Posts Tagged ‘italy’
Attractive Italian Viaduct Has Wind Turbines Built In
The concept would use the space between an existing viaduct in southern Italy to install 26 wind turbines, which designers Francesco Colarossi, Giovanna Saracino and Luisa Saracino say could provide 36 million kilowatt hours of electricity every year.
The design team conceived the Solar Wind project for a contest that aims to repurpose some old, unused viaducts near Calabria, a region in the toe of Italy. It would cost about $55 million to demolish the viaducts, so town officials for proposals that would re-use them in an environmentally friendly way. The wind turbine bridge took second place.
The proposal also includes a solar-paneled roadway to provide another 11.2 million kilowatt hours, Colarossi and colleagues say. It turns the entire viaduct into a park, with spaces to pull over and take in the view off the Italian coast. Travelers could stop and buy fresh produce grown in solar-powered greenhouses located along the bridge. The whole roadway would be covered in a dense grid of solar cells coated in a thin, transparent plastic, the designers say.
All in all, the system would be capable of generating 40 million kWh each year, enough to power 15,000 homes.
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Do Seasonal Changes in Mars’s Atmosphere Have a Biological Cause?
Methane disappears and regenerates every year, according to new study
Methane peaks during the fall in three regions: Tharsis, Elysium and Arabia Terrae. The biggest volcanoes on Mars are in Tharsis and Elysium, and vast amounts of water ice are buried beneath the sands of Arabia Terrae. Methane concentrations drop during winter, and grow so strong in summer that the gas spreads throughout Mars’ thin atmosphere, according to Discovery News.
Scientists led by Sergio Fonti of Italy's Universita del Salento studied about 3 million observations from the Mars Global Surveyor between July 1999 and October 2004, which is about three Mars years. They found that once emitted, methane only lasts about a year. Then something replenishes it and the cycle starts again.
Scientists have known for about seven years that Mars harbors methane, and that its presence changes over time and place. But the new research shows Mars’ methane cycle is much quicker than scientists thought.
Scientists and the public get excited about extraterrestrial methane because it’s usually produced one or two ways — through volcanic eruptions and biological processes. It is prevalent in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus, and more recently, scientists figured out it also exists (with some interesting variation) on .
could also produce methane, such as carbon dioxide combining with melted water beneath the surface.
Though detection of methane is not a smoking gun for life, changes in the presence of methane are intriguing. Methane breaks down in ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which means something on Mars is replenishing it. The methane’s seasonality and variable location rules out cosmic ray or meteorite bombardment, as Fonti told Discovery News.
What’s more, in the Titan study and this study, solar radiation is not enough to account for all the missing methane. As Fonti says, biological processes could be one of a few possible explanations.
Mars’ methane concentrations are still paltry — at peak times, it’s still only 4 percent of the average methane concentration on Earth, .
Fonti and the other researchers presented their findings last week at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome.
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Top Italian Scientists Who Failed to Predict 2009 Earthquake Now Face Manslaughter Charges
"Damned if you don't" is the situation that seven of Italy's top seismologists now find themselves in -- the scientists face manslaughter charges for failing to predict the April 2009 earthquake that struck the town of L'Aquila in central Italy.
In late March 2009, tremors were recorded in the surrounding region, resulting in a magnitude-4.0 earthquake on March 30. The following day, the seven seismologists were in L'Aquila attending a meeting of the Major Risks Committee, a group that advises Italy's Civil Protection Agency on natural hazards risks. At a press conference following the quake, committee member Bernardo di Bernardinis told reporters, "the scientific community tells us there is no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favorable." But on April 6, a magnitude-6.3 quake struck, killing more than 300 people and leaving about 65,000 homeless.
Local citizens claimed they had been planning to leave their homes after the smaller quake, but had changed their minds after the committee's comments. In August 2009, the citizens filed a formal request for investigation, and earlier this month the chief prosecutor stated that his office had enough information to indict the individuals named in the case.
Nearly 4,000 researchers around the world have come to the seismologists' defense, signing a letter to Italy's president, Giorgio Napolitano, urging him to compel decision makers to focus on hazards mitigation and earthquake preparedness rather than holding scientists responsible for doing something that is not yet possible. Despite extensive research efforts by seismologists in recent decades, earthquakes cannot yet be accurately predicted to occur on a specific day, or even in a specific month.
Scientists Spot Subatomic Particles Underground: Geoneutrinos May Help Drive Earth’s Internal Heat
Geoneutrinos -- which are anti-neutrinos -- result from the radioactive decay of uranium, thorium and potassium in the Earth's crust and mantle. Like their regular-matter counterparts, geoneutrinos are chargeless and tiny, passing through matter almost undisturbed. Regular neutrinos are emitted by the sun and cosmic rays.
The Borexino experiment at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory was actually designed to watch for regular neutrinos, but scientists at Princeton University, part of an 88-member team, realized it could also look for subterranean subatomic particles. Geoneutrinos were first studied in 2005.
The Borexino study, published in the April issue of Physical Review Letters B, contains data from two years of observations, according to a . Geoneutrinos and neutrinos are hard to detect because they are so small and just barely interact with other matter, so it takes a long time to make just a handful of observations.
Earth scientists would like to know more about how decaying elements like uranium and thorium affect the planet's temperatures and cause convection in its mantle. Convection is the steady flow of hot rock deep in the Earth that drives plate tectonics -- the movement of continents, seafloor spreading, volcanoes and earthquakes. Scientists don't know whether radioactive decay drives the heating action, or is one of several factors.
At the observatory, scientists look for neutrinos by examining a lot of liquid. When the neutrinos hit the detector, tiny heat changes happen, and those observations allow scientists to indirectly detect the neutrinos.
The detector consists of nested spheres, containing thousands of tons of hydrocarbon liquid and highly purified water. An array of sensitive photodetectors watches for the telltale signals of solar neutrinos and geoneutrinos.
Scientists can imagine a day when a network of geoneutrino-detecting facilities, located at strategic spots around the globe, can sense particles to better understand the Earth's interior dynamics. Data about Earth's internal heat could one day provide enough information to predict volcano eruptions and earthquakes, according to the Princeton news release.
Or it could spur world governments to build a bunch of .
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