Posts Tagged ‘environment’
New Shrimp Farming Technique Yields Record Hauls of Jumbo Shrimp from Minimal Water
A new shrimp farming technology devised by researchers in Texas is churning out record-setting levels of shrimp. Called super-intensive stacked raceways, its a system of indoor aquaculture that generates far more shrimp per cubic meter of water than open pond farming or any other aquaculture technique. And it could be deployed just about anywhere.
The shrimp grow in huge enclosed tubs called raceways, stacked four high in a column. As the shrimp develop and grow under computer-controlled conditions (the water is carefully circulated but not completely renewed, keeping environmental costs and water usage in check), they are moved downward from one raceway to the next--baby shrimp go in the top and progress downward to the bottom raceway, from which they are eventually harvested.
That innovation--the ability to raise very large, protein-rich shrimp (they’re called U15, but you probably know them as “jumbo”) in very little water--means the kilo-per-cubic-meter numbers are through-the-roof: 25 kilograms of shrimp from just one cubic meter of water. For some perspective, that’s equivalent to 1 million pounds of shrimp per acre of water. U.S. shrimp farms top out at about 20,000 pounds per acre of water. The best shrimp farms in tropical climates, working year round, yield something like 60,000 pounds per acre in a good year.
So we’re talking about a vast improvement to our shrimp stores. But the impact isn’t just an abundance of jumbo shrimp to batter up and fry. For one, it provides countries like the U.S. with a fresh shrimp (we import the vast majority of ours, and it’s usually frozen and thawed a few times before it gets to us). And shrimp exporters like China are on the verge of becoming shrimp importers due to socioeconomic trends and population growth, and that would make shrimp . With stacked raceways, we could have our own domestic supply of shrimp, circumventing the need for a series of violent “shrimp wars.”
But further, this method could provide a simple-to-produce means of protein in places where food in general and protein in particular are growing scarce. Plus: jumbo shrimp you guys! These will go great on an hors d'oeuvre table next to those we’ve been cultivating.
How the Greenest Skyscraper Complex Ever Is Rising Out of the Rubble of the World Trade Center
a gallery showing the World Trade Center complex under construction.
LIVE AT LEEDS
LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Certification is an internationally-recognized third-party verification system developed by the to confirm that a building—or community, for that matter—was designed and constructed with the aim of improving energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions, indoor environmental quality, and intelligent resource management.
For the new WTC complex to qualify for the LEED Gold Certification—the second highest attainable below Platinum status—it must meet , among which include achieving a Net Zero CO2 footprint for all base building electricity consumption and reduction of the complex's energy consumption to 20 percent below New York State's energy code requirements.
"The building [in this case, 1 World Trade Center] is designed to achieve a gold level certification. Which, for a project of its size, would be a first of its kind, Eduardo Del Valle, Director of Design Management at 1 World Trade Center, told us. "Now, there are some other projects in New York City that have achieved a Platinum certification, which is the highest—but not on this scale."
ENERGY CONSERVATION AND PRODUCTION
One means of achieving these goals is "Daylighting"—which thankfully involves Bruce Willis nor Cybill Shepherd. Instead, as Del Valle points out, "if enough daylight is coming into the window it automatically dims the interior lights. It's all about reducing energy consumption. Every space within 15 feet of the facade will be equipped with dimming devices."
This practice not only benefits the WTC complex's energy consumption, but the occupants of the towers as well, and reducing the rate of minor illnesses, as well as and increase the activity of natural killer cells simply by improving the quality of light. Because exposure to UVB light in order to synthesize Vitamin D, the dimming of artificial lights and use of ultra-clear glass to allow more natural light in.
When the sun isn't shining, the WTC complex employs hydrogen fuel cells to provide approximately 1.2 megawatts of power and steam turbines which, according to DelValle, "take the wasted steam that happens during steam generation and converts that into electricity."
BREATHING EASIER
During construction, the complex is requiring its contractors to use only ultra-low sulfur diesel fuels—a "" that reduces nitrogen oxide and particulate emissions and is considered one of the cleanest (comparatively speaking) fuels available. This implementation is so effective that New York City and State now require that non-road construction equipment used on public construction projects by public agencies use ULSD. In addition, all construction vehicles are equipped with extra particulate filters to further reduce their impact. Finally, the materials used in the complex cannot include any Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC)—a variety of chemicals that leach from building materials in gaseous form with both short- and long-term health effects.
After construction is complete, Del Valle states that, to further improve indoor air quality, they're going to watch it like a cybernetic hawk:
"CO2 monitors control ventilation and make the building healthier and improve indoor air quality. If the CO2 sensor sends a signal to the air handler software, telling it you need more fresh air in a certain space because there's more CO2 than there should be, it automatically increases the fresh air mix coming into that space. We have over 3,000 points of monitoring."
