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nikolas smyrlakis

German ships sailing through North East Passage - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...hrough-North-East-Passage.html

shipping climate change

shared by nikolas smyrlakis on 14 Sep 09 - Cached
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 14 Sep 09
     
    Two German merchant ships have sailed through the once impassable North East Passage after global warming and melting ice opened a route from South Korea along Russia's Arctic coast to Siberia.
LeopoldS

North Korea's Satellite Is Out of Control: Why This Is Very Bad News - 2 views

gizmodo.com/...trol-why-this-is-very-bad-news

Fun

shared by LeopoldS on 14 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 14 Dec 12
     
    Nice gif...
santecarloni

NC State News :: NC State News and Information » Researcher Finds Faster, Che... - 0 views

news.ncsu.edu/...wms-kasichainula-cooling

technology

shared by santecarloni on 11 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • santecarloni on 11 Apr 12
     
    A North Carolina State University researcher has developed a more efficient, less expensive way of cooling electronic devices - particularly devices that generate a lot of heat, such as lasers and power devices.
Thijs Versloot

Dolphin inspired radar #biomimicry - 2 views

phys.org/...-10-dolphins-radar-device.html

tech bio radar

shared by Thijs Versloot on 23 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 23 Oct 13
     
    The device, like dolphins, sends out two pulses in quick succession to allow for a targeted search for semiconductor devices, cancelling any background "noise",
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Athanasia Nikolaou on 30 Oct 13
     
    and it sends out two pulses of opposite polarity, in succession, such that a semiconductor changes the negative to a positive one, amplifying the returning signal. Very interesting. Maybe we can combine different frequencies for identifying a single variable in earth observation. We already use more that one frequencies but for identifying one variable each.
  • Thijs Versloot on 31 Oct 13
     
    Could it be used to measure ocean acidification? I found a study that links sound wave propagation with ocean acidity. Maybe we are able to do such measurement from space even? "Their paper, "Unanticipated consequences of ocean acidification: A noisier ocean at lower pH," published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that fossil fuels are turning up the ocean's volume. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the overall pH of the world's oceans has dropped by about 0.1 units, with more of the changes concentrated closer to the poles. The authors found that sound absorption has decreased by 15 percent in parts of the North Atlantic and by 10 percent throughout the Atlantic and Pacific"
  • Athanasia Nikolaou on 31 Oct 13
     
    The last time I asked an oceanographer for the use of acoustic waves, she said it is still a bit problematic method to take into account its data, but we were referring to measuring ocean circulation. It may be more conclusive for PH measurements, though. The truth is that there is a whole underwater network with pulse emmitters/receivers covering the North Atlantic basin, remnant infrastructure for spying activities in the WW2 and in the cold war, that stays unexploited. We should look more into this idea
LeopoldS

"new" tablet form an unusual place - 2 views

38north.org/...oductReview_RFrank102213-2.pdf

gadget

shared by LeopoldS on 05 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 05 Nov 13
     
    if any of you happen to pass by North Korea, get me one of these ... probably the only tablet on the market with out an NSA backdoor - unfortunately it can't connect to the internet either ....
  • Thijs Versloot on 06 Nov 13
     
    I am not so sure if its NSA backdoor proof (unless you mean no internet connection? :P), as it is build on Android OS (Ice Cream sandwich)
ESA ACT

Sunrise Alarm Clock - Soleil Sun Alarm Clock - 0 views

www.toolsforwellness.com/62074.html

FUN

shared by ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
  • ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09
     
    To survive the winter in the north.
LeopoldS

Evidence for Water Ice Near Mercury's North Pole from MESSENGER Neutron Spectrometer Me... - 1 views

www.sciencemag.org/...science.1229953.abstract

Mercury water messenger

shared by LeopoldS on 30 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 30 Nov 12
     
    Water ice on mercury!!!
johannessimon81

Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past - 6 views

www.wired.com/...cliodynamics-peter-turchin

INF science

shared by johannessimon81 on 10 Apr 13 - No Cached
LeopoldS and Dario Izzo liked it
  • johannessimon81 on 10 Apr 13
     
    Asimov's Foundation meets ACT's Tipping Point Prediction?
  • ...2 more comments...
  • Dario Izzo on 12 Apr 13
     
