Sony's bio battery turns waste paper into electricity

Sony has released a prototype of a battery that uses paper to generate electricity. They use an enzyme called cellulose and break down the paper into sugar which they then can use to power small electric objects such as a fan. This technology is completely eco friendly as they do not use any harmful chemicals or metals. This battery was inspired by real processes found in nature that Sony recreated to generate electricity. These batteries will be able to top off the power of a phone battery or other electronic device.

Self Cleaning Cotton

Scientists have developed a cloth that cleans itself of microbes and stains when exposed to sunlight. They did this my coating it with titanium dioxide which is found already in sunscreen, some foods, self cleaning windows and many other things. This could be beneficial to the environment because it could reduce the number of aerosol and ammonia products used in the home which could prevent waste and reduce ozone depletion.

Sewage Treatment Plants May Contribute to Antibiotic Resistance Problem

This article was about the part sewage treatment plants play in creating antibiotic resistant genes in bacteria. Even the most high tech of plants such as Duluth, are contributing. The bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics that range from acne and std's to anthrax and the bubonic plague. This is a huge problem and the plants might have to revise their methods.

Pesticides in Cultivated Fish

Scientists are doing research to test if fish grown on farms are accumulating pesticides in their bodies due to the food pellets they are given. Up until now the means to do this research has been impossible. Students in Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME in Schmallenberg have created a method for testing it by using radioactive materials to trace the pesticides which will show if they are making their way into the fishes fat cells. The test results will be published in late fall of 2011.

How a Population Reaches 7 Billion

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/31/141816460/visualizing-how-a-population-grows-to-7-billion

We have reached 7 billion people, which the majority come from Asia. Now it has switched though and the most rapid population increase is in Africa. Although there is a rapid birthrate in Africa, many people are dying there too which keeps it in check mostly. This also covers that the human population has grown by about 7 times in the past 200 years, from 1 billion to 7 billion which is astounding. The U.N believes that the population will level out at about 10 billion, it is just a matter of if we can sustain that amount.

Environmental Toxin Bisphenol A (BPA) Can Affect Newborn Brain, Mouse Study Shows

ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2011) — Newborn mice that are exposed to bisphenol A develop changes in their spontaneous behavior and evince poorer adaptation to new environments, as well hyperactivity as young adults, according to researchers at Uppsala University. Their study also revealed that one of the brain's most important signal systems, the cholinergic signal system, is affected by bisphenol A and that the effect persisted into adulthood.

• Our environment contains a number of pollutants, including bisphenol A, which is used in plastics in a number of different applications. When plastic products are used, bisphenol A can leak out, which is especially problematic as it is used in baby bottles, tin cans, plastic containers, plastic mugs, which are used by people of all ages. Both in Sweden and globally, bisphenol A is widely used, and the substance has been found in human placentas, fetuses, and breast milk.

In recent years measurable amounts of bisphenol have been found in dust from regular homes, but opinion differs regarding any negative effects of bisphenol A, and risk assessments from various parts of the world present contradictory recommendations, even though the information used comes from the same research reports. In Sweden, the Swedish Chemicals Agency and the Medical Products Agency are working on a ban for bisphenol A in baby bottles and certain other plastic products.

In humans and mammals, the brain develops intensively during a limited period of time. In human babies, this brain development period runs from the seventh month of gestation through the first two years of life. The corresponding period for mice takes place during the 3-4 first weeks after birth. Uppsala researchers have shown in previous research studies that various toxic compounds can induce permanent damage to brain function when they are administered to newborn mice during this developmental period. Examples of such compounds are so-called brominated flame-retardants, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and DDT.

In an entirely new study, these researchers examined whether exposure to bisphenol A during the neonatal period can cause permanent damage to brain function. In the experiment different doses of bisphenol A were given to mice when they were ten days old. The mice underwent a so-called spontaneous behavior test as young adults, in which they were made to change cages from their well-known home cage to another identical one during one hour. Normal mice are very active during the first 20 minutes, exploring the new home environment. This activity declines during the next 20 minutes, and in the final 20 minutes it drops even more, and the mice settle down and sleep.

"In our study we found that a single exposure to bisphenol A during the short critical period of brain development in the neonatal period leads to changes in spontaneous behavior and poorer adaptation to new environments, as well as hyperactivity among young adult mice. When this is examined again later in their adult life, these functional disturbances persist, which indicates that the damage is permanent and do not in fact disappear," says Henrik Viberg at the Department of Organism Biology.

