Enjoy Your Bananas - They Are Going to Go Extinct

The bananas you so love will soon vanish into the mists of time. The world's Cavendish variety of bananas are threatened by a strain of Tropical Race 4 fungus which is expected to wipe them out. The Cavendish is of one of a number of banana cultivars and include commercially important versions such as 'Dwarf Cavendish' and 'Grand Nain'.

The $4 billion-a-year worldwide banana export trade is almost entirely based on vast plantations filled with genetically identical Cavendish clones. It is the supermarket banana’s lack of genetic diversity that has put it at risk, perhaps even (as some scientists say) at risk of extinction. A similar situation with another crop, the potato, set the stage for the great Irish famine of the 1840s, after the high-yielding potato varieties favored by Irish farmers fell prey to an airborne fungus that turned whole fields of tubers black and rotten overnight. Today, similar pests are stalking the banana. 

Read more at the Smithsonian Magazine...

"Public Trust" - film from outdoors company Patagonia

Public Trust is the company's effort at broadening the scale and scope of their storytelling on the issues of around conservation. This new feature film aims to raise awareness of federal land being turned over to oil drillers, miners, and others who’d destroy our wild refuges. Patagonia, famously declaring that the POTUS has stolen our lands, back in 2017, produced this film to raise awareness of the kleptocracy-in-progress with the present administration. 

The brand is launching a feature documentary on YouTube called Public Trust, which makes the case for protecting American public lands -- and how extractive industries are actively working to shrink and privatize them. 

Executive produced by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard and Robert Redford, the film focuses on three conflicts: the gutting of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, the threatened destruction of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and the fight over oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Watch the entire film here...

Cold Warrior Satellites Like Corona Help Track Species Decline

The United States launched early spy satellites in response to the Soviet Union Sputnik (first artificial satellite, 1957) and other space efforts. The espionage program, titled Corona, was aimed at locating Soviet missile sites, but its orbital photography captured something unintended: snapshots of animals and their habitats frozen in time. Now, by comparing these images with modern data, scientists have found a way to track the decline of biodiversity in regions that lack historic records.

The researchers tested the approach on bobak marmot (Marmota bobak) populations in the grassland region of northern Kazakhstan. There, Soviets converted millions of hectares of natural habitat into cropland in the 1960s. The scientists searched the satellites' black and white film images on a U.S. Geological Survey database for signs of the squirrel-like animal's burrows.

They identified more than 5,000 historic marmot homes and compared them with contemporary digital images of the region, mapping more than 12,000 marmot burrows in all. About eight generations of marmots occupied the same burrows in the study area over more than 50 years, even when their habitats underwent major changes, the team reports in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Overall, the researchers estimate the number of marmot burrows dropped by 14% since the '60s. But the number of burrows in some of the oldest fields -- those persistently disturbed by humans plowing grassland to plant wheat -- plunged by much more -- about 60%.

Read more over at Slashdot...

UAS-Based Radar Suite for Sounding and Mapping Glaciers

Emily Arnold, Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Kansas, was awarded a five-year, $609,000 National Science Foundation grant to customize an unmanned helicopter with two radar arrays so she can explore Greenland’s Helheim Glacier in 2021.

Carrying two bespoke radars powered by the aircraft's electrical system, the professor and her fellow researchers plan to not only map the glacial surfaces, but probe hundreds of meters into the ice. This kind of detailed data collection is not possible with satellite imagery, which covers great expanses but with less precision/far less resolution than low-altitude radar grid mapping. The UAV will operant in an environment of extreme cold temperatures with winds that can reach 55 knots — all while carrying a 10-pound payload. The specifications are for a mission endurance longer than 25 minutes. This means hardware more capable than the typical off-the-shelf solution.

Arnold and her other University of Kansas collaborators aim to gather data that will help scientists better understand the physics and dynamics of ice. “We want to know what [glaciers'] contribution is to global sea level rise” will be, says Arnold.

See the details here: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1848210

Microsoft is getting into the lumber business

To help offset carbon, Microsoft plans to plant hundreds of acres of native trees in Ireland over the next few years -- the largest corporate investment in Irish forestry in a decade. The plan by Microsoft will focus on native trees, such as Pedunculate Oak, Downy Birch, Common Alder, and Scots Pine. This will help to offset Irish greenhouse gas emissions.

Read more here...

Demand for Solar Panels Expected to Drop as Import Duties are Levied

New tarrifs on solar panels are among the duties imposed by the current U.S. administration.


As someone noted,

The American manufacturers aren't going to come in and sell them at the lower price. All that's being done is lower the demand after raising the prices. This is going to put a lot more people who were installing the panels out of work than the number of people who ever going to be employed making them. There are 10,000s people in the US working to install panels and that work can't be outsourced to any other country. Who cares where the panels come from? The cheaper they are, the more projects (residential and industrial) will become viable and started meaning more people employed.

