Detecting Noise Pollution in the Sea
Posted: December 31, 2010 Filed under: oceans, pollution 1 Comment »
The Applied Bioacoustics Laboratory (LAB) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) has developed the first system equipped with hydrophones able to record sounds on the seafloor in real time over the Internet. The system detects the presence of cetaceans and makes it possible to analyze how noise caused by human activity can affect the natural habitat of these animals and the natural balance of oceans. A new EU directive on the sea has ruled that all member states must comply with a set of indicators for measuring marine noise pollution before 2012.
New botanic database holds a million plant names
Posted: December 30, 2010 Filed under: BIODIVERSITY Leave a comment »Capping the UN’s International Year of Biodiversity, botanists in Britain and the United States on Wednesday unveiled a library of plant names aimed at helping conservationists, drug designers and agriculture researchers.
The database, accessible at www.theplantlist.org, identifies 1.25 million names for plants, ranging from essential food crops such as wheat, rice and corn to garden roses and exotic jungle ferns, and provides links to published research.
The aim is to clear up a century-old taxonomic jumble in which non-standard names sowed ignorance, rivalry and sometimes damaging confusion about the world’s plant wea
Boom for Location Based Service in China
Posted: December 29, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »
China’s location-based services (LBS) market boasted three to four million active users by the end of the third quarter this year. China is already home of more than 30 LBS companies, many of which are growing at a decent clip.
As has happened in the US, Chinese businesses are trying to take advantage of location-based networks to promote their products. On its debut in May, Jiepang signed a deal with a café chain in Beijing to offer users free coffee the first time they check in at one of the stores. The site has also joined up with more than a thousand group shopping websites to help users enjoy bulk purchase discounts on a variety of goods.Currently, around 18 percent of China’s estimated 800 million mobile users are using smart phones, a number expected to grow at an annual average rate of 35 percent in the coming five years.
A location-based service (LBS) is an information and entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device .
LBS services can be used in a variety of contexts, such as health, work, personal life, etc. LBS services include services to identify a location of a person or object, such as discovering the nearest banking cash machine or the whereabouts of a friend or employee. LBS services include parcel tracking and vehicle tracking services. LBS can include mobile commerce when taking the form of coupons or advertising directed at customers based on their current location. They include personalized weather services and even location-based games. They are an example of telecommunication convergence.
Links and Sources:
Ground-Source Heat Pumps:Air Conditioners in Reverse
Posted: December 27, 2010 Filed under: Alternative Energy Leave a comment »
Our quest to find alternative sources of energy is leading us to new frontiers.Ground-source heat pumps (GSHPs), often called “geothermal heat pumps,” are devices to exploit the relatively stable temperatures found just 5 feet (1.5 m) or more below the surface, either depositing or extracting low-intensity heat. Heat pump are basically air conditioners that can be run in reverse to provide heating as well as cooling.
GSHPs should not be confused with geothermal heat, which lurks roughly six miles below the surface, where the earth’s crust gives way to a layer of molten rock. This geothermal energy occasionally explodes to the surface as a volcano, creates natural geysers and hot springs, and, in places like Iceland, it is tapped to produce electricity.
Some Great Stadiums of the World
Posted: December 26, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Croatia Gospin dolac
When it comes to sports stadiums, does it get any more picturesque than this? Gospic Dolac is home to the NK Imotski football club in Croatia and the 4,000 spectators that its bleachers hold get stunning views of nearby medieval ruins, the hillside and the Blue Lake. Gospin Dolac was built in 1989 and is situated next to a 500m deep fall into the lake.
World Games Stadium
Taiwan has what is being touted as the largest solar-powered stadium in the world, the ‘World Games Stadium’. It comes with massive and gigantic solar panels which harnesses all the solar energy in order to generate electricity that could be used by the stadium. It has a 14,155 square meter roof and it harnesses about 1.4 gigawatt hours of electricity every year. When the stadium is not being used, 80% of the neighborhood around the stadium can also be powered through the electricity generated by the stadium!
Marina Bay
The Float at Marina Bay, also known as Marina Bay Floating Platform, is the world’s largest floating stage. It is located on the waters of the Marina Reservoir, in Marina Bay, Singapore. Made entirely of steel, the floating platform on Marina Bay measures 120 metres long and 83 metres wide, which is 5% larger than the soccer field at the National Stadium. The platform can bear up to 1,070 tonnes, equivalent to the total weight of 9,000 people, 200 tonnes of stage props and three 30-tonne military vehicles. The gallery at the stadium has a seating capacity of 30,000 people.
Vesturi a Eioinum
Vesturi a Eioinum Stadium is a multi-use stadium in Vagur, which is one of the larger villages in the southernmost island Suduroy in the Faroe Islands. It is currently used mostly for football matches and is the home ground of FC Suduroy, former called VB Vagur (until 2005) and VB/Sumba (until 2009). The stadium holds 3,000 people, but has only 330 seats. The Faroe Islands are an island group situated between the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean. Their national football team’s stadium is located next to the sea. There’s a guy in a boat that collects the balls that fall into the sea during a match.
Sapporo Dome, Japan
Sapporo, Japan gets so much snow every year that engineers faced a dilemma in designing a stadium for the city: how could they ensure that the grass playing field would get enough sunlight without using a retractable roof, which may not hold up to 20 feet of frozen precipitation? Their solution was 8,300-ton field that slides in and out of the flying saucer-like stadium, allowing it access to fresh air and sunlight on nice days. This moving field also enables the stadium to switch between baseball and soccer.
