Nuclear reactors don't emit beta particles at a high enough energy to create Cerenkov radiation in air. On the other hand, Cerenkov radiation in molten glass (which is now solidifed and known as Chernobylite) coming up through the air and scattering off dust is quite plausible.
That procedure might be suitable in a dire emergency, but if the medical system is so degraded that most heart surgeries are dire emergencies what does that say about the society's capabilities and priorities? It certainly does not fit with Soviet claims of being the Worker's Paradise and the pinnacle of civilization.
I don't mean this as a snide or snarky remark, I mean it seriously. One of the environmental factors stressing corals is the acidity of the water, which makes carbonate less stable (tends to convert it to bicarbonate). The more CO2 you add to the oceans, the more the CO3-- to HCO3- balance is tipped toward HCO3- as carbonic acid (H2CO3) reduces alkalinity.
What does this have to do with electrolytic promotion of coral growth? Just that the chemistry has to balance out. Charging the rebar so that CO3-- is preferred in its vicinity means that something, somewhere else, is emitting opposite charges doing the opposite thing. If the rebar grids make the water in their vicinity more alkaline, the other electrode (the positive one, I expect) is going to make its water more acid. This acid water will stress the coral and every other carbonate-shelled organism in its vicinity harder than it was before.
I can see this technique as beneficial for maintaining small enclaves of living and thriving coral in an ocean which has turned hostile, but it doesn't seem to address the big problem. Still, I suppose that little "zoos" or "nature preserves" of semi-natural reef are better than none.
If gravity is blocked by mass, this effect would be much easier to measure on the Moon during lunar eclipses than on Earth: the entire Moon is shadowed during many lunar eclipses whereas only part of the Earth is fully shadowed during even total eclipses, and the effect should be easier to measure against the smaller gravity of the Moon.
For real confirmation, an experiment on one of the Jovian moons would do nicely.
Yes, I'm serious about this. This is fundamental to our understanding of physics, which is in turn fundamental to our understanding of the origins, processes and fate of the universe. A billion to put a pendulum on the Moon would be money well spent.
I'm sure the engineers would like to see how their entry and descent gear fared, but the scientists who are running the show at this point care about the history of Mars. Time spent checking out hardware is time wasted.
Figure 500 US gallons per year, 6.167 lbm/gallon, general chemical formula CH2(n) (some molecules will have more or less carbon than the average, but it's close enough).
500 gallons * 6.167 lbm/gallon = 3083 lbm fuel.
3083 lbm fuel * (12 g carbon / 14 g fuel) = 2643 lbm carbon.
2643 lbm carbon * (44 g CO2 / 12 g carbon) = 9689 lbm CO2.
That's close enough to 5 tons (4.5 metric tons) for my taste. Your mileage (pun intended) may vary.
There are several reasons for an animal to die young:
It has internal weaknesses which prevent it from living long.
It lives in an environment which is likely to kill it regardless.
T. Rex was big, each adult representing a huge investment in energy. It would make sense for the species to live long so that each adult could reproduce as much as possible, so the internal weaknesses would tend to be selected against. But what about 2? If the environment (including other T. Rex's) made it very unlikely for an individual to live much past adulthood, the selective pressure would be on individuals to reproduce early and often instead of living long and reproducing over time. This would account for the very rapid growth to an abbreviated adulthood.
Elephants live to 60 or so, and some whales appear to live for a century or more (Eskimos finding antique bone harpoon points inside newly-killed whales being proof positive). If T. Rex didn't often make it past 30, that says something. Maybe that's why dinosaurs never evolved sapience, which guaranteed that they wouldn't travel in space and be able to avoid the disaster which wiped them out.
The initial deformation is assumed to be
fully and instantaneously transmitted to the sea surface, where, through restoring gravity forces, tsunami waves begin to propagate across the sea.
The remnant of the historical landslide off California mapped here doesn't show any evidence of rolling motions required to create wave trains (that looks like one slump, like an avalanche in air); the water will do that by itself. All you have to do is drop a pebble in water and watch the ripples moving outward to prove to yourself that a sharp event will cause an oscillation - and if such events didn't cause waves, why are we concerned about asteroid impacts in the water?
