| Navy Green: Military Investigates Biofuels to Power Its Ships and Planes Ships powered by algae and planes flying on weeds : that's part of the future the U.S. Navy hopes to bring to fruition. This week, the seagoing branch of the military purchased 40,000 gallons of jet fuel derived from camelina--a weedy relative of canola--and 20,055 gallons of algae-derived diesellike fuel for ships. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Measuring the Daily Destruction of the World's Rainforests Dear EarthTalk: Do you have current facts and figures about how much rainforest is being destroyed each day around the world, and for what purpose(s)? --Teri, via e-mail [More] rss.sciam.com |
100 Years Ago: The Flooding of Paris FEBRUARY 1960 METEOR DUST -- “The recent extension of geophysical investigations into nearby space has given emphasis to the fact that life on earth is shielded by the earth’s atmosphere. Death from ‘meteoritic stroke’ might be a not-uncommon coroner’s verdict if the protective canopy of the atmosphere were not spread above our heads. During the past 13 years I have been engaged in efforts to secure direct measurement of the meteoritic fallout. My samples of meteoritic dust and cosmic spherules have come from the tops of high mountains remote from industrial civilization, and from the bottom of the ocean. The data now show that meteoritic material comes down to earth in much larger quantity (about five million tons per year) than earlier estimates. Moreover, it appears that the rate of fall has varied during the past 10 or 15 million years. --Hans Pettersson” [More] rss.sciam.com |
Flying Blind in Policy Reforms The long and divisive fight over U.S. health care reform exposed basic weaknesses in the processes of governance. As is so often true in American politics these days, politicians and lobbyists kept complex subjects to themselves, pushing expert discussion and systematic public debate to the sidelines. Although the final legislation expands coverage, and I favor it for that reason, it falls far short of the changes we need to lower costs and improve health outcomes.During 14 months of debate over health care, the administration did not put forward a clear, analytical policy white paper on the aims, methods and expected results of the proposed reforms. Only the Congressional Budget Office’s budget scoring of legislative proposals was even partly systematic; no comparable independent analysis exists on other substantive issues. The actual health consequences of the legislation were never reviewed or debated coherently. [More] Politics - Health care - United States - Congressional Budget Office - Health care reform in the United States rss.sciam.com |
Rocket stoves in Mwamgongo: Finalizing the design and seeing acceptance Editor's Note: Students from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. This series chronicles work being done by the student-led group , known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), to design "rocket stoves" in the village of Mwamgongo and top-light updraft design (TLUD) gasification stoves in the village of Kalinzi. The goal is to create a healthier, more energy-efficient cooking apparatus that these villagers will accept and use. HELP students are filing these dispatches from the field during their trip. This is their 12th blog post for Scientific American. [More] Energy - Tanzania - Thayer School of Engineering - Technology - Dartmouth College rss.sciam.com |