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Sylvia A

Bats In The Desert Southwest - 0 views

  • Bats are often thought of as flying mice,but they are more closely related to primates, including humans, than they are to mice.
  • the bat's body is covered by hair, with the exception of its wings.
  • Vampire bats don't suck blood. They make a small incision and lap up the blood of their hosts.
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  • A bat will eat half its weight in insects in a single night.
  • Fewer people have died from bat rabies during the past 40 years than have died from dog bites or bee stings in a single year.
  • Although the bat is not blind, its eyes are best adapted to seeing in the dark, and see in only black-and-white.
  • The thumbs of the forefoot are small, equipped with sharp claws and not connected to the membrane.
  • Bats are very shy creatures and like most wild animals, avoid contact with humans while going about their business of eating, reproducing and avoiding predators.
  • When a bat returns to its roost for its upside-down sleep, it will spend as much as 30 minutes cleaning itself before settling down to sleep.
  • Some species of bats prefer to live alone in trees.
  • Nearly all bats that live in the United States feed on insects.
  • Mating may occur two or even three times a year
  • Bats have many natural enemies and large numbers of them die while still young.
  • The most significant causes of premature bat death, however, are the activities of people.
  • Bat droppings (guano) support entire ecosystems of unique organisms, including bacteria useful in detoxifying wastes, improving detergents and producing gasohol and antibiotics.
Kate L

The Energy Story - Chapter 15: Solar Energy - 0 views

  • Solar energy can also be used to make electricity.
  • solar power plants, like the one in the picture to the right in California's Mojave Desert, use a highly curved mirror called a parabolic trough to focus the sunlight on a pipe running down a central point above the curve of the mirror.
  • mirror focuses the sunlight to strike the pipe
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  • gets so hot that it can boil water into steam
  • team can then be used to turn a turbine to make electricity.
  • California's Mojave desert, there are huge rows of solar mirrors arranged in what's called "solar thermal power plants"
  • this idea to make electricity for more than 350,000 homes
  • problem with solar energy is that it works only when the sun is shining
  • cloudy days and at night, the power plants can't create energy.
  • solar plants, are a "hybrid" technology
  • daytime they use the sun
  • night and on cloudy days they burn natural gas to boil the water so they can continue to make electricity.
  • form of solar power plants to make electricity is called a Central Tower Power Plant, like the one to the right - the Solar Two Project.
  • Sunlight is reflected off 1,800 mirrors circling the tall tower
  • mirrors are called heliostats
  • move and turn to face the sun all day long
  • light is reflected back to the top of the tower in the center of the circle where a fluid is turned very hot by the sun's rays.
  • luid can be used to boil water
  • make steam to turn a turbine and a generator.
  • We can also change the sunlight directly to electricity using solar cells.
  • Solar cells are also called photovoltaic cells
  • PV cells for short
  • be found on many small appliances
  • calculators
  • even on spacecraft
  • first developed in the 1950s for use on U.S. space satellites
  • made of silicon, a special type of melted sand.
  • sunlight strikes the solar cell, electrons (red circles) are knocked loose
  • move toward the treated front surface (dark blue color)
  • electron imbalance is created between the front and back
  • two surfaces are joined by a connector, like a wire, a current of electricity occurs between the negative and positive sides.
  • individual solar cells are arranged together in a PV module and the modules are grouped together in an array.
  • arrays are set on special tracking devices to follow sunlight all day long.
  • electrical energy from solar cells can then be used directly
  • used in a home for lights and appliances
  • in a business
  • Solar energy can be stored in batteries to light a roadside billboard at night
  • energy can be stored in a battery for an emergency roadside cellular telephone when no telephone wires are around.
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    Solar/ thermal energy
Stephania D

Green Countries - 0 views

  • China in particular has long argued that it is too poor to afford the Western luxury of environmental awareness.
  • China ranks last among 15 nations in its income group (the fifth decile), behind Vietnam. If Colombia, the group's leader, can afford environmental concern, why can't China?
  • China fares slightly better in protecting its habitat but much worse in measures of industrial ills.
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  • One conclusion to be drawn from the Yale-Columbia project is the need for better data, which requires funds.
  • Experiences like the recent biofuels surge, which is driving up food prices, show how treacherous even well-intentioned decisions about the environment can be when they're uninformed.
  • The same holds for consumers, who sometimes think paying somebody to plant a few trees will compensate for flying around the world in airplanes.
  • For such decisions, data are essential. If we're going to avoid squandering our natural resources, the quicker we begin to rely more on facts and less on assumptions, the better.
  • Some countries simply lie or make up the facts.
  • Today's Russian bureaucrats may still be fudging its environmental figures.
  • Among the worst offenders were Japan, South Korea, Brazil, the United States, Italy and Paraguay.
  • (While there are good comparative data on ozone, smog also includes nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxides and other components that are poorly tracked in most nations.) Among the best industrial countries were Malaysia, the United Kingdom and all of Eastern Europe (a legacy of the Soviet nuclear program).
    • Stephania D
       
