Gulf Coast States Get Creative With BP Oil Spill Money

Tourists watch as workers clean oil from the sand along a strip of oil that washed up on the beach in Gulf Shores, Ala., in 2010 after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded off the Louisiana coast.

 
Gulf Coast states are lining up to spend $1 billion from BP on coastal restoration. The money is part of BP's legal responsibility to restore the Gulf of Mexico's natural resources in the aftermath of the worst oil disaster in U.S. history. But the nature of some of the state projects, including boat ramps and a beachfront hotel, is raising questions about just what counts as coastal restoration. 

Feathered Dinosaurs: More on the Deinonychus

Teeth found in association with fossils of the ornithopod dinosaur Tenontosaurus are quite common in the Cloverly Formation. Two quarries have been discovered that preserve fairly complete Deinonychus fossils near Tenontosaurus fossils. The first, the Yale quarry in the Cloverly of Montana, includes numerous teeth, four adult Deinonychus and one juvenile Deinonychus. The association of this number of Deinonychus skeletons in a single quarry suggests that Deinonychus may have fed on that animal, and perhaps hunted it.

Ostrom and Maxwell have even used this information to speculate that Deinonychus might have lived and hunted in packs. The second such quarry is from the Antlers Formation of Oklahoma. The site contains six partial skeletons of Tenontosaurus of various sizes, along with one partial skeleton and many teeth of Deinonychus. One tenontosaur humerus even bears what might be Deinonychus tooth marks

Feathered Dinosaurs: DEINONYCHUS

   

First discovered in 1964 in Montana, DEINONYCHUS was a bipedal carnivore with a large scythe-like claw on each foot. It is believed that these dinosaurs may have hunted in packs, due to the fact that many skeletons were discovered together. The brain was large for a dinosaur of this size, and it was probably quite intelligent. Because of this, its razor sharp claws and pack behavior, Deinonychus must have been one of the most terrifying animals to live in the Cretaceous period.

Drexel Students Take On the Solar Car Challenge

 

Conjee Yeung, driver for the Drexel University solar car engineering team, smiles from the cockpit bubble on the way to technical inspections at the Shell Eco-marathon Americas in Houston.

Photograph by Harley Soltes, National Geographic

When 11 engineering students at Drexel University decided last year to enter a contest to design and build a super-fuel-efficient car, they knew that choosing to power their homemade vehicle with solar energy would increase their costs, their risks, and their aerodynamic drag.

They decided to go for it.

...  the Drexel students—all graduating seniors who soon will be taking their skills into the job market—are part of a cadre who are convinced that they are entering a world demanding fundamental change in how we fuel transportation and the economy. "If you get in the energy field, eventually, you will be doing alternative energy," said Drexel electrical engineering student Asaf Erlich. "There's no way around that."

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Working on THE LOST WORLD (1925) Willis O'Brien with puppet by Marcel Charles R. Knight Delgado...

Working on THE LOST WORLD (1925) 

Willis O'Brien with puppet by Marcel Delgado ...

...which was based on painting by Charles R. Knight

Charles R Kight was one of the first Dinosaur Artists.

While the name of Charles Knight may be unfamiliar to many today, he is the man responsible for bringing dinosaurs (and a host of other prehistoric creatures) out of the specimen case and into the consciousness of everyday life. Through his many sculptures, book illustrations and museum murals, Knight influenced the way generations of Americans perceived the ancient world.

Charles R. Knight was one of the first American painters to depict dinosaurs, providing imaginative and largely scientifically based renditions of the extinct beasts in real-world settings. His realistic renderings were referred to as restorations. During a time when dinosaurs were capturing the fascination of people across the country, Knight's ground-breaking images combined paleontology and artistry to create some of the most popular museum displays of his day. Though somewhat speculative and not entirely based on solid evidence, Knight's paintings put flesh on creatures no one had ever seen, and he helped shape the image of dinosaurs that lives in public consciousness to this day.

