TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Working Out the Details of Guns in National Parks A new law will allow guns in national parks and wildlife refuges, leaving officials to wonder how the new rules will affect enforcement of poaching and permit laws. nytimes.com |
Saving the environment from behind bars Paid just 85 cents per hour, inmates at a Seattle-area prison provide a relatively inexpensive source of scientific labor. But who knew they could also grow frogs better than some traditional research facilities? [More] rss.sciam.com |
Bee Afraid, Bee Very Afraid [More] rss.sciam.com |
Another Century of Oil? Getting More from Current Reserves (preview) On fourteen dry, flat square miles of California’s Central Valley, more than 8,000 horsehead pumps--as old-fashioned oilmen call them--slowly rise and fall as they suck oil from underground. Glittering pipelines crossing the whole area suggest that the place is not merely a relic of the past. But even to an expert’s eyes, Kern River Oil Field betrays no hint of the technological miracles that have enabled it to survive decades of dire predictions.When Kern River Oil Field was discovered in 1899, analysts thought that only 10 percent of its unusually viscous crude could be recovered. In 1942, after more than four decades of modest production, the field was estimated to still hold 54 million barrels of recoverable oil, a fraction of the 278 million barrels already recovered. “In the next 44 years, it produced not 54 [million barrels] but 736 million barrels, and it had another 970 million barrels remaining,” energy guru Morris Adelman noted in 1995. But even this estimate proved wrong. In November 2007 U.S. oil giant Chevron, by then the field’s operator, announced that cumulative production had reached two billion barrels. Today Kern River still puts out nearly 80,000 barrels per day, and the state of California estimates its remaining reserves to be about 627 million barrels. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Hoisting One for Wind Power: Climbing Crane Expected to Keep Vestas Turbines Spinning [Slide Show] Now that the United Nations climate talks have wrapped up in Copenhagen, nations agreeing to the accord drafted there are now obliged to keep their promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions . Wind power is one of the key sources of renewable energy expected to play an important role in helping to cut emissions and wean society from its dependence on fossil fuels, which means wind-power companies must be prepared to quickly fix mechanical problems that threaten to slow down renewable energy production. [More] rss.sciam.com |