ANIMALS - Pets battling cancer can join clinical trials too
(HealthDay)-If you hear that a friend's beloved family member has joined a clinical trial for cancer treatment, don't assume the patient is human ...
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-06-pets-cancer-clinical-t
BOOKS - The Science Delusion argues that science wrecks truth and beauty
Curtis White's book, The Science Delusion, makes two broad points: that science is based upon 'assumptions that are deluded,' and that scientists can be real jerks. He provides ample proof for one of those claims.The title of the The Science Delusion, published on May 28th, is an obvious reference Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. It's no surprise, then, when Dawkins is one of the many scientists that populate its pages. They're not an attrac ...
CLIMATE - $110 Billion Price Tag for Extreme Weather Events in 2012
When it came to extreme weather and climate events, 2012 was a colossal year for the U.S. It was the warmest year on record in the lower 48 states, featuring a massive drought and deadly heat waves that broke thousands of temperature records. Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, and one of the most intense and long-lasting complexes of severe thunderstorms, known as a "derecho," plunged 4 million people into darkne ...
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/extreme-weather-cost-u.s.
CLIMATE - Interactive Wildfires Map Tracks the Blazes in Colorado
By Climate Central Aided by strong winds, the Black Forest wildfire near Colorado Springs has now become the most destructive fire in Colorado's history, surpassing 2012's Waldo Canyon fire. It's burning through thousands of acres of land, and firefighters are struggling to contain the blaze. The 15,702-acre Black Forest fire has destroyed at least 360 homes and forced the evacuation of nearly 40,000 people from areas in and around C ...
CLIMATE - Spring in U.S. Was Cooler and More Extreme Than Average
The U.S. had a cooler and wetter than average spring that featured deadly tornadoes in Oklahoma, widespread flooding in the Midwest, and deepening drought in the Western U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In a report released Thursday, NOAA said the March-through-May period was the coolest such stretch since spring of 1996, ranking as the 38th-coolest spring on record despite a warmer-than-average May. ...
EARTH - A map of all the rivers in the United States, and nothing else
Just how many rivers are there in the United States? Based on this map, a hell of a lot more than you might think.Nelson Minar put this wonderful map together. He put all the data the files he used up on Github so you can make your own version. See also: this map of U.S. roads and nothing else.CaliforniaMississippi[Via Kottke ...
EARTH - Daniel Fox's lava captures "birth of new Earth"
Photographer Daniel Fox captures "the birth of new Earth" within the stunning beauty of lava flows on Kalapana, Hawaii ...
EARTH - How sharing equipment helps gold miners use mercury-free processing in Mongolia
In many ways, the biggest story in Mongolia right now is the story of mining. A new model for mercury-free mining can protect the environment and empower miners ...
EARTH - Massive Floods Are Coming. We Are Not Prepared.
The risk of flood is on the rise, and experts agree: society isn't ready for what lies ahead.Yesterday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) published a landmark investigation on the connections between climate change, population growth and sea-level rise. The study concludes that the amount of the U.S. at risk for floods could increase 45% by 2100, doubling the number of flood-prone properties covered by the National Flood Insurance pr ...
EARTH - This is the totally bonkers story of the US/Canada border
The most interesting thing you'll watch today is this video about the geographic border between Canada and the ol' U.S. of A. Yes, really.In his latest video, the always-entertaining C.G.P. Grey expounds on the northern hemisphere's 49th parallel - the circle of latitude that ostensibly separates America from the Great White North. But as Grey explains, the parallel's application as a strict, undeviating and linear international border has prove ...
http://io9.com/this-is-the-totally-bonkers-story-of-the-us-c
ECONOMICS - A New Blog Begins
Welcome to my new blog discussing energy and economic issues. First, a little bit about me. I spent nine years as the business columnist for the Houston Chronicle, and when you cover business in the world's energy capital, you devote a lot of column inches to energy issues ...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorensteffy/2013/06/13/a-new-blo
ECONOMICS - Midas List 2013: The Top 10
The top 10 venture capital investors from the 2013 Forbes Midas List ...
