TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| The Great Electric Car Quandary: How to Build a Charging Infrastructure Before Demand Grows Which came first: the electric car or the infrastructure needed to power the electric car? That's one of the key questions that carmakers will have to answer if they ever hope to fill up the freeways with their plug-in vehicles. [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 |
Molecular Breeding Makes Crops Hardier and More Nutritious For the past two decades, promises of crop improvement have been the domain of genetically modified plants : mostly, crops supplemented with bacterial genes to resist pests or weedkillers like Roundup. More than 85 percent of U.S. corn, soy or cotton grown contains such genes.But there is more than one way to transform a plant. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Act I, Scene I: Among the Trees For Patrick Dooley, the artistic director of the Shotgun Players, summer means putting on a show at John Hinkel Park in Berkeley. nytimes.com |
Karibu Tena: Rocket Stoves in Mwamgongo 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. The student-led group , known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), will file dispatches from the field during their trip. This is their fifth blog post for Scientific American.The water taxi edged past the final jungled outcrop of Gombe Park in Tanzania. As we crept away from the park towards civilization, the monkey-filled trees of Gombe faded into burned out hillsides replete with palm oil trees and dust. It was in this scarred land that I caught a first glimpse of the village Mwamgongo: my home for the next two months. [More] Tanzania - Africa - Water - Dartmouth College - Energy rss.sciam.com |