Friday, December 25, 2009

Sample Prayer For Tournament

Artificial trees

To address the exponential rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide Concentrations Since the Industrial Revolution, Professor Klaus S. Lackner, director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at the Earth Institute, is working on ambitious carbon capture and sequestration strategies. “Our goal is to take a process that takes 100,000 years and compress it into 30 minutes,” says Lackner.

Lackner and his team are developing a device they have dubbed an air extractor, modeled after one of the most abundant but most complicated devices in nature: the leaf of a tree. Leaves are significant absorbers of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but planting enough of trees to absorb the current overabundance of carbon dioxide in the world would leave no fertile land left for other uses.

Surprisingly, the basic idea for Lackner’s carbon dioxide air extraction device was the consequence of an eighth grade science fair project. His daughter, Claire, was able to successfully demonstrate that carbon dioxide (an acid) can be captured from the air in an acid/base reaction using a fish pump and sodium hydroxide (a very strong base). The father-daughter pair discovered that the rudimentary device captured half of the carbon dioxide that ran through the test tube. This simple demonstration won Claire first prize in the science fair and pushed her father onto a research path that could revolutionize the way we approach combating climate change and global warming.

“I was surprised that [Claire] pulled this off as well as she did, which made me feel that it could be easier than I thought,” said Lackner during a PBS NOVA ScienceNow interview in 2007. Though Claire had demonstrated that carbon dioxide capture was possible, there were energy balance issues that needed to be considered. Since the system consumes electricity, the issue of net carbon emissions must, of course, be addressed. “We needed to come up with a shape where you don't have to have an aquarium fish pump driving all the air through the system,” said Lackner, “but to have the wind just deliver the air and pass it through the collector.”

“The first sketch I made ended up looking like a tuning fork, or a goal post, with Venetian blinds,” Lackner recalled. He later began testing different materials in order to replicate the function of a leaf on a tree. He enlisted two engineers to collaborate with him and formed Global Research Technologies (GRT). After a year of testing, GRT was able to design a new material, flat and smooth, that would pull CO2 out of the air in a process called engineered chemical sinkage.

As an engineer and the director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at the Earth Institute, Lackner has pioneered approaches for dealing with energy issues of the future. In addition to figuring out what to do with the byproducts of energy use, he works on environmentally acceptable technologies for the use of fossil fuels, and he has published numerous papers and articles on clean fossil fuel technology.

In addition to developing the air extraction device in cooperation with GRT, Lackner also played a pivotal role in forming the Zero Emission Coal Alliance, an industry-led effort to develop coal power with zero emissions to the atmosphere. His vision in self-replicating machine systems was recognized by Discover Magazine as one of seven ideas that could change the world.

Relating the basics of carbon sequestration to the familiar territory of Columbia University, Lackner uses the “Alma Mater” statue in the center of the New York City campus as a prime example of nature’s solution to global warming. “She is sitting on a pedestal of serpentine rock…. This serpentine has absorbed CO2, probably out of rain water. If you wait long enough, that’s what will happen to all the CO2 we make.” This carbon capture process normally takes 100,000 years. To make it a more useful strategy in reducing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, we need to find ways to accelerate this process.

“I believe that it is impossible to stop people from using fossil fuels, so we have to develop technologies which allow us to use them without creating environmental havoc to the planet,” Lackner says.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Benzoic Acid And Quinine

Google.org satellite service not for profit Against deforestation

Seeing the forest through the cloud
Thursday 12/10/2009 04:59:00 AM

Today, at the International Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, we demonstrated a new technology prototype that enables online, global-scale observation and measurement of changes in the earth's forests. We hope this technology will help stop the destruction of the world's rapidly-disappearing forests. Emissions from tropical deforestation are comparable to the emissions of all of the European Union, and are greater than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide. According to the Stern Review, protecting the world's standing forests is a highly cost-effective way to cut carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. The United Nations has proposed a framework known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) that would provide financial incentives to rainforest nations to protect their forests, in an effort to make forests worth "more alive than dead." Implementing a global REDD system will require that each nation have the ability to accurately monitor and report the state of their forests over time, in a manner that is independently verifiable. However, many of these tropical nations of the world lack the technological resources to do this, so we're working with scientists, governments and non-profits to change this. Here's what we've done with this prototype to help nations monitor their forests:

Start with satellite imagery
Satellite imagery data can provide the foundation for measurement and monitoring of the world's forests. For example, in Google Earth today, you can fly to Rondonia, Brazil and easily observe the advancement of deforestation over time, from 1975 to 2001:

(Landsat images courtesy USGS)

This type of imagery data — past, present and future — is available all over the globe. Even so, while today you can view deforestation in Google Earth, until now there hasn't been a way to measure it.

