Posts
May 18, 2013
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3:50 AM | A Small Cottage Industry
By Susan Freinkel
When Jay Shafer is asked to explain his peculiar career choice, he harks back to the sprawling house in Iowa City in which he grew up. One of his chores was vacuuming all 4,000 square feet of it -- even its rarely used spaces, like the dining room. That particular room, he thought, was a ridiculous waste of square footage; vacuuming it seemed like a commensurately ridiculous waste of time and energy. So years later, when Shafer decided to
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3:43 AM | A Novel Approach
By Ted Genoways
Louise Erdrich draws a clear distinction between her identities as a writer and as a citizen. As a novelist, she has earned nearly every accolade possible. Her epochal first novel, Love Medicine, won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award; The Plague of Doves was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize; and her most recent novel, The Round House, won last year's National Book Award for fiction. Most of Erdrich's works are set on a
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3:31 AM | Looking to Let Off a Little Steam
By Craig Canine
In his 1874 novel The Mysterious Island, Jules Verne envisioned a world in which water, split apart into hydrogen and oxygen, would furnish a free and inexhaustible fuel for heating, lighting, and transportation. In more recent times, hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles have been the perennial cars of the future -- always said to be "coming soon" but never actually arriving in dealer showrooms. Fuel-cell enthusiasts keep on hoping, however,
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3:08 AM | A Sea Change
By Laura Fraser
Growing up in southern New Jersey in the 1950s, Karen Garrison spent summers at the seashore, swimming, body surfing, beachcombing, and digging for the clams her grandmother would eat raw. "I would have lived underwater if that had been an option," she says. Today Garrison, NRDC's senior oceans policy analyst, still loves the sea; her generously windowed office in San Francisco, with its blue-green hues (thanks to posters of fish on the
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2:59 AM | Let's Not Weaken a Good Law
By Bob Deans
In Norman Rockwell's 1943 painting Freedom of Speech, an American everyman in faded khakis stands tall in a public meeting, speaking his mind and exercising a basic democratic right. At the time, though, citizens had no guarantee their voices would be heard if they stood up to speak out for clean water, fresh air, or unspoiled wilderness. What changed? Something called the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which passed with
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By Frances Beinecke
Last February, a special report on climate change in USA Today caught my eye. A lot of it concerned the impact felt by ordinary people. For example, Jimmy Strickland, who runs a small accounting business a few blocks from the waterfront in Norfolk, Virginia, has lived through three powerful storms in the past 10 years. After each one, Strickland had to close his business for two months to make repairs. "You lose time, and time is money,"
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2:40 AM | Have You Visited Los Angeles Lately?
By Douglas S. Barasch
In the back lots of Hollywood movie studios, our articles editor Jeff Turrentine reminds us, "brilliant production designers once transformed Southern California into the antebellum South, first-century Jerusalem, and the Land of Oz." So what better setting for a tale of urban renewal, reinvention, and reimagination than Los Angeles -- where now, he says, equally dedicated teams of individuals are attempting to make it into "a very
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May 17, 2013
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When you are buying a car you always look at official miles per gallon figures to find out how much fuel it will use. At the same time, most people have only a vague idea about how much energy their houses consume, even though home energy expenditures often account for a larger share of the household budget. Read more »
N.A. McNabb (2013). Strategies to Achieve Net-Zero Energy Homes: A Framework for Future Guidelines Workshop Summary Report., NIST Special Publication, DOI: 10.6028/NIST.SP.1140
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Photosynthetic oxidation of water is one of the central processes of life on Earth, but it is still not completely understood. Now, a German-American team of scientists has set out to observe the intermediate stages of this complex catalytic reaction using ultrashort snap shots taken at light sources including BESSY II in Berlin and the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford. Read more »