Hubble sees very well in the visible and the near UV, so if we want full-spectrum coverage of unknown objects we are not going to be able to get it with just the Webb telescope.
Since we have another mirror for it (better than the one in orbit), why not just build another unit of the same design and loft it on an expendable rocket? If we have a replacment in orbit we don't have to worry about the old one, except if we want to put it in a museum instead of the ocean.
This would also set a precedent for adding new capability instead of spending huge sums to maintain the old stuff. Why shouldn't we have several Hubble-type scopes instead of just one, anyway?
Aside from the wonderful time you'd have wiring up a few hundred cubic km of rock with explosives, there's the question of the good it would do. In this case, it would probably be zero.
The problem here is that the rock goes down and displaces water, which comes up. The potential energy of the falling rock is partially converted into kinetic energy of the water, which becomes a tsunami when it hits the surface. You are not going to get rid of this energy by fragmenting the rock. Some tsunamis appear to have been caused by mudslides, and it's hard to get any more fragmented than mud.
The infrared emitted by the Sun is at very short (blue) wavelengths compared to the infrared emitted by objects on the Earth. This should not be surprising, because the wavelength peak of blackbody emissions is proportional to the absolute temperature and the Sun is about 20x as hot as the Earth. The properties (transparency, reflectance) of things like the atmosphere and glass are very different for those two bands.
It's even more lopsided than that, because the IR coming in and going out are so wildly different in wavelength. The IR coming into the car from the Sun is around 7000-14000 angstroms, where glass is reasonably clear; in the wavelengths radiated by objects around 300-400 Kelvin, glass is opaque. (If you wear glasses with glass lenses, look at your image in a thermal camera sometime. They will look cold while your face looks warm; the thermal IR from your skin and eyes does not go through them.)
the better scientific path (IMO) is to grab this energy and use it to power the home (solar).
Scientific? Did you subject this conclusion to peer review, or even research it?;-) (I know, I'm nit-picking.)
Spend time and effort developing more efficient, resilient, and less-expensive tech on solar energy and every new house could be roofed with 100% solar tiles. These homes could even GENERATE enough exess energy to sell back to the grid, which would help every income level.
The cost of this power is set mostly by the carrying costs of the debt you take on to buy the generation gear (or the opportunty costs of the income you forego on the savings you invest). The price you can get for the power is determined by supply and demand. If there are so many buildings covered with PV that the daytime price of power won't cover the cost of the roofing, it wouldn't help anyone's income.
But why can't the consumptive tech be improved so solar collectors/transformers DO use ALL the heat (or the amount above xx Celsius)? Is this some law of nature where thermal can be blocked but not utilized?
Yes. It's called the second law of thermodynamics. You can't convert heat to more-useful forms without a heat "sink" at a lower temperature, and when your house is the thing at the lowest temperature and you want to cool it this is problematic. Just keeping the heat out is the easiest and most economical thing to do; heat that doesn't get in doesn't have to be pumped out again.
Roughly half of all solar EM radiation is in the infrared, so reflecting it when it's hot is a good way to control unwanted thermal gain.
The blackbody curve of solar radiation has a peak in about the green wavelengths. The curve falls rapidly as the wavelengths get shorter (bluer), which is why it takes minutes instead of seconds to get a sunburn even under the most intense sunlight. But the curve slopes off much more gently to the red end of the spectrum (see this page).
Vanadium is a common alloying element in steel. The two MSDSpages I found indicate that the powdered oxide isn't very good to breathe or eat, but the amount released by breaking a window is probably so small that you wouldn't notice. The biggest hazard would be to people working in the manufacture of such windows.
What if instead we ground it up, heated it to 101C, cooled it down, then fed the powder to the furnace- wouldn't the extra surface area both enable more mostiure to leave AND insure a more complete burn?
As the previous respondent mentioned, most coal plants already use pulverized coal (look up "gravimetric feeders" to see what he's talking about).