Charles R. Knight working on Stegosaurus in 1899

Born in Brooklyn and educated at the Polytechnic Institute, Knight studied at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Students League before beginning a life-long career in the service of natural history. His mentor in paleontology was Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897), Curator of Paleontology at The Academy of Natural Sciences, who helped Knight envision prehistoric creatures as living organisms with many of the same behaviors as their modern counterparts.

10 Essential Books Featuring Dinosaurs in Science Fiction

Dinosaur Planet by Anne McCaffrey (1978)

This little-known McCaffrey effort was written in the early days of her formulating her Pern series. The novel concerns a group of space travelers who “discover” a planet called Ireta which they hope to mine for awesome previous jewels. They find a bunch of dinosaurs and mutineers instead. A sequel called The Survivors (or sometimes Dinosaur Planet II) was published in 1984, but work on the Pern series meant McCaffrey never returned to this world. 

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CalTech: Mimicking Nature, Minimizing Turbulence

Photograph courtesy John O. Dabiri, Caltech

Arranging vertical turbines in a school-of-fish pattern allows them to be placed closer together without the turbines' wakes interfering. "We wanted to achieve something similar [to fish schools], where instead of minimizing energy consumed we wanted to maximize energy generated," said Dabiri, of California Institute of Technology's Center for Bioinspired Engineering.  The goal, he said, is to increase the amount of wind energy that can be generated in the same amount of space, and so far, the experiments have produced a stunning ten-fold gain in efficiency.

Because the turbines are vertical and shorter than typical propeller-style turbines, they're also quieter and safer for migratory birds than the typical turbines, Dabiri said.

But as seen in the energy applications of bull kelp and termite mounds, nature doesn't necessarily hold all the answers. A lively debate on the limits of biomimicry was touched off when 13-year-old Aidan Dwyer last year won a Young Naturalist Award from New York's American Museum of Natural History for a bio-inspired array of solar panels: instead of arranging them in rows, he built a "solar tree," with panels arranged like leaves on branches.

Bloggers and scientists took Dwyer to task because, when he measured the effectiveness of the panels, he measured voltage instead of power (a combination of voltage and current). In fact, arranging panels to mimic a tree isn't the most efficient layout, because trees aren't the most efficient collectors of sunlight, said Jan Kleissl, an environmental engineer at University of California, San Diego, in an email. "Trees have to combat weight and wind loading. If trees used a steady, continuous surface that was always oriented perfectly towards the sun, the force of strong winds would topple the tree . . . Evolution has to make great trade-offs in supporting life."

The fact that nature can't always serve as a cheat sheet for humans is the "unpopular yet true story," Kleissl added. "Human 'evolution' left natural evolution in the dust during industrialization."

Still, biomimicry advocates believe that nature offers enough lessons about storing and using energy that civilization needs to try to apply these ideas that have evolved over eons, combining them with the human ingenuity of today.

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Four Star Review From Night Owl Suspense

Fossil River by Jock Miller is a riveting novel which offers a warning to countries that are dependent on OPEC's oil. The plot centers around an America in crisis: China has cut a deal with OPEC which will result in skyrocketing gas prices in the US. That is unless a new domestic source of oil is found. If not the economy will soon grind to a halt. It is good news indeed when an oil cache of unprecedented size is discovered in Alaska. There's just one caveat: the oil is located inside the territory of a previously unknown animal that has already demonstrated it doesn't care for trespassers. After a strike team is brutally massacred, the government enlists the help of paleontologist Dr. Kimberly Fulton and military veteran Scott Chandler to devise a way to outwit the creature and secure the oil without any additional loss of life. Time is of the essence and unless Fulton and Chandler succeed America's economy will collapse and life will never be the same.

Jock Miller does a first class job of weaving together fact and fiction to create a novel that will be hard for any science fiction lover to put down. Fossil River contains dynamic character development, engaging dialogue and perhaps most importantly, a believable plot. I give this book 4 stars and look forward to future novels by this author.
The perfect energy storm is sweeping over the United States: Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown has paralyzed nuclear expansion globally, BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill has stalled deep water drilling, Arab oil countries are in turmoil causing doubt about access to future oil, the intensity of hurricanes hitting the Gulf’s oil rigs and refineries has intensified due to global warming, and the nation’s Strategic Oil Supply is riding on empty.