http://www.forbes.com/pictures/eegi45eidmk/jim-breyer
ENERGY - Chinese Ban, Higher Royalties Could Dethrone King Coal In Indonesia
Indonesia's coal exports have anchored a multi-year growth spurt, but the party may be over. Prices for thermal coal recently touched a three-year low of below $90/ton, a far cry from their post-2008 rebound on the back of demand from China and India. At this price, some producers are digging coal at a loss. In addition to soft global prices, Indonesian miners face two regulatory threats. The first is China's proposed import ban on low-qu ...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/simonmontlake/2013/06/13/chinese
ENERGY - Energy Efficiency Gets More And Less Attention
Energy efficiency is attracting more attention from global decision makers than it did a few years ago, according to a new survey ...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/06/14/energ
ENERGY - Energy Savings Myths
What you didn't know about energy efficiency that could hurt your pocket book ...
http://www.forbes.com/pictures/efee45ikhk/energy-savings-myt
ENERGY - How Green Is Your Country? (Map)
This article was originally published on RenewEconomy.Today's Graph of the Day comes courtesy of The Energy Collective, and gives an interesting perspective of the level of renewable energy in the electricity systems of countries across the globe: the lighter the green, the higher the percentage of renewables.But appearances can be deceiving. The sub-Sahara region is bathed in light green, but this is because they rely on traditional biomass .. ...
ENERGY - In Energy, `Picking Winners' Isn't the Problem
The government shouldn't pick winners. It's a common refrain from the oil and gas side of the energy business, used to argue against subsidies and tax breaks for renewable fuels. There's a bit of selective memory, if not collective delusion, in the argument ...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorensteffy/2013/06/13/in-energy
ENERGY - Leichhardt, Sydney Aims For 100% Renewable Energy By 2025
This article was originally published on RenewEconomy.By Sophie VorrathThe council of the inner-west Sydney city of Leichhardt has committed to becoming 100 per cent renewable by 2025, building on its recent draft plan to tackle climate change by reducing emissions in local government facilities.Leichhardt, which last year became the second council in NSW to achieve carbon neutrality, made the commitment last week - a goal it plans to achiev .. ...
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/06/13/leichhardt-sydney-aims-f
ENERGY - Moving To The Cloud Could Save 23 Billion Kilowatt-hours Of Electricity
A study conducted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Northwestern University and funded by Google has found that moving common software applications used by US workers to the cloud could save 23 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, approximately enough energy to power all the homes, businesses, and industry of Los Angeles for a whole year.The report (PDF) identified three common businesses applications which could be moved to the .. ...
ENERGY - Shale Gas: China's Untapped Resource
When I met recently with a senior investment officer from China Investment Corporation (CIC), the country's sovereign wealth fund, I was told that CIC is very bullish on the United States. Why? In CIC's opinion, the existence of large shale gas reserves in the U.S. will provide a massive shot in the arm for the country's large but mature economy - kind of a modern-day energy equivalent to the deus ex machina in Greek literature ...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jackperkowski/2013/06/13/shale-g
ENERGY - Why America's Shale Oil Boom Could End Sooner Than You Think
America's oil producers are nervous. They've had a great run the past few years. Domestic oil production is up 43% since 2008 to 6.5 million barrels per day, the highest level in decades. The majority of that 2 million bpd jump comes out of the two most successful new oil fields, the Bakken and the Eagle Ford. To develop these and all the other fields nationwide, the top 50 operators invested $186 billion in 2012, according to Ernst & ...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/06/13/why
ENERGY - Sweden's Quest To Be The First Oil-Free Nation
This post first appeared on Fuel Freedom By Zana NesheiwatFamous for Volvo, Ikea and Absolut Vodka, Sweden is now on a new pursuit to become the first completely oil-free economy in the world by 2020.The oil crisis in the early 1970s forced Sweden to embark on a quest for alternative energy sources. Its phasing out of oil has proceeded smoothly; in 1970, oil accounted for 77% of Sweden's energy, but by 2003 that figure fell to 32%. According .. ...
