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Reflections on a changing Washington, D.C.  

Peter Sefton, D.C. Preservation League trustee, reflects on how Washington, D.C. has changed in recent years. (Anacostia Community Museum video series)

 

The post Reflections on a changing Washington, D.C. appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

 
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Hiram Powers 1805-18  
Hiram Powers 1805-1873  
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Atmospheric chemistry on paper  
Normally computers speed up calculations. But with his new pen-and-paper formula, a researcher gets his results thousands of times faster than using conventional computer codes. The astrophysicist calculates the abundances of molecules (known as atmospheric chemistry) in exoplanetary atmospheres. Ultimately, deciphering the abundances of molecules allows us to interpret if features in a spectrum are due to physics, geology or biology.  
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Sh*t's Bad Right Now, So Here's A Short Story About A Rescued Cat  


Shit's kind of heavy for all of us right now, and we have a long road ahead, but I thought maybe, just maybe, you'd like five minutes of light reading about how I saved a cat and she saved me.

Her name is FatFace.

She's been feral for at least five years and she has three teeth and she weighs under five pounds.



FatFace was part of a feral colony my neighbor took care of, and which I've subsequently taken over after my neighbor moved across town.

I enjoy our cat colony, which totals between 10-12 mostly black or Russian blue cats, but let me tell you something about taking care of cat colonies: Don't publicly share that info at parties. One time I was at a networking event and met a handful of interesting people and had to stop this sentence from coming out of my mouth: "Oh, man. I have to get going! My cat colony is going to be piiiiissed if I don't get home soon for feed time."

(Side note: Our colony is fixed and if any genitalia-sporting cats come into the colony, my former neighbor traps them and gets them fixed through the Austin Humane Society's trap-neuter-release program.)



FatFace was one of the oldest cats in the colony, and like most of the other ferals, she was terrified of us. Most of her time was spent hiding under the neighbor's house or keeping herself at a distance, squinting, watching our every move. However, we took a shine to the little goober because of her tiny stature and her expressive face. When I acquired the colony and discovered she only had three teeth, I began feeding her soft food.



Over the course of nine months, FatFace went from eating soft food we left out, to letting us get very close to her, to letting us touch her, to letting us brush her, to letting us pet her. Now I'm happy to say she lives in our house and enjoys sleeping on my butt and sniffing my armpits. She also enjoys curling up like a tiny donut.



Here are some other fun fact about FatFace:

She's between 5-10 years old.

We called her "he" for five years until I asked my vet to check out her netherparts.

She also likes to sleep on my chest and stare at me from about two-to-three inches from my face.

She does not like to be picked up; she makes this pathetic "muu-annn" sound when you do it.

She doesn't like fancy-ass soft food; she likes good-ol' mystery meat from Friskies.

We've managed to put one pound on her; she now weighs over five pounds.

My bf thinks she is part dwarf cat.

She has mouth herpes.

She loves when you push on her nose really hard. She gets so into it that she might bite your face.

She doesn't mind if you scratch her stomach -- but not the feet.

She's a very affectionate, chill cat. Even when she's ready to party at 3AM or eat at 7AM, she just stares at us or head bunts us.

She's kind of a slob. Because she has mouth herpes and few teeth, she can't eat or groom well. Most of the time we get salmon sneezes all over our faces.

During the day, I'll lay on the bed next to her and instantly fall asleep.

At night time I can no longer get work done because she sleeps on my neck.

She's very much loved by us.



I've never owned a cat before, and I never thought I could love a cat as much as I do. She has brought great joy to my life, and I hope I bring joy to hers.

If you'd like to follow the #LifeofFatFace, let's hook up on Instagram!

A version of this post originally appeared on Medium.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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Obama's Landmark Greenhouse Gas And Fuel Economy Standards Are Working - Now Let's Look to the Future  

(Tom Toles, Washington Post, Sept 2, 2012)

This week the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) released a very positive report regarding the historic federal greenhouse gas and fuel economy standards. In a nutshell, car manufacturers can meet the current 2025 goals to improve efficiency and slash greenhouse gas emissions at a cost similar or less than expected four years ago.

But despite these clear and comprehensive findings, some elements in the auto industry will inevitably push back, arguing that the rules will be too expensive or that gasoline prices are so low that customers don't want fuel-efficient vehicles.

These arguments against long-term standards are myopic. Remember that when these rules were first adopted in 2009, the auto industry was in collapse. The fate of iconic car companies, for decades the pride of the United States, was a huge question mark. Eventually, the federal government decided to throw GM, Chrysler and Ford a multi-billion dollar lifeline. It was in the midst of these economic conditions, with fragile domestic manufacturers and gasoline prices around $2.00 a gallon--actually lower than today--that EPA, NHTSA and CARB first began developing today's greenhouse gas and fuel economy standards.

To its credit, domestic and foreign manufacturers agreed to the groundbreaking standards. American manufacturers realized they had become overly dependent on heavy, gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. In 2009, they began to chart a new course that would ensure their long-term competitiveness, both domestically and globally. They bet on building a next generation of vehicles for a cleaner and more efficient future. The environmental upside to this innovation was staggering. Six billion metric tons of CO2 emissions would be avoided and consumers would save $1.7 trillion at the pump.

So how does the auto industry stand seven years later? Have manufacturers crashed and burned? No. From a bankrupt shambles in 2009, US auto industry sales have expanded dramatically. In 2015, they grew by 4.5 million vehicles, numbers on par with historic highs. Profits are also back on solid footing. GM, the largest of the Big Three, has swung from a $30.9 billion loss in 2008 to nearly $10 billion in profits in 2015. In fact, according to one analysis, the "Big Three" stand to fully recover compliance costs and be even more profitable per a range of future scenarios.

What about the variety of vehicles available? It's the largest and most diverse ever. The vast majority of vehicles are still internal combustion, but there are more than 76 alternative powertrain models available. Drivers can choose a large Chevy Suburban with a conventional engine, a hybrid Ford Focus or an all-electric Nissan Leaf. And every single model is more efficient than its 2009 counterpart, making it less polluting and cheaper to operate.

Does the industry have problems meeting the standards? Not at all. In fact, according to the EPA, over a quarter of the 2015 models met the 2018 standards. Fuel economy is at the highest level ever by 5 miles per gallon since 2004. Currently, the 2016 Honda Civic and the Scion iA already meet the 2023 standards. Several Ford-150 models already meet the 2021 standards, as do the Toyota Rav4, Chevy Malibu hybrid and Chevy Cruze.

Just seven years after the auto industry's 2009 nadir, it is in the midst of an innovation renaissance. The costs and the performance of current powertrain technologies are advancing faster than was anticipated. New technologies, such as Li-Ion batteries - the primary driver of cost in an electric vehicle - have come down nearly 70% in the last 6-7 years. So, even with national gasoline prices averaging $2.34 a gallon in early June, an electric vehicle is still about 50 percent cheaper to fuel than a gasoline vehicle.

The drop in battery costs is also translating into greater range. The mid-priced Chevy Bolt EV, which boasts a 200-mile range before being recharged, will be available at the end of the year. Tesla's mid-priced all-electric Model 3, expected in 2018, got over 400,000 advance orders in a matter of weeks. After federal incentives, both are expected to cost around $30,000 - cheaper than the average transaction price of a vehicle last December. What's more, that pricing is based on an electric vehicle market that is less than 1% of all car sales. Over the next decade, increased market penetration combined with technology advances will reduce those prices even further.

Meanwhile, what seemed like science fiction just decades ago is quickly becoming reality. A tech company, Google, continues to make rapid advances in self-driving. Cars with fuel cell powertrains produce only water from the exhaust. The first generation fuel cell production car, the Toyota Mirai is already available for sale in California.

The innovation that has been unleashed over the past seven years is exactly what is needed to take on the biggest threat to our future: climate change. But while it is merely a good start, these rules are not nearly enough for the world to avert the worst impacts of climate change. This past December, nations from around the world agreed that we have to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 2º Celsius from 2005 levels by 2050. In order to meet that goal, the International Energy Agency projects that we will need 100 million electric cars on the road by 2030--up from the 1.26 million in 2015. This is a huge task--but it is still doable with companies continuing to invest and the right government policies.

This year, as the regulatory agencies review the 2025 standards, industry voices should not be calling for the standards to be rolled back. This is not the time to again look in the rearview mirror. Instead, industry and government must set ambitious future targets for 2030 and beyond. We need to provide long-term certainty for the innovative companies that have set us on our current trajectory. We must enhance the Nation's energy security. We have to deal head-on with climate change.

To do so, EPA, NHTSA and CARB should consider setting greenhouse gas standards for cars in 2030 that would lead to a significant number of plugged-in electric vehicles to be on the road. Once again, the auto industry should bring its expertise to be an integral part of the process.

Government policies should also consider incorporating electric vehicles that are shared and autonomous into the standards. Shared and autonomous cars have the potential to use much less fuel or electricity. Under the right government policies and incentives, these vehicles could contribute to lower greenhouse gas emissions and other air pollutants, while reducing congestion and accidents.

These type of commitments will help us avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Setting our standards higher is the only way to shift the balance from an intensely polluting fossil fuel economy to a cleaner and more sustainable future. They will also help the nation's automakers be global leaders in environmental innovation and, as already demonstrated, to profitably secure their futures.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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A PV Panel On Every Roof  
In the home stretch of his presidency, Barack Obama still has some ideas up his sleeve. The latest is his crusade to make sure that every American household and business can become a solar power plant.

There has been plenty of good news about solar energy in recent years. It is becoming much more affordable and it's sprouting up on rooftops nearly everywhere in the United States. Yet we have barely begun to capture its potential. Sunlight is free, ubiquitous, domestic, inexhaustible and clean, but it still provides less than 1 percent of the nation's electricity.

Its potential is much greater. The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado calculates that if every suitable roof was equipped with solar panels, we could get 40 percent of our electricity from sunlight.



That's a theoretical number, not a plan. But reality will get much closer to theory if solar energy's virtuous cycle continues. The cycle goes like this: Because of state and federal incentives, improvements in technology and state renewable energy mandates, the price of rooftop solar systems has dropped so that more people can afford them. As more people buy solar panels, more must be manufactured. The more that are manufactured, the less expensive they become because of economies of manufacturing scale. As they get even less expensive, more people buy them, more are manufactured, there are more economies of scale, and so on.

However, the virtuous cycle has not yet brought the price of rooftop solar systems down to the point where low-income families or people with low credit scores can afford them. In a study it issued in January 2015, the George Washington University Solar Institute reported that the 40 percent of American households that earn less than $40,000 each year account for less than 5 percent of the nation's solar installations. In other words, we still have a solar income gap in the United States. The study noted that solar energy has the ability to "alleviate the financial burdens of lower income communities, but targeted policies will be necessary for solar to expand into this underserved market."

President Obama responded six months later with some of those targeted policies. In July 2015, the White House announced a National Community Solar Partnership designed to make solar accessible to all income levels. The objective is 300 megawatts of solar power on federally subsidized housing. In addition, because half of the nation's homes and businesses are not suitable for producing solar power, the Administration budgeted $520 million for the development of community solar systems that serve multiple buildings. Several of these arrangements are in place today around the United States so that several buildings can share the capital costs and the savings of a photovoltaic array, including buildings where rooftop solar would not work because of ownership issues, poor solar access and so on.

Many moderate- and low-income families face two other barriers. They may not have the money to pay the up-front costs of a system, and they may have trouble finding affordable financing. The marketplace has spawned some innovative solutions. Today, a homeowner can lease a solar system rather than buy one. The lessor pays all the up-front costs to install the system, plus the cost of maintaining it. The homeowner uses part of the savings on his energy bills and the income from selling solar power to his utility to make lease payments.

Some utilities offer on-bill financing for homeowners to make energy efficiency and renewable energy improvements. The utility loans the homeowner the money for energy upgrades; the homeowner repays the loan with a special charge on his or her monthly utility bills. When on-bill financing is done correctly, the homeowner's energy savings are more than his or her loan payments.

Yet another low-interest option is Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing. Similar to utility financing, the municipality puts up the money for energy efficiency and renewable energy improvements. The building owner repays the assessment with a fee on his or her property tax bill. This option has worked well for commercial buildings, but PACE loans for residences have been in limbo for several years because of objections from the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) over who gets paid first when the house is sold -- the municipality or the mortgage holder.

The Obama Administration has worked out a solution. Earlier this week, the White House unveiled another initiative called Clean Energy Savings for All. It clears up the FHA's objections to residential PACE programs so that municipalities can create them by designating energy financing districts and issuing bonds so homeowners can add PACE assessments to their HUD and Veterans Administration mortgages.

In addition, the Administration will make it easier for the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance program at HUD to fund renewable energy systems.

The goal for this new package of initiatives is 1 gigawatt of solar for low- and moderate-income families by 2020.

The old rap against rooftop solar was that it is a boutique technology that only upper-income homeowners could afford. But because of falling prices for solar panels and innovative financing options, and because of the Obama Administration's ongoing work to make solar power accessible to everyone, distributed solar systems are rapidly becoming an egalitarian technology that gives all of us some choice in where our energy comes from. It also gives us the opportunity to do our patriotic duty and join America's clean energy revolution.

It's time to make America's energy system great again.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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Margo T. Oge: Obama's Landmark Greenhouse Gas And Fuel Economy Standards Are Working - Now Let's Look to the Future  
This year, as the regulatory agencies review the 2025 standards, industry voices should not be calling for the standards to be rolled back. This is not the time to again look in the rearview mirror.

