Friday, August 28. 2009
Engineers say a forest of 100,000 "artificial trees" could be deployed within 10 to 20 years to help soak up the world's carbon emissions. BBC
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Via Archinect
Tuesday, August 18. 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
A device called Somniloquy processes network traffic autonomously, allowing a computer's CPU, hard disk, and display to be powered down.
By Will Knight
The Somniloquy network adapter. Credit: Microsoft / UCSD. |
While working on a story about routing internet data based on electricity price fluctuations, I came across a clever idea for reducing the amount of power used by ordinary computers.
Researchers at Microsoft and UCSD created a network adapter dubbed Somniloquy (meaning to talk in one's sleep) that can process network traffic autonomously, allowing a computer's CPU, hard disk, display, and I/O buses to be powered down without losing connectivity.
As Bruce Maggs, VP of research at Akamai, points out in the story, energy-aware routing will only work if hardware uses significantly less power when idle. After we spoke, he sent me a link to the Somniloquy research project noting that it could help make existing hardware more power efficient.
The Microsoft-UCSD network interface (described in this paper) could take over many network-related tasks like bit torrent file-sharing, and managing a remote desktop connection and a VOIP account, allowing the connected machine to enter "sleep" mode without losing its network link.
The adapter consists of a gumstix module with a 200 MHz XScale processor, 64 MB of RAM and 2GB SD memory card running embedded Linux. When the adapter detects that the connected machine has entered sleep mode, it copies over networking information and carries out simple communications on its behalf.
The researchers also show that the adapter can perform more complex tasks on behalf of its host. They created a modified IM client capable of responding to network messages and waking the host computer when a proper message is received; they also developed a compact bit torrent client that continues to download a file while the host is in low-power mode.
It's a smart idea and I wouldn't be surprised to see such features in future desktop and laptop computers, especially as energy use becomes an increasing concern.
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Via MIT Technology Review (blog)
Saturday, August 15. 2009
"If a picture is worth one thousand words, then The Oil Age Poster is worth one million words because people can not only see the oil production Hubbert's peaks in many countries and regions, but also read the facts proving that global peak oil is both inevitable and quite probably imminent."
- U.S. Congressman R. Bartlett
Maryland (Republican)
This poster traces the history of the Oil Age from its beginnings in the hills of western Pennsylvania in 1859 to its rise as the engine of global industrial economies. The poster's main chart features a year-by-year rendering of worldwide oil production from 1859 to 2050 with projections of future production based on Colin Campbell's Oil Depletion Model. Historical annotations as well as detailed data on production, trade and reserves make this poster a versatile tool for presenting the realities and implications of global oil production and its impending peak.
The primary goal of The Oil Age poster is to increase awareness of the critical role of oil in modern industrial society and to call attention to the impending worldwide peak in oil production.
The Oil Age Poster Website
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Via MetaboliCity
Monday, August 03. 2009
Ever since we assembled a 1.6 MW solar panel installation at our headquarters in Mountain View in 2007, we've been wondering, "Does cleaning the solar panels make them more effective?" We thought it might, but we needed to be sure. So we analyzed the mountains of data that we collect about the energy that these panels produce — after rain, after cleaning and at different times of the year.
We have two different sets of solar panels on our campus — completely flat ones installed on carports, and rooftop ones that are tilted.
Since the carport solar panels have no tilt, rain doesn't do a good job of rinsing off the dirt they collect. (Also, our carports are situated across from a sand field, which doesn't help the situation.) We cleaned these panels for the first time after they had been in operation for 15 months, and their energy output doubled overnight. When we cleaned them again eight months later, their output instantly increased by 36 percent. In fact, we found that cleaning these panels is the #1 way to maximize the energy they produce. As a result, we've added the carport solar panels to our spring cleaning checklist.
The rooftop solar panels are a different story. Our data indicates that rain does a sufficient job of cleaning the tilted solar panels. Some dirt does accumulate in the corners, but the resulting reduction in energy output is fairly small — and cleaning tilted panels does not significantly increase their energy production. So for now, we'll let Mother Nature take care of cleaning our rooftop panels.
Accumulated dirt in the corners of a rooftop solar panel
We've also been crunching numbers on dollars-and-cents; the more energy our panels produce, the sooner we'll be paid back by our solar investment. Our analysis now predicts that Google's system will pay for itself in about six and a half years, which is even better than we initially expected.
If you want to learn more about our solar study, check out these slides showing the effects that seasonality, tilt, dirt, particulate matter, rain and cleaning have on Google's solar energy output. We hope you solar panel owners out there can tailor our analysis to the specifics of your own installation to produce some extra energy of your own!
Posted by Winnie Lam, Senior Product Manager
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Via The Official Google Blog
Personal comment:
Logique... Mais cqfd!
Several recent studies show that the rapid warming of Arctic tundra is leading to a host of sweeping changes, including more extensive fires, the growth of larger vegetation, more absorption of solar energy, melting permafrost, and substantially larger releases of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. Taken together, the studies demonstrate that rising temperatures set in motion a vicious circle of more warming and higher releases of greenhouse gases. In Alaska, scientists studying a 2007 fire that burned nearly 400 square miles of the Brooks Range found that the burned tundra lost 40 to 120 grams of carbon per square meter, while pristine tundra absorbed 30 to 70 grams. Burned tundra also absorbed 71 percent more solar radiation than normal and caused permafrost to melt to a depth of several inches. A study in the Canadian Arctic has shown that tundra vegetation is becoming weedier, larger, and darker, significantly increasing the amount of absorbed sunlight and further boosting temperatures. The study also showed the warming tundra giving off unexpectedly high levels of methane and nitrous oxide. And in Scandinavia researchers found that by warming Arctic peatlands by nearly 2 degrees F over eight years, the tundra released an extra 60 percent CO2 in spring and 52 percent in summer, according to a study in the journal, Nature.
This piece originally appeared on Yale Environment 360
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Via WorldChanging
Personal comment:
Rien de vraiment surprenant dans ce qui est dit dans cet article. Cependant, il est intéressant de souligner la complexité des phénomènes (de réchauffement), une chose en amène un autre, etc. Et ici, le facteur de l'albedo (indice de réflexion solaire d'une surface) est clairement mis en avant. Faudra-t-il repeindre (re-engineering) la surface de la planète en blanc? Ou revêtir les villes d'un albedo élevé pour compenser la pertes des calottes glaciaires?
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