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Hugh Pickens writes “When the wind is blowing, it is usually the cheapest peaking power available. However utilities need consistent always-on power from large, cheap coal and nuclear power plants that are the backbone of the electric grid. Wired reports that operators are looking at Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) using abandoned mines and sandstones of the Midwest to store compressed-air. This converts the intermittent motions of the air into a steady power source by using it to run air compressors to pump air into an underground cave where it’s stored under pressure. The first CAES plant in the United States actually went online in McIntosh, Alabama in 1991 where engineers created a geological pocket 900 feet long and up to 238 feet wide in a dome by pumping water into it to dissolve the rock salt. When the (briny) water was pumped back out, the salt resealed itself and they had an air-tight container.”

Source: The Future of Wind Power May Be Underground

We gave the BBC a hard time this morning for going a little overboard in declaring the Large Hadron Collider a broken-down mess. But here’s something cool: In a new documentary, a team simulated the blast that “Underwear Bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to create on Christmas Day last year. Their finding: Even if he had blown up the bomb successfully, it wouldn’t have been enough to take down flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Dr John Wyatt, an international terrorism and explosives adviser to the UN, replicated the conditions on board the Detroit flight on a decommissioned Boeing 747 at an aircraft graveyard in Gloucestershire, England [BBC News]. Wyatt used the same amount of the explosive pentaerythritol that the bomber carried, about 80 grams, which packs about the punch of a hand grenade. They put it on the same seat and lit off a controlled explosion, which sent a shock wave through the aluminum exterior.

The metal was permanently bowed out, and a handful of rivets were punched out, but no gaping holes appeared. The pressurized air inside the cabin would have slowly leaked out [Discovery News]. Wyatt and his cohorts say that wouldn’t have been life-threatening, and it wouldn’t have brought down the plane. However, the blast would probably have killed the bomber and the person next to him. And things wouldn’t have been all sunshine and roses for the survivors, either. Team member Captain J. Joseph said the noise and the smoke would have been awful, “not to mention the parts of the bodies that were disintegrated as part of the explosion” [BBC News]. Their eardrums could have ruptured, too.

This wasn’t a perfect simulation: Wyatt tested a 747, while the actual bomber flew aboard an Airbus 330. And the conditions inside were normal atmospheric pressure, not the pressurized state of a plane in flight. But Wyatt argues that the Airbus’ stronger composite materials mean it would have fared even better than his test aircraft. As for the pressure? “It’s over so quickly that the difference in pressure wouldn’t make a difference,” said Wyatt. “By the time the shock wave got to the door the pressure would have normalized” [Discovery News].

In Britain, the documentary (called “How Safe Are Our Skies?”) aired on BBC Two. You can still see it on their iPlayer. For those of us here in the United States, the Discovery Channel broadcasts it tomorrow night (Thursday) at 10 PM EST.

Source: Underwear Bomber Couldn’t Have Brought Down Flight 253, Simulation Suggests

eldavojohn writes “A new report from Games Industry indicates that MMO gamers in the United States paid $3.8 billion to play last year, with an analysis of five European countries bringing the total close to $4.5 billion USD. In America, the report estimated that payments for boxed content and client downloads amounted to a measly $400 million, while the subscriptions came to $2.38 billion. Hopefully that will fund some developer budgets for bigger and better MMOs yet to come. The study also found that roughly a quarter of the US population plays some form of MMO. Surely MMOs are shaping up to be a juicy industry, and a market that can satisfy people of all walks of life.”

Source: US Gamers Spend $3.8 Billion On MMOs Yearly

When researchers rack up the carbon emitted across the world, the standard trends emerge: Europeans put less CO2 into the atmosphere than Americans, but China’s rapid ascent is sending its emissions shooting past those of the United States. However, this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford University researchers attempt to rejigger the numbers to reflect not just where the emissions are produced, but who is responsible for them—who’s buying and consuming the products that cause those emissions.

After study global trade databases, Steven Davis and Ken Caldiera say that in 2004, 23 per cent of global CO2 emissions – some 6.2 gigatonnes – went in making products that were traded internationally. Most of these products were exported from China and other relatively poor countries to consumers in richer countries [New Scientist]. The researchers say that developed countries outsource about a third of the carbon dioxide emissions connected to their consumption.

When you look at the numbers this way, the per capita emissions in Europe don’t look quite as good: If those emissions were tallied on the other side of the balance sheet, it would add more than four tons of CO2 per person in several European nations [TIME]. The United States saw a lesser increase of 2.4 tons per person, though that’s not really a cause for celebration. Part of the reason is that the country has more carbon-intensive exports than Europe, the study says, and under the new accounting those emissions are going on somebody else’s books. The United States also takes in the lion’s share of China’s: 22.5% of China’s emissions are generated during production of goods and services consumed overseas, and 7.8% are embodied in exports to the US alone [BBC News].