Read more: Environment, Carbon Emissions, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Fuel Efficiency, Climate Change, Green News

 
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Photos of the Day: July 21, 2016  

Explore the news of the day with these images from around the world.  
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Scenes From the Republican National Convention (31 photos)  

Thousands descended on Cleveland this week to attend the four-day Republican National Convention at Ohio's Quicken Loans Arena. The crowd was composed of delegates, politicians, protesters, journalists, and even some celebrities like boxing promoter Don King. The GOP event comes to a close this evening with a speech by Donald Trump, the party's official nominee for president. Below are a selection of some of the more interesting images to come out of Cleveland.

 
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the peak  

fiddleoak posted a photo:

 
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Brain mapping: Getting it right  
This post was written in collaboration with Randy Gollub, Jeanette Mumford, Panthea Heydari, Leonardo Fernandino, and Cyril Pernet, as well as was approved by the entire Communications Committee and the Council of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping.

Scientific publications generate a written conversation that evolves over time. Each new publication expands on the conversational foundation established by its predecessors. Despite our positive view that a recent study by Eklund and colleagues makes a valuable contribution to the conversation in our field of brain mapping, many reports have interpreted that findings from this paper cast doubt on all studies conducted with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) over the last two decades. We hope to dispel some of the misconceptions.

You may have read some of these reports, which often repeated convincing figures like "false positive rates up to 70 percent" or "Tens of Thousands of FMRI Brain Studies May Be Flawed" to create doubt and undermine confidence in fMRI. Where did these numbers come from? Well, a major issue that all brain imagers must deal with is determining the reliability of the detected brain activation. Since the detection is made via statistical techniques, there is always a chance that what is determined to be an activation, may in fact be a "false positive". Researchers use methods that control the chance of a false positive within their measurements, capped at a predetermined level (usually 5 percent). Controlling false positives, however, can be a tricky business since it often requires certain assumptions to be made. For those of you interested in a more detailed technical explanation, see the blog we wrote for our community. Assessing the risk of false positives is not a new issue and is central in most scientific fields. Since the field of fMRI research is relatively new - barely above the legal drinking age in the U.S. - we are still determining the best way to control false positives. The work by Eklund and colleagues showed that the false positive rate using some analysis techniques can be as high as 70 percent, which is the origin of that figure in the headlines. 40,000 is an estimate of the total number of studies that have used fMRI, or the size of the pool of studies that this work could possibly impact.


Three example headlines reporting that the findings by Eklund and colleagues may invalidate all fMRI studies. Images sources: Forbes, Wired, and Science Alert.

Now that we know what those figures represent, what do they mean and how do they affect the field of neuroimaging? The elegant study by Eklund and colleagues showed that only a certain subset of analysis decisions can give rise to the highest false positive rate of up to 70 percent (instead of the conventional 5 percent). However, not every brain mapper analyzes their data in the same way or uses the approaches examined by the authors. As pointed out by Dr. Nichols, one of the co-authors, on his blog, only ~3500 studies (or less than 10 percent of the ~40,000 existing fMRI studies) used the statistical methods that Eklund and colleagues called into question. So, over ~90 percent of previously published fMRI studies implemented other analysis methods that were not questioned. Further, the findings from all of these 3500 studies are not necessarily false either. Likely only a fraction of the 3500 studies - for example, those with marginally significant results or those not subsequently reproduced - might be called into question.

So, while some sensationalists seem to think differently, there is no need to question every result ever published with fMRI. The new paper by Eklund and colleagues simply demonstrates that particular variants of methods for statistical inference that are sometimes used are not valid. It does not invalidate either (a) the method of fMRI or (b) the majority of the field's findings. Finding meaningful patterns in fMRI data is an on-going effort. As a reflection of the importance of this process, the journal in which the Eklund study was published has agreed to release an erratum clarifying the interpretation of these data - consistent with what is highlighted in the present post. What we are witnessing is a healthy process of science self-correcting. Over time, scientists will learn to identify and fix techniques, and eventually converge upon those that prove to be the most reliable.

By chance, as one of us was editing this article, a group of junior colleagues from a cognitive neuroscience lab were discussing the paper by Eklund and colleagues in the next room. They were considering if and how these findings have implications for their own data analysis methods. And that is the true value of this work: To openly question and continually improve our methods because after all, fMRI remains one of the best tools available to reveal the inner workings of the living human brain.

Kevin S. Weiner is a neuroscientist, as well as member of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) and writes for the Communications/Media Team. The OHBM Media Team brings cutting edge information and research on the human brain to your laptops, desktops and mobile devices in a way that is neurobiologically pleasing. For more information about brain mapping, follow www.humanbrainmapping.org/blog or @OHBMSci_News

Further reading:

Eklund et al. (2016).


A technical comment on the Eklund at al. paper from our OHBM blog.

A technical comment on the Eklund et al. paper by Guillaume Flandin and Karl Friston.

A white paper on best practices in analyzing neuroimaging data.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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'Pokemon Go' Helped Me Cope With My Social Anxiety  
The first time I tried to catch a Zubat in "Pokémon Go" sucked. I was out on a crowded San Francisco street on a Friday night, and the tiny blue asshole with a smaller asshole for a mouth moved like friggin' Muhammad Ali.  
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Why Wasting Water Is Even Worse for the Environment Than You Think  
Is wasting water actually bad for the environment? originally appeared on Quora: the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by Ava Mohsenin, Communcations Associate at WaterNow Alliance, on Quora:

Yes, wasting water is actually bad for the environment. There are anthropocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric reasons why wasting water is bad.

Anthropocentrically, fresh water is a vital resource for the survival of our population. Seeing as less than 1% of the world's water is freshwater and available for us to consume (not trapped in glaciers), there are limitations that factor into our carrying capacity as a population on Earth including the availability and distribution of freshwater. Different countries are endowed with different stocks of freshwater, and depending on their replenishment rate and usage rate, each has varying degrees of water scarcity that needs to be addressed. Below is a map by World Resources Institute that outlines the water stress by country, with 36 countries displaying an "Extremely High Stress (>80%)," which means that "more than 80 percent of the water available to agricultural, domestic and industrial users is withdrawn annually--leaving businesses, farms and communities vulnerable to scarcity" (World's 36 Most Water-Stressed Countries).

Therefore, wasting water in a country where it may appear water just magically comes out of the tap (i.e. Canada, the U.S., most developed countries), is wasting a precious, vital resource that millions (663 million, according to Water Facts: Facts About the Global Water Shortage) don't even have clean, safe access to.

Furthermore, in places where clean water is scarce, overusing or wasting household water limits the availability of it for other communities to use for drinking, cleaning, cooking or growing--and thus contributes to disease, illness, or agricultural scarcity/starvation.

You could tack on the economic incentive to save water, as it means lower household water utility bills, one of the largest incentives for water-wise individuals or households to conserve water.

Biocentrically, other species rely on freshwater besides humans as a vital component to their survival! Overuse of freshwater in household settings means there is less fresh water for agricultural use (which affects humans on an food scarcity level), but many livestock species rely on freshwater. Also, as we divert more freshwater from aquatic environments to supplement agriculturally, many plant and animal species are threatened or can become endangered. Despite our attempts to separate man from nature, we are indeed part of one ecosystem (the biosphere), and reliant on plants and animals; therefore sharing and properly managing our most precious resource is crucial.

Ecocentrically, wasting water while our demand for water increases (as population and standards of living increase globally), means that we need to supplement for this lack of freshwater by pulling it out of aquifers or groundwater supplies in which their regeneration rate is lower than the extraction rate. This unsustainable practice decreases long term water security and availability.

Furthermore, and almost most importantly, water takes a lot of energy, time, and money to filter and clean so that it's drinkable. Wasting water or overusing household water means you're wasting the energy-intensive process of filtration. The many steps of this process--extraction, transportation, filtration, etc.--require non-renewable fossil fuels and as these resources become depleted, their dangerous by-products such as carbon dioxide build up in the Earth's atmosphere, contributing to your carbon footprint and the Earth's rising temperatures.

This question originally appeared on Quora. Ask a question, get a great answer. Learn from experts and access insider knowledge. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:

• 
  
• Water: What are some lesser known but interesting facts about water?
• 
  
• The Environment: What are some of the best rare natural phenomena that occur on Earth?
• 
  
• Natural Resources Management: How do mining companies know where to mine gold?
• 
  

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The Cruel Market: Nuclear Pain And Environmental Loss  
Just when it needs it most, the United States is losing its most potent weapon in the fight against climate change, which might better be called global pollution. One nuclear plant is closed in Vermont, two are under threat of closure in Illinois, and the only plant in climate-conscious California is to close.

These four plants represent a substantial withdrawal of clean, carbon-free electricity from the market, mostly to be replaced by natural gas, and some wind and solar. Gas will do the bulk of the generating, and it is a carbon-emitter -- less than coal, but a carbon source nonetheless.

What is more, these plants are up and running, which means none of the pollution associated with construction, steel-making or quarrying will have to be repeated. Some, including Marvin Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, have expressed fears that 20 more nuclear plants may yet close.



Diablo Canyon: No fault of its own

The ostensible reason for these closures is that market forces dictate them. That bald statement implies that electricity is bought and sold as freely as any multi-sourced commodity.

But electricity is not traded in any conventional way. And it is weighted in favor of the short term and political goals.

The trouble started when it was decided to deregulate electricity markets in the 1990s. The goal had nobility: Consumers would have choice. At least that is how it was sold by advocates, such as Enron.

Well, choice did not really work for consumers, but it has worked for some large industrial customers, who have been able to shop for price.

Mostly, deregulation has created two kinds of utilities: those that swallowed the deregulation pill, and those who did not, mostly in the South. The northern tier of utilities, under pressure from their state governments, deregulated, some even selling off their generating assets.

The result has been other than anticipated: Consumers have had little or no choice, and the market has set about exterminating long-lived plant, like nuclear, in favor of today's cheapest fuel -- at this moment, natural gas.

The utilities which have remained strictly regulated by their state utility commissions have been more secure financially and able to raise money more cheaply. The leader in this pack, the giant Southern Company, headquartered in Atlanta, has become a technological innovator as well as a builder of new nuclear plant.

Deregulation of the telephone monopoly -- often cited during the passion to deregulate electricity -- created a profusion of innovations. By contrast, deregulating electricity has just brought about a rush to the cheapest fuel of the day.

Electric utilities operate what are known as natural monopolies. Competing entities cannot install a new set of transmission wires, so the deregulated electric market had to be contrived. It was also subject to political and cultural manipulation, as the solar and wind lobbies insisted that their product get preference. Coal was edged out financially, before environmental concerns.

Deregulated utilities have formed transmission organizations to rationalize the system. These are the independent system operators, such as the Midwest ISO or PJM in the Mid-Atlantic. They auction power and the auction system favors the cheapest kilowatt on offer.

That sounds fair, right? Not quite. Some of the power comes from wind and solar, which has been subsidized by an array of tax preferences and other government supports.

Many states have renewable energy portfolios which decree that a percentage of the power has to come from these renewable resources. This is fine because they produce no carbon. But they do not produce that much reliable electricity either. It takes a lot of solar arrays or wind turbines -- and then only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing -- to produce the same electricity as a nuclear power plant or an old-fashioned, coal-fired power plant. They need reliable backup -- and that is natural gas, a fossil fuel.

Also to replace a nuclear plant with renewables chews up a lot of land, whether solar arrays or wind farms. Imperfect markets produce imperfect results. -- For InsideSources

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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City slicker monkeys are overweight and have high cholesterol  
Urban living means plentiful fruit trees and many sugary snacks for Colombia's tamarin monkeys but they pay the price for this unhealthy diet  
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Edward Flattau: Unfit To Govern  
According to the overwhelming majority of the world's climatologists, global warming is the most pressing challenge of our time, posing an existential...

Read more: Trump, Republican National Convention, Gop, Environment, Environmentalism, Politics News

 
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Nope, we can't find dark matter either, says LUX team  

The WIMPs theory is still strong though

An international team of researchers working on the Large Underground Xenon dark matter experiment announced today that they have failed to detect any dark matter particles.…

 
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Water, Wildlife and Hope: Rejuvenating a Kogi Sacred Site  

After years of planning, designing, acquiring materials, developing infrastructure, laying and burying 1,200 meters of pipe, and testing water quality and functionality, the seemingly impossible was achieved: for Colombia's Kogi people, and their related tribes who rely on Jaba Tañiwashkaka, a historically sacred site, an aqueduct that provides access to water for crop irrigation and potable water for consumption is now in place. And thanks to a determined site restoration effort, alligators, nutria, and capybara are only a few of the animals now seen in a wetland previously largely devoid of wildlife.

The Kogi people live on roughly 14.5 million acres in Colombia's northern Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region. Around the margins of the Sierra Nevada is the Línea Negra, the “Black Line,” a chain of 54 pilgrimage sites sacred to the Kogi and once part of their ancestral territories. Most of the associated sites are not currently under Kogi ownership or control—the Kogi were forced to abandon them due to decades of colonization and violent civil conflict—and many are endangered by poorly planned development schemes, megaprojects, mining activity, and/or illicit crop cultivation.

To address this, in 2012, the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) partnered with the Colombian Ministry of Culture and the Organización Gonawindúa Tayrona of the Kogi people to purchase the essential section of a coastal sacred site that the region's indigenous communities call Jaba Tañiwashkaka—an area of great environmental and cultural importance.