ENERGY - The Dept of Energy's other hand facilitating tar sands development in Alaska
A bunch of my friends are up in arms about the Keystone XL pipeline, and the "carbon bomb" it would be if built. Why carbon bomb? Because it is a vast store of hydrocarbon fossil fuels, and building the pipeline would facilitate extraction of those fuels. There's another deposit of tar sands not too far away, in Alaska's North Slope. The U.S. Dept of Energy (DoE) just signed a Memorandum o ...
http://www.longtailpipe.com/2013/04/the-dept-of-energys-othe
ENERGY - Under Pressure: Piezoelectric Energy To Be Generated By Paris Marathoners
People move. All the time. Wouldn't it be great to harness that movement and help power our cities with the movement of people living in them? The Paris Marathon will happen on Sunday, and the organizers are going to lay down some special tiles across the course. While runners are concerned with charging their internal batteries with carbs and sustaining them with goo, their footsteps will charge other batteries: The flexible tiles made from recy ...
ENERGY - Energy Secretary Nominee: Need Carbon Price To Double Or Triple Cost Of Dirty Energy
Reposted from Climate Progress:Tuesday is the confirmation hearing date for Energy Secretary nominee Ernest Moniz. The MIT professor will face the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee (webcast here starts at 10 am ET).I have known Moniz for 30 years. Turns out he was my professor for advanced electromagnetism in 1982. Then I worked with him again at the Clinton Energy Department in 1997 and 1998 (his full bio is here). I think he's .. ...
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/04/08/energy-secretary-nominee
ENERGY - French zoo to generate its own electricity from panda poo
Thanks to plans underway for a new processing plant to convert waste into electricity, pandas will soon be helping to cut this zoo's energy bill -- with heaps of their potentially-powerful poop ...
ENERGY - Sucking Up CO2 In The Desert
Reposted from Lenz Blog:Image Credit: Solar panel, wind turbine & globe via ShutterstockPaul Gipe just posted an article looking back at his three decades of renewable advocacy titled "100 Percent Renewable Vision Building."In that article Gipe describes how reality has performed much better than what was expected decades ago. And now we are discussing 100 percent renewable.That is a great article, and I recommend reading it.But it also .. ...
ENERGY - Switchgrass Biofuel Potentially Cheaper Than Oil for Heating Homes
To be filed in the category of everything old is new again: a new study from the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) suggests that millions of homes and businesses in the U.S. would save money by burning biomass in their basement furnaces instead of oil, in form of switchgrass biofuel pellets. That would bring things back - way back - full circle to the days when the prevailing form of energy was distributed energy, in the form of biomas .. ...
ENERGY - Turning tires into gas for energy and new, valuable materials
Tire recycling represents an untapped opportunity, that may prove a success if processing costs do not become prohibitive ...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130404081548.ht
ENERGY - DOE Announces Winners Of 5th Annual Lighting Competition
Reposted from EERE (image added from Next Generation Luminaries Design Competition website):The Energy Department on March 20 announced the winners of the fifth annual Next Generation Luminaires™ Design competition for indoor lighting. Sponsored by the Energy Department, the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America, and the International Association of Lighting Designers, the competition promotes excellence in the design of energy- .. ...
ENERGY - DOE's Big New Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative
Reposted from the U.S. Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy website (photo added):As part of the Energy Department's launch of the Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative, Assistant Secretary David Danielson toured the new Carbon Fiber Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Carbon fiber has the potential to improve the fuel efficiency of vehicles.Photo Credit: Jason Richards, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.By David Danielson, Assistant S .. ...
MOVIES - Man of Steel: Worth It Just For The Super-Powered Combat
There's really only one reason to see the new Superman movie: to watch people with superhuman powers pounding the crap out of each other, flying into each other and burninating each other with heat vision. Luckily, The Man of Steel more than delivers on the super-punching front, even as it muddles through in other ways.Minor spoilers ahead...Seriously, the action scenes in this movie are fantastic. They're like a virtuoso performance, a dissertat ...
