Do the Engine-Performance Benefits of Nitrogen-Enriched Gas Outweigh the Added Emissions?

Dear EarthTalk : Since nitrogen oxide compounds are components of smog and are common water pollutants, does nitrogen-enriched gasoline create additional pollution? --Rick Oestrike, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. [More]



Pollution - Nitrogen oxide - Water pollution - Smog - Environment Read more »

Internet Ideology War: Google's Spat with China Could Reshape Traditional Online Freedoms

Editor's note: We are posting this story from the April 2010 issue early. [More]



Google - China - Searching - Search Engines - Wall Street Journal Read more »

Where Will the U.S. Get Its Electricity in 2034?

Cleaner coal , nuclear , solar , wind : these are some of the options for power generation to feed the U.S.'s electric power requirements. That need is expected to grow by 30 percent during the next 25 years, according to the Energy Information Administration , even with a slew of energy-efficiency measures and improvements to the grid infrastructure that delivers the electricity. But the primary source of electricity in 2034, according to a new projection from consulting firm Black Veatch, will be natural gas. It is the fossil fuel with the least greenhouse gas impact on the atmosphere--burning it releases 43 percent less CO2 than burning coal--and looks set to increase its share of the electricity market, even with looming regulations to restrain climate-changing emissions. And there's this boost, too: new, vast reserves of natural gas found in places like the Marcellus Shale Formation, which stretches from West Virginia to New York State. [More]



Greenhouse gas - Fossil fuel - Electricity generation - Natural gas - Energy Information Administration Read more »

It's in the Details: For Ecofriendly Auto Detailing, Do-It-Yourself Is the Only Way to Go

Dear EarthTalk : I recently got my car detailed at a local place and then gasped at the chemical fumes when I got inside. Are there green detailers out there, or products that I could use myself to keep my vehicle clean and my family out of harm’s way? --David Berkowitz, Newton, Mass.

Will the Internet make us stupider?

Few observers, in 2000, would have foreseen Facebook being a ubiquitous presence on the Internet in 2010. Even fewer would have felt comfortable predicting whether some phenomenon like it would be “good" or bad” for human interaction, or for society's use of the English (or any other) language, for that matter. Undaunted by the perils of prognostication, the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project recently asked nearly 900 tech-savvy professionals to “imagine the Internet” in 2020.

More specifically, the project presented people with five pairs of opposing statements, forcing them to choose one from each pair and to then explain why they made the choice. For example, one set of statements said:

FTC issues warnings to plug P2P security holes

The U.S. government has stepped up its efforts to warn computer users about the security vulnerabilities that come with using peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks , the most popular of which today are perhaps BitTorrent and LimeWire . The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported Monday that it has sent letters to nearly 100 businesses, schools and government organizations warning that personal information, including sensitive data about customers and/or employees, has been shared from their computer networks and is available on P2P networks to any users of those networks. P2P users  could use the personal data to commit identity theft or fraud. [More]



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100 Years Ago: Madame Curie's Research

MARCH 1960 MODERN AGRICULTURE -- “The 20th-century Israelites came to a land of encroaching sand dunes along a once-verdant coast, of malarial swamps and naked limestone hills from which an estimated three feet of topsoil have been scoured, sorted and spread as sterile overwash upon the plains or swept out to sea in flood waters. The land of Israel had shared the fate of land throughout the Middle East. A decline in productivity and in population had set in with the fading of the Byzantine Empire some 1,300 years ago. Today most of the people of the world live in the lands where mankind has lived longest in organized societies. There, with few exceptions, the soil is in the worst condition. The example of Israel shows that the land can be reclaimed and that increase in the food supply can overtake the increase that will double the 2,800 million world population before the end of this century.”

Army seeks to eliminate its chemical weapons by blowing them up

Chemical warfare has long been banned from the battlefield, but safely eliminating the world's aging mustard gas, sarin and other chemical weapon stockpiles has proven difficult. Although the U.S. military has been working with Defense Department contractors for more than a decade to develop technology that could neutralize its chemical arsenal without the need for detonation, the Associated Press recently reports that the Army is now proposing the use of explosives to destroy some of the 125,000 weapons being stored at chemical depots in Colorado and Kentucky. This might speed the process some, but the Army acknowledges that it will still miss the 2012 deadline set by Congress in 1997. [More]



Chemical warfare - Colorado - Kentucky - United States - United States armed forces Read more »

How to make more food with transgenic crops

SAN DIEGO--In the next 50 years, humans will have to produce as much food as we have over the entire history of civilization. The planet’s ever-expanding population demands it. Yet productive farmland is scarce, and other resources such as water and fertilizer (which is made from fossil fuels) become more constrained by the day.