    Good luck to them!!
  • Luzi Bergamin on 12 Apr 13
     
    "Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past". GREAT! And physicists probably predict the past with data from the future?!? "scientists and mathematicians analyze history in the hopes of finding patterns they can then use to predict the future". Big deal! That's what any scientist does anyway... "cliodynamics"!? Give me a break!
  • LeopoldS on 16 Apr 13
     
    still, some interesting thoughts in there ... "Then you have the 50-year cycles of violence. Turchin describes these as the building up and then the release of pressure. Each time, social inequality creeps up over the decades, then reaches a breaking point. Reforms are made, but over time, those reforms are reversed, leading back to a state of increasing social inequality. The graph above shows how regular these spikes are - though there's one missing in the early 19th century, which Turchin attributes to the relative prosperity that characterized the time. He also notes that the severity of the spikes can vary depending on how governments respond to the problem. Turchin says that the United States was in a pre-revolutionary state in the 1910s, but there was a steep drop-off in violence after the 1920s because of the progressive era. The governing class made decisions to reign in corporations and allowed workers to air grievances. These policies reduced the pressure, he says, and prevented revolution. The United Kingdom was also able to avoid revolution through reforms in the 19th century, according to Turchin. But the most common way for these things to resolve themselves is through violence. Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops - just like in ecology. "In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks," he writes. "As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats." There are competing theories as well. A group of researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute - who practice a discipline called econophysics - have built their own model of political violence and
  • Luzi Bergamin on 17 Apr 13
     
    It's not the scientific activity described in the article that is uninteresting, on the contrary! But the way it is described is just a bad joke. Once again the results itself are seemingly not sexy enough and thus something is sold as the big revolution, though it's just the application of the oldest scientific principles in a slightly different way than used before.
pandomilla

Not a scratch - 7 views

www.economist.com/21545971

BIO

shared by pandomilla on 12 Apr 12 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • pandomilla on 12 Apr 12
     
    I hate scorpions, but this could be a nice subject for a future Ariadna study! This north African desert scorpion, doesn't dig burrows to protect itself from the sand-laden wind (as the other scorpions do). When the sand whips by at speeds that would strip paint away from steel, the scorpion is able to scurry off without apparent damage.
  • LeopoldS on 13 Apr 12
     
    Nice research, though they have done almost all the work that we could do in an Ariadna, didnt they? "To check, they took further photographs. In particular, they used a laser scanning system to make a three-dimensional map of the armour and then plugged the result into a computer program that blasted the virtual armour with virtual sand grains at various angles of attack. This process revealed that the granules were disturbing the air flow near the skeleton's surface in ways that appeared to be reducing the erosion rate. Their model suggested that if scorpion exoskeletons were smooth, they would experience almost twice the erosion rate that they actually do. Having tried things out in a computer, the team then tried them for real. They placed samples of steel in a wind tunnel and fired grains of sand at them using compressed air. One piece of steel was smooth, but the others had grooves of different heights, widths and separations, inspired by scorpion exoskeleton, etched onto their surfaces. Each sample was exposed to the lab-generated sandstorm for five minutes and then weighed to find out how badly it had been eroded. The upshot was that the pattern most resembling scorpion armour-with grooves that were 2mm apart, 5mm wide and 4mm high-proved best able to withstand the assault. Though not as good as the computer model suggested real scorpion geometry is, such grooving nevertheless cut erosion by a fifth, compared with a smooth steel surface. The lesson for aircraft makers, Dr Han suggests, is that a little surface irregularity might help to prolong the active lives of planes and helicopters, as well as those of scorpions."
  • Ma Ru on 13 Apr 12
     
    What bugs me (pardon the pun) is that the dimensions of the pattern they used were scaled up by many orders of magnitude, while "grains of sand" with which the surface was bombarded apparently were not... Not being a specialist in the field, I would nevertheless expect that the size of the surface pattern *in relation to* to size of particles used for bombarding would be crucial.
Thijs Versloot

Some amazing Aurora timelapse videos #bucketlist #lightsoverlapland - 1 views

lightsoverlapland.com

shared by Thijs Versloot on 03 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 03 Feb 14
     
    That's it.. next trip is going to be Lapland (or Svalbard, Annalisa?)
  • Marcus Maertens on 04 Feb 14
     
    I can recommend spending a winter in North-norway. Was able to see those almost every night.
  • johannessimon81 on 06 Feb 14
     
    Going to Lapland in 2 weeks :-D Can't wait!
Thijs Versloot

Perseids Meteor Shower Gazing - 0 views

www.space.com/meteor-shower-peaking-now.html

space

shared by Thijs Versloot on 12 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 12 Aug 13
     
