Scientific Advance

Source: Forbes

As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins to simmer, it’s worth noting that courthouses and airport security checkpoints aren’t the only places where backscatter x-ray vision is being deployed. The same technology, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on U.S. streets.

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.

“This product is now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever,” says Reiss.

Here’s a video of the vans in action.



The Z Backscatter Vans, or ZBVs, as the company calls them, bounce a narrow stream of x-rays off and through nearby objects, and read which ones come back. Absorbed rays indicate dense material such as steel. Scattered rays indicate less-dense objects that can include explosives, drugs, or human bodies. That capability makes them powerful tools for security, law enforcement, and border control.

It would also seem to make the vans mobile versions of the same scanning technique that’s riled privacy advocates as it’s been deployed in airports around the country. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is currently suing the DHS to stop airport deployments of the backscatter scanners, which can reveal detailed images of human bodies. (Just how much detail became clear last May, when TSA employee Rolando Negrin was charged with assaulting a coworker who made jokes about the size of Negrin’s genitalia after Negrin received a full-body scan.)

“It’s no surprise that governments and vendors are very enthusiastic about [the vans],” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC. “But from a privacy perspective, it’s one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.”

...

But EPIC’s Rotenberg says that the scans, like those in the airport, potentially violate the fourth amendment. “Without a warrant, the government doesn’t have a right to peer beneath your clothes without probable cause,” he says. Even airport scans are typically used only as a secondary security measure, he points out. “If the scans can only be used in exceptional cases in airports, the idea that they can be used routinely on city streets is a very hard argument to make.”

The TSA’s official policy dictates that full-body scans must be viewed in a separate room from any guards dealing directly with subjects of the scans, and that the scanners won’t save any images. Just what sort of safeguards might be in place for AS&E’s scanning vans isn’t clear, given that the company won’t reveal just which law enforcement agencies, organizations within the DHS, or foreign governments have purchased the equipment. Reiss says AS&E has customers on “all continents except Antarctica.”

Reiss adds that the vans do have the capability of storing images. “Sometimes customers need to save images for evidentiary reasons,” he says. “We do what our customers need.”

Weather modification and geoengineering is now being discussed openly by the press, though what is especially revealing about the story below is the dynamic involved, namely that the entire project is funded by a 'consortium' of insurance companies in order to fend off excessive property damage and thereby limit customer claims. This revelation opens a new field of scrutiny as regards the questions as to who is running the global chemtrail program, and for what purposes.

The CBC has a way of adding an element of scientific worship to all they do, therefore this story is told from the perspective of human progressive evolution as a scientific endeavour, but what are we to say when private business can send planes into the upper atmosphere and spray various chemical concoctions in an attempt to smooth out their bottom line? Is this just technological progress and the triumph of man over nature (again) through the use of benign science? Or is this a reckless attempt to thwart natural processes by means which fail to consider the cascade of side-effects that invariably result from such programs?

Is it justifiable to allow for-profit enterprise to spray whatever they wish into our skies in order to secure for themselves higher profit margins? And who is guarding the skies from this intrusion of corporate interests?


Source: CBC

The Monday storm that pounded Calgary with hail the size of golf balls would have been even more severe if cloud seeding planes hadn't been in the sky earlier in the day, says an official with the company that flies the aircraft.

Just before the hail hit the city, Weather Modification Inc. had two airplanes in the air, seeding the clouds with shots of silver iodide, which shrinks the ice stones, said Tom Walton, the company's field program manager.

"We were right in and around, east, west, north and south of Calgary," Walton said. "We were flying for approximately one hour prior to the development of the storm. Then, we stayed with it for the duration in and around Calgary."

The hailstorm dented countless vehicles and damaged homes and businesses, including the glass rooftop greenhouses at the University of Calgary.

The 15-year-old Weather Modification Inc. is paid by a consortium of insurance firms, which banded together as the Alberta Severe Weather Management Society in an effort to reduce the cost of claims associated with hail damage.