With the legal consolidation and traditional management of Jaba Tañiwashkaka well underway, thanks in part to additional land purchases, a pressing task has been the construction of a water supply system that allows for the continuous residence of Kogi families in their reclaimed territory and the establishment of small-scale subsistence agriculture on three hectares to sustain the families and authorities who live at or visit the site. Today, an aqueduct provides access to water for crop irrigation and potable water for consumption. Previously, any water supplied at the site of the Kogi's temples had to be carried in buckets from the Jerez River at a distance of about one kilometer, and this water was not suitable for human consumption.

Now, solar panel energy powers the pump, three 2,000-liter reservoir tanks provide storage, and a filter supplies potable water, with the remainder used for agriculture. The system was designed as a low-maintenance and ecologically responsible project, and a fourth tank has now been sited at the nearby orchard. With assistance from the national government, this land was returned to the ownership and stewardship of the Kogi.

Under the Kogi's care, and through joint efforts with ACT, their sacred territory is being restored through community monitoring, trash collection, and border enforcement. Local waters are decontaminating, as indicated by studies of the health and size of populations of crayfish, a good indicator of water quality. Littoral vegetation is rebounding, and bodies of water previously scattered with refuse are being restored to beautiful freshwater lagoons.

The local population of crabs is increasing, and previously unseen semiaquatic animals such as nutrias and young alligators have been spotted. The alligators further indicate that that a recent prohibition from capturing their eggs has helped their reproduction and repopulation. Moreover, with around-the-clock control of fires, local flora is recovering across the local wetland, including propagation of marsh vegetation and young mangrove.

In addition to the return of its original state and beauty, the temple site can now fulfill its role as a gathering site for the Kogi's traditional practices—ritual offerings, internal meetings, and exchange gatherings—that strengthen their culture and advance the conservation and restoration of the local ecology.

ACT and the Kogi are grateful to a set of funders including the White Feather Foundation, March to the Top, LUSH Cosmetics, Dora Arts Janssen, and anonymous donors whose generosity made the aqueduct a reality and helped breathe new life into this ancient wetland.

 
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Technology that Could Turn the Tide on Climate Change: Energy Storage  
New technology is required to make meaningful progress on climate change. This column will focus on one of those options: energy storage. A breakthrough in this area could alter the energy landscape and help the effort to combat climate change.

Improvements in utility scale energy storage could help decrease emissions and increase efficiency. The usual variability of demand for electricity causes inefficiency in energy production. This is true for any feedstock but it is especially true for renewables. Renewables are intermittent; peak production times for wind and solar don't match peak load times.

The next generation of energy storage can solve this problem. Improved energy storage would allow utilities to store the extra power generated by renewable sources and use it during peak load periods. This would also smooth out the peaks and valleys in fossil fuel-generated electricity, improving efficiency and decreasing the need for expensive energy from peaking plants.

Improved storage increases the flexibility of the utilities. It would allow them to quickly respond to increases in demand and take advantage of bursts of increased supply from renewable sources.

There are a series of demonstration projects underway that will explore ways of expanding energy storage including high tech batteries, thermal energy storage, and pumped hydro.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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Eating each other's faeces helps earwig young survive famine  
The odd feeding behaviour may even help keep the young insects together in a primitive form of social living  
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To protect yourself from malaria sleep with a chicken next to your bed  
For the first time, scientists have shown that malaria-transmitting mosquitoes actively avoid feeding on certain animal species such as chickens, using their sense of smell. Odors emitted by species such as chickens could provide protection for humans at risk of mosquito-transmitted diseases, according to a study.  
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Kings Cross  

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TIME OUT LONDON, VISIT LONDON, LONDONIST & "I KNOW THIS GREAT..." if you use my photo can you please put the credit link to my Facebook Page rather than my Flickr Account. Thank you.


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A Playground... by SaiMon HosSain  

A Playground... by SaiMon HosSain

---------------------------------------- Thank You For Visiting My Photography. Please Don't Use Without Permission. Facebook: www.facebook.com/saimon.hossain Webpage: http://saimonhossain.wix.com/saimonhossain ----------------------------------------

SaiMon HosSain: Photos

 
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Scientists Map Nearly 200 Areas in the Human Brain  
A newly updated map of the human brain may be the most accurate yet, helping solve over 100 years of arguments. This video was reproduced with permission and was first published on July 20, 2016. It...

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com  
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DR JIM STAMPS 30TH ANNIV OF CITES ENDANGERED SPECIES FDC UN COVER 2003 https://t.co/BKt2TtJRUq https://t.co/7ugWxfl3NH 
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Jean Picard Scientist of the Day Jean Picard, a...  

http://lhldigital.lindahall.org/cdm/ref/collection/math/id/4317


http://lhldigital.lindahall.org/cdm/ref/collection/math/id/4317


: http://lhldigital.lindahall.org/cdm/ref/collection/math/id/4322


http://lhldigital.lindahall.org/cdm/ref/collection/math/id/4352


http://lhldigital.lindahall.org/cdm/ref/collection/math/id/4341


http://lhldigital.lindahall.org/cdm/ref/collection/math/id/4203

Jean Picard Scientist of the Day

Jean Picard, a French astronomer, was born July 21, 1620. In 1669-70, Picard successfully measured the length of a degree of latitude.

read more…

 
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Rung by Dany Rio  

Rung by Dany Rio

Run Sunshine !!! giá vé máy bay đi Phú Quốc | gia ve may bay di Nha Trang |

Dany Rio: Photos

 
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Rays by Norbert Mogyorósi  

Rays by Norbert Mogyorósi

Before the journey starts

Norbert Mogyorósi: Photos

 
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Check Your Engines by Juan C Osorio  

Check Your Engines by Juan C Osorio

Juan C Osorio: Photos

 
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Sunset above the Vltava river by Jan Pelcman  

Sunset above the Vltava river by Jan Pelcman

Jan Pelcman: Photos

 
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escape route by Maik Stöckmann  

escape route by Maik Stöckmann

Hotel Saßnitz

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Crumble with a plum and berry. style vintage by Зоряна Ивченко  

Crumble with a plum and berry. style vintage by Зоряна Ивченко

Crumble with a plum and berry. style vintage. top view. selective focus

Зоряна Ивченко: Photos

 
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Coffee with sugar by Darya Komarova  

Coffee with sugar by Darya Komarova

Darya Komarova: Photos

 
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*** by Virginia Badiola  

*** by Virginia Badiola

Virginia Badiola: Photos

 
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Is The GOP Trying To Destroy The Earth?  
The world's scientists overwhelmingly agree: our planet is facing an environmental crisis of staggering proportions. The Earth is warming at an alar...

Read more: Climate Change, Gop, Republican Party, Environment, GOP Convention, Republican Party Platform, Politics News

 
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Selena Gomez's Social Media Posts Are Evidently Worth $550,000 Apiece  
Celebrity women are absolutely dominating social media when it comes to personal branding nowadays, and Selena Gomez is the queen bee of digital buzz.  
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All you need for quantum computing at room temperature is some mothballs  

Much of the current research on the development of a quantum computer involves work at very low temperatures. The challenge to make them more practical for everyday use is to make them work at room temperature.…

 
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Another giant leap  
The story of a group of women who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the early days of rocketry draws both praise and criticism from Lisa Ruth Rand  
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Another giant leap  
The story of a group of women who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the early days of rocketry draws both praise and criticism from Lisa Ruth Rand  
science  

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Web life: Universe Awareness  
The Universe Awareness project aims to bring the beauty and grandeur of the cosmos into the classroom for children aged four to 10  
science  

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Web life: Universe Awareness  
The Universe Awareness project aims to bring the beauty and grandeur of the cosmos into the classroom for children aged four to 10  
science  

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Monument  

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Sea view at Millionaires Walk, Artists Trail, Sorrento, Mornington Peninsula Victoria, Australia  

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View on Canary wharf  

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Grism  

Full Text:

A volume phase holographic (VPH) grism, a combination of a diffraction grating and a prism. This grism combines a grating from Kaiser Optical Systems Inc. with prism wedges from Janos Technology Inc., and was assembled at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) by Al Camacho and Heidi Yarborough. It is used in the new Multi-Aperture Red Spectrometer (MARS, which is CryoCam resurrected).

Image credit: NOAO/AURA/NSF

 
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Fiery end  

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Google tests its own quantum computer both qubits of it  

Here's something to like about 2016: 'Quantum Software Engineer' is a job title

A couple of years ago, a quantum physicist suggested to Vulture South that one of the best uses for quantum computers might be to model reality. Now, Google reckons its boffins have done just that.…

 
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Climate Change This Week: Undersea Deforestation Soars, Flipping Crystals, and More!  
Today, the Earth got a little hotter, and a little more crowded.




Saving BUB, Beautiful Unique Biodiversity, like this golden macaw, is another important reason to save the carbon storing Amazonian rainforest. Source cuyabenolodge.com

Forests: the cheapest way to store carbon




OO Deforestation In The Amazon Continues - Takeaways:

• in the last 50 years, nearly 20% has been lost
• 
  
• almost 300,000 square miles;
• 
  
• In 2015, it lost another 2,000 square miles.

OO Deforestation From Illegal Gold Mining Spreads To Northern Peru show satellite images.


When we harm forests, we harm ourselves.

OO India State Plants Close To 50 Million Trees In A Day - trying to beat a world record. Takeaways:

• govt funded +6.2 billion for tree-planting nationally;
• 
  
• India pledges to increase forest cover to 95 million hectares (235 million acres) by 2030.
• 
  
• long-term survival of trees planted in such mass campaigns remains a concern.

A Beauty Among Many That Are Threatened, the decline of the monarch butterfly is the poster story of much wider insect decline, including the catastrophic decline of bees worldwide. Credit Ted Wilcox

OO Vanishing Act: Why Insects Are Declining
And Why It Matters - they are being lost to pesticides, monoculture, and habitat loss, but are essential to agriculture and \ecosystems necessary for our survival. Think food pollinators, for starters.





Paying For The Right Kind of Greenery Source www.ababaugandasafaris.com

OO Uganda: A Cheap, Simple Way To Slow Deforestation - where it is happening rapidly, is to simply pay land owners not to cut down their trees, a program showed.

The program is a positive model for protecting a biodiverse hub that includes a key habitat for endangered chimpanzees.

It also validates the effectiveness of a "Payments for Ecosystems Services" of the sort that could help slow global deforestation, leading driver of climate change.


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CARBON-STORING UNDERSEA FORESTS THREATENED




Wikipedia

OO Sea Otters Are Climate Champions:
They Protect Carbon Storing Kelp Forests in the Aleutian Islands by eating sea urchins, keeping these kelp eaters from ravaging kelp forests.

"The difference in annual absorption of atmospheric carbon from kelp photosynthesis between a world with and a world without sea otters is somewhere between 13 and 43 billion kg of carbon."





Sea Urchins Flourish, Eating Declining Kelp as oceans warm and acidify. Credit David Doubilet

OO Warming, Acidifying Oceans Harm
Health, Survival Of Kelp Forests - particularly those in the warmest part of their range, shows a new study, reducing kelps while resulting in more of its predators, sea urchins.

Rock lobsters, which usually keep sea urchin numbers in check, are falling, putting yet more pressure on kelp populations. It is uncertain whether kelp communities will survive.

AUSTRALIA SEA FOREST DEVASTATION




An Undersea Jungle No More - most of Australia's kelp forests were recently destroyed by a marine heat wave. Source www.toptenplus.com

OO Australia: Marine Heatwave Devastates Vast Kelp Forests destroying about 90% of forests off the western coast between 2011 to 2013, posing a threat to biodiversity and the marine economy.


Related Headline:

OO Climate-Driven Regime Shift Of A Temperate Marine Ecosystem - rapid warming off Australia's west coast has transformed large stretches of kelp forests into tropical and subtropical marine ecosystems of seaweeds, invertebrates, corals, and fish typical of subtropical and tropical waters, a new study finds.


OO Australia's Other Great Reef Is Also Screwed - While the world panics about the Great Barrier Reef, an even larger and more valuable habitat, Australian kelp forests, are collapsing.






That's Not Snow - It's Skeletons... of mangroves that died from overheating. Credit James Cook University

OO Mangrove Die-Off in Australia Led by Climate Change - About 7,000 hectares of mangroves over 700 km in the north have died due to climate change and El Nino -- the worst in the world, says a mangrove expert.

"This is what climate change looks like. You see things push the maximums or minimums."

Climate change warmed waters in the area made rainfall more erratic and, with this strong El Nino year, pushed mangroves beyond their tolerance threshold.

Australia is also reeling from mass coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef and mass deaths of kelp forests off the coast of Western Australia.






OO Great Barrier Reef: Govt Must Choose Which Parts To Save says an expert, and confront the prospect that some of it may be doomed, an expert on conservation modelling has warned.



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OH-OH



OO Climate May Be More Sensitive And Situation More Dire says new research. The climate may be warming more and faster in response to climate changing emissions than previously thought.


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*

CHANGING LAND USE DRIVES ASIAN CLIMATE-CHANGING EMISSIONS




Like A Giant Climate Changing Infection Asian deforestation emits climate changing carbon gases, and often the farms that replace them further add emissions in growing livestock and crops. Source ulet ifan at flipboard.com

OO Asia: Significant Carbon Emissions from Changing Land Use and Cover from 1980-2009 resulted, and were responsible for 20-40% of such source emissions globally, a new study finds.

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*

HOT NEWS




Source NSF Central Arizona Phoenix LTER site

OO Heat Wave Lifts June To Hottest On Record For US with a record average of nearly 72 F for the lower 48 states.





