Speeding Things Up

Check it out (from Wired Science):

The world is filled with sluggish spectacles. Watching them would be painful were it not for time-lapse photography, which can make those long stories short and remarkably entertaining.

When a phenomenon happens very slowly, viewing accelerated footage helps scientists take a step back and see the big picture: At higher speeds, things that we regard as fixed take motion — even the dullest scenes spring to life.

Here are Wired Science's picks of the best time-lapse videos of nature at work.

I'm not about to take the time to embed all of them, but here is one of my favorites (number 2 according to their list):

'Earth Hour'

From Green Inc.:

New York City’s nighttime skyline will look as if it’s had a few teeth knocked out this coming Saturday.

The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and several other structures and landmarks in Manhattan will turn off their night lights for an hour on March 28 to bring attention to climate change.

The so-called Earth Hour, organized by the World Wildlife Fund, will take place from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., and will involve a variety of familiar Manhattan sites — Rockefeller Center, 7 World Trade Center and the United Nations headquarters building, to the New York Public Library, and the new Time Warner Center, among others. Read more...

The Nano (no - not the iPod)

Is the introduction of the world's cheapest car (the Nano) really a good thing? As usual - the answer is complicated (from Green Inc.):

People across India have been saving money for months with the goal of purchasing the car, made by Tata Motors, a branch of the Indian conglomerate Tata Group, and which will be priced at about $2,000. For many, it represents a leap, overnight, from the indignity of two-wheeled motor scooters to the relative luxury of four wheels and a roof.

For millions the car has become emblematic of their aspirations, as Vishal Bhatia, a Green Inc. reader in Mumbai, suggested in his comment the last time I posted about the Nano:

“I’m buying it because it gives a sense of freedom,” Mr. Bhatia wrote, “freedom to go to someplace in uncrumpled clothes, with my deodorant still being able to mask my body odor. But above all to see the look in my family’s eyes when they see it in person.”

Environmentalists, however, have decried the Nano and its low-cost imitators as an impending disaster. Find out why...

"Waste-personalization"

Here's an interesting approach (from Freakanomics):

A shop owner in England is tackling the litter problem in her neighborhood by marking sweets wrappers and drink bottles with the names of the children buying them. This way, she tells the BBC, she can easily identify and reprimand litter “offenders.” Waste-personalization is hardly a novel ideal; it’s been done before (to Dubner’s delight) with dog poo. Perhaps the best next target is mortgage-backed securities … (HT: Tom A. Kosakowski)

Rise of the Robots: Advances in Artificial Intelligence

Alexander Stoytchev is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State University in Ames who is combining developmental psychology and neuroscience with artificial intelligence and robotic engineering. He and a team of grad students have developed a program that allows robots to learn, the first essential step if artificial intelligence is to become a reality. As Stoytchev explains:

A truly useful personal robot [must have] the ability to learn on its own from interactions with the physical and social environment. It should not rely on a human programmer once it is purchased. It must be trainable.

Here is what they were able to do (from SciAm.com):

In one set of experiments, the robot was presented with 36 different objects, including hockey pucks and Tupperware. It could perform five different actions with each one—grasping, pushing, tapping, shaking and dropping—and had to identify and classify them based only on the sounds they made. After just one action the robot had a 72 percent success rate, but its accuracy soared with each successive action, reaching 99.2 percent after all five. The robot had learned to use a perceptual model to recognize and classify objects—and it could rely on this model to estimate how similar two objects were with only the sounds they made to guide it.

Another set of experiments showed the robot could learn to tell whether or not something was a container. The team presented the machine, topped with a 3-D camera, with objects of different shapes. By dropping a small block on each one and then pushing it, the robot learned to classify objects either as containers—those that moved together with the block ["co-moved"] more often when pushed—or as noncontainers. The robot could then use this knowledge to judge whether unfamiliar objects could hold things; in other words, it had learned, roughly, how to discern the unique characteristics of a container. Read more...