As the energy storm intensifies, the nation’s access to Arab oil, once supplying over sixty percent of our fossil fuel, is being threatened causing people to panic for lack of gas at the pumps, stranding cars across the country and inciting riots.

The U.S. Military is forced to cut back air, land, and sea operations sucking up 58% of every barrel of oil to protect the nation; U.S. commercial airlines are forced to limit flights for lack of jet fuel; and businesses are challenged to power up their factories, and offices as the U.S. Department of Energy desperately tries to provide a balance of electric power from the network of aged power plants and transmission lines that power up the nation.

The United States must find new sources of domestic fossil fuel urgently or face an energy crisis that will plunge the nation into a deep depression worse than 1929.

The energy storm is very real and happening this very moment. But, at the last moment of desperation, the United States discovers the world’s largest fossil fuel deposit found in a remote inaccessible mountain range within Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve surrounding six and a half million acres.

Preventing access to the oil is a colony of living fossil dinosaurs that will protect its territory to the death.

Nobody gets out alive; nobody can identify the predator--until Dr. Kimberly Fulton, Curator of Paleontology at New York’s Museum of Natural History, is flown into the inaccessible area by Scott Chandler, the Marine veteran helicopter pilot who’s the Park’s Manager of Wildlife. All hell breaks loose when Fulton’s teenage son and his girlfriend vanish into the Park.

Will the nation’s military be paralyzed for lack of mobility fuel, and will people across America run out of gas and be stranded, or will the U.S. Military succeed in penetrating this remote mountain range in northwestern Alaska to restore fossil fuel supplies in time to save the nation from the worst energy driven catastrophe in recorded history?

Dinosaur die-off cleared way for gigantic mammals

They just needed some leg room: New research shows the great dinosaur die-off made way for mammals to explode in size — some more massive than several elephants put together.

The largest land mammal ever: A rhinoceros-like creature, minus the horn, that stood 18 feet tall, weighed roughly 17 tons and grazed in forests in what is now Eurasia. It makes the better known woolly mammoth seem a bit puny.

Tracking such prehistoric giants is more than a curiosity: It sheds new light on the evolution of mammals as they diversified to fill habitats left vacant by the dinosaurs.

Within 25 million years of the dinosaurs' extinction — fast, in geologic terms — overall land mammals had reached a maximum size and then leveled off, an international team of scientists reports Friday in the journal Science.

And while different species on different continents reached their peaks at different points in time, that pattern of evolution was remarkably similar worldwide

"Evolution can happen very quickly when ecology permits," said paleoecologist Felisa Smith of the University of New Mexico, who led the research. "This is really coming down to ecology allowing this to happen."

Anyone who frequents natural history museums knows that the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago ushered in the age of mammals, and that some of them were gigantic. But the new study is the first comprehensive mapping of these giants in a way that helps explain how and why their size evolved.

"We didn't have a clear idea of how the story went after the extinction of the dinosaurs," explained Nick Pyenson, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, who wasn't involved with the new research.

'Pretty much varmints'Previous theories suggested that species diversity drove increases in size, but the new study didn't find that connection.

"It suggests there's a deeper explanation of how large body size evolves in mammals," he said.

Mammals did coexist with dinosaurs, but small ones, ranging from about the size of a mouse to a maximum of a small dog.

"We were pretty much the varmints scurrying around the feet of the dinosaurs," is how New Mexico's Smith puts it.

To see how that changed, researchers funded by the National Science Foundation collected fossil data on the maximum sizes attained by all major groups of mammals on each continent throughout their evolutionary history.

How do they know the sizes? Smith said mammal teeth not only tend to preserve better than bones, but they correlate very well to body mass.

The largest was that 17-ton rhino-like Indricotherium, followed closely by an elephant-looking creature named Deinotherium in Africa, Smith said.

Contrast them to modern elephants, which average about 3 to 5 tons.

The herbivores grew large first, perhaps because they had an advantage in eating the vegetation left flourishing after the plant-eating dinosaurs were gone.

