Good Morning All,
Today seems like the day to conquer pollution, as two articles focus on new ways to help clean up current waste (including one for Nuclear Waste), and one article focuses on a new electric car, that may someday be a viable source of transportation. Aside of that, India and Pakistan are working on their relations, which is excellent news, as they've been scurmishing for many years over border rights. Also, an organic orchard farmer discovered the benefits of hogs as pest controllers. I hope you enjoy today's news, and I look forward to your readership tomorrow!
Today's Top 5:
1. India Wants to Live in Peace with Pakistan, Put Past Behind (Times of India)
2. New Material Shows Great Promise For Nuclear Waste Clean-Up (Science Daily)
3. Whisky Works Magic on Polluted Land (Irish Independent News)
4. Seven Winched to Safety from Stranded Vessel (The Scotsman)
5. Scotland Leads Marine Fight Against Disease(The Scotsman)
Honorable Mentions:
1. Welsh Car Could be the Future of Motoring (IC WALES)
2. Hogs Help Battle Beetle in Apple Orchard (Seattle Times)
Today's Top 5:
1. India Wants to Live in Peace with Pakistan, Put Past Behind
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India_wants_peace_with_Pak_PM/articleshow/2839608.cms
5 Mar 2008, 1400 hrs IST, PTI
NEW DELHI: Assuring the newly elected leadership in Pakistan that India seeks good relations with the neighbour, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday hoped the two sides would work on a framework for enduring peace.
"India wants to live in peace with Pakistan. The destinies of our two nations are interlinked. We need to put the past behind us," he said while replying to the debate on the Motion of Thanks to President's Address in the Lok Sabha.
"We need to think about our collective destiny, our collective security, our collective prosperity," he said while assuring the newly elected leadership in Pakistan that India seeks "good relations" with it.
2. New Material Shows Great Promise For Nuclear Waste Clean-Up
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080303190649.htm
Science Daily (Mar. 5, 2008)
Nuclear power has advantages, but, if this method of making power is to be viable long term, discovering new solutions to radioactive waste disposal and other problems are critical. Otherwise nuclear power is unlikely to become mainstream.
A team of Northwestern University chemists is the first to focus on metal sulfide materials as a possible source for nuclear waste remediation methods. Their new material is extremely successful in removing strontium from a sodium-heavy solution, which has concentrations similar to those in real liquid nuclear waste. Strontium-90, a major waste component, is one of the more dangerous radioactive fission materials created within a nuclear reactor.
By taking advantage of ion exchange, the new method captures and concentrates strontium as a solid material, leaving clean liquid behind. In the case of actual nuclear waste remediation, the radioactive solid could then be dealt with separately -- handled, moved, stored or recycled -- and the liquid disposed.
"It is a very difficult job to capture strontium in vast amounts of liquid nuclear waste," said Mercouri G. Kanatzidis, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the paper's senior author.* "Sodium and calcium ions, which are nonradioactive, are present in such enormous amounts compared to strontium that they can be captured instead of the radioactive material, interfering with remediation."
Strontium is like a needle in a haystack: sodium ions outnumber strontium ions by more than a million to one. The material developed at Northwestern -- a layered metal sulfide made of potassium, manganese, tin and sulfur called KMS-1 -- attracts strontium but not sodium.
"The metal sulfide did much, much better than we expected at removing strontium in such an excess of sodium," said Kanatzidis. "We were really amazed at how well it discriminates against sodium and think we have something special. As far as we can tell, this is the best material out there for this kind of application."
KMS-1 works at the extremes of the pH scale -- in very basic and very acidic solutions, the conditions common in nuclear waste -- and everywhere in between. Metal oxides and polymer resins, the materials currently used in nuclear waste remediation, perform reasonably well but are more limited than KMS-1: each typically works in either basic or acidic conditions but not both and definitely not across the pH scale.
In earlier work, Kanatzidis and his team had found KMS-1 to be very quick and facile at ion exchange. (The material gives up an ion and takes another to maintain charge balance.) Knowing this and also that the ion exchange process is a removal process, the researchers decided that strontium was an interesting ion with which to test their new material.
The solution the researchers used in the lab contained strontium and two "interfering" ions, sodium and calcium, in concentrations like those found in the nuclear waste industry.