The introductory material below is important enough that I could overlook the product promotion attached at the end....

Source: Yahoo News

It was treated as an oddball twist in the otherwise wrenching saga of the BP oil spill when Kevin Costner stepped forward to promote a device he said could work wonders in containing the spill's damage. But as Henry Fountain explains in the New York Times, the gadget in question — an oil-separating centrifuge — marks a major breakthrough in spill cleanup technology. And BP, after trial runs with the device, is ordering 32 more of the Costner-endorsed centrifuges to aid the Gulf cleanup.

The "Waterworld" actor has invested some $20 million and spent the past 15 years in developing the centrifuges. He helped found a manufacturing company, Ocean Therapy Solutions, to advance his brother's research in spill cleanup technology. In testimony before Congress this month, Costner walked through the device's operation—explaining how it spins oil-contaminated water at a rapid speed, so as to separate out the oil and capture it in a containment tank:

The device can purportedly take in thousands of gallons of oil-tainted water and remove up to 99% of the oil from it. On Thursday, BP posted to its YouTube page a video of the news conference featuring Costner and BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles announcing the news. You can watch the video here:

"Doug Suttles was the first guy to step up in the oil industry," Costner said at the presser, "and I'm really happy to say when he ordered 32 machines, it's a signal to the world, to the industry, where we need to be."

Suttles said the additional machines will be used to build four new deep-water systems: on two barges and two 280-foot supply boats.

"We tested it in some of the toughest environments we could find, and actually what it's done — it's quite robust," Suttles said. "This is real technology with real science behind it, and it's passed all of those tests." He added that Costner's device has proved effective at processing 128,000 barrels of water a day, which "can make a real difference to our spill response efforts."

In his congressional testimony, Costner recounted his struggle to effectively market the centrifuge. He explained that although the machines are quite effective, they can still leave trace amounts of oil in the treated water that exceeds current environmental regulations. Because of that regulatory hurdle, he said, he had great difficulty getting oil industry giants interested without first having the approval of the federal government.

It's true, as Fountain notes in the Times, that innovation on spill technology has been hobbled in part by the reach of federal regulation — though Fountain also notes that oil companies have elected to devote comparatively little money for researching cleanup devices in the intensely competitive industry.

Costner said that after the device was patented in 1993, he sought to overcome oil-company jitters by offering to allow U.S. oil concerns to use it on a trial basis. He'd extended the same offer to the Japanese government in 1997, he said, but got no takers there either.

Source: NZ Herald

Genetically modified cows were born with ovaries that grew so large they caused ruptures and killed the animals.

The bungled experiment happened during a study by AgResearch scientists at Ruakura, Hamilton, to find human fertility treatments through GM cows' milk.

AgResearch is studying tissue from one of three dead calves to try to find out what made the ovaries grow up to the size of tennis balls rather than the usual thumbnail-size.

Details of the deaths - in veterinary reports released to the Weekend Herald under the Official Information Act - have reignited debate over the ethics of GM trials on animals.

AgResearch's applied technologies group manager, Dr Jimmy Suttie, said he did not see the deaths as a "big deal", and they were part of the learning process for scientists.

...

The calves died last year, aged six months. They were formed when human genetic code injected into a cow cell was added to an egg from a cow's ovary and put into a cow's uterus.

The scientists hoped that the genetic code, a human follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), would enable the cows that were produced to produce milk containing compounds that could be used as a human fertility treatment.

Under permits issued by the Environmental Risk Management Authority last month, AgResearch can put human genes into goats, sheep and cows for 20 years to see if the animals produce human proteins in their milk.

The proteins could eventually be used to treat human disorders.

...

The Official Information Act documents show a Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) investigation found deformities and respiratory problems among animals at the facility - something AgResearch had been open about - but said that was a foreseeable by-product of the project.

...

Scientists noticed that four calves carrying the FSH gene grew more quickly than their clone sister, which did not have the gene.

The FSH calves had bigger abdomens and thicker necks but seemed otherwise healthy, apart from one that easily grew short of breath, said a vet's report.