    Tonight also YoungESA is going to gather at Oudenhoorn beach at the lake in Warmond just North of Leiden from 22h onwards
Dario Izzo

IPCC models getting mushy | Financial Post - 2 views

opinion.financialpost.com/...ipcc-models-getting-mushy

models climate

shared by Dario Izzo on 17 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Dario Izzo on 17 Sep 13
     
    why am I not surprised .....
  • Athanasia Nikolaou on 17 Sep 13
     
    http://www.academia.edu/4210419/Can_climate_models_explain_the_recent_stagnation_in_global_warming A view of well-respected scientists on how to proceed from here, that was rejected from Nature. In any case, a long way to go...
  • LeopoldS on 18 Sep 13
     
    unfortunately it's too early to cheer and burn more coal ... there is also a nice podcast associated to this paper from nature Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling Yu Kosaka & Shang-Ping Xie Nature 501, 403-407 (19 September 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12534 Received 18 June 2013 Accepted 08 August 2013 Published online 28 August 2013 Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century1, 2, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming3, 4, 5, 6, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations. We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r = 0.97 for 1970-2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southern USA. Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas
Beniamino Abis

Wanted: Volunteers for Yearlong Mock Mars Mission in Canadian Arctic - 2 views

www.space.com/mission-arctic-volunteers.html

shared by Beniamino Abis on 31 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Beniamino Abis on 31 Oct 13
     
    Mars Society, which advocates for manned exploration of the Red Planet, has released its requirements for the six volunteers who will be expected to spend 12 months at the society's Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station on Canada's Devon Island, which is about 1,450 kilometers from the North Pole, beginning in July 2014. Crewmembers will spend most of their time doing science, studying things such as carbon release from the permafrost and human performance in extreme conditions. If they want to go outside their base, they'll have to wear a spacesuit. If something breaks, they're the ones who are going to have to fix it.
Nina Nadine Ridder

Moon Dreams | North America > United States from AllBusiness.com - 0 views

www.allbusiness.com/...13948588-1.html

NASA space_tourism launches

shared by Nina Nadine Ridder on 24 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Nina Nadine Ridder on 24 Feb 10
     
    NASA aims to "create a healthy private-sector competition for transport to the space station". Through this the development of space tourism is enforced and an increase in the number of rocket launches should be expected. 
Francesco Biscani

BBC News - Ice deposits found at Moon's pole - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8544635.stm

moon

shared by Francesco Biscani on 03 Mar 10 - Cached
  • A radar experiment aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar spacecraft has identified thick deposits of water-ice near the Moon's north pole.
nikolas smyrlakis

Europe's Ambitious 'Green Grid' Plan - BusinessWeek - 2 views

www.businessweek.com/...gb2010017_256132.htm

smartgrid renewable energy north sea

shared by nikolas smyrlakis on 08 Jan 10 - Cached
  • nikolas smyrlakis on 08 Jan 10
     
    The cables would link existing and new windmills off the German and British coasts with Belgian and Danish tidal power stations and Norwegian hydroelectric plants. The €30-billion project would compensate for the irregular nature of renewable energy and provide a steady flow to the countries involved.
Luís F. Simões

Shell energy scenarios to 2050 - 6 views

www.shell.com/...shell_energy_scenarios_2050

energy future forecast politics economy climate_change

shared by Luís F. Simões on 09 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Luís F. Simões on 09 Mar 11
     
    just in case you were feeling happy and optimistic
  • ...7 more comments...
  • Francesco Biscani on 09 Mar 11
     
    An energy scenario published by an oil company? Allow me to be sceptical...
  • Joris _ on 10 Mar 11
     
    Indeed, Shell is an energy company, not just oil, for some time now ... The two scenarii are, in their approach, dependant of economic and political situation, which is right now impossible to forecast. Reference to Kyoto is surprising, almost out-dated! But overall, I find it rather optimistic at some stages, and probably the timeline (p37-39) is unlikely with recent events.
  • Luís F. Simões on 10 Mar 11
     
    the report was published in 2008, which explains the reference to Kyoto, as the follow-up to it was much more uncertain at that point. The Blueprint scenario is indeed optimistic, but also quite unlikely I'd say. I don't see humanity suddenly becoming so wise and coordinated. Sadly, I see something closer to the Scramble scenario as much more likely to occur.
  • LeopoldS on 12 Mar 11
     
