Human can grow up in space

Human in space can grow up to 3 percent taller during the time in spent living in spaceship, NASA scientists say. While scientists have known for some time that astronauts experience a slight height boost during a  months-long stay on theInternational Space Station, NASA is only now starting to use ultrasound  technology to see exactly what happens to astronauts' spines in microgravity as it occurs.

                                                                              International Space Station 

Smart Highway

Smart highway is a new concept of Holland Architecture Daan Rooseg aarde with Mr Heleen Herbert.Smart highway is  provides glow in the dark and weather forecast  to driver. Smart will build the first time in Holland next year and it will be painted with lines made from a photo-luminescent powder that charges in sunlight to illuminate the road for up to 10 hours overnight.Another technology aimed for implementation is temperature-responsive dynamic paint which will make ice-crystals visible to drivers when cold weather make road surfaces slippery. 

That is not true! The Earth will  darkness on day 23th to 25th December  2012

 Many hours ago NASA denied the information   Earth  blackouts on 23-25 Dec 2012. I checked the message that two person had been talking about blackout on Earth 23-25 Dec 2012 during alignment of Universe and that is not true. That is just an  individual idea from them not from NASA. But every year on Dec. 21 (the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere) is the darkess day of the year.

Turning the oceans into jetfuel

Source: BBC

(Getty Images)

The US Navy is working on turning seawater into fuel for its planes. But will the idea ever fly?

The US Navy has a problem.  Its ships often stay at sea for months on end far away from home. To keep its fleet of ships, boats and aircraft running, a fleet of 15 oil tankers roams the globe acting like floating gas stations. According to the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) nearly 600 million gallons (2,300 litres) of fuel were delivered to Navy vessels in 2011.

Moving those tanks of oil is an expensive business and that is even before the cost of the oil itself is factored in. Over recent years, the piece of oil has fluctuated wildly, but has generally been on an upward trend. Throw in the fact that many of the large oil-producing nations are generally situated in volatile regions of the world, and you begin to understand why the Navy is interested in cutting its dependence on oil.

One of the most interesting lines it is pursuing is a plan to generate jet fuel from a source that is abundance wherever the fleet is: seawater.

Jet fuel, along with all other common fuels, is a hydrocarbon. As the name suggests, these are chains of hydrogen and carbon atoms. In theory if you can combine those two elements in the correct way you can produce a fuel.  It turns out that seawater is a good source of both ingredients – it contains hydrogen in the H20, and a lot of dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2). It also has the advantage of occurring in abundance - and for the Navy - close to the action.

“The ocean contains about 100mg per litre of CO2,” explains the NRL’s Dr Heather Willauer. “It’s about 140 times more concentrated in sea water than it is in the air.”

Dr Willauer has developed a machine to grab those raw ingredients directly from sea. “We have an electrochemical unit. We feed it seawater, we acidify the seawater, and what comes out of the cell is oxygen, CO2, and hydrogen,” she says.

The oxygen is released, and the other two gasses are combined to make a liquid fuel.

“You take those components (CO2 and hydrogen), and use a catalytic process, for a gas to liquid type reaction,” she adds. The basics are similar to the descriptions of a process for converting water and air into petrol, that grabbed headings last week.

If both sound too good to be true, then you would be right. There is a catch. According to the first law of thermodynamics, nothing comes for free. To get useful energy out, you need to put useful energy in to the system. It is like combustion in reverse. Energy is needed to break the water and the carbon dioxide down into constituent parts and then more energy – and time – is needed to form the hydrocarbon.

“We do have to have a power source to supply the electricity for the electrochemical process,” admits Dr Willauer. That could come from solar or – more likely - the nuclear reactors already onboard many ships.  

The system would also only have marginal environmental benefits. It would reduce the burden of moving fuel around, but that may be offset by the production process. And, in the end, it would still produce traditional fuel with its associated emissions when burnt.  For the Navy, this is more about convenience.