SCIENCE - The Science Delusion argues that science wrecks truth and beauty
Curtis White's book, The Science Delusion, makes two broad points: that science is based upon 'assumptions that are deluded,' and that scientists can be real jerks. He provides ample proof for one of those claims.The title of the The Science Delusion, published on May 28th, is an obvious reference Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. It's no surprise, then, when Dawkins is one of the many scientists that populate its pages. They're not an attrac ...
SCIENCE - We Want You . . . to Become a Scientist!
This summer, we want you to become a scientist. You can do it from your cubicle at work, or by going out into the woods and counting frogs. No matter what your scientific passion is, we've got a way for you to help scientists do cutting edge research on it. Join the citizen science revolution!For the next three months, we'll be posting a series of stories about citizen science, and how members of the general public can help make important scient ...
SPACE - Ever Seen a Four-Planet Sunset?
You have now.This composite image, captured by astrophotographer Chris Kotsiopoulos, combines a series of photographs snapped from Alikes salt lake in Kos Island, Greece, during last light on May 25th. NASA claims you can spot four planets in the image. The trails of Jupiter, Venus and Mercury appear from left to right, "dropping toward the western horizon, gathered close in last month's remarkable triple planetary conjunction." The ...
SPACE - Is the Earth getting heavier?
Except for the occasional earthquake or volcano eruption, the Earth seems like a fairly stable place. But if you believe that YOU COULD NOT BE MORE WRONG. We are under constant bombardment. From space! And how does all of this cosmic debris affect the earth? In this week's "Ask a Physicist" we'll find out."Visible Earth" image via NASABut first... last week, I posted a call for questions, a contest where the most exci ...
SPACE - This Weekend, Celebrate 50 Years of Women in Space
This Sunday, June 16, marks the 50th anniversary of cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova's 1963 trip to low Earth Orbit - a flight she made just two years after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in history to visit space. Above: Four women serving together on the International Space Station on April 14, 2010 - the most to ever visit space simultaneously. Clockwise from lower right are NASA astronauts Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Stephanie Wilson, bo ...
SPACE - This alien world shouldn't even exist
What you're looking at could be a planet being born some 176 light-years away from Earth. It's a small planet, only 6 to 28 times Earth's mass. But that's not even the best part. This alien world, if we can confirm it, shouldn't be there according to conventional planet-forming theory.Top image: TW Hydrae and the protoplanetary stuff surrounding the star. Astronomers believe a planet is forming within the gas and dust and sweeping up debris, as s ...
SUSTAINABILITY - How New York City plans to survive the next storm
The Building Resiliency Task Force presented a report to New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg on ways the city should adapt to better handle the next superstorm ...
TREES - Signage that makes a park look better, not worse
At last, outdoor signs that are informative and fun ...
URBAN - Cattails As Building Insulation - New Research Brings To Light The Great Advantages Of The Material
Cattails - Typha sp - are a very useful material, one that can be effectively employed for a variety of very different purposes. Throughout history, they have served as a nutritious food source, a source of downy material for bedding, a raw material for wickerwork, a means of cleaning wastewater at sewage treatment plants and of removing toxins from soils, and as a medicinal plant. And now, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Buildin .. ...
URBAN - Easy-to-assemble emergency flatpack shelter uses less than cubic metre of material
This modular emergency shelter has a simple kit of parts that can be rapidly built with no tools and transported with a small vehicle ...
URBAN - Tall wood: 34 storey skyscraper proposed for Stockholm
C.F. Møller Architects' proposal in design competition is light and airy ...
URBAN - The Exbury Egg is an " energy efficient self-sustaining work space"
Artist Stephen Turner will live in it for a year and "provide a voice for mute nature" ...
WATER - $278 Million A Year In Geothermal Benefits For US
The annual health and environmental benefits to the United States from geothermal energy have been estimated to be $278 million a year, according to the Geothermal Energy Association. Binary geothermal energy plants produce almost no fossil fuel emissions, and other types only trace amounts of pollutants. Argonne National Laboratories found that hydrothermal binary plants have some of the lowest emissions of any energy technology, in their 2 .. ...
WIND - New spin on wind turbine adds solar element
The university is touting a design that combines wind and solar in a vertical-axis turbine configuration ...
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