OO We Just Broke The Record For Hottest Year, Nine Straight Times


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*

CLIMATE COSTS MOUNT




US Climate Change Costs Mount with this year looking to equal or be worse than the record US disaster year, 2011. Source NOAA

OO US Billion+ Dollar Weather Disasters Surge to Eight -
And It's Only June - Takeaways:

• 2 floods and 6 severe weather events
• 
  
• Including severe hailstorms
• 
  
• many in Texas,
• 
  
• well above the US average in yearly disaster costs.

European Capitals Are Set to Heat UP under continued global warming.
Credit MikeMey67 at flickr.com

OO Climate Change To Blame For 1,000 Deaths In 2003 Heat Wave says a new study.

• The model attributes 1,000 deaths directly to climate change.
• 
  
• The model looked at Paris and London;
• 
  
• In much warmer Paris, 70% of the deaths were climate linked;
• 
  
• 20% in London.

Extended to the70,000+ deaths in Europe during that hot summer, the model could potentially link far more deaths to climate change.

The chances of experiencing such extreme heat waves in London and Paris have tripled.


OO Boiled Alive - When the human body gets to 42C, it starts to cook. The heat causes the proteins in each cell to irreversibly change, like an egg white as it boils. In the 2003 summer, record temperatures soared from 36.5 C to 41 C in Bosnia.


OO Climate Report Predicts British Heatwaves Of 48C







Source CBC, Reuters

OO Canada: Alberta Wildfires Costliest Disaster In Canadian History


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*

MELTDOWN




Planetary Thermal Shield Disappearing as it literally melts away, allowing the planet to absorb ever more heat every day.

OO Arctic Sea Ice Crashes To Record Low For June
With Record Speed - ice cover disappeared at an average rate of 29,000 miles a day, about 70% faster than the typical rate of ice loss, experts say.


OO Alaska: As Glaciers Melt, Landslides Follow - mountainsides around Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska are giving way, causing seismic tremors and tsunamis.


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*

FIXING CLIMATE CHANGE



@@ A Simple And Smart Way To Fix Climate Change given by Dan Miller in 2014 at a Ted talk suggests a way to profit as we tackle climate change, by finally charging those who sell and use fossil fuels - and distributing the revenues back to all of us.

The strategy is sure to speed transition to clean renewable energy. What's not to like? Check it out!

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*

SPEAKING OUT




Hillary At Least Addresses Climate Change occasionally, but Trump is absent on even acknowledging the problem.

OO Food Shortages, Sea Level Rise:
US Voters' Top Climate Change Concerns


OO Climate Change: The Missing Issue Of The 2016 Campaign - reveals a Guardian survey of US voters, who are angry that the national election campaigns fail to deal with concerns over the gathering global disaster.


*
*

WET NEWS




OO Climate Change Makes Flood More Likely, More Damaging, experts say. Overwhelming scientific evidence shows that the warming of the planet's atmosphere is increasing the occurrence of and the seriousness of heavy rains in West Virginia.


OO Britain Faces Drowning With Global Warming As the Earth's temperature continues to rise at an alarming rate, and catastrophic flooding is just the beginning.





The Bright Eye of Destruction, Nepartak, is the latest in destructive typhoons helped by the heat of global warming. Source climatesignals.org

OO Super Typhoon Nepartak Causes Devastation Across Taiwan's Coastline


OO Climate Change Boosted Nepartak's Intensity, Destruction





OO Acid Oceans Decreasing Carbon Storage in the Oceans - as the acidity* prevents myriad marine organisms from forming calcium carbonate skeletons, an important way that oceans store carbon.

Ultimately, there will be a limit of the carbon dioxide the oceans will be able to absorb. At that point, the planet will, under continued global warming, heat up far faster.

*As humans fill the air with the carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases that cause global warming, much of that carbon gets dissolved in the ocean, causing the water to acidify.




Muscled Out By Climate Change? Source allomoulesfrites.com

OO Climate Change Will Muscle
Mussels Off The Menu By 2100 says a new study, ocean acidification seriously affects mussels' ability to cling onto rocks,, which they must do 6-12 months while they grow to a marketable size.

By 2100, the mussel coastal regions will be so acidic that nearly half of mussels will be unable to cling on long enough to be farmed.


Related Headline:

OO Acid Attack: Can Mussels Hang On for Much Longer?


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*

SOCIAL REPERCUSSIONS




Hot Times - Field and construction workers are particularly vulnerable to heat wave harm. Source imgur.com

OO As Temperatures Climb, US Workers Are Suffering - In 2011, heat killed 61 U.S. workers and sickened 4,400+.

There are no federal heat standards for workers.

OO New York City Faces Drowning Within This Century - from projected sea level rises of 5-7 feet or more.

It's not clear that even the planned 10-foot walls to protect Manhattan will be enough, especially when the next big storm comes.





The Sea Is Claiming Their Homes with rising tides, faster than these Marshall Islanders can find new ones. Source Bikini Atoll Local Government via AP

OO Seas Rising Faster Than Refugee Law Can Adapt - in being able to decide what rights people have when displaced by rising sea levels.





From Wet to Dry: As Lake Poopo Died, So Did the Identity of A Community

OO Climate Change Drying Up Lakes That Sustain Communities in the Andes in South America.



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*




OO What Happens When Society Crumbles And Progress Stops Takeaways:

Every complex society in history - think Rome, the Maya, Greece - has collapsed.

• societies grow more complex at the cost of energy;
• 
  
• social collapse occurs when not enough energy exists to sustain social complexity;
• 
  
• collapse of trade, political institutions, technology, economies, production ensues.
• 
  
• collapses are inhumane: MANY people die.

• in past regional collapses, people refashioned new societies from remnants.
• 
  
• the next collapse is likely to be global;
• 
  
• current resource devastation and pollution means
• 
  
• there will not be much left to develop our current level of society, again.

MEH: If we brought our populations to sustainable numbers and consumption levels humanely, we might spare our descendents this inhumane future.


*
*

A SWEET SPOT IN CREATING SUSTAINABLE POPULATIONS




Triple Win: Using Profits to Provide Needed US Family Planning - Medicines360.org is key to creating a sustainable US population and bright futures for women - AND saving taxpayers many billions yearly in community costs by preventing unintended pregnancies. Source medicines360.org

GOOD IDEAS




Credit E. Moinu, IITA

OO The Limits To Green Growth - Reconciling environmental and economic imperatives will be hard, but necessary.


"Some might argue that calling for radical transformation, rather than incremental change, is inappropriate...
But this view implicitly underestimates the seriousness of the environmental crisis that the world faces, and assumes linear change when the needed transformation will be non-linear."





"We Now Live In A Full World, but we still behave as if it were empty..."
Credit Randy Scott Slavin

As Herman Daly notes:

"we now live in a full world, but we still behave as if it were empty, with ample space and resources for the indefinite future...

The prevailing obsession with economic growth puts us on the path to ecological collapse, sacrificing the very sustenance of our well-being and survival.

To reverse this ominous trajectory, we must transition toward a steady-state economy focused on qualitative development, as opposed to quantitative growth, and the interdependence of the human economy and global ecosphere."




Credit Natash at free images

OO How The World's Most Fertile Soil Can Help Reverse Climate Change - Takeaways:

• Soil mixed with biochar* and organic matter stores far more carbon;
• 
  
• Retains far more water and is far more fertile;
• 
  
• In combo with reducing fossil fuel use, it could make a huge difference
• 
  
• And address many agriculture, food security and hunger issues.
• 
  

*organic wastes heated in a low oxygen environment - a way to recycle human and agricultural wastes, both plant and animal.





Source AFP via Getty Images

OO Fix or Nix the Most Inefficient, Dirtiest Plants
To Reduce Emissions in every country, a new study indicates, since not all plants are equal in how much emissions they produce per unit power.


OO A Super Microgrid Controller Allows Microgrids to 'Talk' to Each Other - important as clean energy microgrids spread.




OO Flipping Crystals Improves Solar Cell Performance - Takeaways:

• Perovskite crystals can convert sunlight to electricity efficiently;
• 
  
• A new two dimensional formation of the crystal has tripled that efficiency
• 
  
• And is outstandingly stable.
• 
  
• Perovskites are closer to being used in solar installations.

OO California: Making Your Home Energy Smart With A Click - the state government is making it happen.





Source floridatrend.com

OO Miami's Plan To Deal With Climate Change: Make Developers Pay Up - charging fees for those who develop in environmentally sensitive areas.


OO Here's What US Can Learn From Germany's Sunny Grid - One day recently, Germany had generated just short of 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy. Part 3 of 4.


OO Surviving Kenya's Drought:
Catching Water With Rocks - Rock catchment systems use naturally occurring rock outcrops to divert rainwater to a central collection area. A concrete wall is built to direct the water that trickles down the rock surface into a sand and gravel filter, then down pipes into covered storage tanks.


*
*

GOOD CLEAN NEWS



OO Big Solar Is Leaving Rooftop Systems In The Dust - Solar power is on pace for the first time this year to contribute more new electricity to the grid than will any other form of energy - a feat driven more by economics than green mandates, favoring large scale over rooftop installations.


OO Offshore Wind Costs Hit Record Low .

OO Wind Power Plant In Atacama Desert Fills Chile's Clean-Energy Sails





OO Google, Amazon and Apple Are Forging
the Future of Corporate Energy Management
Large corporations are taking a more active approach to managing their energy.


OO New York Investing Bigtime in Clean Energy Future







Bringing The Sun to her community in Tanzania, selling solar lights, and clean stoves as part of the Solar Sisters cooperative. Source Solar Sisters

OO From Basket Weavers To Salt Farmers:
The Women Leading A Renewables Revolution - From Tanzania to India, social enterprises are helping women become clean energy entrepreneurs.


OO Deutsche Bank Pulls Back From Deals in Coal Mining Sector


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*

CLINTON BESTS TRUMP AT CLIMATE AND ENERGY POLICY




Where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Stand on Climate, Energy
Source www.realclearpolitics.com

OO Where Clinton, Trump Stand on Energy, Climate Change


OO Trump's Wall Will Hurt U.S. Energy Companies - by choking off a burgeoning energy relationship between the US and the emerging oil and gas nation of Mexico.


*
*

CLUELESS LEADERSHIP




OO Despite Economic Advantages,
Some Republican States Are Discouraging Clean Energy


OO G20 Nations Fail To Agree
On Timeline For Phasing Out Fossil Fuel Subsidies


*
*

FOSSIL FUEL FOLLIES




OO Coal Dust Pollution Kills 23,000 Yearly In EU penetrating lungs, and it racks up tens of billions of euros in health costs, says a new report.


OO Shell Seeks Exemption To North Sea Clear-Up Rules so it doesn't have to remove all the drilling crap it left undersea - some of the structures the size of the Empire State Building.


OO Poland's Disappearing Lakes Fuel Battle Over Coal Mining as the industry siphons groundwater for its mining, and farms and lakes dry up.

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*

ELECTION YEAR:




If You Don't Vote For Climate Action, You Can Forget The Rest - in a climate-changing world of famine, drought, rising seas, giant storms and heat waves, there will be no security in jobs, health, wealth, or national safety. There will be chaos ensuing from increasing crises and disasters. Vote.

OO Global Warming Policies We Set Today Will Determine The Next 10,000 Years - of global warming, a new study shows -- and whether our civilization survives or not: history shows that harmful climate change has destroyed civilizations before.

This time, it could be worldwide. Let's keep "The Hunger Games" in the realm of fiction.

*
*



If we do not grow sustainably,
Our children will die inhumanely.





@@ The Cost of Unintended Pregnancy: Too Young

Teen childbearing cost US taxpayers $9+ Billion in 2010
And the costs of raising a child usually ensures decades, if not a life, of poverty for its mother.
- US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Help prevent unintended pregnancies in your community:
publicize where women can access affordable contraception.



They can go here to find locations:




And there are many more actions you can do, right here.

*
*
*

SOLAR KEEPS SMILING




OO Faster Rooftop Solar Growth
To Cut Demand From Biggest U.S. Grid


OO 'The Switch: How Solar, Storage And New Tech
Means Cheap Power For All' - the solar revolution is closer than you think, argues an expert, as storage and new technology evolve.


OO MGM Resorts Expands Solar Array, Now US Largest





*
*
*


WHY WE SHOULD ACT NOW: RISING RISKS




Daily Climate Change: Global Map of Unusual Temperatures, July 20, 2016

How unusual has the weather been? No one event is "caused" by climate change, but global warming, which is predicted to increase unusual, extreme weather, is having a daily effect on weather, worldwide.

Looking above at recent temperature anomalies, much of the US and the waters surrounding it are experiencing warmer than normal temperatures: the eastern Pacific warm spot continues and so does the drought in California, despite the occasional precipitation.

Much of the areas surrounding the North Pole are experiencing much warmer than normal temperatures - not good news for our Arctic thermal shield of ice. Hotter than usual temperatures continue to dominate human habitats.



There is, of course, much more news on the consequences and solutions to climate change. To get it, check out this annotated resource list I've compiled, "Climate Change News Resources," at Wordpress.com here. For more information on the science of climate change, its consequences and solutions you can view my annotated list of online information resources here.

To help you understand just what science does and does NOT do, check this out!

Every day is Earth Day, folks, as I was reminded by this wild flower I photographed one spring. Making the U.S. a global clean energy leader will ensure a heck of a lot more jobs, and a clean, safe future. If you'd like to join the increasing numbers of people who want to TELL Congress that they will vote for clean energy candidates you can do so here. It's our way of letting Congress know there's a strong clean energy voting bloc out there. For more detailed summaries of the above and other climate change items, audio podcasts and texts are freely available.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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Mary Ellen Harte: Climate Change This Week: Undersea Deforestation Soars, Flipping Crystals, and More!  
Today, the Earth got a little hotter, and a little more crowded.




