://dsc.discovery.com

Earth 2050: From Sugarcane to Superfuel

In Barra Bonita, Brazil, a team of researchers, scientists and farmers collaborate to create one of the lowest cost, lowest-carbon bio fuels in the world: sugarcane ethanol.

http://dsc.discovery.com