Bond Villain Wins in Iceland, Volcano to be used for... good?!

We learn that...

Iceland says its geothermal power station at Reykjanes can produce clean energy independent from fossil fuels by generating electricity from the heat stored inside the earth
It's named after a Nordic god and drills deep into the heart of a volcano: "Thor" is a rig that symbolises Iceland's leading-edge efforts to produce powerful clean energy.

If successful, the experimental project could produce up to 10 times more energy than an existing conventional gas or oil well, by generating electricity from the heat stored inside the earth: in this case, volcanic areas.
Launched in August last year, the drilling was completed on January 25, reaching a record-breaking depth of 4,659 metres (nearly 3 miles).

Read more here...

Work Outside for Better Health

Need a place to enjoy the sunshine, blue skies and a place to charge your mobile? OUTBOX is an innovative workspace offering on-the-go professionals a perfect spot to escape the office -- work and create in the fresh air. OUTBOX was designed in creative partnership with Architectural Technology students from the Department of Applied Technology at Montgomery College.

This month, the Outbox, an outdoor office space in Silver Springs (sic) in the US state of Maryland, reopened for the summer. It was created last year by real estate development firm Peterson Companies

Read more here...

Hate litter in our waterways? Innovative way to clean them up

How many times have you been hiking with your dogs along your favorite river, stream or creak, only to cringe at the plastic bottles, cigarette butts, and other crap floating past? Maybe you have participated in "clean the creek" activities, like we have around our area?

How about applying some basic mechanical engineering ingenuity to automate clean-up? In Baltimore, Maryland some enterprising persons have done just that... With a water wheel!
http://youtu.be/v5l7s6wC50g
Watch how it works here...

Amazon Should Pick Up Their Empty Boxes to Recycle

Why doesn't Amazon. with their fancy new delivery services, pick up the empty boxes of our purchases, and re-use them?

Of course, you could donate to a worthy cause, packing the goods in your Amazon boxes.

Goodwill – the organization that receives all the unwanted clothes and household items from Give Back Box’s participants – pays for the costs of shipping as a way to increase its donations...

Sophie talks about options for recyling on her blog. Here's a discussion about the idea, on Amazon's forums.

@amazon #bluedog

Electric Utilities Change Rate Schedules to Rob You of Solar Savings

Electric utilities change the rate schedule so owners of solar arrays pay a higher rate during the evening, and can only sell power back to the grid at a lower rate than previous.

Read more here...

Spreading Life with Drones

While not as good as sowing seeds for trees the old fashion way, a former NASA engineer wants to increase the planet's forest canopy by deploying seedlings via drone. Using off-the-shelf technology, he suggests drones that first fly above an area and report on its potential for restoration. IF appropriate, the quadracopters would take up a position 10-15 feet above the ground and deploy pods containing seeds that are pre-germinated and covered in a nutritious hydrogel.

BioCarbon Engineering would plant germinated seeds using precision agriculture techniques. Their scalable, automated technology significantly reduces the manpower requirements -- thus, costs. Finally, mapping from the company's unmanned aerial vehicles will provide invaluable intelligence on planting patterns, landscape design and other factors.

Read more here....

Followup: iOS 8 + iPhone 6 = Portable Weather Station

With the iPhone six array of sensors, it is no wonder scientists are jumping on board. For example, OpenSignal is putting the barometer to use as old-fashioned weather sensors. Their app will download to any iPhone with iOS 8, with Apple’s two newest handsets you can take pressure readings, which Open Signal will plop into its crowdsourced weather map. Those readings combined with the barometric pressure measurements of Android users can then be used to give an ever-updating look at the pressure changes in your area. The data is also being sent off to climatologists, such as the University of Washington’s Cliff Mass, who are exploring ways of incorporating crowdsourced smartphone readings into future meteorology models.

Even add-on components are becoming available. Soon crowd-sourced real-time weather data will supplement satellite information to give us a better picture of our atmosphere. So you can do more than make satellite calls.

Interested in this technology? Read more here...

And, of course, sign up now for US national weather alerts...

What to do when the wind "don't blow an' the sun don't shine"

Solar and wind are the most talked about renewables when it comes to alternate energy sources. But when the wind doesn't blow, and the sun "don't" shine, how does one meet one's power needs?

A logical approach is to store electricity when those types of generators are out peak output, for consumption later. Batteries can be environmentally unfriendly, costly, and not meet performance goals.

