Blogs / Discoblog

Pandora on Earth

If you’re a big Avatar fan, then James Cameron’s Oscar loss may have left your eyes swollen and your popcorn soggy. But if Avatar grabbed your attention with its story of greedy humans ravaging the alien moon Pandora for a mineral that Earth needs, then here are a handful of real-life stories, from good ol’ planet Earth, that might make the plight of Pandora’s native Na’vi seem eerily familiar.

First we have members of the Dongria Kondh tribe from Orissa, India, talking to the tribal-rights group Survival International about their quest to save their sacred mountain from a large mining company. The company wants to raze a huge part of their lush, bountiful, holy mountain to mine not “unobtanium,” but bauxite. Wait, James… are you getting this down?

Survival International took out an ad in the film industry magazine Variety to appeal directly to Cameron for help. Says Survival International director Stephen Corry: “Just as the Na’vi describe the forest of Pandora as ‘their everything,’ for the Dongria Kondh, life and land have always been deeply connected.  The fundamental story of Avatar – if you take away the multi-coloured lemurs, the long-trunked horses and warring androids – is being played out today in the hills of Niyamgiri in Orissa, India.”

An Argonne National Laboratory scientist thinks he has developed a better way to recycle a ubiquitous scourge of the environment—the plastic bag.

New Scientist reports:

Waste plastic from “throwaway” carrier bags can be readily converted into carbon nanotubes. The chemist who developed the technique has even used the nanotubes to make lithium-ion batteries.

This is called “upcycling” – converting a waste product into something more valuable. Finding ways to upcycle waste could encourage more recycling…

The process isn’t cheap, however. It involves an expensive catalyst in cobalt acetate, which is not easily recovered, to convert the high or low-density polyethylene (HDPE and LDPE) into carbon nanotubes. But if the nanotubes are then used to make lithium-ion or lithium-air batteries, that might overcome this problem, since these batteries are already recycled at the end of their use to recover cobalt.

Getting the bags to a recycling facility in the first place may be a hurdle as well. As the picture above shows, asking the public to put forth any effort sometimes seems to be asking too much.

Related Content:
80beats: How to Make a Battery Out of Office Paper & Nanotubes
DISCOVER: The World’s Largest Garbage Dump: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Discoblog: Prison for Plastic? Indian City Initiates Harsh Penalties for Using Plastic Bags
Discoblog: It’s In the Bag! Teenager Wins Science Fair, Solves Massive Environmental Problem
DISCOVER: 9 Ways Carbon Nanotubes Just Might Rock the World

Image: flickr / Sam Felder

Since World War II, Russian scientists have been researching ways to bend the weather to their liking. Today, they routinely ensure sun-splashed Victory Day celebrations by chasing away clouds using a technology known as cloud seeding (the same technology the Chinese government used to chase away clouds during the Beijing summer Olympics).

It’s nice to have sunny parades, but Moscow officials believe they can use their technology to alter the weather and save some rubles, according to the Los Angeles Times:

Now they’re poised to battle the most inevitable and emblematic force of Russian winter: the snow.

Moscow’s government, led by powerful and long-reigning Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, has indicated that clearing the capital’s streets of snow is simply too expensive. Instead, officials are weighing a plan to seed the clouds with liquid nitrogen or dry ice to keep heavy snow from falling inside the city limits.

(more…)

Note to self: the next time you need to carry a container filled with hydrochloric acid to work, take a cab.

Tokyo got a scare this morning after a man dropped his bottle of the toxic liquid on a subway train. Several people when to the hospital with minor injuries, but thankfully this chemical clumsiness didn’t cause a major disaster.

Police didn’t arrest the man in question, a 20-year-old stone mason, deciding he didn’t intend to spill his chemicals on the train. Hydrochloric acid has a number of industrial uses, though perhaps carrying it in a bottle on a crowded train isn’t the best transportation strategy.