Soure: Indiatimes
NASA’s Mars Rover to Zap Rocks With Laser
Posted: December 25, 2010 Filed under: Space Leave a comment »
A rock-zapping laser instrument on NASA’s next Mars rover has roots in a demonstration that Roger Wiens saw 13 years ago in a colleague’s room at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.The Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument on the rover Curiosity can hit rocks with a laser powerful enough to excite a pinhead-size spot into a glowing, ionized gas. ChemCam then observes the flash through a telescope and analyzes the spectrum of light to identify the chemical elements in the target.
read here
Life May be Detected on Distant Planets because of a new Remote Sensing Technique
Posted: December 24, 2010 Filed under: BIODIVERSITY, Remote Sensing 101 Leave a comment »
Thanks to a new remote sensing technique, astronomers may soon be able to detect the presence of multicellular life (like trees) on planets outside of the Solar System.Excitingly, we’ve been able to detect the composition of atmospheres on a handful of planets orbiting other stars. But if next-generation space observatories go online within the next couple of decades, some scientists propose using a new technique to determine details such as tree-like multicellular life on extrasolar planets.
read here
Oceans on Earth and Other Planets were made by Traces of Water
Posted: December 22, 2010 Filed under: oceans, water Leave a comment »
A recent study by an MIT planetary scientist suggests that the planetesimals themselves provided the water that created oceans. As Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor of Geology in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, reports in a recent paper in Astrophysics and Space Science, these planetesimals contained trace amounts of water — at least .01 to .001 percent of their total mass (scientists don’t know the precise size of planetesimals, but they estimate that those that created Earth were between hundreds and thousands of kilometers in diameter). In the paper, Elkins-Tanton says it is likely that even tiny amounts of water in the planetesimals could create steam atmospheres that later cooled and condensed into liquid oceans on terrestrial planets.
source:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208154442.htm
Measurement of Magnetic Field in Earth’s Core
Posted: December 20, 2010 Filed under: earth, Earth Magnetism Leave a comment »
A University of California, Berkeley, geophysicist has made the first-ever measurement of the strength of the magnetic field inside Earth’s core, 1,800 miles underground.The magnetic field strength is 25 Gauss, or 50 times stronger than the magnetic field at the surface that makes compass needles align north-south. Though this number is in the middle of the range geophysicists predict, it puts constraints on the identity of the heat sources in the core that keep the internal dynamo running to maintain this magnetic field.
read here
Barometric Pressure and Why it Matters
Posted: December 18, 2010 Filed under: Guest Post Leave a comment »Guest Post by Joy Paley.
You hear about barometric pressure quite often actually, but unless you have a good memory of your junior high science classes, you might not have a clue what it means. Turn on the Weather Channel for the day’s forecast, and they’ll not only report the truly helpful temperature highs and lows and chance of precipitation, but that more obscure meteorological measure of barometric pressure.
The scientific explanation of barometric pressure is actually pretty simple. Barometric pressure is also known as atmospheric pressure, because it measures the pressure exerted by the weight of air above any particular place on the planet. You know the earth is swathed in a layer of air between us and space—that’s why we can breathe. But, despite how it feels, that air isn’t weightless. When you’re up in a plane, for example, you know that the cabin is pressurized—there’s a lot less air pressing down on a place a mile above the earth, and so the air pressure there is much lower. When you begin your descent in that same aircraft, the water bottle you’re holding will crunch up as if squeezed by an invisible hand; the increased pressure of the atmosphere back on the earth’s surface causes the air inside the bottle to compress.
So why does the Weather Channel bother to report the barometric pressure on a daily basis to a public who could care less? The air pressure changes don’t only fluctuate with altitude, but they also shift when high and low pressure fronts of air that sweep through a particular region. A change in barometric pressure is also an indicator that the weather is changing, whether it be through a temperature shift or precipitation.
Scientific studies also point to some interesting health effects brought on by shifting atmospheric pressure. A recent one in the journal Circulation, published by the American Heart Association, showed that particular atmospheric pressures increased an individual’s risk of heart attack. The 10-year study followed over 250,000 men and recorded the temperature and barometric pressures at the time that they experienced a heart attack. These men were 12% and 11% more likely to experience a heart attack if the pressure fluctuated 10 millibars above or below 1016 millibars of pressure.
This study is one of the first to confirm this relationship between atmospheric pressure and an increased risk for heart attack, so the authors weren’t quick to put out a definitive reason as to why it has this impact. In other studies, certain atmospheric pressure ranges have been shown to increase blood pressure levels in already hypertensive patients—this correlation between atmospheric pressure and a risk factor for heart attack might be to blame.
If you’re at a risk for a heart attack and interested in moving somewhere with a stable barometric pressure, these are a few cities in the world with the smallest fluctuations (as a side note though—check out the study; temperature also has a significant affect on the rate of heart attacks of men in the group). This map shows the general areas of the world with stable barometric pressure, in blue.
- Honolulu, Hawaii
- San Diego, California
- Townsville, Australia
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Santiago, Chile
Joy Paley is a science and technology writer based in Berkeley, California. She is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on accredited online colleges for Guide to Online Schools.