Dr Suttie said the abnormalities were reported to the animal ethics committee, which told the company to monitor the calves.

Tests five months later found three of the four calves had abnormally large ovaries.

When the calves were six months old, one died suddenly of a haemorrhage to her uterine artery, probably because of stretching and distortion caused by her deformed ovaries.

Five days later, a second calf died, after her ovary became twisted and separated from her uterus.

The third calf with over-sized ovaries was killed the same day so scientists could study her tissue.

Dr Suttie said the root of the trouble was that the human FSH genes had affected the whole calf and not the mammary glands only, as was intended - a problem that did not show up in trials on mice.

"This was not intended to happen. But, bluntly, this is what research is all about."

Source: Planet Ark

A funding battle is brewing in Europe over a 16-billion-euro ($21.5 billion) experiment to crack the puzzle of commercializing nuclear fusion -- the process that powers the sun.

The European Union's executive arm is trying to coordinate an extra contribution of 1.4 billion euros in 2012-2013 from EU member countries, whose finances have been crippled by the economic crisis.

Many environmentalists say the cost of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project is out of control and money would be better spent on low-carbon projects such as home insulation which also create millions of jobs.

ITER's backers argue it has the potential to change the course of history and needs unwavering commitment.

At the center of the issue are dreams of harnessing nuclear fusion, which releases vast amounts of energy in the core of a star, under huge gravitational forces and temperatures of around 10 million degrees Celsius.

Scientists have shown the process can be recreated on Earth, combining simple hydrogen isotopes to release vast amounts of energy, but so far it has not been demonstrated on an industrial scale. Nor have previous experiments released more energy than they consume.

In 2006, more than 30 countries signed a deal to build the ITER nuclear fusion reactor, under construction in Cadarache, southern France.

At its core will be a 500-cubic-meter doughnut-shaped steel vessel in which a superheated stream of plasma circulates in a vacuum, held in place by superconducting magnets.

EXPLODING COSTS

If all goes well, from 2020 the project will be capable of generating around 500 megawatts of fusion energy -- clean power with no climate-damaging emissions and little radioactive waste.

But increasing complexity and rising prices for steel, concrete and copper have led to a tripling of construction costs since they were estimated in 2001. The 27-country European Union is committed to picking up 45 percent of that.

"It is irresponsible to invest huge amounts in a dead-end technology without creating jobs in this period of financial crisis," said Green group politician Claude Turmes.

A 1.4 billion euro funding gap has emerged in the EU contribution over the two years 2012-2013, and the European Commission also hopes to coordinate a stable source of longer-term funding within the next EU budget from 2014.

The overall EU share of construction costs has more than doubled from 2.7 billion euros in 2001 to 7.2 billion now.

The timing could not have been worse.

Spain, Italy and Greece are grappling with huge public debts and unions have been demonstrating against austerity measures.

"Instead of a huge investment with exploding costs and without any added value, we Greens think we should use techniques that are available and reliable now like renewables and energy efficiency," Turmes said.

But European Commission officials argue the two issues are not connected and that EU governments have always remained well-informed on the cost overruns as they have the bulk of members on ITER's European executive board.

"We must not lose sight of the potentially epoch-changing benefits of ITER," EU Research Commissioner Maire Geoghegan-Quinn told ministers recently.

"The potential prize in terms of energy supply and security, tackling climate change and also in terms of major contributions to our economies and to geopolitical stability is huge," she said.

Constructing ITER will also lead to spin-off benefits in research, such as new heat-transfer technology and superconducting magnets that could be used in levitation trains and the transport of electricity, officials say.

ITER's international council, which also includes Japan, India, China, Russia, South Korea and the United States, will meet on June 16 to discuss the scope, schedule and costs of the project. But the meeting is unlikely to reach concrete decisions until the EU has solved its financing issues.

Source: Post Carbon Institute

Following the failure of the latest efforts to plug the gushing leak from BP's Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, and amid warnings that oil could continue to flow for another two months or more, perhaps it's a good time to step back a moment mentally and look at the bigger picture—the context of our human history of resource extraction—to see how current events reveal deeper trends that will have even greater and longer-lasting significance.