Using the same behavioral method, it was also examined whether the individuals that had received bisphenol A during their neonatal period reacted differently than normal individuals to adult exposure to nicotine, which would indicate that one of the brain's most important signal systems, the cholinergic signal system, was affected. Normal animals exposed as adults to the given dose of nicotine experience dramatically increased activity compared with animals that were not exposed to nicotine. Animals that had been exposed to bisphenol A during their neonatal period and then received nicotine as adults did not evince the same hyperactivity as normal animals at all. This indicates that the choligernic signal system had been affected and that these individuals had had developed increased sensitivity to this type of exposure in adulthood. Once again, this effect was induced during the neonatal period but persisted into adulthood.

"We have previously seen this type of effect from several other environmental toxins that are still prevalent in both indoor and outdoor environments. As these effects are similar to each other, it's possible that several different environmental toxins, including bisphenol A, may work together in causing disturbances during brain development. This in turn may mean that the individual dosages of the various environmental toxins that are required to cause disturbances may be lower than those we examined in our studies of, for example, Bisphenol and brominated flame-retardants," says Henrik Viberg.

Columbus blamed for Little Ice Age

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate

By Devin Powell

Web edition : 10:43 am

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MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries.
The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxidefrom the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University.
“We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival,” says Nevle, who described the consequences of this change October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting.
Tying together many different lines of evidence, Nevle estimated how much carbon all those new trees would have consumed. He says it was enough to account for most or all of the sudden drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice during the 16th and 17th centuries. This depletion of a key greenhouse gas, in turn, may have kicked off Europe’s so-called Little Ice Age, centuries of cooler temperatures that followed the Middle Ages.
By the end of the 15th century, between 40 million and 80 million people are thought to have been living in the Americas. Many of them burned trees to make room for crops, leaving behind charcoal deposits that have been found in the soils of Mexico, Nicaragua and other countries.
About 500 years ago, this charcoal accumulation plummeted as the people themselves disappeared. Smallpox, diphtheria and other diseases from Europe ultimately wiped out as much as 90 percent of the indigenous population.
Trees returned, reforesting an area at least the size of California, Nevle estimated. This new growth could have soaked up between 2 billion and 17 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air.
Ice cores from Antarctica contain air bubbles that show a drop in carbon dioxide around this time. These bubbles suggest that levels of the greenhouse gas decreased by 6 to 10 parts per million between 1525 and the early 1600s.
“There’s nothing else happening in the rest of the world at this time, in terms of human land use, that could explain this rapid carbon uptake,” says Jed Kaplan, an earth systems scientist at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne in Switzerland.
Natural processes may have also played a role in cooling off Europe: a decrease in solar activity, an increase in volcanic activity or colder oceans capable of absorbing more carbon dioxide. These phenomena better explain regional climate patterns during the Little Ice Age, says Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University in State College.
But reforestation fits with another clue hidden in Antarctic ice, says Nevle. As the population declined in the Americas, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere got heavier. Increasingly, molecules of the gas tended to be made of carbon-13, a naturally occurring isotope with an extra neutron. That could be because tree leaves prefer to take in gas made of carbon-12, leaving the heavier version in the air.
Kaplan points out that there’s a lot of uncertainty in such isotope measurements, so this evidence isn’t conclusive. But he agrees that the New World pandemics were a major event that can’t be ignored — a tragedy that highlighted mankind’s ability to influence the climate long before the industrial revolution.  

Nitrate Levels Rising in Northwestern Pacific Ocean

"Normally in a marine environment nitrate is the limiting factor, but increased nitrate in the ocean can spur growth and create a situation where phosphorus becomes the nutrient in short supply," says Raymond G. Najjar, professor of oceanography, Penn State. "This change in nutrients could favor organisms that are better suited for high nitrate and low phosphorus."

ScienceDaily (Sep. 22, 2011) — Changes in the ratio of nitrate to phosphorus in the oceans off the coasts of Korea and Japan caused by atmospheric and riverine pollutants may influence the makeup of marine plants and influence marine ecology, according to researchers from Korea and the U. S.

