Earlier this month, we described the successful flight of Solar Impulse, a manned solar plane that flew for over 26 hours before a safe landing in Switzerland. Now comes news of another feat of solar-powered derring-do. Currently circling above Arizona, a British-built unmanned solar plane dubbed the Zephyr has now flown for a record-breaking seven days straight. Zephyr’s developer, the defense company QinetiQ, hopes the plane can stay aloft and double its own record for a total of fourteen days.
With a 74-foot wingspan, this latest version of the Zephyr is fifty percent bigger than its predecessors. Its designers hope that the plane will one day find use both for military reconnaissance and also for scientific research. Without a payload, it weights about 110 pounds. Says project manager Jon Saltmarsh:
“Zephyr is basically the first ‘eternal aircraft.’… The launch was absolutely beautiful; it was just so smooth,” said Mr Saltmarsh. “We had five people lift it above their heads, start running and it just lifted away into the sky.” [BBC]
If three months of waiting for BP to fix its oil leak have taught us anything, it’s not to get too optimistic about potential fixes. On Thursday, BP installed a cap that appeared to cut off the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, but yesterday the federal government officials overseeing the leak response said (pdf) that there appear to be hydrocarbons leaking from the seafloor near the well, and possibly methane detected above the well.
The upshot is that BP has until tomorrow (Tuesday) to investigate this possible leak. If it is there, the government could force BP to reopen the cap and resume pumping oil up to tankers on the surface.
The discovery of a seep and the unspecified anomalies suggest that the well could be damaged and that it may have to be reopened soon to avoid making the situation worse [The New York Times].
Do you hear that? That’s the sound of oil not gushing uncontrollably into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s leak, for the first time in nearly three months. BP is still running tests on the new cap the company installed this week, but at least for now there’s some for slight optimism.
The flow stopped yesterday afternoon, and BP video feed of its leak site showed quiet containment.
The view on Thursday afternoon was eerily tranquil, just the slate blue of the deep interspersed with small white particles floating across the screen. Though the exact amount of the oil that has poured out of the well may never be known, it was suddenly and for the first time a fixed amount. The disaster was, for a little while at least, finite [The New York Times].
The task now is a pressure test, which will take place over two days. Lower pressure inside the well would mean the surrounding rocks are leaking a little; high pressure would indicate the well is sealed off.
Imagine enough forest to cover the state of Florida. According to a recent report (pdf), a downturn in illegal logging has protected that amount of forest land–some 42 million acres–over the past decade.
The decrease is a good start, London think tank Chatam House authors say, but there is still more work to do.
“We’re a quarter of the way there,” said Sam Lawson, one of the report’s authors. He expressed the hope that newer regulations–such as a European law passed last week that will ban the import of illegal timber by 2012–would cut the amount of illegal logging even further. [AP]
During the last decade, the report says, Cameroon, the Brazilian Amazon, and Indonesia have decreased logging between 50 and 75 percent. Meanwhile, the seven studied consumer and processing countries have decreased illegally harvested wood imports by 30 percent.
Among those importing countries is the United States, which in 2008 became the first country to ban all imports of illegally logged plants and plant products, including furniture and paper. Europe’s ban, passed earlier this month, will go into effect in 2012.
North Americans may remember 2005 as the year of Hurricane Katrina, but below the equator another fearsome tempest wrought its own devastation that year. From January 16th to 18th a line of thunderstorms tore through the Amazon basin, and researchers who conducted a botanical “body count” after the storm estimate that it laid low between 441 and 663 million trees.
Over the course of two days, a squall line measuring 620 miles (1,000 km) long and 124 miles (200 km) wide raged across the region from southwest to northeast, with buzzsaw-like winds of 90 mph (146 km/hr) causing widespread damage to property and a handful of deaths [Time].
Jeffrey Chambers, a forest ecologist at Tulane University, wanted to assess the damage caused throughout the massive Amazon basin, so he turned to satellites.
Will this solution finally be the solution? Today in the Gulf of Mexico, BP is attempting to secure another containment cap onto its oil leak, which the company says could trap and collect all the oil gushing from the leak—if it works.
On Saturday BP removed the leaky cap that had been catching a little bit of the oil, meaning that the oil is now flowing unchecked into the Gulf as engineers race to install the new one. This is the latest try in a string of attempts to cap the leak, and BP’s Kent Wells says that engineers are lowering the new, tighter-fitting cap into place this morning.
The new cap, which should eventually not allow any gas or oil to escape, will be used to divert more oil to collection ships that will be brought in over the next two to three weeks, Mr. Wells said. “We’ll continue to ramp up the capacity so that sometime along the line, whatever the flow is, we’ll capture it all,” he said [The New York Times].