The (good and bad) future of the Internet

SAN DIEGO--“We know even now that we are at some fundamental limits of what the Internet can handle,” warned University of California, San Diego processor kc claffy [ sic capitalization ] at the beginning of her talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego. “We have one big expectation--being able to innovate,” she said. “And it is unclear whether we will be able to do that.”

claffy’s warnings are based on the observation that the Internet’s infrastructure is, for the most part, hidden. In the U.S. there are on the order of one hundred Internet service providers that control the fiber lines and the routers that direct traffic throughout the network. Each of these ISPs has agreements with the others to exchange traffic. In essence, these agreements say if you move my bits, I’ll move yours . However, all these agreements are not just independent and unregulated, they’re secret. Proprietary corporate information. This makes it impossible to understand how traffic will get redirected when, say, one path fails. It makes it impossible to understand just how strong the overall system is when something goes wrong. It makes it impossible to map the overall structure of the Internet (something intensely frustrating to claffy, whose job it is to map the overall structure of the Internet ). And it also makes it difficult to predict how the Internet will grow.

Multimedia Memory Boost

Listen and Learn Learning by listening to information as we sleep has long been a mainstay of science fiction--and wishful thinking--but a new study suggests the idea may not be so farfetched. What we hear during deep sleep can strengthen memories of information learned while awake.

Germany Floats New Plans to Keep Hydrogen-Powered Cars in the World's Transportation Mix

It's amusing to reduce the development of next-generation electric- or hydrogen-powered cars to a binary paper-versus-plastic decision, but the companies making these cars and the infrastructure to support them are hoping there will be room for both. Hydrogen cars, in particular, have had a bumpy road thus far--the Obama administration has been at odds with Congress over whether to fund hydrogen fuel-cell research. Meanwhile, the first commercial models are not expected to hit the road until 2015, a few years after their hybrid and all-electric counterparts . [More]



Fuel cell - Hydrogen vehicle - Technology - Energy - Hydrogen Read more »

In a Hurry? New Battery Recharging System Promises Quicker Turnaround for Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles

When plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) start hitting the road later this year, most drivers will plug into a normal 110-volt outlet when not driving in order to trickle charge life back into their car's battery. Whether this is a feasible model is an open question, with some consumers concerned that trickle charging may not be fast enough to sufficiently recharge batteries between trips. Without a charged battery, PHEVs rely on their internal combustion engines, something hybrid drivers aim to avoid. [More]



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Science, Stimulated: 7 Stimulus-Funded Research Projects [Slide Show]

Can you put a price on science? The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), signed into law on February 17, 2009--a year ago today--sent some $31 billion to scientific pursuits. [More]



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Shot in the Arm: Has the U.S. Invested Enough Health Stimulus Money in Prevention?

As lawmakers divvied up billions of dollars last year to address the nation's fiscal crisis via the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), they did not skimp on funding health . About one of every six and a half ARRA dollars went to programs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)--the single largest allocation for any federal agency. Less than 1 percent of those monies, however, are going toward keeping people from getting sick in the first place. [More]



United States Department of Health and Human Services - United States - Department of Health - American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - Health Read more »

Is the Recovery Act Stimulating Science and the Economy?

So far, $9.3 million for researchers building robotic bees, $1.3 million to hunt for viruses that infect single-celled organisms, and $845,000 to study past climate change in Russia has been doled out. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been able to fund thousands of new research projects with money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), aka the economic stimulus package , which was passed a year ago today. [More]



Climate change - National Science Foundation - American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - Russia - Environment Read more »

Stem Cell Vitamin Boost

Soon after the exciting discovery of a method to turn human adult cells into stem cells in 2007 came the frustration of actually trying to make that transformation efficient. In creating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, scientists typically only get 0.01 percent of a sample of human fibroblast (skin) cells to change.

A group led by Duanqing Pei of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health in China has found that a simple chemical can boost the efficiency by 100-fold--namely, vitamin C.

Can Fresh Funds Jump-Start a U.S. Nuclear Renaissance?

President Obama announced the first federal nuclear-power loan guarantee, $8 billion for Southern Co. to build two new reactors in Georgia.

In a speech at a job-training center at the IBEW Local 26 headquarters in Lanham, Md., Obama said the loan guarantee will help "build a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in America" as part of a White House effort to create a "clean energy" economy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

25 ways to better secure software from cyber attacks

Concerns about cyber security seem to be as pervasive as the Web itself, whether it's China's capacity to wage cyber warfare , the vulnerability of U.S. public utilities and other critical infrastructure to online attacks, or even Google's recent efforts to close security holes in its new Buzz social networking site . For the past several years, those defending their computers and networks against hackers have been playing catch up to their increasingly well-funded and organized adversaries. [More]



Google - China - Computer security - Cyberwarfare - Security Read more »

Photovoltaic Breakthroughs Brighten Outlook for Cheap Solar Power

Enough sunlight bathes Earth's daytime half in an hour to meet all human energy needs for a year. Sadly, there are several problems with meeting human energy demands by tapping such abundant, free solar power--not least of which is the cost of making semiconducting material that can cheaply harvest the power in sunlight. But material improvements from the California Institute of Technology and IBM might just lower the cost of solar power. [More]



Energy - photovoltaic - IBM - Solar - Technology Read more »