Eideard

One nagging issue with electric vehicles is range. While today’s lithium-ion batteries are much better than yesterday’s nickel-metal hydride batteries, they still don’t offer enough energy storage to take an EV much further than 100 miles without a lengthy recharge. Even if the Li-ion batteries were up to the challenge, there is still the awkward problem of where to pack 1,000 pounds (or more) of bulky storage cells into a vehicle’s chassis.

IBM thinks it has a solution with a promising new lithium-air battery. According to the technology giant, a typical Li-air battery cell has a theoretical energy density more than 1,000 times greater than today’s industry-standard Li-ion battery cell. Even better, Li-air batteries are one-fifth the size and they offer a lifespan at least five times as long.

So, what has been holding IBM back? It appears that there was a problem with the the original Li-air automotive application, as frequent recharging cycles compromised battery life. However, the engineers have recently found alternative electrolyte compounds that look very promising. The team’s goal is to have a full-scale prototype ready by 2013, with commercial batteries on sale by the end of the decade.

Bravo! I’m afraid we’ll have to replace my wife’s decades-old Volvo before an affordable EV is actually available on the car lots of New Mexico. But – I keep watch on projects like this, anyway. Maybe, we’ll get the opportunity to buy one, yet.

Click on the image twice – to bring up the whole disaster.

The Environmental Protection Agency has completed regulations limiting the release of mercury and other toxic air pollutants from cement plants, a move the Obama administration said would save lives but that cement makers warned could drive jobs overseas.

This is the first time the federal government has restricted emissions from existing cement kilns. The regulations aim to reduce, by 2013, the annual emissions of mercury and particulate matter by 92%, hydrochloric acid by 97% and sulfur dioxide by 78%.

EPA officials said the limits would benefit children, whose brains can be damaged by mercury that makes its way through the air to water and then to fish that children eat. They also predicted the rules would stave off thousands of premature heart and lung deaths each year attributed to particulate pollution.

“By reducing harmful pollutants in the air we breathe, we cut the risk of asthma attacks and save lives,” EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said in a statement.

Environmentalists said California, which is the nation’s largest producer of cement and has several heavy-emitting kilns, would see particularly high public health returns…

Cement producers said the rules would cost them “several billion dollars” to implement by installing pollution scrubbers at existing kilns. They warned that regulations could lead to plant closures and job outsourcing.

There’s more of the same from the corporate suits. Mostly crap threats.

True. Manufacturers needn’t worry much about laws being enforced under a Republican administration; but, I believe we’re safe from that for another six years, anyway. Especially if the GOP continues to be led around by nose rings attached to teabaggers who wish for leaded gas, free cigarettes for schoolchildren and the return of black-and-white TV.

The accidental discovery of a bowl-shaped molecule that pulls carbon dioxide out of the air suggests exciting new possibilities for dealing with global warming, including genetically engineering microbes to manufacture those CO2 “catchers,” a scientist from Maryland reports.

J. A. Tossell notes in the new study that another scientist discovered the molecule while doing research unrelated to global climate change. Carbon dioxide was collecting in the molecule, and the scientist realized that it was coming from air in the lab. Tossell recognized that these qualities might make it useful as an industrial absorbent for removing carbon dioxide.

Tossell’s new computer modeling studies found that the molecule might be well-suited for removing carbon dioxide directly from ambient air, in addition to its previously described potential use as an absorbent for CO2 from electric power plant and other smokestacks. “It is also conceivable that living organisms may be developed which are capable of emplacing structurally ion receptors within their cell membranes,” the report notes.

I like the idea of creating micro-critters from these molecules.

We could train them to migrate to high-pollution environments and clean up our mess without having to think or commit.

Standby mode is often accused of being the scourge of the planet, insidiously draining resources while offering little benefit other than a small red light and extra convenience for couch potatos. But now Nokia reckons a mobile phone that is always left in standby mode could be just what the environment needs.

A new prototype charging system from the company is able to power itself on nothing more than ambient radiowaves – the weak TV, radio and mobile phone signals that permanently surround us. The power harvested is small but it is almost enough to power a mobile in standby mode indefinitely without ever needing to plug it into the mains, according to Markku Rouvala, one of the researchers who developed the device at the Nokia Research Centre in Cambridge, UK.

This may sound too good to be true but Oyster cards used by London commuters perform a similar trick, powering themselves from radiowaves emitted by the reader devices as they are swiped. And similarly old crystal radio sets and more recently modern radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, increasingly used in shipping and as antitheft devices, are powered purely by radiowaves.

The difference with Nokia’s prototype is that instead of harvesting tiny amounts of power (a few microwatts) from dedicated transmitters, Nokia claims it is able to scavenge relatively large amounts of power — around a thousand times as much — from signals coming from miles away. Individually the energy available in each of these signals is miniscule. But by harvesting radiowaves across a wide range of frequencies it all adds up, said Rouvala.

Everyone ready for a re-read of Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein? I may decide to join the scientist in getting a lead-lined suit to protect myself from all the RF zapping us every minute of the day and night.

OTOH, if we could use this effect to keep my coffee warm – I may endorse it.

Daylife/AP Photo by Sucheta Das

A gigantic brownish haze from various burning and combustion processes is blanketing India and surrounding land and oceans during the winter season. This soot-laden Brown Cloud is affecting South Asian climate as much or more than carbon dioxide and cause premature deaths of 100 000s annually, yet its sources have been poorly understood.

Uh, if there’s anyone who doesn’t have a clue about the origins of this Brown Cloud they must work either in newspaper publishing or for one or another government of half-wits.

In the journal Science Örjan Gustafsson and colleagues at Stockholm University and in India use a novel carbon-14 method to determine that two-thirds of the soot particles are from biomass combustion such as in household cooking and in slash-and-burn agriculture.
Brown Clouds, covering large parts of South and East Asia, originate from burning of wood, dung and crop residue as well as from industrial processes and traffic.

These findings provide a direction for actions to curb emissions of Brown Clouds. Örjan Gustafsson…leader of the study, says that the clear message is that efforts should not be limited to car traffic and coal-fired power plants but calls on fighting poverty and spreading India-appropriate green technology to limit emissions from small-scale biomass burning. “More households in South Asia need to be given the possibility to cook food and get heating without using open fires of wood and dung” says Gustafsson.

South Asia has to deal with the worldwide whine – based in Wall Street and Washington, DC – which uses the Brown Cloud as an excuse for reactionary nationalist politics.

No doubt Asian nations will achieve the same.

Isn’t this the way everyone flies?

A US air strike killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, as they were travelling to a wedding in Afghanistan, an official inquiry found today. The bride was among the dead…

Fighter aircraft attacked a group of militants near the village of Kacu in the eastern Nuristan province, but one missile went off course and hit the wedding party, said the provincial police chief spokesman, Ghafor Khan.

The US military initially denied any civilians had been killed…

The US is facing similar charges over strikes two days earlier in another border area of Afghanistan.

The nine-member inquiry team appointed by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to look into the wedding party incident found only civilians had been killed in the attack.

There’s no shock and amazement here. Well, maybe, shock.

When, of course, we have our fair share of all of the above. But, the culture of complicity and corruption is so thoroughly a part of our everyday life and economy, we have become an nation of accepting, compliant sheep. Most of us.