WASHINGTON — The White House is getting a new garden. First lady Michelle Obama is scheduled to break ground Friday on a new garden near the fountain on the South Lawn that will supply the White House kitchen. She will be joined by students from Bancroft Elementary School in the District of Columbia. The children will stay involved with the project, including planting the fruits, vegetables and herbs in the coming weeks and harvesting the crops later in the year. Mrs. Obama spent time earlier this week at an exhibit on rooftop gardening. ‘We’re going to get a big one in our back yard, the South Lawn,’ she promised the volunteers. Such a White House garden has been a dream of noted California chef Alice Waters, considered a leader in the movement to encourage consumption of locally grown, organic food. She has been appealing for change through the taste buds since the 1960s. She organized a series of fundraising dinners in Washington before President Barack Obama’s inauguration in January that served foods purchased from local producers at an area farmer’s market to show how it can be done. Reached Thursday at her Berkeley, […]
Kansas has tripled its wind generating capacity in the last 15 months, and wind power supporters are hoping that is just the beginning. Flat Ridge Wind Farm in Nashville, about 60 miles southwest of Wichita, began operations recently and will generate about 100 megawatts of power a year. And the Central Plains Wind Farm in Marienthal, just east of Leoti, is partially online. It will produce 99 megawatts when fully operational. The two new wind farms make Kansas one of the few states in the country that can now generate more than 1,000 megawatts of wind power a year. Government and industry officials say Kansas is making strides in taking advantage of its windy conditions, but there is still a long way to go to make wind energy profitable in the state.
Our bottled water habit has a huge environmental impact, including the amount of energy it takes to make the plastic bottles, fill them and ship them to thirsty consumers worldwide. A new study breaks down just how much energy is used at each step of the process. An estimated total of the equivalent of 32 million to 54 million barrels of oil was required to generate the energy to produce the amount of bottled water consumed in the United States in 2007, according to the study, detailed in the January-March issue of the journal Environmental Research Letters. Of course, this is but a third of a percent of the energy that the United States consumes as a whole in a year. In 2007, the last year for which global statistics were available, more than 200 billion liters of bottled water were sold around the world, mostly in North America and Europe. The total amount sold in the United States alone that year (33 billion liters) averages out to about 110 liters (almost 30 gallons) of water per person, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation. Since 2001, bottled water sales have increased by 70 percent in the […]
In order to save money and energy, many people are purchasing hybrid electric cars or installing solar panels on the roofs of their homes. But both have a problem — the technology to store the electrical power and energy is inadequate. Battery systems that fit in cars don’t hold enough energy for driving distances, yet take hours to recharge and don’t give much power for acceleration. Renewable sources like solar and wind deliver significant power only part time, but devices to store their energy are expensive and too inefficient to deliver enough power for surge demand. Researchers at the Maryland NanoCenter at the University of Maryland have developed new systems for storing electrical energy derived from alternative sources that are, in some cases, 10 times more efficient than what is commercially available. The results of their research are available in the latest issue of Nature Nanotechnology. ‘Renewable energy sources like solar and wind provide time-varying, somewhat unpredictable energy supply, which must be captured and stored as electrical energy until demanded,’ said Gary Rubloff, director of the University of Maryland’s NanoCenter. ‘Conventional devices to store and deliver electrical energy — batteries and capacitors — cannot achieve the needed […]
A huge chunk of Antarctic ice can’t withstand nonstop global warming, according to a new study published in the latest Nature magazine. And if it melts, the ice will raise the global sea level by 15 or 20 feet – or more. The only good news here is the catastrophe isn’t likely to unfold quickly. The ice in question is called the West Antarctic ice sheet. In some ways, it’s the planet’s Achilles’ heel. It holds a vast amount of water, locked up as ice, and it’s sitting below sea level, so it’s inherently unstable. Research On The West Antarctic Ice Sheet David Pollard at Penn State University says there has been intense research recently to figure out how the ice sheet has behaved over the past 5 million years. ‘Before there was only a vague idea of how the West Antarctic ice sheet grew and decayed over those time scales,’ he says. Now, a scientific drilling project has brought back sediment samples taken from underneath the ice sheet, allowing scientists to study the mud layers, like so many tree rings, to show what ice there has done over history. ‘It’s really exciting,’ […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