Kern, J., Alonso-Mori, R., Hellmich, J., Tran, R., Hattne, J., Laksmono, H., Glockner, C., Echols, N., Sierra, R., Sellberg, J. & Lassalle-Kaiser, B. (2012). Room temperature femtosecond X-ray diffraction of photosystem II microcrystals, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109 (25) 9721-9726. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1204598109
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By Jason Bittel
Things are not going well for frogs. A type of fungus known as chytrid has decimated populations around the globe, causing the serious decline or extinction of 200 species. Even worse, scientists believe chytrid is capable of infecting most of the world’s 6,000-some amphibian varieties -- an event that would likely be cataclysmic for food chains worldwide. Luckily, a paper published in the online journal PLOS One this week offers some
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This week, the Energy Department launched H2USA—a new public-private partnership focused on promoting hydrogen infrastructure to support more transportation energy options for U.S. consumers, including fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs). The new partnership brings together automakers, government agencies, gas suppliers, and the hydrogen and fuel cell industries to coordinate research and identify cost-effective solutions to deploy infrastructure that can deliver affordable, clean hydrogen […]
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This one is for you, Jac. Related articles New Image Page (mhrussel.wordpress.com) Image: E. coli on cellulosic biomass (mhrussel.wordpress.com) A proud day: I did it! Scene 1 from my bacteria animation (mhrussel.wordpress.com) Filed under: Bacteria, Education, Nature, STEM Tagged: Animation, Bacteria, bacteria as art, Biology, Microorganism, Nature, Science, STEM
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By The Editors
Fracking fracas: The Obama administration proposed new rules for fracking on federal land yesterday that aimed to please both environmentalists and energy producers. Good luck with that. Green-friendly Massachusetts Congressman Edward Markey says the regulations would give drillers permission to “frack first and ask questions later,” while Big Oil buddy and North Dakota senator John Hoeven argues that the rules would “exacerbate
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The California Energy Commission (CEC) has awarded $1.7 million to a partnership between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Cool Earth Solar Inc. (CES) to conduct a community-scale renewable energy integration demonstration project at the Livermore Valley Open Campus. The central idea of the project is to use solar forecasting to make photovoltaic power generation more reliable and thus more widely used. Read more »
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12:04 AM | Parks and Restoration
By Andrew Nikiforuk
After winter’s snows have finished their seasonal work scrubbing the sky clean, the clear late-spring air of Banff National Park enters the lungs like a riotous celebration. As soon as the last of the skiers and snowboarders have come back down to earth, cold rivers gurgle back to life. Bears awaken, poppies bloom. Banff reminds us that there’s a strict order to this world with roots in neither the digital nor the
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May 16, 2013
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11:57 PM | India's Forests, Fires, and Funerals
By George Black
In ancient times, according to Hindu legend, there was a place called Anandavana, the Forest of Bliss, which spread out along the Ganges to the south of the sacred city of Kashi, which is known today as Benares, Banaras, or Varanasi. Its shady groves offered an idyllic setting for temples, ashrams, and places of meditation. The Forest of Bliss, like most of India’s forests, is long gone. There are many reasons for this, but one important
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11:25 PM | NRDC: The Virtual River
By The Editors
Q&A with Doug Obegi, a staff attorney with the western water project, based in NRDC’s San Francisco office. California’s water supplies and fisheries are under stress. Is climate change going to make things worse? It’s already affecting us. For instance, the winter snowpack is melting earlier than it did just a few decades ago. Climate models predict that much of the state will experience hotter temperatures and receive less snow.
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11:15 PM | Could California's Salmon Make a Comeback?