Saving BUB, Beautiful Unique Biodiversity, like this golden macaw, is another imp...

Read more: Climate Change, Environment, Drought, Extreme Weather, Global Warming, Sustainability, Energy, Energy Efficiency, Nature, Science, Technology, Technologie, Green Technology, Technology News, Climate Change Denial, Climate, Climate Science, Climate-Change, Obama, Green Energy, Clean Energy, Renewable Energy, Natural Gas, Wind Power, Solar Power, Fossil Fuels, Heat Waves, Congress, Voting, Weather, Business, Business News, Corporations, Economy, Climate Change Solutions, Greenhouse Gases, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Carbon Emissions, Food, Water, Coal, Fracking, Oil, Agriculture, Crops, Rising Sea Levels, Insurance, Pollution, Wildlife, Transportation, Transports, Transport, Cities, Deforestation, Jobs, Natural Disasters, Population, Population Growth, Overpopulation, Oceans, President Obama, Barack Obama, Epa, Nasa, Noaa, Department of Energy, Republicans, Gop, Democrats, Animals, Cute Animals, Fish, Birds, Activism, Political Activism, Humor, Alaska, California, Florida, New York, Nevada, United Nations, United Kingdom, England, Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Europe, European Union, France, India, Asia, Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Norway, Denmark, Children, Babies, Children'S Health, Kids, Human Health, Health, Education, Air Pollution, Seafood, Google, Apple, Amazon, Soil, Art, Taiwan, New York City, Poland, Peru, Gold, Green News

 
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Untitled by Amanda  

Untitled by Amanda

Amanda: Photos

 
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The Wild Ones: The Border  
The Wild Ones is a documentary series following the intersecting lives of men and horses at an Arizona prison.  
general  

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Canary Wharf from Greenwich  

Aleem Yousaf posted a photo:

 
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20160630-IMG_9180.jpg  

mrlaugh posted a photo:

 
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Rehab Hospitals May Harm A Third Of Patients, Report Finds  

Patients sent to rehabilitation facilities to recover from medical crises or surgery too often suffer additional harm from the care they get there, according to research by U.S. health officials.

 
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Former Attorney General Will Work With Airbnb To Address Discrimination  

The short-term rental platform has hired Eric Holder as outside counsel to help it craft a new anti-discrimination policy. Individuals and researchers have reported racial bias by the site's users.

 
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Twitter Bans 'Breitbart' Editor For Sending Offensive Tweets To Leslie Jones  

In an unusual move, Twitter has decided to ban a troll. The company suspended the account of a technology editor at the conservative news site Breitbart after he tweeted offensive posts to Leslie Jones, the Ghostbusters actress.

 
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What Does It Take To Get Permanently Banned From Twitter?  

Twitter says it's reviewing its hateful-conduct policy. The suspension of conservative writer Milo Yiannopoulos has prompted a new focus on the company's ongoing struggle to reign in abusive messages.

 
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Twitter Permanently Suspends Conservative Writer For Targeted Abuse  

The suspension of Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos comes amid a recent campaign in which users tweeted hundreds of racist and abusive messages at Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones.

 
technology  

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http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/19/486670809/bookstores-tweet-leads-to-love-then-marriage?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=technology  
Bookstore's Tweet Leads To Love, Then Marriage  

In 2012, the corporate Twitter account for a bookstore in London posted a joke about Pokemon. "I'm in love," a woman responded. More tweets followed, then a date. The wedding was last weekend.

 
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Black Robin  

Grantmasters posted a photo:

Old Blue - The saviour of the species.
The NZ Black Robin went through the most severe population bottleneck that you could imagine in the late late 70's. By 1980 she was the only breeding female left of the entire species! At one point the whole population consisted of just 5 individuals.
The fact that there are more than 200 Black Robins alive today is incredible.

If you don't already know about this species I recommend checking it out :)

 
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Without a Climate Plan, Republicans Struggle as Voters Shift  
The 2016 elections are heating up. And so is the planet. According to NASA, there is a 99 percent chance that 2016 will be the hottest year on record, surpassing the current record set in 2015.

And yet for the first time in the age of modern climate science, a presidential nominee believes climate change is a hoax. Donald Trump has said that global warming was "created by and for the Chinese" (he later said he was joking), and that he will rescind the Paris climate agreement and roll back the steps President Obama has taken to address the issue (definitely not joking).


Photo Credit: Jeremy Symons

Where does that leave Republicans who think the GOP should pay attention to climate change and support clean, renewable energy sources?

On their own.

GOP Stirrings in Congress

A week before the convention, 33 House Republicans joined Democrats to successfully defeat a proposal that would have stripped funding of climate change science at the Environmental Protection Agency.

It's not a vote that will set us on the path to doing something about climate, but the growing number of Republicans who are willing to vote independently on the issue is a notable shift. Just two years ago, only one House Republican, Rep. Chris Gibson of New York, voted against an amendment that would have prevented federal agencies from assessing the costs and risks posed by climate change.

This is the latest, but not the only, sign of heightened interest among Republicans in Congress. Fourteen House Republicans have now supported a resolution calling for action on climate change. When the resolution was introduced last September, Republican Carlos Curbelo explained the reality faced by his constituents in Florida.

"South Florida is the frontline of climate change, where we have seen its negative impact in the form of rising sea-levels and the erosion of our coastal communities. Our goal...is to shift the debate from whether climate change is real to what we can do to mitigate its effects."

In the Senate, a coalition of five Republicans and five Democrats, led by Senators Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat from Rhode Island, introduced an amendment calling for the United States to be a world leader on climate change and for Congress to act.

Many of these congressional voices on climate change took a pass on attending the GOP convention, according to Grist's Ben Adler.

Voters Heading in Different Direction

The GOP's slide into climate denial with Trump should alarm strategists who put together the Republican National Committee's post-mortem analysis of Mitt Romney's 2012 defeat. Their conclusion: the GOP lost the hearts, minds and votes of young voters, swamping the GOP's edge among older voters.

Democrats came to the same conclusion. Jim Messina, who ran President Obama's re-election campaign, revealed after the election one of the secrets to their success: climate change.

"In the 2012 election we did focus groups with young voters...and we asked them to describe a Republican, and their #1 word was 'dinosaur., We asked them why, and their biggest example was 'climate change.'"

The shift is also pushing against the trend of public opinion, and in particular a complex and evolving set of views among Republican voters.

Notably, there has been a 19 percent increase over the past two years in the share of conservative Republican voters who think global warming is happening. That's a larger jump than any other group of voters. Altogether, 73% of voters think global warming is happening.

And when it comes to addressing the problem, a May poll also found that 67 percent of Republicans support a Clean Energy Commitment and believe that "moving rapidly to clean energy is a big step toward reducing the damaging impacts of climate change."

Organizing Around a Moral Cause

Against this backdrop, a number of grassroots leaders convened in Cleveland during the Convention to discuss ways to spring the GOP from the box it has trapped itself in and re-connect with voters to offer a way forward. According to Rachel Lamb of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action:

"First and foremost, it's a moral issue." Climate change is "negatively impacting people, as well as the environment, which we're called to take care of by God."

A Road Back from the Abyss?

As Politico reports, Republican businessman and philanthropist Jay Faison laid out the challenge at a GOP convention event:

"If we have an environmental policy, I don't know what it is....we're virtually defenseless on this issue. Any purple state, we are at risk and we don't know it. Period."

The GOP's road back from the abyss of denial is anything but clear.

Perhaps mayors will lead the way. After all, mayors from both parties have to deal with the real climate damages to their communities.

Or perhaps the growing unrest among Republican rank-and-file in Congress offers a glimpse of a more hopeful path beyond the elections. If more republicans are ready to bring their ideas on climate solutions to the table, who knows what can happen?

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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Jeremy Symons: Without a Climate Plan, Republicans Struggle as Voters Shift  
The 2016 elections are heating up. And so is the planet. According to NASA, there is a 99 percent chance that 2016 will be the hottest year on record, surpassing the current record set in 2015.

Read more: Politics, Climate Change, Green, Congress, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Gop, Republicans, Clean Energy, Donald Trump, Green News

 
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Sunset  

moschettiphotography posted a photo:

 
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40 years ago today the US govt sent a taxpayer-funded robot to invade an alien hostile world  

Phenomenal photographic proof of planet plundering

Pics The surviving members of the Viking Mars probe team have been celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first probe to make it down onto the surface of the Red Planet, send back pictures, and perform scientific experiments.…

 
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Raving mad: Glow sticks are secret weapon in Facebook's 2.1Gbps laser internet drones  

Umm-tsch umm-tsch umm-tsch umm-tsch

At Facebook's F8 Developer Conference this year, Mark Zuckerberg revealed more details about his laser-firing drones that will encircle the world and relay Facebook, sorry, the internet to far-flung places, reaching potentially all seven billion of us.…

 
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Water-bottle bees cool the hive after their overheated mates beg  
After a hot day, some honeybees become living water tanks they store water in their gut in anticipation of demand from their sisters  
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Peckham  

p3cks57 posted a photo:

 
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Waterloo Sunset  

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London, England.
Olympus OM-D E-M10.

Website I Facebook I VSCO I Instagram

 
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Dusk at Hyde park  

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Dusk at Hyde park.

 
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The queens house  

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3D display exploits twisted light  
Images are encoded in orbital angular momentum of photons  
science  

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http://redirect.viglink.com?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2016%2F07%2F160719214826.htm&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8  
Tiny microbe turns tropical butterfly into male killer, scientists discover  
A male-killing microbe has now been identified in a tropical butterfly called the African Queen, which leads to the death of all sons when a mother is infected.  
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http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Flab-notes%2Fbracing-for-fire_b_11054740.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dgreen%26ir%3DGreen&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8  
Bracing For Fire  
By Rodman Linn


A photo from space of the Las Conchas fire in the Jemez mountains near Los Alamos, N.M. just after its start at 1:30 p.m. on June 26, 2011. On the first day, driven by strong and unpredictable winds, the fire burned 43,000 acres--a rate of about an acre per second. By the time the fire was controlled, it had burned more than 150,000 acres. (Photo courtesy of NASA.)

How Computer Modeling Might Help Us Better Understand--and Better Manage--Wildfires

This summer, throughout the West, higher temperatures and decreased precipitation brought on by climate change have ramped up the frequency of wildfires -- big, catastrophic fires -- while a century of fire suppression feeds the flames with a thick tangle of fuel in our overgrown forests.

We can't stop all fires -- and we shouldn't. Healthy ecosystems depend on them. But understanding what drives big fires and predicting their behavior helps the fire community prepare for the next blaze through appropriate land management, emergency plans and firefighting strategies. Beyond those benefits, a deeper understanding of wildfires prompts important insights into tactics for using prescribed fire as well as insight into larger regional environmental issues, including how fires change river flows and the availability of water for drinking, agriculture and energy production.

For scientists studying wildfire, the challenge is predicting the seemingly unpredictable. A wide range of conditions -- temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, larger weather patterns, available fuel, fuel conditions and terrain --influence the behavior of fire. Figuring out details such as the movement of hot gasses coming off a raging forest fire or the combination of convective and radiative heat transfer that ignite unburned fuels, for example, seems impossible at first. There's so much to consider, from how the fire front interacts with the atmosphere that drives it forward to the feedbacks of the fuel's structure on the fire and winds to the impacts of the topography and regional meteorology.

Fortunately, Los Alamos National Laboratory is well suited to address this kind of multidisciplinary, ultimately physics-based problem -- and the lab has a stake in wildfire prediction and management. As the Cerro Grande and Las Conchas fires demonstrated, the laboratory and neighboring communities are equally vulnerable to runaway conflagrations on our doorstep. Furthermore, Los Alamos' mission includes addressing energy security and national security, both of which can be affected by wildfires.



Modeling wildfires exploits the lab's unique capabilities in physics, computational modeling and high-performance computing. For decades the lab has built computer models of complex systems that move and change through time. That work includes hot gasses -- fire -- and the atmosphere. The laboratory's supercomputers make it possible.

When a team of atmospheric scientists, computational physicists and mathematicians in the laboratory's Earth and Environmental Sciences division, collaborating with the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station and Southern Research Station, set out to simulate the interacting processes that make up a wildfire as a basis for predicting its behavior, they leveraged a wealth of expertise and experience that had been developed partially through the laboratory's weapons program.

A research effort initiated by Laboratory Fellow Francis Harlow, a pioneer in computational fluid dynamics, and Andrew White, a visionary figure in the national high-performance computing community, led to the development of FIRETEC. It was the first wildfire model to simulate the interaction among many of the physical processes that determine the continuously shifting dance between fire and its surroundings. FIRETEC, which is now developed in collaboration with U.S. Forest Service, simulates three-dimensional interactions among fire, fuel and the environment at landscape scales. By coupling FIRETEC with an atmospheric-dynamics model called HIGRAD and using real-world data, the team can represent the interaction between fire and atmosphere and the way fire adjusts to terrain, vegetation, fuel and the dynamics of fire itself.

FIRETEC presents a new way of studying fire and learning how to better manage and cope with it. The model provides additional scientific input for decisions by policymakers working in land management, water resources and energy. The team hopes it will eventually assist fire and fuel management operations. Currently the team is partnering with the Rocky Mountain Research Station to study the combined influence of wind and slope on heat exposure in firefighter safety zones, with the Air Force Wildland Fire Center to study the efficiency of various prescribed fire tactics and with INRA of France and the Canadian Forest Service to study the effects of fuel breaks for fire management.