This isn’t the first time that climate change experts have raised the question of how much responsibility consumers bear for carbon emissions produced on the other side of the globe. Other studies are trying to crack this same problem, tracking “consumption” emissions rather than just the “territorial” emissions produced inside a country’s borders. What they find could shake up how the world goes about trying to reduce emissions. The U.N. system is built around the idea of capping carbon emissions from individual nations. But which country is responsible for the carbon emitted in global trade? The buyer or the seller? [TIME]

Image: iStockphoto

Source: When China Makes Goods for the US, Who’s Responsible for the Emissions?

crowfeather notes an interview with cybersecurity czar Howard Schmidt that Wired’s Thread Level conducted this week. “Howard Schmidt, the new cybersecurity czar for the Obama administration, has a short answer for the drumbeat of rhetoric claiming the United States is caught up in a cyberwar that it is losing. ‘There is no cyberwar,’ Schmidt told Wired.com in a sit-down interview Wednesday at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco. ‘I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept,’ Schmidt said. ‘There are no winners in that environment.’ Instead, Schmidt said the government needs to focus its cybersecurity efforts to fight online crime and espionage. His stance contradicts Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence who made headlines last week when he testified to Congress that the country was already in the midst of a cyberwar — and was losing it. … There’s been much ink spilled in recent years over the turf battles in D.C. over whether the NSA (representing the military) or DHS (on the civilian side) takes the lead role in cybersecurity. But… “I haven’t seen that tension,” Schmidt said. As for which will take the cybersecurity lead, Schmidt simply says it’s a shared effort.”

Source: There Is No Cyberwar

Hugh Pickens writes “The NY Times has an interesting article about Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — that have become a phenomenon in China: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, or run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results. ‘In the United States, traditional media are still playing the key role in setting the agenda for the public,’ says Jin Liwen. ‘But in China, you will see that a lot of hot topics, hot news or events actually originate from online discussions.’ In one well known case, when a video appeared in China of a woman stomping a cat to death with the sharp point of her high heel, the human flesh search engine tracked the kitten killer’s home to the town of Luobei in Heilongjiang Province, in the far northeast, and her name — Wang Jiao — was made public, as were her phone number and her employer. ‘Wang Jiao was affected a lot,’ says one Luobei resident. ‘She left town and went somewhere else.’ The kitten-killer case didn’t just provide revenge; it helped turn the human-flesh search engine into a national phenomenon. Searches have also been directed against cheating spouses, corrupt government officials, amateur pornography makers, Chinese citizens who are perceived as unpatriotic, journalists who urge a moderate stance on Tibet and rich people who try to game the Chinese system.”

Source: China’s Human Flesh Search Engine

After 12 years of refusing to let any new genetically modified food crops take root in the European Union, the EU has finally given the go-ahead to an engineered potato. However, the GM potatoes won’t end up in French pomme frites or German potato dumplings, as they’ve been approved only for industrial or animal feed purposes. Regulators say the high-starch spuds will likely be used by paper and textile companies.

The Amflora potato was created by the German chemical company BASF and will be cultivated this year on a commercial scale of 250 hectares in the Czech Republic, Sweden, and Germany. Before Amflora, only one other GMO had been approved for cultivation in the EU — Monsanto’s MON810 maize, in 1998 — in spite of repeated findings from the European Food Safety Authority that such products did not pose health risks [Financial Times]. And even though that GM maize variety was officially approved by the EU, a number of European countries have banned its cultivation.

The EU’s decision to allow cultivation of the GM potatoes was met with considerable opposition. Heike Moldenhauer, of Friends of the Earth, said the potato carried a controversial antibiotic resistant gene that could cause problems if it enters the food chain through feeding the industrial pulp from the potatoes to livestock [The Telegraph]. Unlike the United States, where GM crops are widely cultivated, many of the European Union’s member countries remain staunchly opposed to their use, with critics particularly vocal in France, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Greece.

John Dalli, EU Health and Consumer Policy Commissioner, said the decision to allow the GM potatoes was based on “sound science.” The approval, coming after a dozen years of official hostility to GM crops, may signal a larger shift in policy. The decision also raises the possibility that other GM crops could soon win cultivation approval…. Along with the cultivation approval, the commission announced that it would proceed with plans to allow European countries to independently decide if GM crops can be grown in their borders [Greenwire].

Image: Wikimedia

Source: Biotech Potato Wins European Approval; May Signal a Larger Shift on GM Crops

Atrazine, one of the world’s most widely used herbicides, is wreaking havoc on the sex lives of male frogs. In a new experiment, exposure to the chemical emasculated more than half of the male African claw frogs in the study, and made one in ten turn into females. The results, which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have raised concerns that the herbicide found in waterways is altering amphibians’ hormones, and could potentially have similar effects on other animals, including humans.

Biologist Tyrone Hayes studied 40 male control tadpoles along with 40 male tadpoles reared in water tainted with atrazine. The levels of the chemical matched the levels the frogs would encounter in their natural settings, and was also within the drinking water standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency. The results showed that 75 percent of male tadpoles reared in atrazine-contaminated water developed into frogs that had low testosterone levels, decreased breeding gland size, feminized laryngeal development, suppressed mating behavior, reduced sperm production and decreased fertility, while the control group showed features typically found in male frogs [AFP]. Most of these “chemically castrated” frogs were unable to reproduce.

