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Fossil River
by Jock Miller

Prehistoric predators threaten the U.S. economy.

Whiskey Biofuel? Only in Scotland

A whiskey library. Credit: Ethan Prater.

Scientists in Scotland announced that they figured out a way to produce biofuel from whiskey. At first, this dram fan was horrified: Why would anyone want to waste good whiskey to make biofuel? But the process turns out to be rather brilliant.

A team of researchers at Edinburgh Napier University's Biofuel Research Center led by the center's director, biology professor Martin Tangney, have spent the last two years experimenting with two byproducts of the whiskey-making process.

They took the byproducts, a liquid from copper stills called "pot ale" and spent grains, wonderfully named "draff," and turned it into a butanol "superfuel." The butanol could then be blended with regular gasoline or diesel, similar to the way small amounts of ethanol are blended now, meaning engines wouldn't need any alterations.

The scientists used draff and pot ale from the Glenkinchie Distillery in Pencaitland, Scotland, but they're staying mum on exactly how they made the biofuel. I can only imagine there were some heady smells involved.

The potential market for transforming this organic waste into fuel is actually sizable. According to the university, the $6.25 billion whiskey industry produces more than 400 million gallons of pot ale and 187,000 tons of draff every year. So far, the scientists have filed a patent on the biofuel and plan to start a company that will develop it commercially.

I think the appropriate thing to say now is something along the lines of "cheers!" or "bottoms up!" but I'm going to go with "whiskey-biofuel!" Neat.

Reposted from Discovery News

The Four Winged Dinosaur: Microraptor

 The discovery of a beautiful and bizarre fossil astonished scientists and reignited the debate over the origin of flight. With four wings and superbly preserved feathers, the 130 million-year-old creature was like nothing paleontologists had ever seen before.

Beyond Ethanol: Drop-In Biofuels Squeeze Gasoline From Plants

Cut southern yellow pine trees are stacked up outside the first commercial cellulosic biorefinery, KiOR's plant in Mississippi. The wood that once fed paper mills will be chipped up, as seen below, and converted directly into gasoline and diesel fuel in a process its advocates say will be more sustainable than corn ethanol.

Photograph courtesy KiOR

Fred Cannon was working at a Dutch chemical company when he had a conversation with a chemist about the movie Back to the Future—in particular, the scene near the end in which Doc Brown refuels his time-travel car with household garbage.

Corn distilled into ethanol was touted as a way to reduce civilization's dependence upon fossil fuels, but it required different pipelines—and only a specially equipped car could run on a mix of fuels made mostly of ethanol. 

Wouldn't it be better if you simply could take waste material, or biomass, and transform it into fuel?

Not quite a decade later, that fantasy may be starting to become reality. Cannon is now chief executive of the alternative energy start-up KiOR. A few weeks ago, the company produced and shipped what it says is the world's first commercial volume of cellulosic diesel fuel from its new biorefinery in Columbus, Mississippi. KiOR's product, made from pine wood chips, is chemically identical to the petroleum-based fuel it is designed to replace, the company says. 

KiOR's breakthrough is one part of a wide-ranging effort by a number of companies and government-supported researchers to develop and perfect "drop-in" biofuels—fuels so similar to their petroleum-based counterparts that they could be pumped through the same pipelines and used to power the engines of cars and trucks without any modifications. Drop-in biofuels proponents say they could help free modern civilization from its dependence upon petroleum, without requiring extensive rebuilding of the fuel-supplying infrastructure or the junking of vast numbers of existing vehicles.

"Globally, we've invested trillions of dollars into our transportation infrastructure—our refineries, pipelines and distribution systems, our cars—so we need biofuel solutions that 'drop-in' to this infrastructure," Cannon said. "And today that infrastructure is made for hydrocarbon-based fuels. So what that means is that drop-in biofuel must be a hydrocarbon—molecularly indistinguishable from the gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel making the world mobile today."

Before drop-in biofuels become the transportation energy source of the future, there are still significant technological, economic, and environmental hurdles to overcome. Producers would need to be able to manufacture large quantities of drop-in biofuels at a cost that's competitive with gasoline and other petroleum products, and without expending excessive amounts of energy in the process. Some critics warn that drop-in biofuels would still release carbon into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change; they argue that electric cars powered by renewable energy provide a cleaner path to alternative fuel for transportation.

But biofuel believers point out that as long as coal—the most carbon-intensive fuel—generates 40 percent of U.S. electricity, greenhouse gas emissions remain a problem for electric cars.