Vanadium flow batteries offer the kind of low cost, high capacity energy storage solutions that will help transform the wind and the sun into power sources that rival fossil fuel plants for stability and reliability, but as always there are a couple of obstacles: where to get the transition metal vanadium, at a reasonable cost? One possibility is to recover the metal from other industrial activities, such as oil/gas production, or from recycling.

On a related note, why is the cost of solar so much less in Germany compared to the US? One possibility is that this s primarily due to Germany's more mature market, so market scale and associated learning-induced "cost reductions" are at work. However, as this article discusses, it seems the tax structure in the US is skewed away from adoption-incentives, resulting in higher costs for American buyers of solar over German ones.

The End of the Banana As We Know It

The world's most popular fruit -- not just among Germans -- is in danger. A fungus that is deadly to Cavendish bananas — the common yellow variety that amounts to 80 percent of all banana exports — has shown up in Mozambique and Jordan. Until now the fungus, Fusarium oxysporum f. sp.cubense, only affected crops in Southeast Asia and Australia. (Specifically Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and China.) With this cross-continental migration, researchers fear the fungus will soon reach Latin America, which grows the majority of the world's bananas.

This isn't the first time. A strain of the fungus in the 1950s was responsible for the demise of the precursor to the Cavendish, the Gros Michel banana -- the main type of banana imported into the U.S. from the 19th century through the 1950s. Gros Michel has been described as tastier than the much-loved Cavendish, but most present-day fruit lovers have never tasted its glorious flavor.

The Cavendish, which is rich in Vitamins B6 and C, has high levels of potassium, magnesium, and fibre; it is also cheap—about sixty cents a pound. In 2008, Americans ate 7.6 billion pounds of Cavendish bananas, virtually all of them imported from Latin America. Your supermarket likely sells many varieties of apples, but when you shop for bananas you usually have one option. The world’s banana plantations are a monoculture of Cavendishes.

Compounding the problem, Costa Rica declared its own banana emergency after mealybugs and scale insects began attacking banana plants, making them ineligible for export. Agriculture engineer Eric Bolanos told Sky News that these bugs are essentially banana vampires:

Basically, what it does is suck out the nutrients, or sap from the plant's organs, stems, leaves. It could reach the fruit, causing damage (like) dark stains.

A representative from the country's Phytosanitary Service said up to 20 percent of crops could be affected. But as for the fungus threat, scientists are working on options. A team of scientists -- led by James Dale of the Queensland University of Technology -- is working on genetically modified Cavendish. Another group, led by Juan Fernando Aguilar of the Fundación Hondureña de Investigación Agrícola, is attempting to naturally engineer a better banana.

Sharing Economy - the Start Trek future is happening, again

First it was the communicator, er, ubiquitous mobile phones.

And Bluetooth

Then transparent aluminum. And, of course, that device Mr. Spock used to always carry over his shoulder, particularly when the Away Team first surveyed a new planet, the tricorder.

Now, the replicator from Star Trek may push the world into a future more like the Federation. Many posit that the future depicted in Star Trek relies on an apparently post-scarcity, post-currency, socialistic economy. In the time-line of ST, technology gets better and better, so things that are mass produced (get cheaper and more abundant). From obvious clues in the TV shows and films, in ST there exists a post-scarcity economy where anyone can replicate any kind of consumer goods. This is not some Orwellian welfare state, but a world (universe?) where energy is abundant enough (anti-matter for power generation) and computational power is so high that people have unrestricted access to consumer-grade replicators. Consider what Matthew Yglesias says in his column,

There is absolutely, obviously, still private property in the Federation: most obviously Joseph Sisko’s restaurant in New Orleans and Chateau Picard, evidencing that not just small possessions are allowed but that the land itself is still privately owned. One could argue that these aren’t really Sisko and Picard’s to own, but they are routinely referred to as “his” restaurant and vineyard so we gotta go with Occam’s Razor here and assume they do, in fact, own them.

Over at the BBC, we read that first music, then movies and novels, became the vanguard of the "sharing" (post-scarcity) economy. Now everything in "meatspace" (IRL, in real life) appears to be at risk of piracy. This is perhaps nascent steps towards the replicator of the future. The proliferation of 3D printing open the possibility where, potentially at least, anything can be made at home, And, of course, anything could be pirated.

Next up, unlimited (well, cheap) power, not from anti-matter, but from fusion. Fusion offers the prospects of an inexhaustible source of energy for future generations -- but there are (so far) ginormous scientific and engineering challenges. Research is centred on tokamak reactors which confine a deuterium-tritium plasma magnetically. Many countries take part in fusion research to some extent, led by the European Union, the USA, Russia and Japan, with vigorous programs also underway in China, Brazil, Canada, and Korea. Initially, fusion research in the USA and USSR was linked to atomic weapons development. Following a breakthrough at the Soviet tokamak, fusion research became 'big science' in the 1970s. But the cost and complexity of the reactors involved increased to the point where international co-operation is the only way forward.