(Nonradioactive strontium, which works the same as the radioactive version, was used in the experiments.) KMS-1, a free flowing black-brown powder, was packaged like tea in a teabag and then dropped into the solution. The all-important ion exchange followed: the metal sulfide "teabag" soaked up the strontium and gave off potassium, which is not radioactive, into the liquid.
KMS-1 does its remarkable work targeting only strontium by taking advantage of two things: strontium is a heavier ion than calcium, and sulfur (a component of KMS-1) attracts heavier ions; and KMS-1 attracts ions with more charge so it attracts strontium, which has a charge of 2+, and doesn't attract sodium, which only has a charge of 1+. So, as Kanatzidis likes to say, "Our material beats both sodium and calcium."
"The nuclear power process generates enormous amounts of radioactive liquid waste, which is stored in large tanks," said Kanatzidis. "If we can concentrate the radioactive material, it can be dealt with and the nonradioactive water thrown away. I can imagine our material as part of a cleansing filter that the solution is passed through."
Looking to the future, to be a scaleable and affordable remediation method, the metal in the metal sulfide needs to be inexpensive and readily available and also make a stable compound.
"We focused on potassium, manganese and tin because we have been working with them for some time," said Manolis J. Manos, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern and lead author of the paper. "All three metals make stable compounds and are common and abundant."
"Our next step is to do systematic studies, including using an actual waste solution from the nuclear power industry, to learn how KMS-1 works and how to make even better metal sulfides," added Manos.
The results will be published online the week of March 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition to Kanatzidis and Manos, Nan Ding, a former graduate student in Kanatzidis' group, now at Claflin College in South Carolina, is the other author of the PNAS paper, titled "Layered Metal Sulfides: Exceptionally Selective Agents for Radioactive Strontium Removal."
3. Whisky Works Magic on Polluted Land
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Whisky-works-magic-on-polluted.3842864.jp
05 March 2008
SCIENTISTS yesterday unveiled the latest weapon in the battle to clean up polluted ground-water at contaminated land sites – whisky.
A natural by-product from the preparation of Scotland's national drink is being used to clean contaminated ground and waste water in a pioneering technique, potentially worth millions of pounds, developed by scientists at Aberdeen University.
The innovative technology – known as Dram (device for the remediation and attenuation of multiple pollutants) – is said to be cheaper and easier to deploy than standard treatments and has a massive potential to cut the UK's annual estimated spend on land remediation (remedying the presence of pollutants) of £1.2 billion.
Scottish Enterprise has provided almost £300,000 for the research via its Proof of Concept programme, and the world-famous Speyside distillery, Glenfiddich, has also helped researchers by donating the unidentified by-product.
Dr Graeme Paton, one of the researchers and a leading soil toxicologist, said: "Dram is a groundbreaking technology. Currently, we are using the by-product of Scotland's most famous export but our technology can use other by-products from the food and beverage industry.
"The clean-up of contaminated ground-water is a massive global market. The technology we have developed here at Aberdeen is environmentally friendly and sustainable and has the potential to put Scotland at the forefront for remediation technologies.
"It is the first technology that can remove metal contaminants at the same time as degrading organic pollutants such as pesticides."
Dr Paton explained that the current system for cleaning up contaminated ground-water involved pumping the water out of a site, processing it to remove any pollution, then pumping it back into the ground.
The "passive" system the Scottish team has developed involves inserting the organic material from whisky processing into the ground to attract solvents, which it breaks down.
"No intervention is required to apply it to contaminated sites as it can use existing infrastructure and remain in place unobtrusively for years," Dr Paton said. "Other processes used in the clean-up of sites require expensive equipment to be brought on to site, trenches to be dug and fences erected. Sometimes the cost of this – together with deadlines for remediation – mean it is too costly to clean up the land."
Dr Paton explained: "We cannot identify the product on the advice of our patent lawyer. But it is a natural by-product of the distilling process."
4. Seven Winched to Safety from Stranded Vessel
Crab boat trapped beneath cliff
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/seven-winched-to-safety-from-stranded-vessel-1306983.html
Wednesday March 05 2008
Seven fishermen were recovering yesterday after being dramatically winched to safety from a crab vessel which became stranded on rocks. The vessel got stuck under a cliff on Lough Swilly in the early hours of yesterday morning.
In a precarious rescue mission, made worse by pitch darkness and high seas, the Sligo based Irish Coast Guard helicopter hovered close to a 60 metre cliff face for 50 minutes, while a winchman and operator lifted the men, two by two, from the stranded boat.