Why you don't want to heat the coal: The goal of the exercise is to not waste the energy required to evaporate the moisture. If pressing removes water with less energy expenditure than heating, that's a more efficient way to do it. (If the coal can be dried with the heat from nearly-spent steam, maybe that's better - but it would take lab work to tell which method is superior, and plenty of engineering to make a machine which can uniformly heat a fine powder and then transfer it to the boiler.)
The fact is, the biggest Islamic threat TO THE USA today, is from a group founded by a guy who's pissed about US troops not leaving Saudi soil after Gulf#1.
That's flat-out wrong. Osama bin Laden takes years to research, design and carry out attacks; his first attack on the WTC was in 1993. US troops only entered Saudi Arabia in 1990-91 to remove Saddam from Kuwait; ObL would have had to start his apparatus before Iraq invaded to have met his timetable.
I recall seeing statements by ObL stating that the United States was a target dating back to 1988. He doesn't like "infidels", period.
Coal used for steam averages 13 million BTU/ton if memory serves (can't find the link on the DOE web site at the moment). Petroleum products seem to fall in the range of 115-130,000 BTU/gallon.
Looking at energy density is somewhat misleading, because the conversion efficiency of these fuels into work is typically less than 40%, often less than 20% (I've read that personal vehicles average a lousy 17%). If an alternate energy source has a higher conversion efficiency, it could store more useful energy in a given space than the fossil-derived fuel. Watch my blog for this, it's an important topic and I'm doing an analysis of it.
Removing the moisture from lignite removes a lot of inert (non-combustible) material from the fuel. This is matter that you'd have to heat up in the process of combustion, reducing your gas temperature and cutting the amount of heat you can recover from the gas (you can't get useful energy from condensing the water, it condenses at a far lower temperature than you need to generate steam).
This doesn't reduce the carbon emissions per unit of carbon, but it does increase the recoverable energy per unit of carbon. Greater efficiency means less fuel has to be burned for a given amount of output. This reduces net CO2 emissions.
Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear reactors don't emit beta particles at a high enough energy to create Cerenkov radiation in air. On the other hand, Cerenkov radiation in molten glass (which is now solidifed and known as Chernobylite) coming up through the air and scattering off dust is quite plausible.
That procedure might be suitable in a dire emergency, but if the medical system is so degraded that most heart surgeries are dire emergencies what does that say about the society's capabilities and priorities? It certainly does not fit with Soviet claims of being the Worker's Paradise and the pinnacle of civilization.
I don't mean this as a snide or snarky remark, I mean it seriously. One of the environmental factors stressing corals is the acidity of the water, which makes carbonate less stable (tends to convert it to bicarbonate). The more CO2 you add to the oceans, the more the CO3-- to HCO3- balance is tipped toward HCO3- as carbonic acid (H2CO3) reduces alkalinity.
What does this have to do with electrolytic promotion of coral growth? Just that the chemistry has to balance out. Charging the rebar so that CO3-- is preferred in its vicinity means that something, somewhere else, is emitting opposite charges doing the opposite thing. If the rebar grids make the water in their vicinity more alkaline, the other electrode (the positive one, I expect) is going to make its water more acid. This acid water will stress the coral and every other carbonate-shelled organism in its vicinity harder than it was before.
I can see this technique as beneficial for maintaining small enclaves of living and thriving coral in an ocean which has turned hostile, but it doesn't seem to address the big problem. Still, I suppose that little "zoos" or "nature preserves" of semi-natural reef are better than none.
For real confirmation, an experiment on one of the Jovian moons would do nicely.
Yes, I'm serious about this. This is fundamental to our understanding of physics, which is in turn fundamental to our understanding of the origins, processes and fate of the universe. A billion to put a pendulum on the Moon would be money well spent.
... if you read The Volokh Conspiracy.
I'm sure the engineers would like to see how their entry and descent gear fared, but the scientists who are running the show at this point care about the history of Mars. Time spent checking out hardware is time wasted.
500 gallons * 6.167 lbm/gallon = 3083 lbm fuel.
3083 lbm fuel * (12 g carbon / 14 g fuel) = 2643 lbm carbon.
2643 lbm carbon * (44 g CO2 / 12 g carbon) = 9689 lbm CO2.
