Though this is technically a form of genetic engineering, it is not a comprehensive description.
What you describe is selective breeding . . . it has existed for a long time. But this is using naturally occuring genes in the genepool and selecting for them through mating within a species or closely related species.
Taking a gene from a firefly and implanting it in a tobacco plant to create glowing tobacco, or creating a brand new modified gene that does not exist in the natural gene pool is also genetic engineering. The statement
The difference is that now, we have the advantage of looking under the hood at the genes themselves. This new data gives farmers and geneticists an unprecendented level of control in selecting for certain traits.
is true but not comprehensive. It ignore the concerns of the alarmists. We aren't just looking under the hood . . . to use your analogy, we are taking parts one vehicle and force fitting them into another. And we are coming up with new parts that don't exist yet and fitting them into our existing vehicles. The alarmists beleive that we don't know what effect these new vehicles will have on the environment
Blimps are lighter than air aircraft In fact the FAA has a certification for blimp operators that is a "Light Than Air Craft:. . . They are like a submarine for the air complete with a air filled ballast ballonets to make the craft pitch up or down. and change the density of the craft to make it ascend or descend.
The fuel needed consumed to maintain lift is signficantly diminished.
In the article they refer to it as a sperical airship . . . I'm not sure that it isn;'t compartmentalized and redundant. They claim that it can remain in one place which implies some engine/driving force . . .
I read somewhere a couple years ago that the US military liked the idea of blimps etc. because they can stay up longer and they're cheaper to operate than a plane.
As far as shooting them down goes . . . one could easily shoot down an AWAC (large radio relay and surveilance plane) too, but they are escorted and/or fly near, but outside the combat theatre.
The intent of balloons/blimps is to keep them outside the theatre of combat . . . If it flies high enough, then one can use it to spy enemy activities past the horizon . . . or at least the horizon at ground level. In other words, at higher altitudes, one can see/snoop on radio transmissions/etc. further than at ground level due to the curvature of the earth . . . so even if you fly behind friendly lines, you can still spy on the enemy.
In theory, space regolith is formed by the impact of micrometeorites up to 150 micrometres in size travelling at speeds of up to 100,000 kilometres per hour.
I'm no expert but I'd be very surprised if you could get meteorites of this speed and size on the surface of Mars . . . Even a very thin atmoshere would slow down such tiny meteors before they hit the surface.
Mars has a significant atmosphere (though not as thick as earth's) . ..Didn't a probe burn up in the atmosphere b/c we couldn't convert units of measure?
Cost of upkeep on PC's has got to be more or at least the same as a school's library . . .
Add in network support and the "kids may be tough on hardware" factor and I think you've exceeded most school's paltry library budgets.
And, don't forget, one still has to buy the books regardless of whether the books are online or on paper. . . and if there's "no waiting in line" as you suggest, then the school should have multi user licenses . . . which would be like buying a bunch of copies of the same book.
Also, there may not be a cost to replace lost books, but the non-fiction books and text books become out of date after a while (must be replaced regularly) and they are the some of the most expensive books in the library (encyclopedias, texts, reference books, etc).
On top of all that computers have a life cycle shorter than most primary school/secondary school text books . . . so the PC's will also have to be replaced more regularly than the books (which are still being purchased). . .
I have a hard time seeing schools saving money or even breaking even . . . .
I would make sure that you research your potential career change before plunging in. You mentioned a "factory" job as a potentially less stressful career. Most "factory" operators would love to do nothing more that sit in front of a computer clicking the mouse and pushing buttons on the keyboard rather than sweating an upset in the factory that could potential lead to an enviromental release that at best will result in an EPA investigation and at worst lead to an evaculation of the local area or poisoning all the fish in the local lake (I seen the effects . . . it really does happen). I'm not trying to say that your job is easy or unchallenging, but if you plan to make a change, make sure you do your homework first.
If you love design websites, then changing what you know that you "love" is probably not the answer. Perhaps you have a bad boss? hostile work environment? poor working conditions? problems from home brought to the office? unprofessional colleagues? etc. . . . Make sure that you have an understanding of the root cause of yor unhappiness before making a change. Change for the sake of change may not solve anything and if you change the aspect of the job that you "love" you may make things worse.
The amount of crude oil processed by a refinery in measured in millions of barrels annually. The amount of energy that these refineries use is often not obvious because most of the energy used is extracted from the crude as it is processed.