By Barry Yeoman
Jon Rosenfield and I bushwhack through the scrubby willows that line the American River east of Sacramento. The air is crisp this October morning, and the timing of our visit should be just right to watch California’s Chinook salmon as they return to where their lives began and spawn the next generation. Rosenfield, a biologist, works for a conservation group called the Bay Institute, and he wants me to witness an annual ritual that future
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10:19 PM | NRDC: The Climate-City Link
By The Editors
Q&A with Amanda Eaken, deputy director of sustainable communities within NRDC’s energy and transportation program, based in San Francisco. Why is SB 375 considered such a landmark accomplishment for California? What changes has it already led to, and what future changes can we expect? SB 375 is the first state legislation in the United States to explicitly tie transportation and land use to the reduction of greenhouse gases. By
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10:07 PM | L.A. Takes the High Road
By Jeff Turrentine
In the summer of 1998, my wife and I left Brooklyn and gamely headed west to Los Angeles, as disaffected New Yorkers are wont to do, in search of the proverbial greener grass. We found it right away in front of the quintessentially L.A.–style rental house we had been dreaming of: a cozy 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival, complete with a yard and a bounteous garden. One day shortly after we moved in, I found myself standing in this garden
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9:33 PM | INFOGRAPHIC: Grand Slam in Seattle
By Henry Gass
If environmentalists want to touch the hearts and minds of Americans, actor-director (and NRDC trustee) Robert Redford once suggested, they should tap into their passions. Nothing arouses greater passion than sports: 62 percent of Americans describe themselves as fans, supporting a $400 billion industry. While all major league sports have now joined the effort to green stadiums and arenas, baseball is the undisputed leader, with teams such as
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Renault S.A., a French multinational vehicle manufacturer known for its role in motor sport, and its success over the years in rallying and Formula 1, has signed on as official Technical Partner of Spark Racing Technology to supply the Formula E cars to be entered in the FIA Formula E Championship. Formula E is intended to be the highest class of competition for one-make, single-seat, electrically powered racing cars. The series was conceived in 2012, with the inaugural championship to be held […]
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Using a combination of microanalytic techniques that at the same time image photoelectric current and chemical reaction rates across a surface on a micrometer scale, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have shed new light on what may become a cost-effective way to generate hydrogen gas directly from water and sunlight. Read more »
Esposito, D., Levin, I., Moffat, T. & Talin, A. (2013). H2 evolution at Si-based metal–insulator–semiconductor photoelectrodes enhanced by inversion channel charge collection and H spillover, Nature Materials, DOI: 10.1038/nmat3626
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By The Editors
Five #greenreads to enjoy while sending samples of your family's feces to the lab.Michael Pollan in the New York Times Magazine on our inner jungle: Much of the wild world needs conserving, but one wilderness that has escaped most of our attention (perhaps purposefully) is the one within us. Entire ecosystems live within our gut, on our skin, and in our mouths, noses, eyes, and colons. And we have a lot to learn about them. After getting lab
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3:18 PM | Fitting a model to data
In studying the earth, we can't afford to take enough observations, and they will never be free of noise. So if you say you do geoscience, I hereby challenge you to formulate your work as a mathematical inverse problem. Inversion is a question: given the data, the physical equations, and details of the experiment, what is the distribution of physical properties? To answer this question we must address three more fundamental ones (Scales, Smith, and Treitel, 2001):
How accurate is the
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By The Editors
Consider the numbers crunched: An exhaustive survey of thousands upon thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles on climate change reveals a whopping 97.1 percent of them agree that climate change is caused by human activity (a 2004 study found a similar consensus). The survey looked at work from 29,000 scientists in 11,994 academic papers. Will this move the needle for the American public? (And perhaps more importantly, American
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A joint-federal-agency 15-day research expedition in the northern Gulf of Mexico yielded innovative high-resolution seismic data and imagery that will help refine characterizations of large methane hydrate resources in the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf. Known reservoirs are expected to contain 6,700 trillion cubic feet of gas—more than the largest “conventional” natural gas fields. (According to the International Energy Agency, the South Pars natural gas condensate field located in the […]
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Reblogged from Dinner Table Science: Cows are cool. And here is why. They're not especially smart, or amazingly athletic, nor are they formidable predators or experts of camouflage. Their main survival tactic is to be large and to move in groups. But what's really cool about cows, is that they are ruminants. A ruminant is a mammal that […]
May 15, 2013
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Most Michigan and Pennsylvania residents say that hydraulic fracturing (commonly known as fracking) is good for the economy, but have concerns about chemicals used and other environmental risks, according to a recent survey done by the University of Michigan. Read more »
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By Tom Vanderbilt
No revolution is deserving of the label if it doesn't provoke resistance from a threatened establishment. That’s why the backlash against Citi Bike -- the new bike-sharing program scheduled to put 6,000 bikes and 330 stations on New York City’s streets by the end of the month -- is a positive development. Let us first qualify. As far as backlashes go, the anti-Citi Bike outcry is fairly tame stuff: a smattering of lawsuits, some very
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