This week it’s green for green: On Tuesday, we mentioned that the Department of Energy was giving out loans totaling $2 billion for two big solar panel projects. Now, the DOE has offered $67 million for research on carbon capture, in hopes of propelling nascent carbon capture and storage projects.
Carbon capture, as its name suggests, requires trapping carbon dioxide from fossil fuel-burners like coal power plants before it enters the air. It isn’t easy. For one, you have to figure out what to do with all the CO2 once you capture it. The first power plant to try out carbon sequestration has found that its neighbors aren’t keen on having CO2 pumped deep into the earth below their town.
Also, capturing the greenhouse gas requires energy, adding 80 percent to the cost of electricity for a new pulverized coal plant and around 35 percent for a high-tech coal gasification plant. The goal, the DOE says in the award announcement, is to reduce these costs to less than 30 percent and 10 percent, respectively.
Success for Solar Impulse: This morning the solar-powered plane touched down in Switzerland after more than 26 hours in the sky—including flying overnight on battery power.
As we noted yesterday, this was by far the most ambitious test of adventurer Bertrand Piccard’s experimental aircraft, which is covered by 12,000 solar cells. Swiss pilot André Borschberg had to decide last night whether those cells had absorbed enough battery power during the day to coast through the night, and he managed to do it.
“I’ve been a pilot for 40 years now, but this flight has been the most incredible one of my flying career,” Mr. Borschberg said as he landed, according to a statement from the organizers of the project. “Just sitting there and watching the battery charge level rise and rise thanks to the sun. I have just flown more than 26 hours without using a drop of fuel and without causing any pollution” [The New York Times].
On Saturday, five gallons of tar balls appeared on the Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston Island in Texas. Their arrival means that BP oil has now hit all five gulf states. Researchers don’t believe that ocean currents alone carried the balls, but instead say that the glops of gloop washed off recovery ship hulls.
Specifically, the researchers from a joint BP-Coast Guard response team looked at the tar balls’ “weathering,” which they say was too light for oil that had traveled from the leak site, around 550 miles away.
Galveston’s mayor, Joe Jaworski, said he was hopeful the analysis was correct and that the tar balls were not a sign of more oil to come. “This is good news. The water looks good. We’re cautiously optimistic this is an anomaly,” he said. [BBC]
The oceans are getting louder and forcing some whale to speak up, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Biology Letters.
Lead researcher Susan Parks of Penn State University eavesdropped on seven male and seven female North Atlantic right whales by attaching acoustic tags to them via suction cups. Each tag recorded from 2 to 18 calls, which included the whales’ greeting “upcalls” (seemingly questioning “hmm?” sounds that go from a low to high pitch — see video), as well as background noise–believed to come from commercial shipping.
Bioacoustics researcher Christopher Clark of Cornell University, who did not participate in the study, says that ocean noise is becoming a serious issue.
“If I had to immerse you into the sea off Boston, you’d be shocked. You’d be like a country mouse dropped in the middle of Heathrow Airport,” says Clark. “In one generation, we have raised the background level for an entire ocean ecosystem.” [New Scientist]
Are we finally going to clean the skies of smog-causing nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide? The Environmental Protection Agency proposes new rules this week that would force power plants in 31 states, mostly in the East, to cut emissions of both to more than half of their 2005 levels by 2014.
The new rules take advantage of the “good neighbor” provision of the Clear Air Act to cut interstate transport—not cars and trucks, but the drift of air pollutants across state borders. (Air pollution, not unlike oil spills, does not respect the lines of the map) [TIME].
The Bush Administration tried to adopt a similar rule, but two years ago a U.S. Court of Appeals said the EPA had overstepped its bounds and nixed the regulations.
As a result, many power companies scaled back their investments in pollution controls. Now those companies will have to decide whether it is more cost-effective to retrofit their dirtiest power plants or shut them down [Los Angeles Times].
As I write this, a plane powered by the sun is flying somewhere over Europe, undertaking its most ambitious test flight yet.
When we last left the Solar Impulse back in April, the experimental aircraft had flown a two-hour test to prove it was flight-worthy. Today, the pilot in the plane, which weighs about as much as a car and is covered in 12,000 solar cells, will try to stay aloft for 24 hours, even cruising along during the nighttime hours.
“The goal of the project is to have a solar-powered plane flying day and night without fuel,” said team co-founder Bertrand Piccard, adding that this test flight – the third major step after its first ‘flea hop’ and an extended flight earlier this year – will demonstrate whether the ultimate plan is feasible: to fly the plane around the world. “This flight is crucial for the credibility of the project” [AP].