The amount of energy to purify a quantity of ethanol with a stored energy capacity equivavlent to the production of a typical refinery is astronomical. If one used electrical energy, one would need an amount of energy that could justify construction of a dedicated power plant (some chemical plant actually do this and power it with waste gas or waste heat).
Practically speaking the capital cost of a solar installation that would equal the power generation of a typical co-gen (waste gas electrical generator on a plant) would be completely economically infeasible with current technology.
Additonally, the cost of a single startup and shutdown at a major facility can be in the millions of dollars and produce tons of off spec material. No one will want a plant that has to shut down when its cloudy.
Iogen's EcoEthanol process uses an enzyme hydrolysis to convert the biomass into sugars. These sugars are fermented and distilled into ethanol fuel using conventional ethanol distillation technology.
Actually the enzymes are used to break the cellulose (a polysaccaride or sugar polymer) into monosaccarides (simple sugar or sugar monomer). The fermentation is still "convenential." This cellulose breakdown technology has been around for a long time on the lab bench, though not with an efficiency or yield that has been considered commercially viable. Commercializing the creakdown of cellulose into monosaccarides is the patented techology that Iogen brings to the table.
Actaully, vacuum distillation is used in large scale separation in refineries to reduce the temperature in columns that would otherwise be very hot. Running separation columns at higher temperatures creates a higher driver force for heat loss (higher temperature difference between inside the column and ambient air causes more heat to leave the column). When one is distilling huge quantities of a material at high temperatures, the energy requirement to create a slight vacuum to reduce vapor pressures can result in a net saving in energy for the refinery/plant.
Vacuum distillaiton is also used to separate water from other components when the other components should not be heated to 212 or when the boiling points of the separable components change at different rates and one can run under vacuum and change the difference in boiling points significantly (this doesn't always happen).
Its unlikely that pulling a vacuum would have a significant effect on a water ethanol separation. The boiling points are relatively low and already differ by a significant margin. This can be confirmed by a McCabe Theile estimate of the number of distillation trays needed (a small number not a large number).
Molecular sieves are one of the last choices for separation because they are very expensive and there is significant difficulty in scale up.
Also, one would need to get the ethanol/water mixture into the gas phase . . . this would further increase the energy requirements making the ideas even more economically unfeasible.
So should the military teach combat by showing Rambo movies?
Perhaps convicts can learn to be nice people by watching episodes of Family Matters.
I'm thinking about opening a Salvage Yard, I'm gonna do some market research by watching Sanford and Son.
About production of ethanol. Note that the raw materials . . . acetaldehyde and ethylene are originally sourced from crude oil if ones goes all the way up the supply.
Much ethanol not intended for drinking is now made synthetically, either from acetaldehyde made from acetylene, or from ethylene made from petroleum. Ethanol can be oxidized to form first acetaldehyde and then acetic acid. It can be dehydrated to form ether. Butadiene, used in making synthetic rubber, may be made from ethanol, as can chloroform and many other organic chemicals. Ethanol is used as an automotive fuel by itself and can be mixed with gasoline to form gasohol. Ethanol is miscible (mixable) in all proportions with water and with most organic solvents. It is useful as a solvent for many substances and in making perfumes, paints, lacquer, and explosives. Alcoholic solutions of nonvolatile substances are called tinctures; if the solute is volatile, the solution is called a spirit.
E85 fuel can be placed in the EXACT same fueling infrastructure that we have here in the US. . . . . We can drastically cut our dependency on OPEC
Big oil companies produce most of the ethanol used for fuel at least in the US . . . from crude oil sources as a byproduct. This will not cut our dependency on OPEC. If ethanol becomes a staple fuel, big oil can comvert refineries to maximize ethanol production and produce it in larger volumes and cheaper than bio-sources.
Producing more energy than it takes to produce it is not the lynch-pin in the economics model. Right now, ethanol can be and is produced in chemical plants from crude oil sources for much cheaper than it can be produced from bio-sources. Purification of this byproduct is also cheaper because ethanol is slightly polar and most of the other things in the chemical soup at these plants are non-polar.
Until the economics change, Bio-fuels will be economically challenged in the marketplace.
Anyone know if there is a cheap way to purify ethanol? Ethanol from biomass is essentially fermentation and the alcoholics;-) in the crowd will know that typically it is hard to get fermentation to produce concentrations of alcohol above ~12%. This is because the fermenting bugs don't live well in liquid with high concentrations of sugar or alcohol.