      desert nations how trouble with water supplies. Israel looks better than other nations.
  • Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, which have more severe water problems.
  • Brazil is another country whose high rank—34th—is deceptive.
  • Brazil is a vast land blessed with an abundance of water, which yields energy relatively cheaply with no carbon emissions
  • Brazil is now the world's fourth biggest emitter of carbon, mainly due to the felling of trees.
  • By contrast, Belgium and the Netherlands, which share much in terms of population and geography with their neighbors, suffer from neglect of the environment—particularly in protecting native habitats.
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    The countries doing worst and best with water pollution
Tucker Haydon

Emu info. 2 - 0 views

  • soft-feathered, brownish emu is common throughout most of mainland Australia, although it avoids big cities, dense forests, and deserts.
  • The emu is the second-largest living bird in the world (the ostrich is the largest), with adult female emus being larger and heavier than the males.
  • can sprint at 30 miles per hour (48 kilometers per hour) for quite a distance. Emus are the only birds with calf muscles. Their feet have three toes and fewer bones and muscles than those of flying birds. Their strong legs also allow the bird to jump 7 feet (2.1 meters) straight up. With good eyesight and amazing agility, emus can escape most any trouble!
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  • ominivores
  • pouch in its throat that is part of the bird's windpipe and is used for communication.
  • make deep booming, drumming, and grunting sounds.
  • heard up to 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) away!
  • 5 to 15 eggs
Ashley T

War Dogs - U.S Army's use of dogs 1942-Present - 0 views

  • war dog training during
  • Dogs continued to serve the armed forces with distinction in Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Afghanistan and Iraq and many recent contingency operations.
  • U.S. Army's use of dogs 1942-Present
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    website
Stephania D

Cactus Goo - 0 views

  • used for scouring arsenic, bacteria and cloudiness out of rural drinking water
  • There, the residual water from boiling the flat, oval-shaped lobes of prickly pear for salads and other dishes was used to clear up cloudy water drawn from the river before use for cooking or drinking.
  • Mucilage is the clear, gooey, viscous liquid from within the cactus which helps to seal water inside the plant so it can survive desert-dry conditions.
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  • She found that the mucilage binds to the dirt and causes the particles to coagulate, forming large enough clumps that they can settle out of the water.
  • The group's more recent research has shown that the mucilage can also form a complex with arsenic, a carcinogenic water contaminant that can occur naturally or from industrial or agricultural pollution.
  • "Sometimes we get 80 percent removal, and sometimes we get lower than 50 percent removal," Alcantar said. "We don't yet know exactly what it is; we haven't found what are the exact best conditions for the mucilage [to get the most arsenic removal]."
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    Cactus goo can make water safer
Katie M

Global Warming Effects, Global Warming Causes, Causes of Global Warming, Effects of Glo... - 0 views

  • Many scientists have specified various reasons for global warming effects on the environment and for human life. It is not easy to point one reason for global warming effects, but recently you might have saw many change in global climate. Global warming effects have various consequences such as glacier volume decreasing, rise in sea levels, shrinkage of Arctic and altered fashion of doing agriculture have been named as direct effects on global warming. Secondary global warming effects are extreme weather events, increase in tropical diseases, changes in the timing of seasonal patterns in ecosystems, and drastic economic impact.
  • Before many times back, many scientist and researchers were hopping that a positive effect of global warming would be increased agricultural yields(outputs), because of the role of carbon dioxide in photosynthesis which might behave in positive manner, but now it resulting in destructions of several crops. In the area of Iceland, due the rising temperatures which have made possible the widespread sowing of barley easily in an effective manner, which was not possible twenty years from now. The net result is expected to be that 33% less maize—the country's staple crop—will be grown. The reduction in rainfall has turned millions of land into deserts.
  • Insurance industry has been affected very badly with the risk of insurance; the number of major natural disasters has been increased to 300% since 1960s, and insured losses increased fifteenfold in real terms. According to Choi and Fisher (2003) each 1% increase in annual precipitation could enlarge catastrophe loss by as much as 2.8%.
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  • All major Transportation sources such as Roads, airport runways, railway lines and pipelines, always require time to time maintenance and renewal as they become subject to greater temperature variation. Regions already adversely affected include areas of permafrost, which are subject to high levels of subsidence, resulting in buckling roads, sunken foundations, severely cracked runways and many other related problems.
  • Most of the low-lying countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Netherlands and many other small islands have been affected by sea level rise, in terms of floods or the cost of preventing them. In most of the poorest low-plain countries, land is the only available space, or fertile agricultural land which is livelihood for them. But due to flood they are finding problem now to perform their activities.
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    effects of global warming
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