Using GPS to Find Flight 370

BY ALLISON LINN

The pervasiveness of consumer technology that can track our every move has left some people scratching their heads as to why something so much more technically advanced, like the Malaysia Airlines jet carrying 239 people, could just disappear from the sky.

Experts say the technology used to track an airplane like the Boeing 777 is state of the art, and leaps and bounds more sophisticated than anything you’ll find in a consumer device. But it could have the same weakness that consumer technology has.

If the technology in a modern jet is so much more sophisticated than anything consumers have, why is it so hard to find missing Malaysian Airlines flight 370?

“GPS and tracking devices only work if they’re turned on or if they’re not destroyed,” said Scott Hamilton, aviation analyst for the consulting firm Leeham Co.

No one yet knows what happened to Malaysia Airlines flight 370. Hamilton said it’s possible the pilot or someone else turned off the transponder, or that the plane was destroyed in a sudden, violent event that also knocked out the tracking system.

There are also secondary radar systems, but Hamilton said those have some dead zones, particularly over large bodies of water.

William McCabe, president of the aviation safety consultancy The McCabe Group, said it’s very rare in the modern era for air traffic controllers and others not to know exactly where an aircraft is at all times, because of the overlapping technologies and procedures designed to make flying safe.

“It’s hard to know why that stopped,” he said. “Normally you can track an airplane extremely precisely, much more than a car.”

Still, there has been some discussion about augmenting existing technology with even more advanced systems, such as technology that would transmit in real time all the detailed information experts usually find in a black box long after the catastrophic event.

McCabe said that for now, such technology is quite expensive and may seem cost prohibitive given all the other technology that is used to track aircrafts’ whereabouts – and all the other costs associated with running profitable airplanes.

“What is the likelihood that whatever data is there would be needed on all those airplanes flying?” he said. “It turns out, one of the thousands of airplanes in the sky that day needed it.”

Converting Greenhouse Gases into Fuel

Finally! Scientists and concerned groups are now working on a solution to save this planet from the effects of Global Warming and Climate Change.

What if you could take greenhouse gases and convert it to fuel for an energy-hungry world?

"That's currently a 'holy grail' of science," says Utah State University biochemist Lance Seefeldt. "Imagine the far-reaching benefits of capturing environmentally damaging byproducts of burning fossil fuels and using them to make alternative fuels."

Yet that's exactly what Seefeldt and USU graduate student Zhiyong Yang accomplished using modern genetics. With colleagues Vivian Moure of Brazil's Federal University of Paraná and Dennis Dean of Virginia Tech, the scientists published findings in the Nov. 12, 2012, online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Yang, lead author on the paper, cautions the team's findings are just a first step toward converting carbon dioxide, one of the most abundant emissions from fossil fuel use, into usable hydrocarbons.

"We've only been able to convert a tiny amount of carbon dioxide to methane and our process is very slow and inefficient," says Yang, a USU doctoral student who earned his first doctorate in organic chemistry at China's Nankai University. "But now we can begin to understand the chemistry. We can establish the mechanistic principles for this conversion, on which other chemists can build to design better, more efficient catalysts to accomplish this process."

Reducing or "breaking apart" carbon dioxide molecules is difficult, Seefeldt says, because carbon dioxide is very stable.

He and Yang have long studied bacterial enzymes, known as nitrogenases, used in nitrogen reduction and, in the course of their research, discovered a molybdenum nitrogenase capable of converting carbon monoxide into hydrocarbons. The team reported their findings in June 3, 2011 issue of Journal of Biological Chemistry.

"Using this knowledge, we took a step back and wondered if we could use a similar process to convert carbon dioxide," Seefeldt says.

The biochemists used genetic engineering to remodel the nitrogenase protein so it can now convert carbon dioxide into methane.

"An advantage of our process is it provides a path to learn how to turn carbon dioxide into useful chemicals and fuels," Yang says. "The continuing challenge will be figuring out how this process works and then transferring that knowledge to the construction of robust catalysts that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into something useful."

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-11-biochemists-greenhouse-gas-fuel.html#jCp

The Tree Planting Myth

PLANT MORE TREES, it will reduce global warming.  So why stop the use of fossil fuels if planting more trees can reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? More trees, problem solved, right? -- DREAM ON.

Perhaps this is the reason why coal barons and governments tolerate the creation of more coal-fired power plants to solve the energy crisis especially in 3^rd world countries because of the myth that planting more trees could help in reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The Rising Tide Problem

Sea Levels on the Rise — Is there Anything We Can Do About It?

Over the past century, the burning of fossil fuels and other human and natural activities has released enormous amounts of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. These emissions have caused the Earth's surface temperature to rise, and the oceans absorb about 80 percent of this additional heat. 