Chicken power’

At the moment a 1.5mx1.5m (5ftx5ft) prototype is installed onshore at an NRL engineering facility in Key West, Florida. It has been using seawater from the Gulf of Mexico to test the conversion process and is now focused on optimizing the technology and scaling it up. They are also beginning to think about the engineering challenges of putting a system to sea.

“Because we are developing technologies to potentially be used by the Navy, that goes into the technology when we develop it,” says Dr Willauer. “We want to make sure it has as small a footprint, and a small a size as possible, and keep those constraints in mind.”

The team is also willing to stick its neck out and predict a cost for jet fuel produced by the process of $3 to $6 per gallon.

If they were able to keep to that cost – and there are plenty of people who think that the real cost would be much higher – it would give it the edge over another fuel the Navy is currently experimenting with.

Earlier this summer, the Navy ran its first large-scale exercise fuelled by a $12m blend of biofuels produced from everything from chicken bones to algae. The Pacific demonstration was part of a project known as Great Green Fleet. During the manoeuvres, F/A-18 Super Hornets and other aircraft screamed off the flight deck of the USS Nimitz over the Pacific Ocean powered by conventional jet fuel mixed with the biofuels.  Two destroyers and a cruiser also ploughed the oceans fuelled by a similar mix.

All went well with the exercise, until the costs came in. The biofuel mix cost around $26 per gallon ($6 per litre), significantly more than the $3.50 per gallon ($1 per litre) paid for regular fuel. Critics pointed out that the Navy’s job was defending the US, not helping the emerging biofuel industry bring down its costs, a point that has been compounded by looming defence cuts. For now, the Navy is continuing with its vision and has reiterated its commitment to have half of its fleet powered by alternative energy sources by 2020.

But don’t expect that fleet to be accompanied by refueling ships, sucking in seawater. That research is far behind the biofuel work. It will take six to eight years for the NRL to fully develop the seawater idea, depending on funding. And then it will take many more years to build working systems. By then, the Great Green Fleet may have already sailed.

Prehistoric Flamingo Nest with Eggs Discovered

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  Nest and eggs fossilized in a limestone …

A fossil bird's nest has been discovered in Spain, cradling at least five eggs that scientists believe belonged to an ancient flamingo some 18 million years ago.

The nest was found in a limestone block in the Ebro Basin in northeastern Spain. The researchers think it was abandoned and sunk to the bottom of a shallow, salty lake (which once also housed snakes, turtles and crocodiles) before being covered in mud and fossilizing during the early Miocene.

Scans of the eggshell fragments revealed microscopic features that closely match that of the modern flamingo's eggs. However, the type of nest the eggs sit in is much different from the type the birds build today.

Modern flamingos make muddy volcano-shaped nests with a single, large egg in each, but this ancient nest was made from twigs and leaves and holds several eggs. The researchers said the nest actually looks more like those of modern grebes, diving birds that build floating platform nests, which typically hold three to eight eggs and are anchored to the bottom of a lake with aquatic plants.

Though they have very different reproductive and nesting behaviors, flamingos and grebes are closely related. This new fossil then might indicate that the grebe-style nest is ancestral to this group of birds and that, over time, modern flamingos diverged, developing their volcano-shaped nests, the researchers said.

The team, led by paleontologist Gerald Grellet-Tinner, reported their findings Oct. 17 in the journal PLoS ONE. (Grellet-Tinner is affiliated with the National Council of Research and Technology in Argentina, The Field Museum, Chicago, and The Journey Museum in South Dakota.)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/prehistoric-flamingo-nest-eggs-discovered-123130280.html 

Experts: Global warming means more Antarctic ice

By SETH BORENSTEIN | Associated Press – Wed, Oct 10, 2012

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  Associated Press/NSIDC, University of Colorado - This handout photo provided by NSIDC, University of Colorado, taken in Oct. 2003, shows the Antarctic sunlight illuminating the surface of the sea ice, intensifying.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The ice goes on seemingly forever in a white pancake-flat landscape, stretching farther than ever before. And yet in this confounding region of the world, that spreading ice may be a cockeyed signal of man-made climate change, scientists say.