Just like with today's lions and elephants, the largest carnivores who came along a bit later remained an order of magnitude smaller than the biggest prehistoric herbivores.

Why did mammal size level off? Available land area and the earth's temperature, Smith said.

Ninety percent of the food mammals eat goes to maintaining their core body temperature, and the amount of food is related to the amount of land supporting a population.

The biggest mammals evolved when a cooler climate meant lower sea levels and more land area. Also, bigger animals conserve heat better, a problem when temperatures rise.

Scientists debate if climate change or early humans eventually ended the age of giant mammals, something the new study doesn't address.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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Snappers Schooled in Efficient Flow

Photograph by William R. Curtsinger, National Geographic


A school of snappers arranges itself to reduce drag and increase efficiency, much as a flock of geese flies in a "V".

"There's a lot of information in the literature as to what the optimal fish school should look like," said CalTech bioengineering professor John Dabiri. So in order to design a better arrangement of wind turbines, his team looked to fish


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The Hidden Costs of Hamburgers

Americans love hamburgers -- we eat about three burgers a week. But what are the hidden environmental costs? See sources from the Center for Investigative Reporting

Directed and produced by Carrie Ching, Reported by Sarah Terry-Cobo and Carrie Ching, Illustrated and animated by Arthur Jones.

Amazing Transportation Inventions: Hand-Powered Submarine

Illustration from Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy

Human-powered vehicles these days might bring to mind recreational contraptions for garage tinkerers or the green-minded set. But rewind back to the American Revolutionary War, and you'll find a human-powered vehicle at the heart of a military attack. Well, an attempted attack, anyway.

Meet the American Turtle: the first combat submarine, designed in 1775 by a Yale College student in his 30s named David Bushnell. The oak and iron vessel measured 7.5 feet (2.3 meters) tall and 6 feet (1.8 meters) wide across its midsection. A solo pilot would crank two propellers and maneuver a rudder by hand. To attack, the operator was meant to drill a screw into a ship's hull and light a time fuse, which would be attached to a charge of gunpowder. Then he would crank like mad to get the heck out of Dodge.

As it turned out, the hull of the British warship selected as the Turtle's first target was plated in copper. That mission, and two later attacks, failed.

Bushnell's Turtle did not have much of a career in future military operations, let alone in civilian life. But roadways today are peppered with technology and designs initially developed for military applications. Chris Gerdes, director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University, pointed to the Jeep as the most prominent example of military vehicles influencing civilian mobility. "This really went from iconic military transport to iconic expression of freedom and mobility," he wrote in an email.

Even the Volkswagen Beetle has its roots in defense projects. "This chassis was used by the German military and production was restarted by the British army after the war to meet their needs," said Gerdes. "Some of these were exported by soldiers to the UK and the Beetle craze began."

Today, the U.S. military is investing in biofuels, solar, energy conservation, and other green technologies. "Today, one Marine has more technology than I had for 40,000 troops in 2000," Major General Anthony Jackson said during an event at Stanford University last month, just weeks before retiring. "When wars end," he added, "all that technology goes into the civilian sector."

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Vermont Cow Power!

CVPS Cow Power™ offers significant benefits to CVPS electric customers, participating Vermont farmers and the environment, and furthers state policy. Some customers want to reduce their reliance on non-renewable energy, so providing customers with a renewable energy choice is important. 

Cow Power will provide a new income stream to participating farmers, help reduce some of the water quality impacts of farming through the introduction of innovative manure management technologies, and significantly reduce manure odors, particularly during spreading. Participating farms may also reduce bedding costs by using dry byproducts of the process in place of sawdust or other bedding. Funds not supporting farm methane power will support other renewable generation resources.

Five Star Review on Examiner.com !

Fossil River by Jock Miller is an interesting thriller about the United States becoming extremely desperate for oil and the largest oil supply in the world being discovered along with living fossils that threaten any that venture into the remote area of a national park in Alaska. The main characters include a former Marine helicopter pilot that manages the park and lost his arm in combat; his Native American co-worker; and a female curator from New York Museum of Natural History that has a past with the former Marine.