In addition, the WTC will improve the air of the greater Manhattan Financial District by reducing the amount of vehicular traffic in the area by providing and extensive facilities for bicycle commuters.
HARVESTING THE RAIN
It rains in New York City, on average, —second only to Miami. Rather than simply let this precipitation run off the buildings and into storm drains, the WTC will collect and store that rain water for later use in its new high-efficiency evaporative cooling towers and for irrigating greenery within the 16-acre complex. (Since it hasn't been treated, the harvested rainwater cannot be used as a potable source.)
HARVESTING THE HUDSON
New York, as with most areas of the country outside of the confines of Northern California, requires significant air-conditioning service throughout the year. The occupants of the new WTC complex will stay frosty in even the muggiest of Autumnal weather thanks to the new and highly efficient 12,500-ton (CCP) that uses water from the Hudson River to cool the WTC Transportation Hub, National September 11 Memorial and Museum, retail space and other non-commercial areas.
FULL SIZE
Located in the far Southwest corner of the complex—roughly as the previous plant—the CCP employs water extracted through the River Water Pump Station (RWPS), on the other side of the West Side Highway, to chill (and heat, during the Winter) water for distribution to the rest of the complex.
It will circulate 30,000 gallons of river water every minute. That's enough to fill , and cool the same amount as approximately .
"It uses the Hudson as a way of both dissipating heat and preheating water," Del Valle explained. "Because water below a certain depth is a pretty constant temperature (about 45-50 degrees Fahrenheit), so what happens is, during the winter it takes less energy to heat and circulate it, and conversely, in the summer it takes less to cool it."
RECYCLING, REDUCING, REUSING
The new World Trade Center is already 75 percent old. Everything from the gypsum boards to the ceiling tiles contains a minimum of 75 percent post-industrial recycled content. This reduces the environmental footprint, not only on-site, but reduces the stress on the natural resources and energy needed to produce them.
At the same time, the WTC construction project recycles an incredible 80 percent of the waste generated at the site. According to Del Valle, "We've exceeded our original target by about 20 percent. The contractors have been really good, we've been watching and documenting how the material is recycled and sent back to the plants. It's really a cycle that's feeding on itself."
Monster Machines is all about the most exceptional machines in the world, from massive gadgets of destruction to tiny machines of precision, and everything in between.
A civilization can distinguish itself by how well it responds to disaster, and 10 years later, 9/11 is as much a story about recovery and rebuilding as it a story of terrible loss and tragedy. As a nation, our political and economic response has been imperfect—possibly even dead wrong—but we're focusing on the mechanical marvels that have helped us bounce back.
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Google Releases its Energy Consumption Numbers, Revealing a 260 Million Watt Continuous Suck
How does that translate? Google also estimated that its total carbon emissions for 2010 were just below 1.5 million metric tons. Not all of Google’s electricity comes from carbon resources--a quarter comes from renewable fuels like wind, thanks to some deals the company has made with utilities--but that’s still some decent tonnage.
Still, Google argues that its consumption really isn’t so bad. Its data centers carry out billions of operations--a billion searches per day alone--and many of those save fuel. Google searches save trips to the library or the travel agent, for instance, offsetting the power consumed by its processing farms. And when you break it down it’s not so bad, considering the vast numbers of people using Google’s services. The company said an average user consumes just 180-watt hours per month, which roughly equates to running a 60-watt light bulb for three hours.
And how does that power usage break down? Google apparently didn’t detail every last watt, but it did say that search queries only burn 12.5 million of those 260 million watts. As for the other quarter billion, it’s probably a pretty even split between Gchat and Rebecca Black.
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Christchurch is Thinking of Replacing Its Earthquake-Ravaged Church with a Cardboard Cathedral
Japanese architect Shigeru Ban is heading up the design effort, which is currently in the midst of a $50,000 feasibility study. If the plan is approved, Ban plans to erect a massive 78-foot-high A-frame cathedral from cardboard tubes that will sit upon a foundation of 20-foot shipping containers (and we’re pretty positive that building plan is nowhere in the Good Book).
Don’t be misled by the term “temporary.” This structure is meant to serve as a stand-in for Christchurch Cathedral--the city’s iconic landmark--for a full ten years. It will cost about $3.4 million and could be erected in as few as three months. And try not to associate cardboard with “temporary” either--Ban has been building cardboard structures since 1989 (including a church in Kobe, Japan and several temporary housing buildings in Haiti), and he builds them to last.
Known as an “emergency architect,” Ban is a big proponent of cardboard as a building material, particularly after natural disasters when the prices of building materials spike. It’s cheap and abundant, it recycles when you’re done with it, and it’s surprisingly strong. In a pinch, you can usually get your hands on a lot of it fast at low cost.