This is Antarctica, the polar opposite of the Arctic.

While the North Pole has been losing sea ice over the years, the water nearest the South Pole has been gaining it. Antarctic sea icehit a record 7.51 million square miles in September. That happened just days after reports of the biggest loss of Arctic sea ice on record.

Climate change skeptics have seized on the Antarctic ice to argue that the globe isn't warming and that scientists are ignoring the southern continent because it's not convenient. But scientists say the skeptics are misinterpreting what's happening and why.

Shifts in wind patterns and the giant ozone hole over the Antarcticthis time of year — both related to human activity — are probably behind the increase in ice, experts say. This subtle growth in winter sea ice since scientists began measuring it in 1979 was initially surprising, they say, but makes sense the more it is studied.

"A warming world can have complex and sometimes surprising consequences," researcher Ted Maksym said this week from an Australian research vessel surrounded by Antarctic sea ice. He is with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Many experts agree. Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado adds: "It sounds counterintuitive, but the Antarctic is part of the warming as well."

And on a third continent, David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey says that yes, what's happening in Antarctica bears the fingerprints of man-made climate change.

"Scientifically the change is nowhere near as substantial as what we see in the Arctic," says NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati, an ice expert. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be paying attention to it and shouldn't be talking about it."

Sea ice is always melting near one pole while growing around the other. But the overall trend year to year is dramatically less ice in the Arctic and slightly more in the Antarctic.

It's most noticeable in September, when northern ice is at its lowest and southern ice at its highest. For over 30 years, the Arctic in September has been losing an average of 5.7 square miles of sea ice for every square mile gained in Antarctica.

Loss of sea ice in the Arctic can affect people in the Northern Hemisphere, causing such things as a higher risk of extreme weather in the U.S. through changes to the jet stream, scientists say. Antarctica's weather peculiarities, on the other hand, don't have much effect on civilization.

At well past midnight in Antarctica, where it's about 3 degrees, Maksym describes in a rare ship-to-shore telephone call from the R.V. Aurora Australis what this extra ice means in terms of climate change. And what it's like to be out studying it for two months, with the nearest city 1,500 miles away.

"It's only you and the penguins," he says. "It's really a strikingly beautiful and stark landscape. Sometimes it's even an eerie kind of landscape."

While the Arctic is open ocean encircled by land, the Antarctic — about 1.5 times the size of the U.S. — is land circled by ocean, leaving more room for sea ice to spread. That geography makes a dramatic difference in the two polar climates.

The Arctic ice responds more directly to warmth. In the Antarctic, the main driver is wind, Maksym and other scientists say. Changes in the strength and motion of winds are now pushing the ice farther north, extending its reach.

Those changes in wind are tied in a complicated way to climate change from greenhouse gases, Maksym and Scambos say. Climate change has created essentially a wall of wind that keeps cool weather bottled up in Antarctica, NASA's Abdalati says.

And the wind works in combination with the ozone hole, the huge gap in Earth's protective ozone layer that usually appears over the South Pole. It's bigger than North America.

It's caused by man-made pollutants chlorine and bromine, which are different from the fossil fuel emissions that cause global warming. The hole makes Antarctica even cooler this time of year because the ozone layer usually absorbs solar radiation, working like a blanket to keep the Earth warm.

And that cooling effect makes the winds near the ground stronger and steadier, pushing the ice outward, Scambos says.

University of Colorado researcher Katherine Leonard, who is on board the ship with Maksym, says in an email that the Antarctic sea ice is also getting snowier because climate change has allowed the air to carry more moisture.

Winter sea ice has grown by about 1 percent a decade in Antarctica. If that sounds small, it's because it's an average. Because the continent is so large, it's a little like lumping together the temperatures of the Maine and California coasts, Vaughan says.