The oceans are becoming a repository for almost all the Earth’s excess heat, driving up sea levels and threatening coastlines, according to a draft of the most comprehensive United Nations report addressing climate science. 

The oceans absorb about 80 percent of this additional heat...

Consequences

When sea levels rise rapidly, as they have been doing, even a small increase can have devastating effects on coastal habitats. As seawater reaches farther inland, it can cause destructive erosion, flooding of wetlands, contamination of aquifers and agricultural soils, and lost habitat for fish, birds, and plants. 

When large storms hit land, higher sea levels mean bigger, more powerful storm surges that can strip away everything in their path. 

In addition, hundreds of millions of people live in areas that will become increasingly vulnerable to flooding. Higher sea levels would force them to abandon their homes and relocate. Low-lying islands could be submerged completely. 

Storm Surge During Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) in the Philippines

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Most predictions say the warming of the planet will continue and likely will accelerate. Oceans will likely continue to rise as well, but predicting the amount is an inexact science. A recent study says we can expect the oceans to rise between 2.5 and 6.5 feet (0.8 and 2 meters) by 2100, enough to swamp many of the cities along the U.S. East Coast. More dire estimates, including a complete meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet, push sea level rise to 23 feet (7 meters), enough to submerge London and Los Angeles.



References:

1. http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/10/what-the-new-ipcc-report-says-about-sea-level-rise/
   
2. http://ocean.nationalgeographic.com/ocean/critical-issues-sea-level-rise/

WANTED: Jade Rabbit

China's first lunar rover, Yutu, has officially been declared lost.

The English-language website of the state-owned China News Service reported Wednesday that Yutu "could not be restored to full function Monday as expected and netizens mourned it on Weibo, China's Twitter-like service."

The six-wheeled, solar-powered moon buggy, whose name translates to "Jade Rabbit" in Chinese, hasn't been working since Jan. 25, when it experienced mechanical problems. The problems appeared to be related to the probe's process for shutting down for the lunar night, which lasts more than two weeks and brings the surface temperature down to –180 C.

The 140-kilogram rover arrived on the moon in December aboard the stationary Chang'e 3 lander, which became the first man-made vehicle to land on the moon in 37 years. It was designed to spend three months exploring for natural resources on the moon.

Chang'e 3 was named after a mythical Chinese goddess of the moon. It is designed to take scientific measurements for a year.

Force Field

Force field just a fantasy? Think Again! 

By Jeremy Wagstaff

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A new way of assembling things, called metamaterials, may in the not too distant future help to protect a building from earthquakes by bending seismic waves around it. Similarly, tsunami waves could be bent around towns, and soundwaves bent around a room to make it soundproof.

While the holy grail of metamaterials is still to make objects and people invisible to the eye, they are set to have a more tangible commercial impact playing more mundane roles - from satellite antennas to wirelessly charging cellphones.

Metamaterials are simply materials that exhibit properties not found in nature, such as the way they absorb or reflect light. The key is in how they're made. By assembling the material - from photonic crystals to wire and foam - at a scale smaller than the length of the wave you're seeking to manipulate, the wave can, in theory, be bent to will.

This makes metamaterials the tool of choice for scientists racing to build all sorts of wave-cloaking devices, including the so-called invisibility cloak - a cover to render whatever's inside effectively invisible by bending light waves around it.

"The invisibility cloak was just one more thing we were discovering - that we have all this flexibility in this material and here's another thing we can do," David Smith of Duke University, widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of metamaterials, said in a telephone interview. "But we're equally interested in seeing this transition in making a difference in people's lives."

Indeed, Smith's own journey from laboratory to factory illustrates that while metamaterials have for some become synonymous with "Harry Potter" cloaks, their promise is more likely to be felt in a range of industries and uses, from smaller communication devices to quake-proof buildings.

BENDING LIGHT

At the heart of both metamaterials and invisibility are waves. If electromagnetic waves - whether visible light, microwave or infrared - can be bent around an object it would not be visible on those wavelengths. It was long thought you couldn't control light in this way with natural materials as their optical properties depended on the chemistry of the atoms from which they were made.

It was only when Smith and his colleagues experimented with altering the geometry of material in the late 1990s that they found they could change the way it interacted with light, or other kinds of wave - creating metamaterials. With that, says Andrea Alu, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, scientists found "it may be possible to challenge rules and limitations that were for centuries considered written in stone."

The past decade has seen an explosion in research that has built on Smith's findings to make objects invisible to at least some forms of light.