But there's more research to be done to further improve wildfire modeling for practical use in the field during a fire. FIRETEC's complexity and the massive amounts of data involved require enormous high-performance computers such as those available at Los Alamos to perform simulations. The laboratory-led team is now working with the Forest Service to apply what it learns from FIRETEC to assist in developing and refining less detailed but faster-running tools that incident fire commanders could run on their laptops to predict fire behavior over the next few hours. This is a short enough time frame to deploy firefighters in anticipation of the fire's next move or help keep firefighters out of harm's way. This faster-running tool could also benefit decision-support tools such as Simtable, which is currently used in the laboratory's Emergency Operations Center.

On another front, as part of a larger Los Alamos study on the impact of climate-driven changes on watersheds, laboratory researchers are working toward using FIRETEC to potentially spin off simplified models. One model can explore, for example, how the aftermath of a catastrophic fire in the Colorado River system might alter flows in the San Juan River. That's important locally because the San Juan supplies drinking water to Santa Fe and cools the Four Corners Generating Station, a major regional energy source. How will climate-driven changes to vegetation alter the pattern of fires and the severity of the effects in that watershed? What can be done to minimize those impacts? Research underway now should answer these questions.

Providing those answers is an appropriate endeavor for Los Alamos for several reasons. While the Los Alamos community has had more than its fair share of encounters with wildfire, the research is more than personal: it fits the laboratory's mission to enhance energy security and national security. Additionally, the required expertise in the combination of multi-phase fluid dynamics, heat transfer, combustion, computational modeling and computer science are optimally aligned with many of the laboratory's other mission areas. "Science serving society" is a catchy phrase, but in the case of wildfire modeling at Los Alamos, it couldn't be more apt.

Rod Linn is a senior scientist in the Computational Earth Science group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he studies and models a wide range of atmospheric phenomenon using computational physics. Linn has led much of the development and application of the FIRETEC computer program for predicting wildfire behavior, but the breadth of work using this tool is accomplished through a broad set of Los Alamos investigators as well as domestic and international collaborators.


More about how Los Alamos National Laboratory prepares for wildfires:

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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President Obama's New Energy Initiative Another Win for Solar  
Today, the White House announced a truly groundbreaking initiative called Clean Energy Savings for All Americans. This program aims to increase access to solar energy across communities of all income levels and geographies, so that no matter where you live, if you have a sunny roof, you have the chance to go solar. And the Administration did so by providing a bevy of options that move renewables and solar forward significantly.

The array of initiative components culminates in a goal of providing one gigawatt of solar for low to middle-income households by 2020. And chief among the announcements is the issuance of new guidance for property-assessed clean energy (PACE) financing that will allow mortgage insurance to now be issued by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA), rather than through the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Association (Freddie Mac), which ran into roadblocks with PACE loans six years ago.

Cutting through the alphabet soup of federal agencies, the bottom line is that more Americans will now be able to choose solar, and private industry can seize the opportunity to build more solar systems.

"Solar panels are no longer for wealthy folks who live where the sun shines every day, they're already a reality for Americans in communities all across the country. Today we're offering even more families and communities the chance to choose cleaner sources of energy," said Obama about the initiative.




One of the greatest parts about the PACE plan is that it leverages the flexibilities of the executive branch in ways that are seldom seen in Washington stovepipes. The initiative cuts red tape with the result that roughly 200,000 homes could choose to lower their electricity bills through solar over the next four years.

SEIA applauds the President for taking these measures, which mirror the solar industry's commitment to expand solar access to everyone, regardless of their income or where they live. These policies empower veterans and lower income households to cut power bills, while putting more Americans back to work with good-paying jobs installing solar panels from Los Angeles to Boston.

This is how it should be. This year, solar reached one million installations in the U.S., crossed over the threshold of providing 1 percent of American electricity, and provided more new power capacity than all other energy sources combined in the first quarter, and we're just getting warmed up. It's time for all Americans to have a ticket to the solar revolution, celebrating American innovation and smart federal policy.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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The Armed Citizens of the Republican Convention  

Ohio is an open-carry state, so many people at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland are toting firearms. For some, it's about protecting police. For others, it's about keeping protesters safe. The Atlantic spoke with two of these gun-wielding civilians about why they're armed at the RNC.

 
general  

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http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Flab-notes%2Fbracing-for-fire_b_11054740.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dscience%26ir%3DScience&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8  
Bracing For Fire  
By Rodman Linn


A photo from space of the Las Conchas fire in the Jemez mountains near Los Alamos, N.M. just after its start at 1:30 p.m. on June 26, 2011. On the first day, driven by strong and unpredictable winds, the fire burned 43,000 acres--a rate of about an acre per second. By the time the fire was controlled, it had burned more than 150,000 acres. (Photo courtesy of NASA.)

How Computer Modeling Might Help Us Better Understand--and Better Manage--Wildfires

This summer, throughout the West, higher temperatures and decreased precipitation brought on by climate change have ramped up the frequency of wildfires -- big, catastrophic fires -- while a century of fire suppression feeds the flames with a thick tangle of fuel in our overgrown forests.

We can't stop all fires -- and we shouldn't. Healthy ecosystems depend on them. But understanding what drives big fires and predicting their behavior helps the fire community prepare for the next blaze through appropriate land management, emergency plans and firefighting strategies. Beyond those benefits, a deeper understanding of wildfires prompts important insights into tactics for using prescribed fire as well as insight into larger regional environmental issues, including how fires change river flows and the availability of water for drinking, agriculture and energy production.

For scientists studying wildfire, the challenge is predicting the seemingly unpredictable. A wide range of conditions -- temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, larger weather patterns, available fuel, fuel conditions and terrain --influence the behavior of fire. Figuring out details such as the movement of hot gasses coming off a raging forest fire or the combination of convective and radiative heat transfer that ignite unburned fuels, for example, seems impossible at first. There's so much to consider, from how the fire front interacts with the atmosphere that drives it forward to the feedbacks of the fuel's structure on the fire and winds to the impacts of the topography and regional meteorology.

Fortunately, Los Alamos National Laboratory is well suited to address this kind of multidisciplinary, ultimately physics-based problem -- and the lab has a stake in wildfire prediction and management. As the Cerro Grande and Las Conchas fires demonstrated, the laboratory and neighboring communities are equally vulnerable to runaway conflagrations on our doorstep. Furthermore, Los Alamos' mission includes addressing energy security and national security, both of which can be affected by wildfires.



Modeling wildfires exploits the lab's unique capabilities in physics, computational modeling and high-performance computing. For decades the lab has built computer models of complex systems that move and change through time. That work includes hot gasses -- fire -- and the atmosphere. The laboratory's supercomputers make it possible.

When a team of atmospheric scientists, computational physicists and mathematicians in the laboratory's Earth and Environmental Sciences division, collaborating with the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station and Southern Research Station, set out to simulate the interacting processes that make up a wildfire as a basis for predicting its behavior, they leveraged a wealth of expertise and experience that had been developed partially through the laboratory's weapons program.

A research effort initiated by Laboratory Fellow Francis Harlow, a pioneer in computational fluid dynamics, and Andrew White, a visionary figure in the national high-performance computing community, led to the development of FIRETEC. It was the first wildfire model to simulate the interaction among many of the physical processes that determine the continuously shifting dance between fire and its surroundings. FIRETEC, which is now developed in collaboration with U.S. Forest Service, simulates three-dimensional interactions among fire, fuel and the environment at landscape scales. By coupling FIRETEC with an atmospheric-dynamics model called HIGRAD and using real-world data, the team can represent the interaction between fire and atmosphere and the way fire adjusts to terrain, vegetation, fuel and the dynamics of fire itself.

FIRETEC presents a new way of studying fire and learning how to better manage and cope with it. The model provides additional scientific input for decisions by policymakers working in land management, water resources and energy. The team hopes it will eventually assist fire and fuel management operations. Currently the team is partnering with the Rocky Mountain Research Station to study the combined influence of wind and slope on heat exposure in firefighter safety zones, with the Air Force Wildland Fire Center to study the efficiency of various prescribed fire tactics and with INRA of France and the Canadian Forest Service to study the effects of fuel breaks for fire management.

But there's more research to be done to further improve wildfire modeling for practical use in the field during a fire. FIRETEC's complexity and the massive amounts of data involved require enormous high-performance computers such as those available at Los Alamos to perform simulations. The laboratory-led team is now working with the Forest Service to apply what it learns from FIRETEC to assist in developing and refining less detailed but faster-running tools that incident fire commanders could run on their laptops to predict fire behavior over the next few hours. This is a short enough time frame to deploy firefighters in anticipation of the fire's next move or help keep firefighters out of harm's way. This faster-running tool could also benefit decision-support tools such as Simtable, which is currently used in the laboratory's Emergency Operations Center.

On another front, as part of a larger Los Alamos study on the impact of climate-driven changes on watersheds, laboratory researchers are working toward using FIRETEC to potentially spin off simplified models. One model can explore, for example, how the aftermath of a catastrophic fire in the Colorado River system might alter flows in the San Juan River. That's important locally because the San Juan supplies drinking water to Santa Fe and cools the Four Corners Generating Station, a major regional energy source. How will climate-driven changes to vegetation alter the pattern of fires and the severity of the effects in that watershed? What can be done to minimize those impacts? Research underway now should answer these questions.

Providing those answers is an appropriate endeavor for Los Alamos for several reasons. While the Los Alamos community has had more than its fair share of encounters with wildfire, the research is more than personal: it fits the laboratory's mission to enhance energy security and national security. Additionally, the required expertise in the combination of multi-phase fluid dynamics, heat transfer, combustion, computational modeling and computer science are optimally aligned with many of the laboratory's other mission areas. "Science serving society" is a catchy phrase, but in the case of wildfire modeling at Los Alamos, it couldn't be more apt.

Rod Linn is a senior scientist in the Computational Earth Science group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he studies and models a wide range of atmospheric phenomenon using computational physics. Linn has led much of the development and application of the FIRETEC computer program for predicting wildfire behavior, but the breadth of work using this tool is accomplished through a broad set of Los Alamos investigators as well as domestic and international collaborators.


More about how Los Alamos National Laboratory prepares for wildfires:

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
science  

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http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/sunset-at-the-viking-lander-1-site  
Sunset at the Viking Lander 1 Site  
On July 20, 1976, at 8:12 a.m. EDT, NASA received the signal that the Viking Lander 1 successfully reached the Martian surface. This major milestone represented the first time the United States successfully landed a vehicle on the surface of Mars, collecting an overwhelming amount of data that would soon be used in future NASA missions.  
astronomy  

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http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2Fjasonbuckley777%2F28331944802%2F&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8  
HEART OF GLASS  

jason Buckley. posted a photo:

 
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http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fanna-jane-grossman%2Fdonald-trump-poop-bags-my_b_11076128.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dgreen%26ir%3DGreen&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8  
Donald Trump Poop Bags, My Cartoonist Dad And Me: Rethinking How We Pick Up After Dogs  
In the 1970s in New York City, dog poo was a whole to-do. A campaign to clean up the streets of excrement began when Fran Lee, an Upper West Side activist, started drawing attention to a purported link between feces on sidewalks and child blindness. What followed was something of a waste-management creativity renaissance: enthusiasts wrote up plans for everything from sidewalk dog toilets to poop-freezing sprays to city-funded "enviromaids" employed to pick up after dogs.

Ultimately, the solution was a simple mandate: Pick up after your dog. Many scoffed at the thought. My dad was among the dissenters. But, one day in the early 1980s when we were out together in SoHo with our dog Mabel, she went, we walked away, and then a stranger shouted at us for not picking it up. That moment changed everything.

Back then, our excrement removal routine depended on something once commonly found in most households: newspaper. Indeed, Fran Lee, the anti-poop crusader, specifically suggested people use The New York Times for this purpose. It was an exciting time for print media.

In our home, newspaper served several purposes, not a few of which had to do with animal care and control; it lined the ground for Mabel when she was a puppy; it was bedding for the guinea pig. Once, when he was coming home with the Sunday Times, my dad spotted a rat on the stairs and slammed the paper down, killing it. He wrote to the Times to tell them of this alternate use of their publication. They published it as a letter to the editor.

This was not the first time my dad's work was seen in a major paper. He is a prolific political caricaturist, and his send-ups were frequently in the publications I'd bring on walks. Often, while walking the dog, I would find myself interested enough in something that I'd stand over Mabel's deposit for a minute, finishing a paragraph. It was a habit I probably picked up from my dad. "I remember reading a Times article on a piece of paper I was using to scoop," he once told me. "It was about some new discovery regarding the stars and planets. My deep thought was about living out, at that moment, the perfect conjunction of the glorious and the disgusting. Needless to say, I never finished the article."

Years later I would go on to write for some of the newspapers we used to for this purpose. Was my choice of career determined by these stolen moments of paper-reading? Hard to say, but I know the secondary use for newspaper never left my mind. In the pre-blog era, if I found myself obsessing about an article I was writing, I'd remember the ephemeral nature of the medium. It'd soon be covered in shit.

When I got my own dog in the mid 2000s, I realized that my family had been living in the dog-waste dark ages. Even the most functional use of print media was on the wane. Every pet store carried small plastic bag rolls especially made for the purpose of poop. The bags were cheap, but it seemed weird to me to spend any money on a plastic bag that would be used to place poop into another plastic bag.

