Science & Technology

CHICAGO (Reuters) – On days when there is a lot of dust and other large-particle pollutants in the air, slightly more elderly people go to hospital emergency rooms with heart problems, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

There was also an increase in hospital visits by elderly patients complaining of respiratory illnesses when “coarse,” or large, particle pollution was plentiful, although the rise was not significant, the researchers said.

“Though the evidence is mixed at this point, we did find an association between cardiovascular admissions and coarse particulate matter,” Roger Peng of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

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The U.S Department of Energy (DOE) today released a first-of-its kind report that examines the technical feasibility of harnessing wind power to provide up to 20 percent of the nation’s total electricity needs by 2030. Entitled “20 Percent Wind Energy by 2030”, the report identifies requirements to achieve this goal including reducing the cost of wind technologies, citing new transmission infrastructure, and enhancing domestic manufacturing capability.

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Green Vehicles. What are they? Well they can be hybrid vehicles or full electric vehicles. But can they be horse powered? Well this one can. An Iranian engineer based in Dubai has come up with something truly different. Abdolhadi Mirhejazi has built the Naturmobil (previously, the Naturcar). The Naturmobil is 1 HP. That is the truth. It’s literally powered by one horse. The Naturmobil is a six wheeled, polycarbonate framed buggy with a top speed of 50mph although typical cruising velocity is closer to 12mph.

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NRC researchers are busy engineering the production of hydrogen from organic wastes and crop residues. Their goal: turn low-grade waste into affordable, clean energy without producing greenhouse gases.

Today, most hydrogen is produced from natural gas, with the balance produced primarily from heavy oils, naphtha, and coal. Not only do these methods consume a lot of energy, they also produce greenhouse gases.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Arctic and Antarctica are poles apart when it comes to the effects of human-fueled climate change, scientists said on Friday: in the north, it is melting sea ice, but in the south, it powers winds that chill things down.

The North and South poles are both subject to solar radiation and rising levels of climate-warming greenhouse gases, the researchers said in a telephone briefing. But Antarctica is also affected by an ozone hole hovering high above it during the austral summer.

“All the evidence points toward human-made effects playing a major role in the changes that we see at both poles and evidence that contradicts this is very hard to find,” said Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

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OSLO (Reuters) – Global warming could gradually starve parts of the tropical oceans of oxygen, damaging fisheries and coastal economies, a study showed on Thursday.

Areas of the eastern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with low amounts of dissolved oxygen have expanded in the past 50 years, apparently in line with rising temperatures, according to the scientists based in Germany and the United States.

And models of global warming indicate the trend will continue because oxygen in the air mixes less readily with warmer water. Large fish such as tuna or swordfish avoid, or are unable to survive, in regions starved of oxygen.

“Reduced oxygen levels may have dramatic consequences for ecosystems and coastal economies,” according to the scientists writing in the journal Science.

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LONDON (Reuters) – Natural climate changes may offset human-caused global warming over the next decade, keeping ocean temperatures the same or even temporarily cooling them slightly, German researchers said on Wednesday.

However, this short-term situation might create a problem if policymakers regarded it as a sign they could ease efforts to limit greenhouse gases or play down global warming.

“The natural variations change climate on this timescale and policymakers may either think mitigation is working or that there is no global warming at all,” said Noel Keenlyside, a climate researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany who led the study.

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via: Science Blog

Whether you live in a cardboard box or a luxurious mansion, whether you subsist on homegrown vegetables or wolf down imported steaks, whether you’re a jet-setter or a sedentary retiree, anyone who lives in the U.S. contributes more than twice as much greenhouse gas to the atmosphere as the global average, an MIT class has estimated.

The class studied the carbon emissions of Americans in a wide variety of lifestyles–from the homeless to multimillionaires, from Buddhist monks to soccer moms–and compared them to those of other nations. The somewhat disquieting bottom line is that in the United States, even people with the lowest energy usage account for, on average, more than double the global per-capita carbon emission. And those emissions rise steeply from that minimum as people’s income increases.

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