As destructive natural phenomena go, hurricanes are among the heavyweights. If not for the gale-force winds and resulting projectile debris, then for the massive flooding that results when one makes landfall and stalls out, a hurricane is a nasty piece of work. Just ask the residents of the coastal Carolinas and Georgia this week as they wring themselves out from Hurricane Matthew’s weekend deluge.
If you’re looking to build a new home on coastal waters where hurricanes are known to roam, you might want to skip the two-by-fours and cement and instead start drinking bottled soda. A Canadian company has recently completed construction of a home with exterior walls made from recycled plastic, and it’s claimed to be able to withstand winds gusting at over 300 miles per hour.
Built by JD Composites, the three bedroom home is situated near the Meteghan River in Nova Scotia. Aside from a distinct lack of trees, gardens, and neighbors, the house looks like any other dwelling with a clean modern design and a minimalist facade. Inside it’s fully furnished and finished with drywall covered lumber walls, but the exterior is what makes the house appealing as a new, and seemingly much improved, approach to construction.
While solar and wind power are rapidly becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels in areas with lots of sun and wind, they still can’t provide the 24/7 power we’ve become used to. At present, that’s not big a problem because the grid still features plenty of fossil fuel plants that can provide constant baseload or ramp up to meet surges in demand.
But there’s broad agreement that we need to dramatically decarbonize our energy supplies if we’re going to avoid irreversible damage to the climate. That will mean getting rid of the bulk of on-demand, carbon-intensive power plants we currently rely on to manage our grid.
Alternatives include expanding transmission infrastructure to shuttle power from areas where the wind is blowing to areas where it isn’t, or managing demand using financial incentive to get people to use less energy during peak hours. But most promising is pairing renewable energy with energy storage to build up reserves for when the sun stops shining.
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If 150,000 volt stun guns aren’t enough to deter criminals, law enforcement might want to give Rob Flickenger a buzz.
The IT expert, who also has a bit of a reputation as a DIY mad-scientist, has a shocking new invention: a real-life lightning gun. Built over a period of at least 10 months, the zapper is the end result of combining the aim-and-shoot functionality of an aluminum-encased Nerf gun with the electrical power supplied by an 18V drill battery.
The gun, which some of you might have guessed, is essentially a weaponized version of a Spark Gap Tesla Coil. To generate a high-voltage discharge, Flickenger designed a system that channeled the power drill’s 18V of power into a ZVS driver circuit, which in turn drives a flyback transformer, thereby raising the voltage to about 20,000V. All of this is admitted pretty technical, so if you want a detailed explanation of how it works, check out his site Hackerfriendly.com, where he goes through the finer points of the technology.
There’s no way to store toxic coal waste that’s completely safe. There’s also no way to mine and burn coal that doesn’t threaten communities, our waterways and our climate. Duke needs to stop burning coal, clean up its toxic mess, and invest in abundant, affordable clean energy sources like solar and wind. #2048istoolate #BeyondCoal #YEARSproject with Sierra Club.
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Can bacteria generate radio waves?
On the face of it, this seems an unlikely proposition. Natural sources of radio waves include lightning, stars and pulsars while artificial sources include radar, mobile phones and computers. This is a diverse list. So it’s hard to see what these things might have in common with bacteria that could be responsible for making radio waves.
But today, Allan Widom at Northeastern University in Boston and a few pals, say they’ve worked out how it could be done.
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation has been responsible for widespread, simultaneous crop failures in recent history, according to a new study from researchers at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and other partners. This finding runs counter to a central pillar of the global agriculture system, which assumes that crop failures in geographically distant breadbasket regions such as the United States, China and Argentina are unrelated. The results also underscore the potential opportunity to manage such climate risks, which can be predicted using seasonal climate forecasts.
The study, published in Science Advances, is the first to provide estimates of the degree to which different modes of climate variability such as ENSO cause volatility in global and regional production of corn, wheat and soy. Such variability caused nearly 18 percent volatility in global corn production from 1980 to 2010, for example.
“Global agriculture counts on the strong likelihood that poor production in one part of the world will be made up for by good production elsewhere,” said Weston Anderson, a postdoctoral research scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and lead author on the study.