"One of the things we have to do is get real," said clean technology investor Vinod Khosla, whose Khosla Ventures is controlling shareholder of KiOR. "Biofuels . . . even with [today's] inefficient engines, can do something like an 80 to 85 percent reduction in carbon emissions with very little increase in cost. It's the cheapest way to get carbon reduction in transportation at scale.

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Four-Winged Dinosaur: Microraptor

 

Surprising fossils from northeastern China spur a debate over how birds evolved.

In 2002, the discovery of a beautiful and bizarre fossil astonished scientists and reignited the debate over the origin of flight. With four wings and superbly preserved feathers, the 130 million-year-old creature was like nothing paleontologists had ever seen before.

Dubbed Microraptor, the crow-sized fossil is one of the smallest dinosaurs ever found and one of the most controversial, challenging conventional theories and assumptions about the evolution of flight.

 Artists have historically played an important role in paleontology by helping to reconstruct the appearance and behavior of ancient animals. In the case of Microraptor, two completely different reconstructions were made, one at the American Museum of Natural History, and the other at the University of Kansas, based on different specimens and different techniques.

The two markedly different reconstructions play into a long-running scientific controversy over the origin of flight in birds. For years the debate has been a standoff between two camps—those who believe dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds, and those who do not.

With a Deep Dig Into Its Past, Perugia Built an Energy-Saving Future

The Dig for a New Future

The minimetro, which has helped hilly Perugia, Italy to reduce car traffic, is more than public transport, says the city's mayor. "It's architecture, technology, design."

Photograph by Franco Origlia, Getty Images

It all started, incredibly enough, in the early 1980s, with a few escalators.

City archeologists had unearthed the subterranean streets of a former patrician neighborhood under a park that was built far below Perugia’s urban core. The city developed a lower town to showcase this district that had been covered over since the 16th century. To connect the lower town to Perugia’s center, which stands on a 490-meter (1,600-foot) rock promontory, the city built a series of escalators. At the base, the urban planners added a multilevel parking garage and bus station that looks like a subway station minus the trains. And vehicles other than delivery vans and taxis were banned from the Corso Vannucci.

More escalator-parking lot locations were soon built, followed by a "Zona di traffico limitato" (ZTL), or limited traffic zone. Car travel or parking in downtown requires a permit. Cameras snap license plates, and hefty fines are levied on those who venture into the city by motor vehicle without a permit.

Still, Perugians feared that such measures would turn their beloved city into a museum. Plus, reality intruded. Perugia hosts some popular festivals throughout the year, among them Umbria Jazz in July, and Eurochocolate, a tribute to the Perugina company that makes the city’s famously addictive Baci chocolate, every October. How to bring in thousands of attendees without overloading the streets, parking lots, and escalators?

City planners considered the alternatives. Long ago, a tram ran from the rail station to the center, but that was in a gentler time, with few cars on the road. A subway? The hills are too steep. Besides, the population of 160,000 couldn't support the expense of building or operating a full-sized system. After a decade of debate, the city decided on an innovative system built by the Italian company Leitner AG, a 3-kilometer (1.8-mile) "minimetro."

"This is Perugia," said Mayor Wladimiro Boccali. "In a city like ours, with its wealth of art and history, we had to do something original. The minimetro is more than public transport. It's architecture, technology, design."

It's fun to ride, too. There's a big parking lot on the outskirts for those arriving by car. One station connects with the main train station at the foot of the hill. The stations' avant-garde design is no accident; it’s all the work of French architect Jean Nouvel, winner in 2008 of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize.

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Flying Dinosaurs: Eudimorphodon

Eudimorphodon was a pterosaur that was discovered in 1973 by Mario Pandolfi near Bergamo, Italy and described the same year by Rocco Zambelli. The nearly complete skeleton was retrieved from shale deposited during the Late Triassic (mid to late Norian stage), making Eudimorphodon the oldest pterosaur then known. It had a wingspan of about 100 centimetres (3.3 ft) and at the end of its long bony tail may have been a diamond-shaped flap like in the later Rhamphorhynchus. If so, the flap may have helped it steer while maneuvering in the air

Eudimorphodon showed a strong differentiation of the teeth, hence its name, which is derived from ancient Greek for "true dimorphic tooth". It also possessed a large number of these teeth, a total of 110 of them densely packed into a jaw only six centimeters long. The front of the jaw was filled with fangs, per side four in the upper jaw, two in the lower jaw, that rather abruptly gave way to a line of smaller multipointed teeth, 25 in the upper jaw, 26 in the lower jaw, most of which had five cusps, others three or even four.