Here are some additional SciAm.com articles discussing recent advances in robotics:

Natural Born Automatons
Rise of the Machines

Seeing Is Believing

From SciAm.com Earth 3.0:

Preserving the planet includes improving the human condition. See who needs help the most and who can most afford to give it. This slide show reveals the distribution of wealth around the globe, clean technology funding, urban carbon footprints, and the toxic ash fallout from a Tennessee coal plant in December 2008.

View the Slide Show

"Winning the Carbon Game"

From SciAm.com Earth 3.0:

When it comes to perhaps the largest and most complex policy challenge facing the Obama administration—finally slowing the pace of global warming before dangerous changes become unstoppable—the new president stares down a Dickensian paradox. On the one hand, it’s the best of times for dealing with the issue. The Democratic-controlled Congress is itching for action, with environmentalist Californians Senator Barbara Boxer and Representative Henry Waxman at the head of key committees. And the problem has risen so much in visibility that many fossil-fuel companies have come to consider the capping of their greenhouse gas emissions a virtual inevitability. They have joined together in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership—a group featuring General Electric, DuPont, General Motors and many other major corporations—which has called for “cap and trade” legislation that would limit and then slowly ratchet down emissions.

Slide Show: Obama's Cabinet

Yet it’s also the worst of times to address global warming. The recession makes the enactment of strong climate protection policies—which are bound to raise the price of energy, at least in the short term—highly vulnerable to attack. Given the state of the economy, global warming simply cannot top the president’s agenda; ideally, though, progress on it would follow a breakneck timeline that some experts are already describing as impossible to meet. Read more...

Happy World Water Day!

From 60 Second Science:

Happy World Water Day! Today is the 16th annual United Nations-sponsored water awareness day. This year's theme "Sharing Waters Sharing Opportunities" aims to up knowledge about all of the bodies of fresh water (263 by the U.N.'s count) that cross – or create – international borders. These can include the usual suspects, such as rivers and lakes, as well as subterranean aquifers that so many rely on for drinking water. Although H20 covers more than 70 percent of the planet's surface, only about 0.3 percent of surface water is in rivers and lakes, and underground aquifers hold about only another 1.6 percent of the earth's water.

More than half of the world's population lives in river basins shared with other countries, according to the U.N., yet only 16 countries (Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Namibia, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Qatar, South Africa, Sweden, Syrian Arab Republic and Uzbekistan) have signed the group's Convention on Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses (an agreement to ensure countries don't hog or harm shared water resources). Per the U.N.'s decision, the agreement won't be ratified until at least 35 nations are officially on board. But some have argued that the convention, which began in discussions back in 1971, doesn't adequately cover new environmental issues or pose a strong enough legal structure to settle potential conflicts. Negotiating the use and conservation of these waters is nothing new, though. People have been making international water treaties for more than 4,500 years (dating at least back to two Sumerian city-states that quibbled over the Tigris River around 2500 B.C.E.).

Today also marks the final day of the 5th World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey, which is organized and run every three years by the World Water Council, an international nonprofit. In preparation for the forum, the U.N. released its third World Water Development report last week. While the analysis found promise in increasing access to clean drinking water, U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon, said that the global water "situation is unconscionable… There has been a widespread failure to recognize water's vital role in providing food, energy, sanitation, disaster relief, environmental sustainability and other benefits."

But organizers of World Water Day hope to flood that awareness gap, partly through a host of events, which are happening this week from Anchorage to Australia. But to whom should we be raising our glasses of bubbly (spring water, that is)? The Danube and its tributaries, of course, which earns the claim as the most international watershed by dipping into 18 different countries.

What's Going On?!?!?!

From Thomas Friedman's NYT article titled "Are We Home Alone?":

I ran into an Indian businessman friend last week and he said something to me that really struck a chord: “This is the first time I’ve ever visited the United States when I feel like you’re acting like an immature democracy.”

You know what he meant: We’re in a once-a-century financial crisis, and yet we’ve actually descended into politics worse than usual. There don’t seem to be any adults at the top — nobody acting larger than the moment, nobody being impelled by anything deeper than the last news cycle. Instead, Congress is slapping together punitive tax laws overnight like some Banana Republic, our president is getting in trouble cracking jokes on Jay Leno comparing his bowling skills to a Special Olympian, and the opposition party is behaving as if its only priority is to deflate President Obama’s popularity.