All we need to complete Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future -- warp drive. And we are on it! Hello, united federation. Goodbye, alien invaders.

Of course, nerds everywhere think the Xbox with Kinect will lead the way to the holodeck...

Emulate the Dutch for Healthy Citizens, Higher Quality of Life

Cycling in the Netherlands is extremely popular -- for a long time, except for a brief period post-war. The BBC has an interesting look at why bicycles are so popular in the Netherlands. This method of transport (and source of recreation) accounts for 27% all trips nationwide, and up to 59% of all trips in Dutch cities; so says Yes Magazine.

What can other countries adopt to help citizens become more fit, lower domestic reliance on petrol, and reduce congestion and pollution? In many countries bicycles, as a means of transportation, are largely ignored. Those who use bicycles to get around are often required to choose between uncomfortable, unsafe routes that go directly to their destination, or indirect, roundabout routes that provide better safety.

It seems in the Netherlands, the government is adept at providing direct, well-marked routes for bicyclists. This makes it easy to avoid busy, arterial roads with high speed traffic. This is a worthwhile step planners can take increase the number of people bicycling in DC, Dublin or elsewhere. Routes that are more direct for bicyclists provide further incentives for people to leave the car at home.

Luckily, if you want to visit European countries that are bicycle freiendly, Google has the tools you need -- especially now that they have added bike routes to many maps. Google has worked with partner organizations to map out the best and up-to-date bike routes and has added hundreds of miles of bike paths through Google Mapmaker.

Springtime (well, meteorological spring) Means Cycling!

Today's info-graphic comes courtesy of Green Living,




Of course, DC boasts some of the longest commute times. Why not enjoy the benefits of cycling, as this report summarizes, to get the most out of spring?
I love being out in the fresh air. Most bicycle paths are placed near trees which provides oxygen. Being out in the sunshine also provides the body with Vitamin D. And many studies have shown cycling improves cardiovascular fitness by up to 7 percent. Some experts say cycling can cut your risk of coronary heart disease in half. You can even create an interval training routine by pedaling faster and then taking a break at regular intervals.
With long travel time comes more stress -- and other studies show driving to work causes a tremendous amount of stress. People who have a long commute end up gaining weight. If your commute is long, you will just get in better shape by commuting on bike.
Cycling, I've found, has a meditative effect that relaxes me -- although I have to pay attention to traffic and safety, bicycling does allow my mind to wander.
When you commute to work by bike, you are guaranteed to have two exercise sessions a day. Lack motivation? You still have to ride your bike home at the end of the day. One study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine showed biking is associated with less weight gain in middle-aged women. Riding a bike burns plenty of calories, although exactly how many depends on pace.

Why High Speed Rail Won't Be Pulling into the Station Anytime Soon

High speed rail in the US is, unfortunately, unachievable, for many reasons, but one important one stands out: there are hundreds of thousands of at-grade-crossings. Too many roads and rail lines intersect, requiring crossing gates and slow transversal by trains. In Japan, the entire Shinkansen system resides behind concrete walls and high fences so pedestrians and automobiles don't have to be negotiated.
The culture of trains in other countries stems from a history of adoption of said transport method. Train evolution occurred simultaneously worked with the Industrial Revolution in England in the nineteenth-century, and served to play a crucial part in the lives of Victorians and urban development during this era. The impacts trains produced were unseen in relative terms as the technology pioneered was unlike anything previously.
This chap has an excellent discussion around the British culture is infused with rail technology -- at home and around the empire.
Unlike the poopy and slow horse that preceded this technological wonder, the railways enabled transportation times to dramatically decline. The debut of the steam locomotive of the 1830s turbo-charged the already booming British economy. The cultural impacts that took place due to the augmentation of the train and railways were visible almost immediately.
In Japan, a similar affectation for trains is infused in the culture. Love of all things transport-related is obvious to visitors to Japan, but trains are one if the most visible aspects of Nippon infrastructure loved by its people.


In the US, freight is the true winner for train traveling. Freight on railroads is the critical application for this surface transport. According to this, trains move 42 percent of the county's freight (measured in ton-miles) -- everything from lumber to vegetables, coal to orange juice, grain to automobiles, and chemicals to scrap iron -- and connect businesses with each other across the country and with markets overseas.
Rail contributes billions of dollars each year to the US economy through investment, worker wages, purchases, and taxes.

Dolphins Protest Off Coast of California

The protesters in Washington DC were joined in spirit by our watery brothers, a huge gathering of dolphins who showed brotherly sympathy for those wanting to save this planet. When will we show the largest-brained mammals reciprocal respect?


- Posted by Tom/Bluedog