And because of his butterfingers, New Yorkers aren’t alone in revisiting unpleasant memories of terrorist attacks (as a 9/11 conspirator’s trial comes to Manhattan). Reuters says:

Japan is particularly sensitive to hazards on its trains after a 1995 incident in which members of [the Aum Shinrikyo] religious cult released highly toxic sarin gas on the Tokyo subway, killing 12 and injuring thousands, some permanently.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Nerve Gas in the Subway, revisiting the 1995 attack
DISCOVER: What Invisible Things Are in the Surfaces You Touch and the Air You Breathe? (in a which a DISCOVER editor finds out how dirty the New York subway system really is.)
80beats: MIT Students Who Hacked Boston Subway Silenced; Report Gets Out Anyway

Image: Wiki Commons / Fg2

Hugo Chavez: ardent socialist, Venezuelan president, rain maker?

A crippling drought in his country has led Chavez to embrace cloud seeding. This week, he announced that he will team up with Cuban scientists to fly through clouds and “zap” them with silver iodide so they produce precipitation, one of the most popular kinds of cloud seeding and the one China said it used to induce a snowstorm this February.

Reuters was there to catch the president’s excitement:

“I’m going in a plane; any cloud that crosses me, I’ll zap it so that it rains,” Chavez said.

Seeding the clouds doesn’t do any good if there’s no moisture to begin with, but we presume that President Chavez wants to try anything that might help. Anyway, “zapping” is a more pleasing alternative to threatening, which the president previously tried on his countrymen. From UPI:

Earlier this month Chavez accused Venezuelans, including businesses, of wasting water and warned of tough punitive measures. He advised people … to limit showering to three minutes. Jacuzzis, watering of lawns and flowerbeds and filling of swimming pools have all been banned.

For the sake of Venezuela’s swimmers, horticulture enthusiasts, and hot tub manufacturers, here’s hoping the president’s plan is a success.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Harnessing the Weather
DISCOVER: Microwave a Tornado, Lase a Rainstorm
The Intersection: When Will Geoengineering “Tip?”
Discoblog: Brazilians Urged to Pee in the Shower to Conserve Water

Image: flickr/ Daniel Zanini H.

A small crop dusting-style aircraft skims the land, spraying a mysterious solution onto the ground. Within hours, a few spots begin to glow bright green. No, this scene isn’t some hair-brained Homer Simpson scheme to use nuclear waste as a fertilizer. Rather, it could be a new way to locate one of humanity’s most vile creations: land mines.

University of Edinburgh scientists announced today that they’ve bioengineered a bacteria to glow a bright green when it comes in contact with the chemicals that old land mines leak out into the ground. The project was actually a student creation, and their supervisor, Alistair Elfick, says that they could mix the bacteria into a solution that could be sprayed by air over areas known to be infested with mines.

Elfick says the team isn’t planning to sell the glowing microorganisms commercially. But if the technique works, countries around the world could reap the benefits. From BBC News:

Each year, between 15,000 and 20,000 people are killed or injured by landmines and unexploded ordnance, according to the charity Handicap International.

Some 87 countries are riddled with minefields, including Somalia, Mozambique, Cambodia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Could Rats Be the Next Sniffing Dogs? (They’ve already been trained to find landmines.)
Discoblog: Animal Prosthetics: False Limbs for Elephants, and Silicone Where You’d Least Expect It (Elephants in Myanmar and Cambodia are sometimes the victim of mines.)

Image: flickr / nestor galina

Pulses of certain Turkey Day food ingredients are detected in the water supply in the days after the holiday, according to researchers. But as reported in National Geographic News, it doesn’t stop there:

For instance, thyme and sage spike during Thanksgiving, cinnamon surges all winter, chocolate and vanilla show up during weekends (presumably from party-related goodies), and waffle-cone and caramel-corn remnants skyrocket around the Fourth of July.

A research team from the University of Washington tracked pulses of food ingredients that enter Washington’s Puget sound to learn more about how our actions on land affect the water supply, and to determine what slips through sewage treatment plants. Similar monitoring is underway worldwide, and scientists have turned up things such as flu vaccines, cocaine, heroine, rocket fuel, and birth control in waterways.

Click on over to team leader Rick Keil’s lab Web site to learn more about the Puget Sound research. But Keil told National Geographic News that the no one knows yet whether the subtle seasoning of the water is having an impact.