Then add science
With this technology, it's now possible for scientists to analyze raw satellite imagery data and extract meaningful information about the world's forests, such as locations and measurements of deforestation or even regeneration of a forest. In developing this prototype, we've collaborated with Greg Asner of Carnegie Institution for Science, and Carlos Souza of Imazon. Greg and Carlos are both at the cutting edge of forest science and have developed software that creates forest cover and deforestation maps from satellite imagery. Organizations across Latin America use Greg's program, Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLASlite), and Carlos' program, Sistema de Alerta de Deforestation (SAD), to analyze forest cover change. However, widespread use of this analysis has been hampered by lack of access to satellite imagery data and computational resources for processing.

Handle computation in the cloud
What if we could offer scientists and tropical nations access to a high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine running online, in the “Google cloud”? And what if we could gather together all of the earth’s raw satellite imagery data — petabytes of historical, present and future data — and make it easily available on this platform? We decided to find out, by working with Greg and Carlos to re-implement their software online, on top of a prototype platform we've built that gives them easy access to terabytes of satellite imagery and thousands of computers in our data centers.

Here are the results of running CLASlite on the satellite imagery sequence shown above:



CLASlite online - This shows deforestation and degradation in Rondonia, Brazil from 1986-2008, with the red indicating recent activity

Here's the result of running SAD in a region of recent deforestation pressure in Mato Grosso, Brazil:

SAD online - The red "hotspots" indicate deforestation that has happened within the last 30 days

Combining science with massive data and technology resources in this way offers the following advantages:

* Unprecedented speed: On a top-of-the-line desktop computer, it can take days or weeks to analyze deforestation over the Amazon. Using our cloud-based computing power, we can reduce that time to seconds. Being able to detect illegal logging activities faster can help support local law enforcement and prevent further deforestation from happening.

* Ease of use and lower costs: An online platform that offers easy access to data, scientific algorithms and computation horsepower from any web browser can dramatically lower the cost and complexity for tropical nations to monitor their forests.

* Security, privacy and transparency: Governments and researchers don't want to share sensitive data and results before they are ready. Our cloud-based platform allows users to control access to their data and results. At the same time, because the data, analysis and results reside online, they can also be easily shared, made available for collaboration, presented to the public and independently verified — when appropriate.

* Climate change impact: We think that a suitably scaled-up and enhanced version of this platform could be a promising as a tool for forest monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) in support of efforts such as REDD.

As a Google.org product, this technology will be provided to the world as a not-for-profit service. This technology prototype is currently available to a small set of partners for testing purposes — it's not yet available to the general public but we expect to make it more broadly available over the next year. We are grateful to a host of individuals and organizations (find full list here) who have advised us on developing this technology. In particular, we would like to thank the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for their close partnership since the initial inception of this project. We're also working with the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), a consortium of national government bodies, inter-governmental organizations, space agencies and research institutions through GEO's Forest Carbon Tracking (FCT) task force. Last month Together We Launched the FCT GEO portal and are now exploring how we can together bring Also the power of this new technology to tropical nations.

're excited to be Able to share this early prototype and look forward to seeing what's possible.

Posted by Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google.org and Dr. Amy Luers, Environment Manager, Google.org

Friday, December 4, 2009

Can You Take Superpump With Creatine

"The less meat to save the Earth" The Appeals McCartney Europe

Former Beatles launched "Meat Free Monday" to the European Parliament. "Factory farms pollute more than transport '

BRUSSELS - no meat on Monday. For non-personal health, but of the planet. Paul McCartney, believes a vegetarian for years, has launched a new and unique environmental battles called 'Meat Free Monday. " The goal? Help reduce pollution levels by reducing the consumption of meat, because the farms are among the major greenhouse gas. And today brought before the European Parliament, with government intervention in the classroom, asking for support from the EU.

SPEECH AND SONG - "Do not eat meat on Monday, will help the planet not to die," said the former Beatles. The slogan is: "Less Meat: Less heat," or "less meat, less heat." Between the start of his tour (the way from Hamburg, concluded in London before Christmas) the former Beatles liked to say that Europe will not only be the actions of governments to save the earth from overheating. Even the behavior of individuals rely heavily. Reduce a bit 'consumption of meat (it was for him should stop everybody, but that's another story). "I'm not transport the bad guys - McCartney said - but the meat industry," The livestock industry, he said, produces more greenhouse gases than the entire transport sector. "Every six seconds disappear soccer fields and forests. For a piece of meat you use an equal amount of water to a shower for four hours. Not to mention that farming is a major source of water pollution, "he added. Therefore, for the good of all and also of Health ("Many studies say that red meat is bad '), it would be good without meat at least one day a week. "Let's say on Monday - claims the former Beatle - even after the excesses of the wekend. It would cut emissions by a 1500 km trip by car. " And to support his campaign, McCartney also composed a song, Meat Free Monday ", downloadable software (a gift) from a web page linked to your site that also contains messages to supporters and vegetarian recipes that can replace meat. At least on Monday. Corriere Della Sera 04/11/2009