According to the researchers, the effects of anthropogenic nitrate pollution from the air have been shown to be significant in local lakes, streams and estuaries in Norway, Sweden and the U.S.

"This is the first evidence of increases in nitrate in ocean waters not in an enclosed estuary like the Chesapeake Bay," said Najjar. "These are large, very deep bodies of water and it is surprising to see increased nitrate in these large seas."

Najjar and his Korean colleagues, Kitack Lee, professor, and Tae-Wook Kim, graduate student, School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology; Hee-Dong Jeong, National Fisheries Research and Development Institute; and Hae Jun Jeong, professor, School of Earth and Environmental Science, Seoul National University, studied trends in nitrate and phosphate in the coastal waters of Korea and Japan since the 1980s. They also compared the amount of nitrogen deposited from the air between 2002 and 2008 for Korea and Japan with the amounts of nitrate in the water during that same time period to show that the increased levels in the water are directly correlated to an increase in human-generated atmospheric nitrogen.

The area studied included the Yellow Sea, the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea. The researchers found that the phosphorus levels in the ocean water remained the same through time.

"The abundance of nitrogen relative to phosphorus in northeastern Asian marginal seas has increased significantly since 1980," the researchers report in the Sepembert 23 online edition of Science Express. "Anthropogenic atmospheric nitrogen deposition has narrowed the deficiency of nitrogen relative to phosphorus across the study area and has even resulted in a nitrogen surplus in the East China Sea, Yellow Sea and East Sea, commencing in the mid-1990s."

The other source of nitrate into the oceans is from runoff from industry and agriculture that reaches the seas via rivers. In most cases, this nitrogen is quickly diluted.

"In areas located downstream of the Changjian River plume, contributions from both anthropogenic atmospheric nitrogen and riverine nitrogen fluxes appeared to be of equal importance in governing trends in seawater nitrate," the researchers report.

The researchers also looked at the area in the North Pacific on the south and east of Japan, but while nitrate in these waters did increase slightly, the increase was not significant except close to the Japanese coast. The highest level of increase seen was in the Yellow Sea east of China, where the Changjian River enters the sea. Other areas of significantly increased nitrates include the area east of the Korean peninsula and an area in the north of Japan south of Sapporo.

The researchers suggest that their results have broader applicability. "The observed trends may be extrapolated to the coastal seas of the North American Atlantic Ocean and the North, Baltic and Mediterranean Seas, which have received ever-increasing amounts of anthropogenic atmospheric nitrate deposition and river-borne nitrate, comparable to those absorbed by coastal and marginal seas of the northwestern Pacific Ocean."

NASA, the Korea National Research Foundation and the Korea Meteorological Administration Research and Development Program supported this work.

China's Upcoming Nuclear Power Boom

The triple meltdown in march at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant cast a long shadow on nuclear power in Western countries. At least 25 reactors have been shuttered or canceled in Europe since the disaster, and public support in the United States is once again plummeting. But in China, where energy demand is skyrocketing, the appetite for nuclear power is undiminished. In January the nation announced a 20-year plan to pursue an experimental reactor design called a molten salt reactor (MSR). Instead of running on solid uranium—the industry’s mainstay for more than 50 years—it would rely on liquid fuel suffused with thorium, which is three times as abundant as uranium.

The reactor concept calls for heated salts that act as both a coolant and a medium for fission reactions. Theoretically, this configuration would prevent fuel from overheating and breaching the reactor’s containment vessel. In the event of an increased core temperature or a power failure, the hot liquid salt melts a plug at the bottom of the reactor and drains into passively cooled containment vessels, limiting the risk of radiation release into the environment. “MSRs provide more safety options than what we have today,” claims Kirk Sorensen, president of Flibe Energy, a start-up based in Huntsville, Alabama, pursuing a thorium-fueled MSR. Another potential benefit is that because the reactor uses its thorium fuel more efficiently, it could reduce radioactive waste by a factor of around 100 compared with conventional reactors, says Per Peterson, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee successfully tested the largest-ever MSR prototype in the 1960s, but the technology has languished ever since. Stateside, money may be the biggest deterrent to further development, since construction costs for a radically new reactor could far exceed the $10 billion-plus price tag for a conventional uranium plant. China, which is already constructing 25 new reactors, may be the only nation flush enough to push the technology to the next level.