Mark Serreze, director of the snow and ice data center, says computer models have long predicted that Antarctica would not respond as quickly to global warming as other places. Since 1960, the Arctic has warmed the most of the world's regions, and Antarctica has warmed the least, according to NASA data.

Scientists on the cruise with Maksym are spending eight to 12 hours a day on the ice bundled up against the fierce wind with boots that look like Bugs Bunny's feet. It's dangerous work. Cracks in sea ice can form at any time. Just the other day a sudden fissure stranded a team of scientists until an inflatable bridge rescued them.

"It's a treacherous landscape," Vaughan says.

Source:

Nigerian villagers sue Shell in landmark pollution case

primary source:  By Ivana Sekularac and Anthony Deutsch | Reuters – 10 hrs ago

THE HAGUE (Reuters) - Four Nigerian villagers took Royal Dutch Shell to court on Thursday in a landmark pollution case that campaigners said could open the door to more compensation claimsagainst international companies.

The fishermen and farmers, together with the Friends of the Earth campaign group, accuse the oil major of polluting land and waterways around their homes in the Niger Delta region of Africa's top energy producer.

Shell has denied responsibility, saying the leaks were caused by sabotage.

The villagers launched their claim in a civil court in The Hague, where Shell has its joint global headquarters.

It was the first time a Dutch-registered company had been sued in a Dutch court for offences allegedly carried out by a foreign subsidiary.

Friends of the Earth said the claim, if successful, could open up a new way for plaintiffs to take on multinationals - by suing their parent companies in their home countries.

The villagers, who appeared in court, want unspecified damages saying Shell and other corporations were responsible for pollution from three oil spills between 2004 and 2007.

"My community is a ghost land as a result of the devastation. We had good vegetation. Today people have respiratory problems and are getting sick," said one of the plaintiffs Eric Dooh, from the Goi community, which lives between two pipelines.

"Shell is aware of the whole devastation. I want them to pay compensation, to clean up the pollution so we can grow our crops and fish again," the 44-year-old told Reuters before the hearing.

Shell says the pollution was caused by thieves breaking into pipelines to steal the oil, and believes it has played its part in cleaning it up.

"The matter has been resolved as far as we are concerned and we do not properly understand why Friends of the Earth has submitted the case," Allard Castelein, Shell's vice president for environment, told Reuters before the hearing.

The biggest pollution problem in the Niger Delta was caused by thieves who steal oil from Shell's installations, he said. Around 150,000 barrels of oil are stolen every day in the Delta. That is worth about $6 billion a year.

Friends of the Earth said other companies could face similar claims in European Union cities if it won the case.

"It opens up a range of possibilities for people from poor countries to use the legal system to seek compensation from companies," said Geert Ritsema, international affairs coordinator at the environmental group during a break in the proceedings.

WETLAND ECOSYSTEM

The Nigerians' lawyer Channa Samkalden told the court Shell had failed to maintain pipelines, clean up leaks and prevent pollution.

"It was insufficient maintenance, not sabotage, that was responsible for the leaks ... Shell did not operate as a conscientious oil company," she said.

With around 31 million inhabitants, the Niger Delta is one of the world's most important wetland and coastal marine ecosystems. It is an important source of food for the poor, rural population.

Last year, the United Nations said in a report the government and multinational oil companies, particularly Shell, were responsible for 50 years of oil pollution that had devastated the Ogoniland region, part of the Niger Delta.

The government and oil firms have pledged to clean up the region and other parts of the Delta, but residents say they have seen little action.

Shell Petroleum Development Co (SPDC) is the largest oil and gas company in Nigeria, with production capacity of more than 1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.

It operates a joint venture in which state owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corp has a majority share. Total SA subsidiary Elf Petroleum Nigeria Ltd. also has a stake.

Three judges are expected to deliver their verdict on the Hague case in the new year.

source: http://news.yahoo.com/shell-faces-lawsuit-over-niger-delta-pollution-101133998--finance.html