Much of what follows may seem obvious to some readers, pedantic to others. But very few people seem to have much of a grasp of the basic technological, economic, and environmental issues that arise as resource extraction proceeds, and as a society adapts to depletion of its resource base. So, at the risk of boring the daylights out of those already familiar with the history of extractive industries, here follows a spotlighting of relevant issues, with the events in the Gulf of Mexico ever-present in the wings and poised to take center stage as the subject of some later comments. Readers in the "already familiar" category can skip straight to part 5.

1. The Pyramid Scheme

Perhaps it's best to start with the most familiar metaphor: resource extraction always proceeds on the basis of the low-hanging fruit principle. We typically go after the most easily accessible, highest quality portions of the resource first, and save the hard-to-get, low-quality portions for later.

Geologists use a different metaphor; they commonly speak of a "resource pyramid." The capstone represents the easily and cheaply extracted portion of the resource; the next layers are portions of the resource base that can be extracted with more difficulty and expense, and often with worse environmental impacts; while the remaining bulk of the pyramid represents resources that geologists believe are unlikely to be extracted under any realistic pricing scenario, usually because of depth, location, or quality issues. There's a pyramid for oil, one for coal, one for iron ore, and so on.

As we chew our way down the layers of each pyramid, starting at the top, some fairly predictable things happen with regard to technology, economics, and environmental impacts. These effects are often mutually interacting, and I will try to highlight those mutual interactions as we go.

2. Technology

Some resources can be extracted, at least in initial stages, with very simple tools. Primitive mining was accomplished with stone and wooden picks and shovels, using reed baskets to carry ore (usually copper, gold, or silver) to nearby sites where it could be smelted in charcoal fires. Once copper, tin, and iron had been smelted in sufficient quantities, metal tools began to be used in mining.

Early coal mining consisted simply of digging lumps from surface outcrops, but by the 18th century British miners were working in shafts over 300 feet deep.

Many very early oil wells consisted of shallow pits (up to 100 ft deep) dug into natural seeps; the earliest known drilling for oil occurred in China in the fourth century, achieving depths of up to about 800 feet using bits attached to bamboo poles. As petroleum became a heavily traded commodity in the early 20th century, rotary drills using steel pipes and bits were developed, able to penetrate to depths of thousands of feet.

The patterns are clear and unsurprising: As resources near the Earth's surface become depleted, we have to work harder and dig deeper to extract more of what we want and have come to need. Production problems lead to the development of new extractive technologies—which, in solving those problems, often also make more of the resource accessible. As a larger portion of the resource base becomes available to society, more uses for the resource are discovered. The new technologies themselves (starting with metal tools) also frequently wind up having other purposes—ones that may increase demand for the resource they were developed to extract.

There is no more significant or instructive example of these trends than the story of the steam engine—which was invented to pump water out of deepening coal mines, but (when applied to other ends, such as providing the motive power for railroads) became a prime user of coal. Tellingly, iron rails were also first used in coalmines. And thus, of course, began the Industrial Revolution.

Fast-forward to deepwater drilling rigs, satellite and seismic geological surveys, horizontal drilling, fracking, and Blowout Preventers (BOPs) for finding and extracting oil (and unconventional natural gas); Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) technology for obtaining oil from tar sands; long-wall mining, Underground Coal Gasification (UCG), and Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) in the coal industry; and so much more. Each extractive industry boasts its own fleet of cutting-edge technologies, each consisting of a suite of tool systems all working together to make the production of some fuel or ore cheaper or more environmentally benign.

The 21st-century search for useful non-renewable resources is testing the limits of science; and both the brawn and the intricacy of machines that have been developed to feed our growing human needs for nonrenewable resources are truly impressive. Watching some of these machines in action, it is tempting to think that human ingenuity has no bounds. Moreover, since we are still fairly close to the top of the pyramid with regard to many nonrenewable resources, it is also natural to assume that constantly improving machines will enable us to dig very far down indeed, so as to continue supplying our burgeoning collective appetite for energy and minerals for many generations to come.