The morphology of the teeth are suggestive of a piscivorous diet, which has been confirmed by preserved stomach contents containing the remains of fish of the genus Parapholidophorus.  The teeth were multi-cusped, and tooth wear shows that Eudimorphodon was able to crush or chew its food to some degree. Wear along the sides of these teeth suggests that Eudimorphodon also fed on hard-shelled invertebrates.

10 Essential Books Featuring Dinosaurs in Science Fiction: Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne (1864)

The title of this one is one big giant spoiler-alert for its premise. Impatient and irritable Professor Lidenbrock and his cohorts descend into darkness and encounter all sorts of awesome critters along the way. However, like The Lost World, many of the prehistoric beasts aren’t actually dinosaurs, but instead, other forms of ancient life. For example: a plesiosaurus (hi Nessy!) and a Pterosaur make appearances. Should this get the credit for being the first work of SF to feature dinosaurs instead of Doyle’s The Lost World. Technically speaking, the answer is probably no. While emotionally speaking, the answer might be yes.

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Reader's Review A MUST Read for Any and All Dinosaur Lovers

5.0 out of 5 stars

America is desperate for oil. The earth is quickly running out of the valuable fossil fuels. Scientists have found a new oil field in a national park high in the Alaskan mountains. But the oil field is in the territory of the deadliest predator on the planet. Until recently, the grizzly bear had been given this title but with the oil fields another discovery is made. A new species. Actually, an old species, long thought to be extinct.

This book was a PYOL* from the first page. A fast paced, action packed plot that ranks right up there with the Jurassic Park saga. I found it difficult to set it down even long enough to forage for food. That might have been a good thing as some parts were gory enough that I wouldn't have wanted to run into them while eating.

The characters and attitudes were believable if somewhat predictable. While it was typical behavior of the teens in the story to not consider the danger of heading out into the national park on their own, I couldn't help but roll my eyes and think "DUH! Dinosaurs are dangerous." Even the herbivores are huge and equipped with deadly defenses which can easily kill a person. There wasn't much that even I can complain about in regards to editing, though it wasn't perfect. I highly recommend this book to anyone with a love and/or fascination with dinosaurs.

*The PYOL rating is one of the highest honors that I can bestow upon a book. Basically it is a warning, primarily to my family. They'll need to make their own dinner, find their own socks, arrange for other transportation ... pretty much to Plan Your Own Life because short of a house fire, not much is going to tear me away from this book. Even then I would bring the book along with me. I need something to do while I wait for fire rescue, right? I look forward to reading this book over and over again.

Energy in the Forces of Nature: Earthquakes: Energy in Motion

Photograph from Kyodo/Reuters

Rescue workers, appearing small against the rubble in red and orange uniforms, search through the remains of Noda-mura village, in the Iwate Prefecture in northern Japan, on March 14, 2011.

To cause the tsunami that wreaked devastation here and along the east coast of Japan, the earthquake three days earlier in the northwest Pacific Ocean had to have produced, at minimum, energy that was equivalent to 475 megatons of TNT, according to the estimates that scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey have developed.

That's equivalent to the energy content of 326 million barrels of crude oil, close to the amount the world consumes in four days.

The energy in an earthquake is one of the few forces of nature that is closely measured by scientific instruments. Seismograph readings enable scientists to estimate the energy that an earthquake radiates through the earth, shaking buildings near and far. Even so, the instruments do not capture the whole picture, for example, the energy dissipated as heat through friction.

With a magnitude of 9.0, last year's earthquake was the largest to rock Japan and among the largest ever measured.

Flying Dinosaurs: Dorygnathus ("spear jaw")

 

 Dorygnathus banthensis restoration; the tail form is hypothetical

 

With its long tail and narrow wings, Dorygnathus was a good example of what paleontologists call a "rhamphorhynchoid" pterosaur.

Rhamphorhynchoids have been found almost exclusively in western Europe, though it's not clear if this is because they were confined to this geographical location or if conditions in early Jurassic Europe happened to be well-suited for fossil preservation.

The most notable feature of Dorygnathus was its long, intermeshing front teeth, which it almost certainly used to snag fish off the surface of the water and hold them firmly in its mouth. Although the fossil specimens discovered so far have been fairly small, as pterosaurs go, there's some speculation that adults of the species may have grown throughout their lives and attained wingspans of five or six feet.

A cast in the Urwelt-Museum Hauff at Holzmaden of UUPM R 156, a specimen sold by Bernhard Hauff to the University of Uppsala in 1925

Energy in the Forces of Nature: Volcanoes: Too Hot to Capture

Photograph by Brynjar Gauti, AP

An ash cloud billows from southern Iceland's sub-glacial Eyjafjallajökull volcano on April 16, 2010, signaling an escape of the heat inside the Earth that is drawing renewed interest worldwide as an energy source.