I saw Eric Cantor, a Republican House leader, on CNBC the other day, and the entire interview consisted of him trying to exploit the A.I.G. situation for partisan gain without one constructive thought. I just kept staring at him and thinking: “Do you not have kids? Do you not have a pension that you’re worried about? Do you live in some gated community where all the banks will be O.K., even if our biggest banks go under? Do you think your party automatically wins if the country loses? What are you thinking?”

If you want to guarantee that America becomes a mediocre nation, then just keep vilifying every public figure struggling to find a way out of this crisis who stumbles once — like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner or A.I.G.’s $1-a-year fill-in C.E.O., Ed Liddy — and you’ll ensure that no capable person enlists in government. You will ensure that every bank that has taken public money will try to get rid of it as fast it can, so as not to come under scrutiny, even though that would weaken their balance sheets and make them less able to lend money. And you will ensure that we’ll never get out of this banking crisis, because the solution depends on getting private money funds to team up with the government to buy up toxic assets — and fund managers are growing terrified of any collaboration with government. Read more...(please!)

First Ever Alternative Energy Fed Loan Guarantee

From 60 Second Science:

The Department of Energy (DOE) this week made the first alternative-energy loan guarantee, announcing that Solyndra Inc., a solar energy company based in Fremont, Calif., will receive $535 million. The company – profiled recently by ScientificAmerican.com – plans to use the money to ramp up production of its cylindrical, thin-film solar panels that lie flat on rooftops.

The cash won't flow until the loan receives some final legal and financial green lights, according to a DOE press release. The DOE is reviewing dozens of other projects, from nuclear to carbon capture and sequestration, and will likely be issuing more loan guarantees in the coming weeks, the New York Times reports.

Shell Bails on Alternative Energy Research

From 60 Second Science:

International oil giant Shell announced this week that it plans to suspend funding and research into solar and wind alternatives to fossil fuels. Shell also said it does not view hydrogen as a viable energy alternative either, but that it plans to continue its work on biofuels, Reuters reports.

Energy analysts cite the huge drop in oil prices since last summer as the key reason that Shell pulled the plug on renewables research. “It’s not much of a surprise given the current oil price environment,” says Ian Nathan, senior research analyst at Energy Intelligence. "Shell, like any other oil and gas company, has shareholders it’s responsible to, and in an economic downturn, where revenues are under strain, it would seem to make sense for the company to focus its spending on its bread and butter business, which is oil and gas.” Read more...

Now That's a Hybrid

Check out these half-car, half-plane "hybrid crafts." The one above is called the Transition and is being developed by a company called Terrafugia. According to an article in 60 Second Science:

On March 5, the Transition took off on its maiden flight from Plattsburgh International Airport in upstate New York. Though the test craft only reached about 100 feet (30 meters) and stayed aloft less than 40 seconds, the successful flight lets Terrafugia move forward with making a full prototype to test next summer.

“The story here is that this is real,” says retired Air Force Colonel Phil Meteer, chief test pilot for Terrafugia, a former fighter pilot who has now added a flying car to his roster of flown vehicles. “The concept of flying cars has come a long way from when I doodled them as a kid.”

The vehicle below is the Parajet Skycar, which is a 'hybrid-hybrid', as it runs on biofuels. According to the website:

Whether you are searching for environmentally friendly practical transport or new thrills the Parajet Skycar is no longer a dream….... a machine that can drive like a car and fly like an aeroplane, capable of beating congestion for the commuter or providing a low cost method of reaching remote regions only accessible by helicopter.

We are currently building the world’s first flying Parajet Skycar and after rigorous testing will travel from London across the Sahara to Tombouctou for the maiden voyage in Spring 2009. It will be the first high performance, road legal, carbon neutral flying car capable of providing sports and rally car performance on or off the road and light aircraft performance after just a few minutes of wing preparation.

Pretty cool, huh?