I wasn't a Times subscriber at that point, but, thanks to an abundance of takeout menus and old New Yorkers, I managed to resist the poop-bag craze for years. But seamless.com changed the volume of menus shoved under the door, and I eventually started to read magazines on my iPad. More recently I used supermarket plastic bags, but those are also in their golden years, thanks to online grocery delivery and increasing legislation across the country that imposes fees on their use.

So, I started to buy those darn rolls. Using them is part of a semi-daily ritual that is now about nothing but poop. To be sure, there are a few lines of decorative poop bags -- pink argyle, green stripes, etc. But... yawn. I dreamt of something that would tickle my intellect, not match my handbag.

This line of thinking led me to try to imagine a way in which we could embrace the ephemeral nature of printed content, while also injecting a bit of culture into a routine chore. Is there a way that turd-tidying could be, again, a time to take in a tidbit of art, or even literature? Could we use our dogs' waste to perhaps make a political statement? Is it possible that these small moments of civic duty (doodie!) could get us to look up from our phones and actually, in some way, alter the way we look at the world?

I brought the idea to my father. He has caricatured presidential hopefuls for many decades and has dabbled in unusual media before -- in the 1980s, he sculpted Ronald Reagan out of chopped liver.



Could I mine his talent to put something meaningful on a bag meant for excrement? Who would be the appropriate person for him to caricature for this purpose? It'd have to be someone in the news -- maybe someone generally disliked by the kind of people who would appreciate a bit of wit in an unusual place. The answer seemed obvious: Donald Trump. His name even contains the word "dump!" It was meant to be.

Dad initially refused -- he did not want to be associated with poop. I argued the point: Is poop not one of the great equalizing factors of mankind? He complied.

I didn't have such luck in the other direction: Poop bag makers wanted nothing to do with Trump. There are only a handful of US-based factories that have the machinery to make the kind of small rolls I wanted, and all said they did not want to be involved in politics. After much searching, I finally found a factory in a place that was thrilled to print Donald Trump's face on a minimum of 5,000 poop bags. That place was China.

Call it a physical manifestation of editorial commentary: Experience the joy of smashing the presumptive GOP candidates face into excrement. But the fun doesn't end there! Tie it up and put it on display on the curb -- his head filled with your dog's shit.



My years as a print journalist may be in the rear view, but as a curator of plastic bag art, I've only just found my preferred medium. The Donald Trump bags have inspired me to go big: Why not a subscription service! PoopBag OfTheMonth.com was born. What do YOU want to see on your poop bag?! The only limits are your imagination! And the size of the crap.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fkarl-grossman%2Findian-point-documentary-_b_11035654.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dgreen%26ir%3DGreen&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8  
'Indian Point' -- Documentary On Problem-Plagued Nuclear Plants Is Out  
"Indian Point" is a film about the long problem-plagued Indian Point nuclear power plants that are "so, so risky -- so close to New York City," notes its director and producer Ivy Meeropol. "Times Square is 35 miles away."

The plants constitute a disaster waiting to happen, threatening especially the lives of the 22 million people who live within 50 miles from them. "There is no way to evacuate--what I've learned about an evacuation plan is that there is none," says Meeropol. The plants are "on two earthquake fault lines," she notes. "And there is a natural gas pipeline right there that an earthquake could rupture."

Meanwhile, both plants, located in Buchanan, New York along the Hudson River, are now essentially running without licenses. The federal government's 40-year operating license for Indian Point 2 expired in 2013 and Indian Point 3's license expired last year. Their owner, Entergy, is seeking to have them run for another 20 years--although nuclear plants were never seen as running for more than 40 years because of radioactivity embrittling metal parts and otherwise causing safety problems. (Indian Point 1 was opened in 1962 and closed in 1974, its emergency core cooling system deemed impossible to fix.)

At Indian Point 2 and 3 there have been frequent accidents and issues involving releases of radioactivity through the years. The discharges of tritium or irradiated water, H30, which cannot be filtered out of good water, into the aquifer below the Westinghouse nuclear plants and also the Hudson River have been a major concern.

But it's not just Indian Point that "Indian Point" is about. The film emphasizes: "With so much attention focused on Indian Point, the future of nuclear plants in the United States might depend on what happens here."

"I would give the film an 'A.' I wholeheartedly recommend it for wide release throughout the United States," says Priscilla Star, founder of the Coalition Against Nukes: "It is a stellar learning tool. It depicts the David-versus-Goliath struggle involving those trying to close these decrepit nuclear plants and the profit-hungry nuclear industry. It shows grassroots activists fighting the time bombs in their community."

The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. For the past two weeks it has been showing five-times-a-day at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, also in Manhattan. That run will go until Thursday, July 21. On Friday, July 22, it is to open in Los Angeles. After its theatrical release, it will air on the Epix cable TV channel.

Among those in the film are anti-Indian Point activist Marilyn Elie and long-time environmental journalist Roger Witherspoon who has written extensively about Indian Point. And also Entergy employees appear. Meeropol and her crew were given full access to the nuclear plants.

The documentary provides a special focus on Dr. Gregory Jaczko. He was chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) when the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan began in March 2011. As notes Meeropol, Jaczko sought to have "lessons learned" from the Fukushima catastrophe--which involved General Electric nuclear plants--applied to nuclear power plants in the U.S. And he was given "a really tough time." Pressure by the nuclear industry caused Jaczko, with a doctorate in physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to be "pushed out" as NRC chairman and member. Meeropol tells of how "this guy, a decent person trying to do his job, was completely abused."

Meeropol, in an interview, said the NRC "is too closely linked to the nuclear industry. It's not going to do anything that the nuclear industry regards as too costly or onerous. I want that to be one of the biggest takeaways from the film--how a regulatory body cares more about the industry it is supposed to regulate than the public. And of all industries that should be regulated, it's the nuclear power industry." She said she found the nuclear industry and nuclear energy officials in the U.S. government "one and the same."

Meeropol began the "Indian Point" film project in January 2011. She had moved from Brooklyn up to the Hudson Valley "a decade ago when our son was born. Commuting in and out of the city on the Metro-North train, I went right past the plants. They looked so foreboding and odd there in that beautiful landscape."

Also, until she, her husband and son moved upstate, "having lived in New York City, I had no idea how close they were to the city."

Further, in the community where they went to live, Cold Spring, 15 miles from the plants. "we could hear the [emergency] sirens" from the plants and she was unsettled receiving in the mail an "emergency preparedness booklet titled: 'Are You Ready?'"

So the experienced filmmaker started doing research on the "dangerous endeavor of making nuclear energy." With the Fukushima disaster beginning just a few months after she started on the film, that "broadened" its perspective.

She said the films she has made have always been "character-driven" and she was attracted to feature in "Indian Point" Marilyn Elie--"she knows her stuff"--and Roger Witherspoon. "I liked his dynamic. He is a journalist. She is an activist." She stressed to Entergy officials that she would be even-handed "and quite amazingly was given access" to the plants. Her connecting with Jaczko was crucial. It "became my crusade to redeem Greg Jaczko before the world."

She started making the film on a shoe string. "I ran out of money numerous times." But she was able to get financial support from the Sundance Institute, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Catapult Fund, and individual contributions. And "partnering" with Julie Goldman, founder of Motto Films, was extremely important. Goldman is also producer of "Indian Point." A "very generous grant" was received from the MacArthur Foundation which also "opened up other doors."
Indian Point sits there on the Hudson, continuing with accidents and in emitting what the NRC says are "permissible" levels of radioactivity. They are highly likely candidates for a Chernobyl or Fukushima-level catastrophe in the most highly populated area of the United States. And the NRC, steadfastly ignoring Jaczko's warnings, in league with Entergy, seeks to let the decrepit time bombs run for another 20 years--just asking for disaster.

The good news is that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been endeavoring to have the Indian Point nuclear plants closed and safe-energy activists and an array of environmental and safe-energy organizations are working hard to shut them down--and the film "Indian Point" is out.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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New dinosaur species may give clues to evolutionary origin of megaraptorid clade  
A new species of megaraptorid dinosaur discovered in Patagonia may help discern the evolutionary origins of the megaraptorid clade.  
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More for less in pastures  
Research comparing pastures with multiple types of plants to those with less variety shows surprising results in land productivity and soil health.  
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Scientists watch water fleas take over new territory  
Look into any nutrient-rich pond almost anywhere in the world and you will find Daphnia pulex, a tiny crustacean (also called a water flea) that is a source of food for fish and fascination for scientists. A new study offers insights into this creature's ability to disperse and its remarkable success in the wild.  
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An Archaeological Mystery In Ghana: Why Didn't Past Droughts Spell Famine?  

A terrible drought hit Ghana in the 1400s, far worse than today's conditions. Yet people had enough to eat, while today they go hungry. What changed? In a word, colonialism, a new study suggests.

 
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Party wave!  
Party wave!  
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Eclipse of the moon (© Christopher Collins/Alamy) 2016-07-20 [www.bing.com/search]  
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Yser River in West F  
Yser River in West Flanders, Belgium (© Wouter Pattyn/Minden Pictures) 2016-07-16 [www.bing.com/search]  
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Beach huts in Muizen  
Beach huts in Muizenberg, South Africa (© Getty Images) 2016-07-17 [www.bing.com/search]  
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160720094641.htm  
Social robots: Programmable by everyone  
Social robots can be used in the educational or health system, where they would support trainers and therapists in their work. The robots can be programmed to practice vocabulary with children or to make rehabilitation exercises with stroke patients.  
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160720094432.htm  
Medieval water power initiated collapse of salmon stocks  
Salmon largely disappeared from our waters due to the construction of water mills, ecologists now conclude. The construction of water mills caused the destruction of the gravel beds in streams, making them unsuitable for salmon to spawn. Whereas it was previously thought that water contamination was the most likely explanation, archival research demonstrates that salmon stocks had already dwindled prior to the invention of the steam engine.  
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https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/18-24-july-2016/influence-clients-not-just-sell-2/  
How to influence your clients and not just sell to them  

Design has the potential to be an industry of influence. And for that to happen, every design business and those working within it need to recognise, get comfortable with and develop their potential for influence. By becoming experts in influence, they become better communicators which encourages their clients to be braver with their decisions delivering more for all parties.

What does this mean for you and what needs to happen for it to take place within your business?

A consultancy that is seeing the impact of this change within their business is Open Water. I spoke with Creative Director and Head of the business, Philip Hansen about his experience of a shift in influence.

For Hansen, it's about the bigger picture: “New approaches to influence rather than just selling are just one indication of a more general move towards design thinking within businesses,” he says. He has noticed changes in his clients and the way they are treating their customers. They are setting their businesses up in a far more customer focused way, focussing ‘on' them rather than ‘at' their clients.

Taking the client's perspective

Open Water is acting on this observation. Hansen says the consultancy is “using this insight to improve relationships with clients. We are asking: ‘How can we look at things from their perspective?'”

This has lead Open Water to think more about what it is it brings, with a focus, not just on the deliverables but on the interactions that shape the deliverables. “We bring more than an end product. We bring our thinking,” says Philip.

What can get in the way of this shift? Pressures at both ends play a part, around both time and money.These can force consultancies and clients to be speedy at the expense of opportunity with a rush to the end product. And what you focus on will develop. If you focus on your end product, you're saying ‘this is all we do'.

Focus on the customer not the end product

Hansen believes that “design businesses offer such a broad range of things, services etc they've always got something to offer.  But an approach that is more focused on the process, that uncovers problems and keeps focus on the customer is surely more positive and has greater intrinsic value.”

What impact has growing their own idea of influence had on Open Water? Hansen explains that “As we have become more comfortable about influence, our clients have become better. The kind of work we get improves, but interestingly, the quality of what we do hasn't changed. But what has improved are our ability and skills to guide clients.”

Influence can become a key skill

How has this shift happened? When a consultancy starts to think of influence as a natural and ever present part of the conversation, and part of its expertise it then becomes something that can be managed.

Take for example, a typical situation for a design business, receiving feedback on work. If feedback is always seen as negative, you end up with a jarring communication with your client. What Hansen did was turn that into more of a conversation.

He says: “We ask a client questions about the view they have put forward. We are curious and during this process it may emerge in fact it often does that we can answer these questions in a different way.

“What happens next is that we enter a new position with our clients. When they come to us with a new piece of work, the client starts to ask us these questions before the process has started. For us this is an example of practical influence, it's desirable to all sides.”

When designers are faced with a situation where they could use influence, they don't always think about it in a design way. They may think, ‘the barrier is insurmountable or out of their control.' But actually it's about something that both parties are trying to work towards. Do they have the skills to change that position? Surely they do. These are the skills that got them here in the first place, to the point where they have an idea to present.

Where you can influence your client

So what happens when a client says ‘I don't like this…' or ‘I prefer it this way.' These are opportunities for design businesses to use skills of influence.

How might you go about developing your approach to influence? Here are some questions to ask. If your sales process is about developing a way to create income that is authentic to the business, how does your sales ethos compare with the ethos of the business? Do you have a clear idea of what these are and are they aligned? Sometimes the sales team is separated from the business and protected. They are allowed their own culture because it's ‘the way they work' or ‘how sales have to happen'. But if your business ethos and sales ethos are misaligned? What might you be missing out on? What extra opportunities can you create from these being in-tune with each other?

Hansen also has a rallying call to the industry as a whole: “Being a designer is like living a thousand lives. You get to work with your clients on their business in ways that others don't. If the industry doesn't see itself as an industry of influence, it's too reliant on clients coming to their own conclusions. And that limits our potential for change in the long-run.”

John Scarrott works with design business leaders and their teams on their sales, presenting and networking skills. Follow him @JohnDScarrott or find him at johnscarrott.com

The post How to influence your clients and not just sell to them appeared first on Design Week.