Sure, the planet’s increasing carbon dioxide levels are making the oceans more acidic, but what does that really mean for sea life? We’ve already heard that the ocean’s changing chemistry is damaging corals and interfering with mussels, but that’s just the beginning. It turns out things could get seriously weird.
In a paper published this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers led by Philip L. Munday of James Cook University have given us a concrete example: the increased CO2-levels make some fish purposely swim towards predators.
As part of his experiment, Munday used a Y-shaped maze to force baby clownfish to choose between two paths. One path reeked of rock cod, a natural predator; the other had no danger scents. Munday’s team compared the choices of fish raised in water of varying carbon dioxide concentrations, from today’s levels of 390 parts per million up to future expected levels of 850 ppm.
It will take more than a little sun to get one of the world’s biggest solar power plants up and running: it will also require 1,600 workers to build it and a lot of cash. On Saturday, President Obama announced that the U.S. Department of Energy will use last year’s stimulus bill to issue $1.85 billion in loan guarantees to two solar power companies, one of which plans to build one of the planet’s largest solar power plant in Arizona.
Solana, the big solar power plant planned by Abengoa Solar Inc., will cover an area of around 1,900 acres near Gila Bend, Arizona. As detailed in a White House press release, the company claims that the plant will be one of the first in the United States able to store its own power. According to the release, it will also be able to generate 280 megawatts of power—enough energy to run more than 70,000 homes–and will prevent the emission of 475,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year. After construction, the plant will support 85 some permanent jobs, the company claims.
Things may be looking up, ever so slightly, for the Gulf of Mexico’s endangered sea turtles. A few days ago, environmental groups announced that they were suing BP and the Coast Guard over the “controlled burns” that were intended to burn off oil slicks in the water; the environmentalists said that sea turtles were getting caught in the infernos and burned alive. This morning a judge was prepared to hear arguments on a proposed injunction, but at the last minute the parties declared that they’ve reached a settlement.
The agreement comes in advance of an emergency court hearing set today in New Orleans federal court, where environmentalists sought to force BP to either stop controlled burns or place rescuers on the boats to scoop federally protected sea turtles out of floating sludge patches before the corralled oil is ignited [Bloomberg].
According to Sea Turtles Restoration Project, one of the plaintiffs in the case, BP and the Coast Guard have agreed to station a qualified biologist on every vessel involved in the burns, and to remove turtles from the burn area before setting the blaze. This is good news for the leatherbacks, loggerheads, and Kemps Ridley turtles that make their home in the Gulf. Of course, it would be better news if their home wasn’t saturated with oil and periodically set on fire, but we’ll take what we can get.
Elsewhere in turtle news, conservationists are preparing to collect 70,000 turtle eggs from Alabama and Florida beaches. The ambitious scheme, coordinated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is seen as the best chance of preventing a massive die-off of the threatened creatures. (more…)
80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles on the day's most compelling topics.
80beats is written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. This team darts through each day's science news faster than the ruby-throated hummingbird that beats its wings 80 times per second. Send ideas, tips, suggestions, and complaints to [azeeberg at discovermagazine dot com].
Earlier this month, we described the successful flight of Solar Impulse, a manned solar plane that flew for over 26 hours before a safe landing in Switzerland. Now comes news of another feat of solar-powered derring-do. Currently circling above Arizona, a British-built unmanned solar plane dubbed the Zephyr has now flown for a record-breaking seven days straight. Zephyr’s developer, the defense company QinetiQ, hopes the plane can stay aloft and double its own record for a total of fourteen days.
If three months of waiting for BP to fix 
Do you hear that? That’s the sound of oil not gushing uncontrollably into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s leak, for 
North Americans may remember 2005 as the year of Hurricane Katrina, but below the equator another fearsome tempest wrought its own devastation that year. From January 16th to 18th a line of thunderstorms tore through the Amazon basin, and researchers who conducted a botanical “body count” after the storm estimate that it laid low between 441 and 663 million trees.
Will this solution finally be the solution? Today in the Gulf of Mexico, BP is attempting to secure another containment cap onto 
Success for Solar Impulse: This morning the solar-powered plane touched down in Switzerland after more than 26 hours in the sky—including flying overnight on battery power.
Are we finally going to clean the skies of smog-causing nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide? The 
As I write this, a plane 
Things may be looking up, ever so slightly, for the Gulf of Mexico’s endangered sea turtles. A few days ago, environmental groups announced that they were suing BP and the Coast Guard over the “