That's close enough to 5 tons (4.5 metric tons) for my taste. Your mileage (pun intended) may vary.
Speaking of hadrosaurs...
- It has internal weaknesses which prevent it from living long.
- It lives in an environment which is likely to kill it regardless.
T. Rex was big, each adult representing a huge investment in energy. It would make sense for the species to live long so that each adult could reproduce as much as possible, so the internal weaknesses would tend to be selected against. But what about 2? If the environment (including other T. Rex's) made it very unlikely for an individual to live much past adulthood, the selective pressure would be on individuals to reproduce early and often instead of living long and reproducing over time. This would account for the very rapid growth to an abbreviated adulthood.Elephants live to 60 or so, and some whales appear to live for a century or more (Eskimos finding antique bone harpoon points inside newly-killed whales being proof positive). If T. Rex didn't often make it past 30, that says something. Maybe that's why dinosaurs never evolved sapience, which guaranteed that they wouldn't travel in space and be able to avoid the disaster which wiped them out.
unless you make it from old Klein bottles!
Hubble sees very well in the visible and the near UV, so if we want full-spectrum coverage of unknown objects we are not going to be able to get it with just the Webb telescope.
This would also set a precedent for adding new capability instead of spending huge sums to maintain the old stuff. Why shouldn't we have several Hubble-type scopes instead of just one, anyway?
The problem here is that the rock goes down and displaces water, which comes up. The potential energy of the falling rock is partially converted into kinetic energy of the water, which becomes a tsunami when it hits the surface. You are not going to get rid of this energy by fragmenting the rock. Some tsunamis appear to have been caused by mudslides, and it's hard to get any more fragmented than mud.
The infrared emitted by the Sun is at very short (blue) wavelengths compared to the infrared emitted by objects on the Earth. This should not be surprising, because the wavelength peak of blackbody emissions is proportional to the absolute temperature and the Sun is about 20x as hot as the Earth. The properties (transparency, reflectance) of things like the atmosphere and glass are very different for those two bands.
It's even more lopsided than that, because the IR coming in and going out are so wildly different in wavelength. The IR coming into the car from the Sun is around 7000-14000 angstroms, where glass is reasonably clear; in the wavelengths radiated by objects around 300-400 Kelvin, glass is opaque. (If you wear glasses with glass lenses, look at your image in a thermal camera sometime. They will look cold while your face looks warm; the thermal IR from your skin and eyes does not go through them.)
The blackbody curve of solar radiation has a peak in about the green wavelengths. The curve falls rapidly as the wavelengths get shorter (bluer), which is why it takes minutes instead of seconds to get a sunburn even under the most intense sunlight. But the curve slopes off much more gently to the red end of the spectrum (see this page).
Vanadium is a common alloying element in steel. The two MSDS pages I found indicate that the powdered oxide isn't very good to breathe or eat, but the amount released by breaking a window is probably so small that you wouldn't notice. The biggest hazard would be to people working in the manufacture of such windows.
Energy content data for coal is here.
Why you don't want to heat the coal: The goal of the exercise is to not waste the energy required to evaporate the moisture. If pressing removes water with less energy expenditure than heating, that's a more efficient way to do it. (If the coal can be dried with the heat from nearly-spent steam, maybe that's better - but it would take lab work to tell which method is superior, and plenty of engineering to make a machine which can uniformly heat a fine powder and then transfer it to the boiler.)
I recall seeing statements by ObL stating that the United States was a target dating back to 1988. He doesn't like "infidels", period.
Looking at energy density is somewhat misleading, because the conversion efficiency of these fuels into work is typically less than 40%, often less than 20% (I've read that personal vehicles average a lousy 17%). If an alternate energy source has a higher conversion efficiency, it could store more useful energy in a given space than the fossil-derived fuel. Watch my blog for this, it's an important topic and I'm doing an analysis of it.
This doesn't reduce the carbon emissions per unit of carbon, but it does increase the recoverable energy per unit of carbon. Greater efficiency means less fuel has to be burned for a given amount of output. This reduces net CO2 emissions.