One must separate the water from the Ethanol to make it useful, this is typically done by distillation which uses nearly as much energy as the ethanol produced. What is worse is that Ethanol/Water is aziotropic. This means that when distilling ethanol from water, eventually the separation hits a stopping point at about 95% ethanol because the boiling points of water and ethanol in a mixture of 95%/10% ethanol/water are about the same. This is why the highest proof alcoholic drinks are typically 180-190 proof (as opposed to 200 proof which would be 100% Ethanol).
Mass separating agents (nasty additives) have to be added to the ethanol/water mixture to elicit a near 100% separation. This makes purification even more expensive.
Ethanol in gasoline is almost all chemical and refinery byproducts. Almost none is from bio sources because the chemical byproduct is so much cheaper than bio-fuel ethanol. In fact some alcohol produced at chemical plants is purified and sold for human consumption (it is added to some cheap gins). It's kinda weird to see a bonded and taxed tank of ethanol on a chemical plant site.
Bio-produced ethanol often sounds good to politicians, but unless there is a new low energy water/ethanol separation process, it will never be economicall feasible on a large scale.
I never said that the things that I postulated are true but I do think that they are conclusive. Also a spokesperson for a military contractor that is a private citizen can be under the same disclosure restrictions as a person in the military. The fact that this press release came from a private reporter is no indication of the quality of the disclosure by the US military or its contractors.
If you look at speed of ships on the US Navy Site you will find that the Aircraft carriers are not the fastest ocean going fleet ships, but they can outrun anything in their carrier group. The Navy didn't tell me that.
The US military denied existence of the SR-71 for decades even after people had captured phtographic evidence.
Now given the empirical evidence that everything that the military says is not true, it is important to use conjecture to understand the possiblity that what the military (or its agents and contractors) say today also may not be true or the whole truth or a complete answer to a given question. It is simply credibility. The US military jepardized their credibility . . . perhaps for good reasons of national security etc. but they jepardized it nonetheless. If you believe everything that they tell you in the face of their lack of credibility, then perhaps you would believe me when I offer to sell you a Pentium 12 12e8 Ghz.
I think that its important to note that the trend to the internet at all is much bigger than the trend to "faster bandwidth" (at least at the last mile to people's homes.)
Less than 10% of the world has access to the net. As the other 90+% gets access odds are that they will not have faster bandwidth. They will have 56k and be more than happy looking at lossy compressed graphics . . .
PNG will only slow these people's experience down (for a marginal enhancement of experience . . . I don't know anyone complaining about lossy graphics looking crappy on modern websites) and they are/will be the majority of internet users.
What value does PNG offer to the majority of people browsing on the web? Not much, I don't think that anyone is complaining about the bad quality of lossy graphics on the web. If making them lossless even with a slight increase in bandwidth not going to add customer value, then why bother? Companies are looking to add value to increase revenue, not create busywork.
If your not being sued, why bother changing your graphics? Regardless of the litigation, the patent expires in October.
The Airborne Laser (ABL) is the first megawatt-class laser weapon system to be carried on a specially configured 747-400F aircraft, designed to autonomously detect, track and destroy hostile ballistic missiles.
Reading between the lines:
This could imply that:
A less than megawatt laser system may already be mounted and in use on the 747-400F.
A megawatt laser system may already be mounted on other (than the 747-400F) type(s) of aircraft.
A megawatt laser system may already be in use in the military for purposes other than the destruction of ballistic missles.
Call me a tinfoil hat guy, but when the military talks about its secret stuff, often what they don't say is more informative than what they do say.
Slashdot Mirror
What you describe is selective breeding . . . it has existed for a long time. But this is using naturally occuring genes in the genepool and selecting for them through mating within a species or closely related species.
Taking a gene from a firefly and implanting it in a tobacco plant to create glowing tobacco, or creating a brand new modified gene that does not exist in the natural gene pool is also genetic engineering. The statement
The difference is that now, we have the advantage of looking under the hood at the genes themselves. This new data gives farmers and geneticists an unprecendented level of control in selecting for certain traits.
is true but not comprehensive. It ignore the concerns of the alarmists. We aren't just looking under the hood . . . to use your analogy, we are taking parts one vehicle and force fitting them into another. And we are coming up with new parts that don't exist yet and fitting them into our existing vehicles. The alarmists beleive that we don't know what effect these new vehicles will have on the environment
150 years later and we have a new fancy name for selective breeding and we've gone full circle . . .
Deja vu
Blimps are lighter than air aircraft In fact the FAA has a certification for blimp operators that is a "Light Than Air Craft:. . . They are like a submarine for the air complete with a air filled ballast ballonets to make the craft pitch up or down. and change the density of the craft to make it ascend or descend. The fuel needed consumed to maintain lift is signficantly diminished.