The rest of the results were even more dramatic. Ten percent of tadpoles raised in the chemically tainted water developed into frogs with male genetics but female anatomy, and some of these were actually able to breed and produce eggs. The offspring, researchers found, were all male because both parents contributed male genes. Scientists worry that the sex-reversed males and the subsequent production of all-male offspring is skewing the sex ratio of wild frog populations, and may be contributing to the decline of frog populations worldwide.

This is not the first time that Hayes has found atrazine to be wreaking havoc on male frogs. In 2002, working on the African clawed frog, the researchers found that tadpoles raised in atrazine-contaminated water become hermaphrodites – they develop both female (ovaries) and male (testes) gonads. This occurred at atrazine levels as low as 0.1 parts per billion (ppb), 30 times lower than levels allowed in drinking water by the EPA (3 ppb) [University of California, Berkeley]. Subsequent studies in the Midwest showed that male leopard frogs living in atrazine-contaminated streams often had eggs in their testes. They also had lower testosterone levels and smaller voice boxes, which scientists presumed hampered their ability to call mates.

Other studies have found that atazine can interfere with the hormones and sexual development of fish, birds, and rats. Hayes says his new findings should raise alarms about human health. “It’s a chemical . . . that causes hormone havoc,” Hayes said. “You need to look at things that are affecting wildlife, and realize that, biologically, we’re not that different” [Washington Post].

However, Syngenta, the leading manufacturer atrazine, has disputed Hayes’ studies. Hayes responded by saying that people will have to make a final call on whether the costs of atrazine exposure outweigh its benefits: “Not every frog or every human will be affected by atrazine, but do you want to take a chance, what with all the other things that we know atrazine does, not just to humans but to rodents and frogs and fish?”[AFP].

An estimated 80 million pounds of atrazine is used annually in the United States, and it’s commonly found in ground and surface water. About 75% of stream water samples and 40% of groundwater samples contain atrazine, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, detected atrazine in 90% of tap water samples from 139 water systems [USA Today]. The EPA is currently reviewing the herbicide, while several states are considering banning it all together. Atrazine is already banned in the European Union.

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Image: Tyrone Hayes

Source: Common Weedkiller Chemically Castrates Frogs; Turns Males Into Females

An anonymous reader writes “Throughout the debate over ACTA transparency, the secret copyright
treaty, many countries have taken public positions that they support
release of the actual text, but that other countries do not.
Since full transparency requires consensus of all the ACTA partners,
the text simply can’t be released until everyone is in agreement.
A new leak
from the Netherlands fingers who the chief opponents of transparency
are: the United States, South Korea, Singapore, and Denmark lead the
way, with Belgium, Germany, and Portugal not far behind as problem
countries.”

Source: Leak Shows US Lead Opponent of ACTA Transparency

Forgetting an umbrella or the location of a parking spot may be annoying, but scientists have suggested that for healthy brains to function well, they need to forget. By forgetting, scientists say, the brain makes space for new memories. In an intriguing breakthrough, researchers from the United States and China have identified the protein responsible for forgetting in fruit flies. By tweaking a  protein called Rac, researchers were able to speed up and slow down the erasure of painful memories [New Scientist]. The findings were published in the journal Cell.

Scientists have been unable to pinpoint why people forget. Some have suggested that new memories are ephemeral and vanish over time, while others thought that interference caused earlier short-term memories to be overridden as new information comes in [Science Daily]. While both of these notions seem to suggest that forgetting is a passive mechanism, the new study suggests that forgetting is far more active, and that Rac works to inhibit the formation of more long-term memories.

The scientists studied fruit flies that were exposed to two fly-repellent odors, the second of which came with an electric shock. The flies quickly learned to head to the odor that didn’t cause them pain. Then the scientists switched the set-up, linking the first odor to the shock instead. Regular flies quickly noted the change, discarding the old memory of which odor came with a shock and learning to head towards the now-safe second odor. But when the experiment was repeated after the memory-eroding protein [Rac] was blocked, there was utter confusion. The flies had not erased their first memory, and had made a second memory. Unable to pick which odor to fly toward, they zigzagged back and forth [The New York Times].

The researchers determined that when Rac was switched on, newly formed memories faded fast, allowing new memories to come in and solidify. When Rac was switched off in the fruit flies, new memories lingered longer, extending from the normal limit of just a few hours to more than a day.

The scientists next hope to test the effects of meddling with the proteins in mice. If this mechanism holds true in mammals, it could shed light on the molecular basis of forgetting in humans [New Scientist], as humans also have the Rac protein. The researchers suggest that the identification of this protein could potentially help create techniques to enhance cherished memories or to forget painful episodes, which could be a boon to those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Until now approaches to erasing unwanted memories have largely focused on interfering with the laying-down of memories, rather than our natural ability to forget [New Scientist].

Image: flickr / Image Editor

Source: How the Brain Makes Space for New Memories: By Erasing a Few Old Ones