    not an oil company??? please have a look at the percentage of their revenues coming from oil and gas and then compare this with all their other energy activities together and you will see very quickly that it is only window dressing ... they are an oil and gas company ... and nothing more
  • Joris _ on 14 Mar 11
     
    not JUST oil. From a description: "Shell is a global group of energy and petrochemical companies." Of course revenues coming from oil are the biggest, the investment turnover on other energy sources is small for now. Knowing that most of their revenues is from an expendable source, to guarantee their future, they invest elsewhere. They have invested >1b$ in renewable energy, including biofuels. They had the largest wind power business among so-called "oil" companies. Oil only defines what they do "best". As a comparison, some time ago, Apple were selling only computers and now they sell phones. But I would not say Apple is just a phone company.
  • LeopoldS on 14 Mar 11
     
    window dressing only ... e.g. Net cash from operating activities (pre-tax) in 2008: 70 Billion$ net income in 2008: 26 Billion revenues in 2008: 88 Billion Their investments and revenues in renewables don't even show up in their annual financial reports since probably they are under the heading of "marketing" which is already 1.7 Billion $ ... this is what they report on their investments: Capital investment, portfolio actions and business development Capital investment in 2009 was $24 billion. This represents a 26% decrease from 2008, which included over $8 billion in acquisitions, primarily relating to Duvernay Oil Corp. Capital investment included exploration expenditure of $4.5 billion (2008: $11.0 billion). In Abu Dhabi, Shell signed an agreement with Abu Dhabi National Oil Company to extend the GASCO joint venture for a further 20 years. In Australia, Shell and its partners took the final investment decision (FID) for the Gorgon LNG project (Shell share 25%). Gorgon will supply global gas markets to at least 2050, with a capacity of 15 million tonnes (100% basis) of LNG per year and a major carbon capture and storage scheme. Shell has announced a front-end engineering and design study for a floating LNG (FLNG) project, with the potential to deploy these facilities at the Prelude offshore gas discovery in Australia (Shell share 100%). In Australia, Shell confirmed that it has accepted Woodside Petroleum Ltd.'s entitlement offer of new shares at a total cost of $0.8 billion, maintaining its 34.27% share in the company; $0.4 billion was paid in 2009 with the remainder paid in 2010. In Bolivia and Brazil, Shell sold its share in a gas pipeline and in a thermoelectric power plant and its related assets for a total of around $100 million. In Canada, the Government of Alberta and the national government jointly announced their intent to contribute $0.8 billion of funding towards the Quest carbon capture and sequestration project. Quest, which is at the f
  • Joris _ on 14 Mar 11
     
    thanks for the info :) They still have their 50% share in the wind farm in Noordzee (you can see it from ESTEC on a clear day). Look for Shell International Renewables, other subsidiaries and joint-ventures. I guess, the report is about the oil branch. http://sustainabilityreport.shell.com/2009/servicepages/downloads/files/all_shell_sr09.pdf http://www.noordzeewind.nl/
  • LeopoldS on 16 Mar 11
     
    no - its about Shell globally - all Shell .. these participations are just peanuts please read the intro of the CEO in the pdf you linked to: he does not even mention renewables! their entire sustainability strategy is about oil and gas - just making it (look) nicer and environmentally friendlier
  • Joris _ on 16 Mar 11
     
    Fair enough, for me even peanuts are worthy and I am not able to judge. Not all big-profit companies, like Shell, are evil :( Look in the pdf what is in the upstream and downstream you mentionned above. Non-shell sources for examples and more objectivity: http://www.nuon.com/company/Innovative-projects/noordzeewind.jsp http://www.e-energymarket.com/news/single-news/article/ferrari-tops-bahrain-gp-using-shell-biofuel.html thanks.
Thijs Versloot

Researchers find new phase of carbon, make diamond at room temperature - 1 views

phys.org/...-diamond-room-temperature.html

carbon science

shared by Thijs Versloot on 01 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 01 Dec 15
     
    Researchers from North Carolina State University have discovered a new phase of solid carbon, called Q-carbon, which is distinct from the known phases of graphite and diamond. They have also developed a technique for using Q-carbon to make diamond-related structures at room temperature and at ambient atmospheric pressure in air. It turns out this configuration is harder than diamond, plus the material has a very low work function. The latter might be very interesting for electronics or as electrode material.
  • jcunha on 02 Dec 15
     
    Maybe* this is the wonder material with very low workfunction needed in the Photon Enhanced Thermionic Emitter future prototype :)
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