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AgroForestryTree Database: Copaifera langsdorfii: Copaifera langsdorfii is an evergreen tree to 6-12(-35) m tall, and 1m diameter....
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Copaifera langsdorfii Desf.
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Part of the Handbook of Energy Crops, a description of Copaifera langsdorfii Desf. a.k.a. the diesel tree
Copaifera langsdorffii
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"The tropical rainforest tree Copaifera langsdorffii is known as the diesel tree and kerosene tree....It produces a large amount of terpene hydrocarbons in its wood and leaves. One tree can produce 30 to 40 liters of hydrocarbons per year...."
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Manual Intervention Motor Assist
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99MPG. com was started to support the MIMA modification to the Honda Insight, but has morphed into a site where creative individuals that have modified their hybrid cars to improve the efficiency can share their work with other like minded people.
We need to start now to save ourself s by working together.
They are a small group of people who are working on modifying their cars for higher efficiency.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
California utility to spread 'solar power plant' across rooftops
I've written about similar ideas before, namely that there is a lot of land area containing large warehouse-style buildings that have flat roofs. These buildings could then have roof-top solar panels. There is breaking news (links below) that Southern California Edison is launching a program to install solar panels on commercial rooftops
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The program calls for SCE to put enough solar photovoltaic panels on commercial buildings to turn out 250 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply about 162,000 homes....Once completed, the panels will take up 65,000,000 square feet of roofs in Southern California, or 2 square miles.
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The $875 million initiative also marks the first big move into so-called distributed energy by a major utility. Instead of building a centralized power station and the expensive transmission system needed to transmit electricity to the power grid, Edison will connect clusters of solar arrays into existing neighborhood circuits. A significant hurdle for the massive megawatt solar power plants planned for California’s Mojave Desert is the need in some cases to build multi billion-dollar transmission systems through environmentally sensitive lands to bring the electricity to coastal metropolises....Here’s how the solar roofs initiative will work: Edison will lease warehouse rooftop space from building owners. (The target area is the fast-growing “Inland Empire” of Riverside and San Bernardino counties.) The utility will contract for the installation of the arrays and will retain ownership of the solar systems. California regulators appear inclined to approve the project, which will be financed by a hike in utility rates.
Anybody who drives through modern industrial or office parks knows that there are vast expanses of rooftop space available. As I pointed out in my earlier posting on solar roof tops it's even easier to see this using maps.google.com or other online map services.
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Tuesday, March 25, 2008
U.S. Regains Missile Parts; Gates Orders Investigation
Geez, here we are at it again. First they "mistakenly" send a bomber with nuclear weapons on board when it wasn't supposed to be carrying nukes -- now a shipment of nuclear missile parts have been "mistakenly" sent to Taiwan as part of an arms shipment.
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The U.S. military has regained control of four non-nuclear nose cone assemblies for a Minuteman missile mistakenly sent to Taiwan in 2006
"Regained control of" is a spin job. To regain control of something they had to have lost that thing in the first place. Whew, they got the things back, but the fact is they lost these things.
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The nose cone assemblies and associated electrical parts are proximity fuses for the missiles. While not technically “triggers,” a nuclear warhead atop a Minuteman would not detonate without the signal from these devices.Preliminary information indicates that a shipment took place in response to a foreign military sales order from Taiwan for helicopter batteries, Wynne said. The Defense Logistics Agency depot at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, mistakenly shipped the fuses -- a classified system -- rather than the batteries.
The press release links to the LGM-30 MINUTEMAN III fact sheet where we learn these are part of a silo-launched guided missile, part of the Minuteman system. These are intercontinental missiles which were designed in the 1950's. Whatever the truth of losing these parts, it's likely a pure mistake rather than some kind of subtle strategy of arming Taiwan against threats from Mainland China. Minuteman missiles are not usable by Taiwan, however if those parts were to instead been sent to the Mainland China government this would have been bad in some way.
The problem here is that nuclear technology is so dangerous that it has to be strictly controlled. A genie has been let out, a genie that is willing to grant "wishes" in the form of destroyed cities and millions of dead people.
I keep thinking these weapons are so dangerous that any risk that these weapons will be used is too great, and that they simply should not exist. Any accident or any overly aggressive political leader could cause the use of these weapons, with disastrous effect.
In this case the parts were surplus (declared 'excess') and were in a warehouse. Taiwan had ordered some "helicopter batteries" and were instead shipped these fuses. According to several articles there are procedures in place which would have prevented these parts from being lost.. specifically there are inventory checks which are supposed to happen every 3 months. Somehow the inventory checks did not discover that some missile parts had been lost. Instead it was the Taiwan military who didn't recognize what they had received, and asked what it was they'd been sent.
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Friday, March 21, 2008
Start-up wins funding to draw electricity from 'waste' heat
Start-up wins funding to draw electricity from 'waste' heat: The CEO of GMZ Energy, Mike Clary, told VentureBeat that the company has received seed funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and described the Newton, Mass.-based start-up's plans....Researchers at Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of technology have found a way to more efficiently convert electricity from heat, a breakthrough they claim could make a wide range of products more energy-efficient.
Researchers achieve dramatic increase in thermoelectric efficiency: thermoelectricity is the “hot and cool” issue of physics. Heating one end of a wire, for example, causes electrons to move to the cooler end, producing an electric current. In reverse, applying a current to the same wire will carry heat away from a hot section to a cool section. Phonons, a quantum mode of vibration, play a key role because they are the primary means by which heat conduction takes place in insulating solids....Bismuth antimony telluride is a material commonly used in thermoelectric products, and the researchers crushed it into a nanoscopic dust and then reconstituted it in bulk form, albeit with nanoscale constituents. The grains and irregularities of the reconstituted alloy dramatically slowed the passage of phonons through the material, radically transforming the thermoelectric performance by blocking heat flow while allowing the electrical flow.
Nanotechnology boosts thermoelectric effect: Thermoelectric coolers and power generators were handed a 40-percent boost in performance recently by a nanotechnological reconstruction of a classic bulk material. The technique is suitable for mass production, according to its inventors at Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This makes it of use in both industrial and consumer cooling applications from semiconductors to nanoscale power generators.
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