Overall Fossil River is an exciting read with some interesting twists as the main characters try to learn more about the living fossils and protect them along with the park from being totally destroyed for oil while also struggling to remain alive themselves. There is also a little bit of romance that adds background and depth to the characters even if it is rather predictable.

Dinosaurs (almost certainly) evolved into birds.

Mononykus (Pavel Riha)

Not every paleontologist is convinced, and there are some alternate (albeit not widely accepted) theories. But the bulk of the evidence points to modern birds having evolved from small, feathered, theropod dinosaurs during the late Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Bear in mind, though, that this evolutionary process may have happened more than once, and that there were definitely some "dead ends" along the way (witness the feathered, four-winged Microraptor, which has left no living descendants).

Part of the reason so many ordinary people doubt the evolutionary link between feathered dinosaurs and birds is because when they think of the word "dinosaur," they picture enormous beasts like Brachiosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex, and when they think of the word "bird," they picture harmless, rodent-sized pigeons and robins (and perhaps the occasional eagle or penguin).

Closer to the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, though, the visual referents are a lot different. For decades, paleontologists have been digging up small, birdlike theropods (the same family of two-legged dinosaurs that includes tyrannosaurs and raptors) bearing unmistakable evidence of feathers, wishbones, and other bits of avian anatomy. Unlike larger dinosaurs, these smaller theropods tend to be unusually well-preserved, and many such fossils have been found completely intact (which is more than can be said for the average sauropod).
Feathered Dinosaurs, Birds and Evolution

What do these fossils tell us about the evolution of prehistoric birds from dinosaurs? Well, for starters, it's impossible to pin down a single "missing link" between these two types of animals. For a while, scientists believed the 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx was the indisputable transitional form, but it's still not clear if this was a true bird (as some experts claim) or a very small, and not very aerodynamic, theropod dinosaur. (In fact, a new study claims that the feathers of Archaeopteryx weren't strong enough to sustain extended bursts of flight.)

The problem is, the subsequent discovery of other small, feathered dinosaurs that lived at the same time as Archaeopteryx--such as Epidendrosaurus and Pedopenna--has muddied the picture considerably, and there's no ruling out the possibility that future paleontologists will unearth dino-birds from as far back as the Triassic period. In addition, it's far from clear that all these feathered theropods were closely related: evolution has a way of repeating its jokes, and feathers (and wishbones) may well have evolved multiple times.

To show how tricky this issue is, here's the standard picture of bird evolution: small, running theropods (for the sake of argument, let's say raptors) evolved feathers as a way of keeping warm and attracting mates. As these feathers grew larger and more ornate, they provided an unexpected bonus: a split-second of extra "lift" when their owner pounced on prey or ran away from larger predators. Multiply this scenario by countless generations, and you have a solid theory for the origin of avian flight.

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Check out Bob's Dinosaur Blog !

Bob Strauss is a freelance writer and book author; one of his specialties is explaining scientific concepts and discoveries to both a lay and professional audience.

Bob Strauss is the author of two best-selling question-and-answer books that range across the expanse of science, biology, history and culture: The Big Book of What, How and Why (Main Street, 2005) and Who Knew? Hundreds & Hundreds of Questions & Answers for Curious Minds (Sterling Innovation, 2007).

British Columbia Cows Add Energy to the Grid

Anyone hooked up to the grid in British Columbia can now make good on beef-eating and dairy consumption. The province’s Cowpower program gives people the option to pay a small premium on their utility bill to help pay off a dairy farmer’s investment into an anaerobic digester - so that heat-trapping methane can be used to make power.

Anaerobic digestion uses bacteria to break down organic matter, releasing a biogas that can be used to run a generator. There are more than 6 thousand anaerobic digesters in Germany, but North America is just catching on. An estimated 176 anaerobic digesters were operation in the US at the end of 2011, but so far, BC has just one.

The average cow expels between 200 to 400 pounds of methane per year, and for that, the United Nations has called livestock one of the most serious threats to the global climate. 

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