"There have now been several demonstrations of cloaking at visible wavelengths, so cloaking is truly possible and has been realized," says Jason Valentine of Vanderbilt University, who made one of the first such cloaks. These, however, have limitations - such as only working for certain wavelengths or from certain angles. But the barriers are falling fast, says Valentine.

In the past year, for example, Duke University's Yaroslav Urzhumov has made a plastic cloak that deflects microwave beams using a normal 3D printer, while Alu has built an ultra-thin cloak powered by electric current.

INVISIBLE ARMY?

Funding much of this U.S. research is the military.

Urzhumov said in an email interview that the U.S. Department of Defense is "one of the major sponsors of metamaterials and invisibility research in the U.S." The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which commissions advanced research for the Department of Defense, has funded research into metamaterials since 2000, according to the department's website.

Military interest in metamaterials was primarily in making a cloak, said Miguel Navarro-Cia of Imperial College London, who has researched the topic with funding from the European Defence Agency and U.S. military.

But an invisibility cloak needn't be a sinister tool of war.

Vanderbilt's Valentine suggests architectural usage. "You could use this technology to hide supporting columns from sight, making a space feel completely open," he said.

Other potential uses include rendering parts of an aircraft invisible for pilots to see below the cockpit, or to rid drivers of the blind spot in a car.

Military or not, this is all some way off.

"Most invisibility cloaks, essentially, are still in the research stage," says Ong Chong Kim, director at the National University of Singapore's Centre for Superconducting and Magnetic Materials.

MAKING WAVES

Ong and others say that while metamaterials may not yet be making objects invisible to the eye, they could be used to redirect other kinds of waves, including mechanical waves such as sound and ocean waves. French researchers earlier this year, for example, diverted seismic waves around specially placed holes in the ground, reflecting the waves backward.

Ong points to the possibility of using what has been learned in reconfiguring the geometry of materials to divert tsunamis from strategic buildings.

Elena Semouchkina, a pioneer on cloaking devices at Michigan Technological University, points to screening antennas so they don't interfere with each other, protecting people from harmful radiation or acoustic pressure, and even preventing buildings from destruction from seismic waves.

Metamaterials could also absorb and emit light with extremely high efficiency - for example in a high-resolution ultrasound - or redirect light over a very small distance. This, says Anthony Vicari of Lux Research, "could be used to improve fiber optical communications networks, or even for optical communications within microchips for faster computing."

COMMERCIAL USES

Indeed, there's clearly a growing appetite for commercializing the unique properties of metamaterials.

One of the first to do so was the new defunct Rayspan Corp, a California-based company whose antennas found their way into WiFi routers from networking manufacturer Netgear Inc and a superflat smartphone from LG Electronics Inc.

The antennas were smaller, flatter and performed better than other options, but integrating them into the rest of the phone proved difficult, said former Rayspan executives. A spokesman for LG said the project was no longer active and LG had no plans to apply metamaterials in other products.

"One thing from my experience as an entrepreneur is that technology gets very excited about what it's doing in the lab," said Maha Achour, who co-founded Rayspan, "but the reality when you commercialize things is completely different." The company's patents have since been sold to an undisclosed buyer.

The lessons have been learned. Now, the focus has shifted to using metamaterials in products in markets where they can more easily gain a commercial foothold.

Smith, who built the first metamaterials in 1999, has led the charge, teaming up with Intellectual Ventures, a patent portfolio firm, to spin off two companies: Kymeta Corp, making flat-panel antennas for satellite communications, and Evolv Technologies, which hopes to make a lighter, faster and portable airport scanner - with no moving parts. Kymeta, in partnership with satellite operators Inmarsat and O3b Networks, hopes to ship in early 2015.

The two fields were chosen from a shortlist of 20 potential markets, Smith said. "They're the same metamaterials behind the cloak, but we were looking for more near-term applications."

WIRELESS CHARGING

The next likely consumer use of metamaterials could be in the wireless charging of devices, an area attracting keen industry attention.

Mark Gostock of ISIS Innovation Ltd, an Oxford University research commercialization firm, said he was in talks with several manufacturers to license ISIS' technology. Samsung Electronics has filed several patents related to metamaterials and wireless charging, but declined to comment for this article.

Other companies that cite metamaterials in their patent filings include Harris Corp, NEC Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and Panasonic Corp.

Eventually, says Wil McCarthy, chief technology officer of Denver-based smart window maker RavenBrick LLC and holder of a patent he hopes will bring metamaterials to polarizing windows, metamaterials will be incorporated without much fanfare.

"The people buying these products will have no idea how they work, and won't know or care that they're doing things that were previously considered impossible," he says.

from:  http://goo.gl/uNrhFH