For now, there’s no evidence that a sweeter and spicier sound is a bad thing—salmon, which can smell such flavors, could be enjoying their vanilla-enhanced habitat, Keil said.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Fun in the Sand Now Hindered by Fecal Bacteria
Discoblog: Vatican Science: Pope Blames Male Infertility on…the Pill
80beats: Duck Flu Defense? Tamiflu From Urine Builds Up Downstream

Image: flickr / Lana_aka_BADGIRL

Employers in the U.K. have just learned that there’s a word for discrimination against a person based on their earth-conscious, tofu-eating ways: “greenism.” And firing someone for their environmental views is just as illegal as firing someone for their religious or philosophical beliefs, according to a court ruling.

Tim Nicholson, former head of sustainability at property firm Grainger Plc, claims he was laid off because of his views on climate change and the environment. A judge said Nicholson could take Grainger to the Employment Appeals Tribunal over the layoff, but Grainger challenged the ruling on the grounds that climate change is a scientific and not philosophical viewpoint. However, that challenge was overturned, according to the Telegraph:

In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that “a belief in man-made climate change … is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations.”

The ruling could open the door for employees to sue their companies for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel.

Nicholson said during previous hearings that due to his strong convictions he refused to travel by air and renovated his house to be environmentally friendly. He also said Grainger’s chief executive, who allegedly once flew a staff member from Ireland to London to deliver a forgotten Blackberry, was hostile toward his beliefs. The company said it will now argue that there was no link between Nicholson’s views and his layoff.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Are “Climate Friendly” Food Labels a Terrible Idea?
Discoblog: University Sued for Saying Earth Not Created in 6 Days
Discoblog: Nobel Laureates Go Ape After Royal Society Creationist Comment

Image: flickr / hpeguk

Kindles, iPhones, laptops, and maybe an Apple Tablet make avoiding the printer a cinch. However, should someone actually need to read off dead trees, a new method to remove ink from white paper could make office paper far easier to reuse. All it takes is a solution of 60 percent dimethylsulphoxide and 40 percent chloroform and a little agitation to shake off the ink, and used paper will be almost as good as new, according to a new study.

From Physorg.com:

[Researchers] found that a combination of solvents can remove toner print from paper without harming the paper to make it reusable, although the resulting paper is not quite as white as new paper.

Physorg.com also has a an image of the comparisons between printing on paper treated with chemical solutions versus printing on a fresh sheet.

It’s hard to imaging any office keeping a wet lab and actually doing this, and sloshing through all that solvent can’t be very safe or economical. So here’s an alternative idea: Just stop printing altogether and read things digitally like everyone else.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Not Subtle, But It Works: Peepoo Bag Converts Human Waste Into Fertilizer
Discoblog: Newspapers May Be Dying, But Their Corpses Could Reduce Toxic Waste
Discoblog: Today’s Conservation Gimmick: Drink Your Shower Water!

Image: flickr / michaelkpate

Things looked pretty bleak in Iceland a year or so ago. Declaring national bankruptcy is never high on a country’s list of priorities. But BBC News reports that the beleaguered country is attempting to make a comeback—as the nexus of all the world’s computer servers. In a way, it’s the perfect place to keep a ton of servers that require huge amounts of energy to be kept running, and cool. From the report:

In Iceland, with its year round cool climate and chilly fresh water, just a fraction of this energy for cooling [the servers] is needed. It means big savings.

Just outside Reykjavik, work is well advanced on the first site which its owners hope will spark a server cold rush.

In around a year – if all goes according to plan – the first companies will start leasing space in this data centre.

And if this proves successful more sites are planned.

And with its wealth of geothermal (and therefor carbon-footprint-free) power, the country stands to make a substantial global impact, particularly since all those servers mean a constant increase in CO2 production. As one expert put it:

“[I]f a large internet media company operating thousands and thousands of servers relocated its servers to Iceland, that company would save greater than half a million metric tons of carbon annually.”

Granted, now all they have to do is lay all that fiber optic cable. No getting around the series of tubes!

Related Content:
Discoblog: How To Build A Computer Inside a Deceased Beaver
Discoblog: Man Boots Memories From Brain Straight to Computer