Almost all of Iceland's building and water heating comes from geothermal energy, which also provides about a third of the nation's electricity. But nobody has figured out how to harness that energy safely when it breaks through the surface as an active volcano. That's too bad, because thermal emissions coming from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano in March 2010, during the first of two eruptions, quickly reached 1 gigawatt , and later peaked at 6 gigawatts, says Ashley Davies, a volcanologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

One gigawatt is the capacity of a large power plant, like the Hudson Generating Station across the Hudson River from Manhattan in Jersey City, New Jersey, which serves 750,000 households with a mix of coal, natural gas, and oil. Six gigawatts is greater than the capacity of any U.S. electric plant except for the huge Grand Coulee hydroelectric plant.

And that's just a small portion of the total thermal output in the volcano's 2010 eruption. It does not account for mechanical energy—the accompanying earthquakes and explosive blasts—or additional heat in the erupting lava. NASA measured the volcano's thermal output using satellite imagery, which it also employs to gauge volcanoes elsewhere in the solar system. Some of those other-world volcanoes dwarf those on Earth, Davies adds, including one on the Jupiter moon Io whose 2001 eruption radiated 78 terawatts of heat. Think of that as 78 times the total capacity of all the power plants in the United States.

Over an hour, that would be equivalent to the energy in about 46 million barrels of oil— about half the amount consumed around the world every day.

Back at Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull, another part of the volcano underwent a much larger eruption in April 2010. That eruption occurred under an ice cap that hid much of its power from the NASA satellite, which still measured 60 megawatts of radiated power. Over the course of an hour, that would be equivalent to the energy output of 1,648 gallons (6,238 liters) of gasoline—the amount that an average U.S. motorist would have to buy over four years to fuel a car that drives 10,000 miles annually.

That eruption's interaction of lava with ice generated clouds of steam and ash that groun

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Liquid Salt Extracts Oil from Sand

Jupiterimages

Analysis by Nic Halverson

A more eco-friendly method for extracting oil and tar from sand has been developed by a group of researchers at Penn State University. Utilizing ionic liquids to separate heavy viscous oil from sand, the team's technique could help reduce toxic waste from surface-minded oil sands and aid clean-up efforts after oil spills.

Tar sands, also know as bituminous sands or oil sands, constitute approximately two-thirds of the world's estimated oil reserves. Canada is the world's major producer of the unconventional petroleum from tar sands, and the United States imports more than 1 million barrels of oil per day from Canada, nearly twice as much as from Saudi Arabia. An estimated 32 billion barrels of oil could potentially exist in Utah's tar sands.

Extraction and separation of these deposits are often expensive and harmful to the environment because of they contain complex mixtures of sand, clay, water and bitumen, a "heavy" or highly viscous oil. Processing this mixture to fuel requires significant amounts of water and energy and generates contaminated waste water that is stored in open air ponds. Toxic to aquatic life, this waste water can seep into groundwater, polluting rivers and lakes. Additionally, local fresh water supplies can be depleted as this process requires large amounts of water.

However, the new method developed by the Penn State research team uses very little energy and water, and all solvents are recycled and reused.

Paul Painter, professor of polymer science in the department of materials science and engineering, and his team spent the last 18 months developing this new method using ionic liquids (salt in a liquid state) to facilitate the separation. No waste process water is generated since the separation takes place at room temperature.

"Essentially all of the bitumen is recovered in a very clean form, with no detectable mineral fines, which interact preferentially with the ionic liquid, and no contamination from the ionic liquid," explains Painter on his department's website.

The bitumen, solvents and sand/clay mixtures separate into three distinct parts. They can be removed separately and solvents can be reused.

This method can also be used to extract oil from beach sand after oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez disasters. Using sand polluted by the BP oil spill in one experiment, the team was able to separate hydrocarbons from the sand within seconds. After a small amount of water was used to clean remaining ionic liquids, the sand was so clean could be returned to the beach, instead of landfills.

The ionic liquids researchers work with are based on 1-alkyl-3-methylimidazolium cations, a positively charged material with high chemical and thermal stability, a low degree of flammability, and almost negligible vapor pressure, which makes recovering the ionic liquid relatively easy.

The team has built a functioning bench top model system and is currently reducing their discovery to practice for patenting.

Reposted from: http://news.discovery.com

Solar Prospecting

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