In the article they refer to it as a sperical airship . . . I'm not sure that it isn;'t compartmentalized and redundant. They claim that it can remain in one place which implies some engine/driving force . . .
As far as shooting them down goes . . . one could easily shoot down an AWAC (large radio relay and surveilance plane) too, but they are escorted and/or fly near, but outside the combat theatre.
The intent of balloons/blimps is to keep them outside the theatre of combat . . . If it flies high enough, then one can use it to spy enemy activities past the horizon . . . or at least the horizon at ground level. In other words, at higher altitudes, one can see/snoop on radio transmissions/etc. further than at ground level due to the curvature of the earth . . . so even if you fly behind friendly lines, you can still spy on the enemy.
I'm no expert but I'd be very surprised if you could get meteorites of this speed and size on the surface of Mars . . . Even a very thin atmoshere would slow down such tiny meteors before they hit the surface.
Mars has a significant atmosphere (though not as thick as earth's) . . .Didn't a probe burn up in the atmosphere b/c we couldn't convert units of measure?
Weren't surveillance blimps all the rage during WW-I ? . . . Nearly a century later and we've gone full circle . . .
Add in network support and the "kids may be tough on hardware" factor and I think you've exceeded most school's paltry library budgets.
And, don't forget, one still has to buy the books regardless of whether the books are online or on paper. . . and if there's "no waiting in line" as you suggest, then the school should have multi user licenses . . . which would be like buying a bunch of copies of the same book.
Also, there may not be a cost to replace lost books, but the non-fiction books and text books become out of date after a while (must be replaced regularly) and they are the some of the most expensive books in the library (encyclopedias, texts, reference books, etc).
On top of all that computers have a life cycle shorter than most primary school/secondary school text books . . . so the PC's will also have to be replaced more regularly than the books (which are still being purchased). . .
I have a hard time seeing schools saving money or even breaking even . . . .
Will unscrupulous tourists pick up irradiated rocks and plants just like they steal from Petrified Forest National Park?
If you love design websites, then changing what you know that you "love" is probably not the answer. Perhaps you have a bad boss? hostile work environment? poor working conditions? problems from home brought to the office? unprofessional colleagues? etc. . . . Make sure that you have an understanding of the root cause of yor unhappiness before making a change. Change for the sake of change may not solve anything and if you change the aspect of the job that you "love" you may make things worse.
Practically speaking the capital cost of a solar installation that would equal the power generation of a typical co-gen (waste gas electrical generator on a plant) would be completely economically infeasible with current technology.
Additonally, the cost of a single startup and shutdown at a major facility can be in the millions of dollars and produce tons of off spec material. No one will want a plant that has to shut down when its cloudy.
Iogen's EcoEthanol process uses an enzyme hydrolysis to convert the biomass into sugars. These sugars are fermented and distilled into ethanol fuel using conventional ethanol distillation technology.
Actually the enzymes are used to break the cellulose (a polysaccaride or sugar polymer) into monosaccarides (simple sugar or sugar monomer). The fermentation is still "convenential." This cellulose breakdown technology has been around for a long time on the lab bench, though not with an efficiency or yield that has been considered commercially viable. Commercializing the creakdown of cellulose into monosaccarides is the patented techology that Iogen brings to the table.
Vacuum distillaiton is also used to separate water from other components when the other components should not be heated to 212 or when the boiling points of the separable components change at different rates and one can run under vacuum and change the difference in boiling points significantly (this doesn't always happen). Its unlikely that pulling a vacuum would have a significant effect on a water ethanol separation. The boiling points are relatively low and already differ by a significant margin. This can be confirmed by a McCabe Theile estimate of the number of distillation trays needed (a small number not a large number).
I didn't realize that. How much water in gaoline can you get away with in a conventional engine? How does it help?
Molecular sieves are one of the last choices for separation because they are very expensive and there is significant difficulty in scale up. Also, one would need to get the ethanol/water mixture into the gas phase . . . this would further increase the energy requirements making the ideas even more economically unfeasible.
So should the military teach combat by showing Rambo movies? Perhaps convicts can learn to be nice people by watching episodes of Family Matters. I'm thinking about opening a Salvage Yard, I'm gonna do some market research by watching Sanford and Son.
