n2doc
n2doc's JournalToon: Under Fire Funnies
Might as well post it here because it will just get canned anywhere other than the Gungeon...
The World’s Largest Solar Thermal Power Plant
The Ivanpah solar thermal plant uses concentric circles of mirrors that will focus sunlight onto a central tower, generating high temperatures to produce steam. The plant will feature three towers, each with its own set of mirrors. The first unit, in the foreground, is the nearest to completion. By February of this year, workers had begun to install mirrors, which can be seen in the upper left and right sides of the field.
The outlines of a massive solar thermal power plant—the largest ever—are starting to appear in the wilderness outside of Las Vegas. The $2.2 billion project, which is being built by Oakland, California-based Brightsource, stretches over 3,600 acres near Ivanpah, California. When it’s finished, it will generate 370 megawatts of electricity on sunny days.
The project has been a long time coming. Brightsource first filed an application for the project in the summer of 2007. Approval took three years. Construction was temporarily slowed to accommodate the care and relocation of desert tortoises—a threatened species—found in larger numbers than expected. The project, which will generate electricity by using mirrors to concentrate sunlight to heat up water and drive steam turbines, is now expected to be finished next year.
Even as the project nears completion, the future of solar thermal power plants is in doubt. That’s in large part because prices for solar panels—which convert sunlight to electricity directly—have dropped quickly in the last few years, causing at least one company to abandon plans to build solar thermal plants in favor of making ones that use solar panels.
Yet solar thermal has at least one great strength compared to many other types of solar power: the heat it produces is easy to store, so electricity can be generated even after the sun goes down, and power can be dispatched to the grid whenever it’s most needed.
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/40460/?p1=A1
China paying billions for oil deals in the Americas
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Eager to feed its growing energy appetite, China's worldwide buying binge for oil and other energy assets is spreading to North and South America.
Yet most analysts say China's newfound interest in American energy may actually be good for U.S. consumers, as it will likely increase oil and gas supplies worldwide and possibly lower prices.
China is also said to be interested in building a pipeline to carry 300,000 barrels a day of Colombian oil to the Pacific Coast, according to a recent Eurasia Group note.
These deals come on the heels of some other major energy acquisitions.
They include CNOOC (CEO)'s purchase of a $2 billion stake in Chesapeake's Texas oil fields in 2010 as well as CNOOC's $2 billion purchase of Canadian oil sands operator OPTI Canada in 2011.
more
http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/29/investing/china-oil-energy/index.htm
The Enigma 1,800 Miles Below Us
As if the inside story of our planet weren’t already the ultimate potboiler, a host of new findings has just turned the heat up past Stygian.
Geologists have long known that Earth’s core, some 1,800 miles beneath our feet, is a dense, chemically doped ball of iron roughly the size of Mars and every bit as alien. It’s a place where pressures bear down with the weight of 3.5 million atmospheres, like 3.5 million skies falling at once on your head, and where temperatures reach 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit — as hot as the surface of the Sun. It’s a place where the term “ironclad agreement” has no meaning, since iron can’t even agree with itself on what form to take. It’s a fluid, it’s a solid, it’s twisting and spiraling like liquid confetti.
Researchers have also known that Earth’s inner Martian makes its outer portions look and feel like home. The core’s heat helps animate the giant jigsaw puzzle of tectonic plates floating far above it, to build up mountains and gouge out seabeds. At the same time, the jostling of core iron generates Earth’ magnetic field, which blocks dangerous cosmic radiation, guides terrestrial wanderers and brightens northern skies with scarves of auroral lights.
Now it turns out that existing models of the core, for all their drama, may not be dramatic enough. Reporting recently in the journal Nature, Dario Alfè of University College London and his colleagues presented evidence that iron in the outer layers of the core is frittering away heat through the wasteful process called conduction at two to three times the rate of previous estimates.
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/science/earths-core-the-enigma-1800-miles-below-us.html
Radioactive bluefin tuna crossed the Pacific to US
Source: AP/SF Gate
Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan's crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away — the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.
"We were frankly kind of startled," said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that's still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.
Previously, smaller fish and plankton were found with elevated levels of radiation in Japanese waters after a magnitude-9 earthquake in March 2011 triggered a tsunami that badly damaged the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/05/28/national/a120114D60.DTL&tsp=1
"And when I get rich, I won't have to pay any taxes!"
That's the way things are headed, folks. Not paying taxes will be seen (by poor people) as a perk of being rich, like having a mansion and jet plane. The nice folks on the TV and radio will tell them that this is a great thing, the way things should be.
Essay- The Most Important Thing I've Ever Learned from My Dad, the Veteran
By Cord Jefferson
The problem with holidays like Memorial Day is the intangibility of the whole thing. While Occupy Wall Street inveighs against the 1 percent, the 1 percent most of us forget about are the Americans serving in our wars. Many people don't know anyone currently in the military, and even fewer know actual war veterans or men and women who have died in combat, the people Memorial Day was created to recognize following the bloodshed of the Civil War. Without ever meeting or talking to veterans about their experiences, honoring them on days like tomorrow or Veterans Day rings hollow. We're told that giving thanks to soldiers is the right thing to do, and we think we glean the horrors of war from films like Saving Private Ryan. But what do we really know about the ex-soldier's plight? What right do we even have pretending to empathize with them on Memorial Day with our yellow ribbons and our meager offers of thanks?
I've never been in the military, and today I'm close with only one person who saw combat in Iraq. But I was raised by a father who did two tours of duty in Vietnam as an Army captain. My dad doesn't really like to talk about his time at war, but when he does so he looks away, as if looking at me while telling me of the violence and sadness would sully me in some way. My mother—she and my dad are now divorced—says my father used to have awful nightmares from which he'd wake up screaming and drenched in sweat. When I asked my dad, who has scoffed at drugs my entire life, if he'd ever smoked marijuana while in Vietnam, he said no. "Killing people every day fucks you up enough," he said.
Whenever I think of the sadness and sacrifice of soldiers on Memorial Day, I think of my dad, and one story in particular. It's a story that begins in a Lebanese restaurant in Saudi Arabia, where my dad lives, and to me it says more about what happens to soldiers at war than any gory war movie I've seen or book I've read.
This was in 2008, and during our meal we’d been talking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the former of which was raging less than 600 miles from us. Our chat got so involved that my dad took the long way back to his house so we could have time to finish the conversation. We pulled into his driveway and, still not satisfied, my father turned off the car and we sat there in the dark and the all-consuming midnight heat that wraps Saudi Arabia.
more
http://www.good.is/post/the-most-important-thing-i-ve-ever-learned-from-my-dad-the-veteran/
Scientist: Evolution debate will soon be history
By FRANK ELTMAN, Associated Press
Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history.
Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself.
Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that "even the skeptics can accept it."
"If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it's solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive," Leakey says, "then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges."
...
"If you look back, the thing that strikes you, if you've got any sensitivity, is that extinction is the most common phenomena," Leakey says. "Extinction is always driven by environmental change. Environmental change is always driven by climate change. Man accelerated, if not created, planet change phenomena; I think we have to recognize that the future is by no means a very rosy one."
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/05/26/national/a082942D52.DTL
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