 
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https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/18-24-july-2016/starbucks-launches-new-concept-cafe-busy-london-commuters/  
Starbucks launches new concept café for “busy London commuters”  

Starbucks has launched a new concept café in Canary Wharf which looks to make buying coffee faster and easier for London's busy commuters.

The new express café has been designed by Starbucks' in-house design team, and follows on from similar stores in New York, Toronto and Chicago. The London store marks the first of this style in Europe.

It features a walk-around interior, with a touchscreen at its centre allowing customers to place their orders. Seating and tables are limited and arranged around the peripheries of the store and outside the main entrance, allowing more space for people to walk in and out.

The menu included at this early order point has been “streamlined”, says Starbucks, providing a shorter, more succinct list of coffees to choose from to give customers a speedy ordering experience.

The express store is aimed at customers “on-the-go” who are already well-acquainted with the Starbucks menu, so “know what they want” before they get to the till, says the company.

Included in the short menu is a selection of coffees, espresso shots and some of the more popular food items such as breakfast sandwiches. These items are displayed on digital menu boards which rotate daily.

Customers are also able to order ahead, via Starbucks' own mobile order and pay system through the store's app, customers can locate the store they want to collect from, order their drink then pay via their phone, ready to pick up in store.

The express store follows on from another Starbucks café concept which opened in London earlier this year, which looked to slow down rather than speed up customers.

The Reserve coffee bar, based opposite the Noel Coward Theatre near Leicester Square, encourages pre-theatre-going customers to relax over coffee cocktails, wine and an antipasti platter, while providing break-out spaces and charging points for people wishing to work and study. This café also uses the mobile order and pay system.

But the express store is aimed specifically at commuters in a rush on their way to work, and hopes to “improve convenience for customers”, says Starbucks EMEA vice president of operations Rhys Iley.

He adds that the concept is the “latest in Starbucks' evolving store portfolio”, though there are currently no hints as to future formats. The express store is open seven days a week and based at the centre of the City of London's financial district, in Canary Wharf.

The post Starbucks launches new concept café for “busy London commuters” appeared first on Design Week.

 
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First atmospheric study of Earth-sized exoplanets points to possible habitability  
Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have conducted the first search for atmospheres around temperate, Earth-sized planets beyond our solar system and found indications that increase the chances of habitability on two exoplanets.  
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Ichneumon wasp (Tryc  

Ichneumon wasp (Trychosis sp.) collected at rare Charitable Research Reserve, Ontario, Canada, and photographed at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (sample ID: BIOUG22570-F02; specimen record: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_RecordView?processid=RRMFE3045-15; BIN: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_BarcodeCluster?clusteruri=BOLD:ACW1110)

 
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https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/18-24-july-2016/20th-century-product-like-see-get-21st-century-makeover/  
Which 20th Century product would you like to see get a 21st century makeover?  

Aside from everything that has happened politically over the last month, I've always found it strange that the UK is at the very centre of the €1 and €2 coins, despite the fact that we never adopted the currency.

The UK of course remains part of Europe, even if it will no longer be in the European Union. But the Euro coin, as any mint currency around the world, should present a more accurate representation of its geographical spread.

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Let's go for big, clunky and impractical: the juke box. Many 20th Century revamps have resulted in designing things smaller, streamlined and minimal. I'd like to see the opposite for a change. I don't mean an app-version or a mini digital version of a juke box (I'm sure they exist), I want to get up and properly juke!

Remember the pure joy of sifting through atrocious music choices, deciding on a pretty crap song, yet feeling ecstatic when it (eventually) came on? I would like to relive that experience. Look at how popular Photo Booths are in Berlin, and pin-ball machines are still thriving (there's even an Angry Bird one). So, here's to crap music choices, and dancing like no one's looking.

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Practically every consumer product in our world has got smaller, but noticeable exceptions are TV screens which have got larger and better quality, and cars which have got larger and heavier, taking up more space on the road and using more fuel than they would if they were smaller.

The BMW Mini is a prime example of what was once a miracle of space management, that has now bloated into what 50 years ago would have been a medium sized family car.

What would be really wonderful (and maybe commercially attractive) would be to look at remaking the Mini to its original dimensions, but using modern materials and technology to make it safer, more efficient and better than it ever was.

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The original Saab 900 turbo convertible. More specifically, the Monte Carlo yellow special edition. Sharp at both ends, self-assured and happy, it's a glorious car to look at. It was ahead of its time mechanically and for a car of that age is comfortable, with well-designed leather seats and decent internal space for a convertible.

I fell in love with it as a copywriting intern at KHBB on Charing Cross Road and pledged that one day I'd have one. And I do a J reg, bought on eBay. It drives like running in trainers three times too large, drinks fuel like a tired mum on Prosecco and my hood's stopped working.

I'd love it to be reissued with a great fuel-efficient engine, modern electronics and properly engineered body/chassis arrangement but don't anybody change the body shape. GM did, and it just wasn't a 900.

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Straight out of art college in 1991 I couldn't wait to get my hands on a little black & white Mac Classic in fact I've still got it! It was also around the same time I first played on the Nintendo NES.

Since then I've always seen Nintendo as the Apple of the gaming consoles. So in a similar vein, albeit very cute, tiny, not connected to the internet and with a limited number of games, I'd like to see Apple reproduce the black & white, connected to the internet version of the Mac Classic (Prince of Persia included).

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The Contax T2 35mm point & shoot film camera. In an age of VSCO filters and pixel peeping, an affordable reissue of this beautifully simple, well built and well equipped pocket film camera would be a breath of fresh (1990's) air. No need to make it over just reissue it in all its glory to the same spec including the Zeiss lens.

The post Which 20th Century product would you like to see get a 21st century makeover? appeared first on Design Week.

 
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https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/18-24-july-2016/edward-barber-jay-osgerby-design-wind-installation-london-design-biennale-2016/  
Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby design installation for London Design Biennale 2016  

Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby have worked alongside the V&A to create a wind-powered installation that is set to be displayed at the inaugural London Design Biennale this September.

Alongside installations from more than 35 other countries, Forecast Barber and Osgerby's entry on behalf of the UK has been designed to coincide with the biennale's theme of “Utopia by Design”. The concept celebrates the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More's famous work, Utopia, as part of Somerset House's UTOPIA 2016 season.

Supported by British Land, the installation will be displayed in the Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court at Somerset House throughout the course of the event. It is made up of a group of wind masts and rotating elements, inspired by weather measuring instruments.

“functionality and beauty”

Based on a simple kinetic structure, the installation is designed to respond to the elements, moving when the wind picks up or changes direction. “Forecast responds to the theme of Utopia by linking our seafaring past to a future of truly sustainable power,” say Barber and Osgerby.

“As an island nation, Britain has historically been reliant on harnessing the power of the wind and the waves for transportation, migration, trade and exploration. Today, the UK is a world leader in offshore wind energy. Forecast is intended to reference this and highlight the opportunity for a more sustainable future.”

Victoria Broackes, V&A curator, adds: “Striking a delicate balance between functionality and beauty, Forecast will be an expression of what might be possible: much like Thomas More's vision of Utopia itself.”

The inaugural London Design Biennale London Design Festival's sister event will present newly commissioned contemporary design, design-led innovation, creativity and research by designers from countries across the world.

It will run from 7-27 September at Somerset House, London. Tickets are available here.

The post Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby design installation for London Design Biennale 2016 appeared first on Design Week.

 
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Galway festival 2016: 'a powerhouse of ideas and innovation'  

Ireland's international festival has shown the merits of merging different art forms while reawakening enthusiasm for a much-reprised Beckett classic

They were dancing in the streets last week in Galway. It wasn't simply because the city's international arts festival was in full swing but because it had just been announced that Galway had been named European capital of culture for 2020.

As a regular visitor to Galway, I was delighted but also felt a pang of envy. Of the €45m (£38m) budget for 2020, €39m will come from EU and state funds. Presumably, in a post-Brexit world, no UK city will ever again be eligible either for the award or for the financial boost that comes with it. If Galway deserves the recognition, it is partly because its annual arts festival, under the direction of Paul Fahy, is a powerhouse of ideas and innovation.

Related: Arlington review dance, art and poetry explode in Enda Walsh's brave new world

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Skyscraper city: how New York was built in pictures  

The Big Apple's early 20th-century building boom transformed the city with skyscrapers, subways and an awful lot of cement as documented in these photographs from the New York Public Library's archives

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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/jul/20/maria-svarbova-swimming-pools-slovakia-in-pictures  
The water's lovely: eerie Slovakian swimming pools in pictures  

Slovakian photographer Mária Švarbová stages atmospheric shots of pastel-hued swimming pools, full of pristine waters and blood-red bathing caps

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https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/jul/20/architecture-norway-road-trip-national-tourist-routes  
Driven to distraction: the Norway road trip where cool design meets dramatic scenery  

Norway's roadside architecture project, part of its National Tourist Routes, has led to the creation of bridges and viewing platforms that make every journey a tour de force and more new designs are on the horizon

Vertigo-inducing viewing platforms, island-hopping bridges, and some of the funkiest toilet facilities in the northern hemisphere: these are just a sample of the design flourishes that Norway's National Tourist Routes programme (NTR) has introduced across the country over the past 15 years. Add to this the fact that the roads programme has been a great incubator for Norway's young, vibrant architectural scene which is respected for its daring and imagination across Europe and for anyone heading north this summer, with design leanings or simply curious, a road trip beckons.

This is a far cry from the NTR's beginnings. The first pilot project by the then young and today highly respected firm of Jensen & Skodvin Architects (JSA) was completed in western Norway in 1997. Aimed at drawing tourists into the stunning, if rarely visited, landscape through appealing roadside architecture, a full programme was subsequently launched, with 18 routes across Norway's south, its coastal regions and the far north eventually chosen in 2004. The pieces were primarily architectural, though in places, art installations and sculptures were also introduced, and by the end of the decade a host of impressive works were adding roadside lustre to the grandeur of Norway's geography. A programme of rest stops, viewing platforms, bridges, walkways and restaurants was rolled out, with some jaw-dropping moments such as Tommie Wilhelmsen and Todd Saunders' Aurland lookout.

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Hillary Clinton's Acceptance Speech At The DNC: What Would Roosevelt Do About The Climate Crisis?  
For the past two decades, America's leading environmental analysts, including Lester Brown, Joseph Romm and Thomas Friedman, have written of the need for a World War II-scale mobilization in response to the global climate and sustainability crisis. This election season, the advocacy has finally gone mainstream. Bernie Sanders called for a WWII-scale climate mobilization at the April 14 CNN Brooklyn debate, and on July 9, the Democratic Party platform committee overwhelmingly voted in favor of an amendment calling for a "WWII-type national mobilization to save civilization" from "the global climate emergency."

Many of us have known for years that such a mobilization will be required to save America, and indeed, all of human civilization from catastrophe. In 2007, Secretary Clinton referenced the need for a WWII-scale mobilization to address the climate crisis in a major speech on energy and climate. After the 2012 election, Susie Tompkins Buell urged President Obama to address the challenge of climate change by appointing officials to "galvanize the equivalent of the Roosevelt-led mobilization for World War II."

Now the Democratic Party at large has taken up the mantle of a Rooseveltian climate mobilization. In 2016, the idea of a World War II-equivalent mobilization to restore a stable climate -- not simply a commitment to clean energy -- is what demonstrates to Americans a serious commitment to overcoming the climate crisis.

Secretary Clinton's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention provides a momentous opportunity for her to double down on her advocacy of a WWII-scale mobilization to restore a safe and stable climate. If the Secretary champions a WWII-style climate mobilization, it will provide an inspiring contrast to Donald Trump's neo-isolationist "America First" approach to energy policy and global affairs. Furthermore, if she commits to holding a climate summit in the first 100 days of her administration, it will demonstrate a concrete commitment toward overcoming the climate crisis.

A principled call for a heroic mobilization to save civilization can unite Americans of all political persuasions -- including those who genuinely want to make America great again.

While Donald Trump calls the climate crisis a "Chinese Hoax" the Secretary can demonstrate her commitment to lead like FDR--to commence an "all hands on deck" mobilization that will protect our national security, create millions of new jobs, stabilize the global environment, and show American greatness.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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One part of Antarctica has been cooling since 1998 here's why  
The once fast-warming Antarctic Peninsula has cooled over the past 18 years thanks to shifting winds but global warming will soon override their effect  
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New data on bird population trends and the climate conditions they occupy  
A new study of population trends among 46 ecologically diverse bird species in North America overturns a long-held assumption that the climate conditions occupied by a species do not change over time. Instead, birds that have increased in abundance over the last 30 years now occupy a wider range of climate conditions than they did 30 years ago, and declining species occupying a smaller range.  
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Using bed bug shed skins to combat the pest  
The shed skins of bed bugs retain the 'obnoxious sweetness' smell often associated with the pests, a finding that could potentially be used to combat infestations of the insects, new research suggests.  
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Are forests of the future at risk?  
Human disturbance negatively affects the pollination and seed dispersal of forest trees an effect that can be observed in both tropical and temperate forests. This is the key result of a synthesis of 408 studies from 34 countries around the globe. In the long term, less pollination and seed dispersal is likely to reduce the ability of forests to natural regenerate.  
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Habitat needs of nestling, fledgling songbirds  
Both before and after they leave the nest, baby birds face a host of challenges. A new study examining songbird survival in the nestling and fledgling stages finds that even in the same habitat, different species face different risks and survive at different rates.  
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