Much ethanol not intended for drinking is now made synthetically, either from acetaldehyde made from acetylene, or from ethylene made from petroleum. Ethanol can be oxidized to form first acetaldehyde and then acetic acid. It can be dehydrated to form ether. Butadiene, used in making synthetic rubber, may be made from ethanol, as can chloroform and many other organic chemicals. Ethanol is used as an automotive fuel by itself and can be mixed with gasoline to form gasohol. Ethanol is miscible (mixable) in all proportions with water and with most organic solvents. It is useful as a solvent for many substances and in making perfumes, paints, lacquer, and explosives. Alcoholic solutions of nonvolatile substances are called tinctures; if the solute is volatile, the solution is called a spirit.
Big oil companies produce most of the ethanol used for fuel at least in the US . . . from crude oil sources as a byproduct. This will not cut our dependency on OPEC. If ethanol becomes a staple fuel, big oil can comvert refineries to maximize ethanol production and produce it in larger volumes and cheaper than bio-sources.
Producing more energy than it takes to produce it is not the lynch-pin in the economics model. Right now, ethanol can be and is produced in chemical plants from crude oil sources for much cheaper than it can be produced from bio-sources. Purification of this byproduct is also cheaper because ethanol is slightly polar and most of the other things in the chemical soup at these plants are non-polar.
Until the economics change, Bio-fuels will be economically challenged in the marketplace.
One must separate the water from the Ethanol to make it useful, this is typically done by distillation which uses nearly as much energy as the ethanol produced. What is worse is that Ethanol/Water is aziotropic. This means that when distilling ethanol from water, eventually the separation hits a stopping point at about 95% ethanol because the boiling points of water and ethanol in a mixture of 95%/10% ethanol/water are about the same. This is why the highest proof alcoholic drinks are typically 180-190 proof (as opposed to 200 proof which would be 100% Ethanol). Mass separating agents (nasty additives) have to be added to the ethanol/water mixture to elicit a near 100% separation. This makes purification even more expensive.
Ethanol in gasoline is almost all chemical and refinery byproducts. Almost none is from bio sources because the chemical byproduct is so much cheaper than bio-fuel ethanol. In fact some alcohol produced at chemical plants is purified and sold for human consumption (it is added to some cheap gins). It's kinda weird to see a bonded and taxed tank of ethanol on a chemical plant site.
Bio-produced ethanol often sounds good to politicians, but unless there is a new low energy water/ethanol separation process, it will never be economicall feasible on a large scale.
I never said that the things that I postulated are true but I do think that they are conclusive.
should have read:
I never said that the things that I postulated are true but I do not think that they are conclusive.
I guess I deserve all the flaming that leaving the 'not' out of that statement might incite . . .
I never said that the things that I postulated are true but I do think that they are conclusive. Also a spokesperson for a military contractor that is a private citizen can be under the same disclosure restrictions as a person in the military. The fact that this press release came from a private reporter is no indication of the quality of the disclosure by the US military or its contractors.
If you look at speed of ships on the US Navy Site you will find that the Aircraft carriers are not the fastest ocean going fleet ships, but they can outrun anything in their carrier group. The Navy didn't tell me that.
The US military denied existence of the SR-71 for decades even after people had captured phtographic evidence.
Now given the empirical evidence that everything that the military says is not true, it is important to use conjecture to understand the possiblity that what the military (or its agents and contractors) say today also may not be true or the whole truth or a complete answer to a given question. It is simply credibility. The US military jepardized their credibility . . . perhaps for good reasons of national security etc. but they jepardized it nonetheless. If you believe everything that they tell you in the face of their lack of credibility, then perhaps you would believe me when I offer to sell you a Pentium 12 12e8 Ghz.
PNG will only slow these people's experience down (for a marginal enhancement of experience . . . I don't know anyone complaining about lossy graphics looking crappy on modern websites) and they are/will be the majority of internet users.
What value does PNG offer to the majority of people browsing on the web? Not much, I don't think that anyone is complaining about the bad quality of lossy graphics on the web. If making them lossless even with a slight increase in bandwidth not going to add customer value, then why bother? Companies are looking to add value to increase revenue, not create busywork.
If your not being sued, why bother changing your graphics? Regardless of the litigation, the patent expires in October.
Reading between the lines: This could imply that:
A less than megawatt laser system may already be mounted and in use on the 747-400F.
A megawatt laser system may already be mounted on other (than the 747-400F) type(s) of aircraft.
A megawatt laser system may already be in use in the military for purposes other than the destruction of ballistic missles.
Call me a tinfoil hat guy, but when the military talks about its secret stuff, often what they don't say is more informative than what they do say.