However, as we are about to see, the development of extractive technologies also involves tradeoffs and limits.

3. Economics

Fancy extraction technology comes at a price. But investment in more expensive tools is often justified by greater efficiency of production, reduced environmental impacts, or by the ability to open more of the resource base to exploitation. The relationship between cost and payoff is captured to some extent by the simple ratio of Return on Investment (ROI), to which every drilling or mining company's bean counters pay vigilant attention. This ratio can easily go sour in situations where the resource isn't present in sufficient quantities (even using the newest oil exploration techniques, two out of three initial wells—each costing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars—still comes up dry) or where environmental problems get out of hand (note to self: at end of fiscal year, remember to review BP's balance sheet for Gulf of Mexico operations).

But financial ROI is not the only return on investment that matters. If we're discussing energy resources (oil, gas, or coal) then we also have to keep track of the ratio between the energy invested in exploration and production versus the energy yielded by the resources extracted. This is commonly termed Energy Return on Energy Invested, or EROEI. Technology uses energy, and bigger and more complicated machines usually use more of it. Moreover, the mining and refining of deeper or lower-grade fossil fuels generally takes more energy regardless of what technology is used. When the amount of energy required to produce a given quantity of fuel equals the amount of energy obtained from burning it, that fuel ceases to be a net energy source. There may be financial reasons to continue the production process (including government subsidies or tax write-offs), but from an energetic standpoint the exercise has become pointless. The EROEI for fossil fuels is declining for all the above reasons.

Since each layer further down the resource pyramid requires more expensive extractive machinery, while yielding lower-quality or more expensively produced fuels or ores, one would expect that the market price for resources would continually be rising. But this has not been the case in most instances—until recently. During the 20th century, most commodity prices (including prices for metal ores and, often, fossil fuels) actually declined in inflation-adjusted terms. Why? More areas for exploration were continually being opened, while payoffs from the ability of new technology to access lower layers of the resource pyramid trumped both the extra cost of the technology itself and the declining resource quality (a factor that must be overcome with increasing investment in refining or ore upgrading).

Over the past few years, that situation has begun to change. A study, "Increasing Global Nonrenewable Natural Resource Scarcity," by Chris Clugston tracks the production levels and price of 57 Non-renewable Natural Resources (NNRs). Clugston begins by pointing out that

During the 20th century, global production levels associated with 56 of the 57 analyzed NNRs (98%) increased annually, while global price levels associated with 45 of the 57 analyzed NNRs (79%) decreased annually. Generally increasing global NNR production levels in conjunction with generally decreasing global NNR price levels indicate relative global NNR abundance during the 20th century. On the whole, global NNR supplies kept pace with ever-increasing global demand during the 20th century.

So far, so good. But that's changing.

Generally slowing or declining global NNR production growth in conjunction with generally increasing global NNR prices indicate increasing NNR scarcity during the early years of the 21st century... Annual global production levels increased during the 20th century, then decreased during the 21st century; while annual price levels decreased during the 20th century, then increased during the 21st century...

Case in point: for petroleum, between the years 2000 and 2010 production increased 9 percent, while prices rose by almost 400 percent. No, we're not "running out" of oil, but we are running out of cheap oil. Clugston echoes this conclusion more generally: "We are not about to 'run out' of any NNR; we are about to run 'critically short' of many."

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If the microbes in the video below work as advertised, then why have they not been put to use? Why has the U.S. government not made this a mandatory remediation response as opposed to the highly toxic chemical dispersants being used by BP?

The use of chemical dispersants is nothing but a tragedy, and one that ensures a continued revenue stream for BP as they lose oil into the ocean. Loss mitigation should not be a concern here, the very notion of BP being allowed to manage this disaster given their past history of fraud is a genuine reflection of the apathy and total ineffectiveness of the U.S. government.