If the plan is approved, the cardboard cathedral may be swiftly built to open on Feb 22 of next year, the one-year anniversary of the earthquake. That means a lot of cardboard will have to be erected in quite a hurry. But it’s silly to think of the strength of a building in terms of how much time you spend moving heavy materials into place, Ban says. After all, he said in remarks to Christchurch Cathedral officials, paper buildings don’t collapse during an earthquake.
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To Fight Warming, Brits Plan to Launch a Huge Balloon and Really Long Pipe
Like a volcano, but with a garden hose
It’s a pretty audacious attempt at geo-engineering, and one that very well might not work. The idea is to mimic the effect that volcanoes have when they erupt, pumping all kinds of particulate matter into the stratosphere that helps reflect solar radiation back into space. And while using a balloon and a long stretch of hose to create an artificial volcano may sound a bit “mad scientist,” the UK government is on board, putting more than $2.5 million behind the project. The Royal Society is backing this.
To test the stratospheric particle injection for climate engineering (that’s right: SPICE) project, the team will first send a smaller hose-augmented balloon up just over half a mile, pumping plain water into the air just to test the feasibility of piping particles into the sky. If it looks like they can reasonably stabilize a balloon and hose system at that altitude, work could go ahead on the real deal: a balloon that could be some 650 feet in diameter that would soar all the way into the stratosphere, elongated garden hose in tow.
That rig would more likely spew sulphates and other aerosols into the air that would reflect sunlight back into space. Which has environmental groups a bit edgy, considering we’ve never tried anything like this before. But seriously, spewing chemical particulates into our atmosphere in an attempt to artificially mimic one of mother nature’s most destructive and far-reaching devices--what could possibly go wrong?
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Oil Sheen Sighted in Gulf of Mexico Raises New Questions About Last Summer’s Spill
Reports of a new oil sheen first surfaced on Aug. 18, close to the site of last year’s devastating spill. BP and Coast Guard officials deployed two submersible vehicles to the site, but BP said a visual inspection indicated there was no oil released from the Macondo well. The Coast Guard said last week that the oil was the result of natural seeps and/or permitted releases at other oil drilling sites, according to the in Mobile, Ala.
Reporters from the Press-Register took some samples of their own and sent them to Louisiana State University, where scientists confirmed the oil was Louisiana sweet crude. It was chemically similar to the oil from the Macondo well, but remains unclear whether that is the source, according to the newspaper’s account.
Volunteers with the Gulf Restoration Network and a group called On Wings of Care have been taking aerial photos since Aug. 19, finding a variety of oil slicks in several spots in the Gulf. Bonny Schumaker, founder of On Wings of Care, said the group has posted several flight logs with dozens of pictures of the sheens. Check it out .
Natural seeps have occurred in the Gulf of Mexico for millennia, so it’s certainly possible that they are causing these new sheens. But several scientists said their location — right near the Macondo well — is intriguing.
There are a few explanations beyond natural seeps, including the possibility that oil has been leaking from the broken riser pipe that connected the Deepwater Horizon to the well. Neither the pipe nor the well has been salvaged, the Press-Register points out. Or, heavier hydrocarbon constituents could have settled on the bottom during the spill, and as , lighter-density hydrocarbons are now slowly making their way to the surface. The most troubling possibility, the newspaper says, is that the oil is leaking out of the ground beneath the capped wellhead.
As we wait for more answers, let’s hope that is not the case.
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Pests Are Developing Resistance to Monsanto’s Engineered Supercorn
That could spell all kinds of trouble for food crops, farmers, Monsanto, and pretty much everyone who isn’t a western corn rootworm. Though based on isolated cases thus far, the problem could be more widespread, and the paper is bound to rouse on the benefits and demerits of GM crop cultivation and current farm management practices.
The big problem here would be, of course, the widespread proliferation of rootworm resistance. Monsanto first dropped their rootworm-resistant corn seeds on the market in 2003 at a time when its had made extremely attractive to farmers, who could blanket their fields in herbicide and kill everything but their food crop plants. The corn seed also contains a gene that produces a crystalline protein called Cry3Bb1, which delivers an unpleasant demise to the rootworm (via digestive tract destruction) but otherwise is harmless to other creatures (we think).
The seed was so successful that it’s estimated that roughly a third of U.S. corn now carries the gene. Which means one-third of U.S. corn could potentially be susceptible to rootworm again if the resistance that has reared its head in Iowa is indicative of a larger problem.
The good news is that the same rootworms that are resistant to Monsanto’s special sauce are susceptible to a competitor’s similar-but-different GM toxin. But if rootworms can develop a resistance to one strain of GM toxin, it stands to reason that--if farming practices remain unchanged--that it could eventually become resistant to others.
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