The men, from Donegal, Cork, Antrim and Latvia, were transferred to Altnalgalvin hospital in Derry where they were treated for symptoms of hypothermia and shocked. They were released some hours later.
They raised the alarm at 3.30am, when the 15-metre crabbing vessel 'The Horizon' began taking water, after being pitched onto rocks in a tiny inlet at Saldana Point, on the western shores of the lough near Ballymastocker Bay.
Two Lough Swilly lifeboats, the Mulroy Coast Guard Cliff Rescue team and the Irish Coast Guard helicopter were all sent to the scene south of the seaside village of Portsalon. But the position of the boat, beneath a cliff overhang and surrounded by rocks, made it impossible for the lifeboats to reach it.
Lough Swilly lifeboat coxswain Mark Barnett said they feared for the safety of the men when they arrived at the scene. "The boat was bouncing up and down quite heavily on the rocks and it was taking some water. They were in the wheelhouse trying to keep warm but we had grave concerns for them at that stage," he said.
The helicopter reached the scene shortly after 5am.
"Luckily there was a part of the boat sticking out. Otherwise the rescue would have to have taken place from the top of the cliff and it would have been far more difficult," a spokesperson for the Irish Coast Guard said.
5. Scotland Leads Marine Fight Against Disease
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Scotland-leads--marine-fight.3842808.jp
Published Date: 05 March 2008
A WORLD-LEADING centre that will use marine life to develop treatments for diseases including cancer is to be established in Scotland. Laboratories are being set up at Aberdeen University to take lifeforms from the bottom of the ocean and transform them into potentially life-saving drugs.
The Marine Biodiscovery Centre is expected to boost the Scottish economy, both by the work it generates and the products it will be able to make for private companies. Jennifer Craw, of Scottish Enterprise Grampian, said it was "excellent news for the life sciences sector in Scotland".
The venture is being spearheaded by Professor Marcel Jaspars, a trained diver and chemist, who has been building links with colleagues around the world, including in Fiji, Australia and the United States.
"The idea is we discover small molecules and other things from nature that can be used in some shape or form – mostly for medicine," he said. "I look to extend the concept to not just drugs but anything which has a use to it. It could be a cosmetic or a washing powder."
His team has already developed a compound from a sea sponge that opens human cells and allows drugs to pass into them, sparking interest from multinational companies.
In biodiscovery, chemists take a sample of a species, extract what is basically the essential oil, and clean it up through different scientific processes, such as chromatography, until it is a pure compound. Samples are then tested by biologists for the various properties they might have – such as anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory or painkilling.
The centre will send out the samples to as many researchers as possible, who can test them in their work.
It has taken delivery of two giant superconductor magnets, which can analyse the molecular structure of marine life. It also has the world's most cutting-edge equipment to measure the weights of compounds to establish whether they can bond together to create drugs.
"The big part is trying to figure out the complicated structure," Prof Jaspars said. "That's part of our priorities, to determine what we've got. We'll have the chemist, the biologist and the equipment to test in the same place."
The unit will either work with researchers to develop a drug jointly or license it out to a commercial enterprise.
"One of the things about this is to make sure Scottish enterprise benefits," he said. "Companies come to me and say we have found a new antibiotic, and we help them to define the chemical structure which enables them to get further funding."
The team will also look outside the marine remit to plants, for example.
• Dr Rainer Ebel, of the Marine Biodiscovery Centre, will be discussing the work today at "Innovate with Aberdeen: The Frontiers of Excellence", an event targeting business people, investors and policymakers at Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh.
SEA SQUIRTECTEINASCIDIA turbinata is a sea squirt, or tunicate, that is found in the Caribbean and Mediterranean seas. Last year it became the first marine source to yield a cancer drug. It was developed by a Spanish firm specialising in anti-tumour drugs from marine life. The drug binds to the DNA and stops the cancer cells from multiplying.
BACTERIAAQUAPHARM, based at Oban, is working closely with the centre in thearea of anti-infectives. Bacteria and fungi are collected from the ocean and sent to the centre to find the ones with the best chance of having antibiotic properties. New drugs are particularly important because the bugs develop ways of resisting them.
SEA SPONGESTHE Aberdeen team have discovered a polymer in sea sponges from Papua New Guinea which should speed up drug delivery. It would be administered along with, for example, a cancer drug and would make the diseased cells more susceptible to treatment.
MAGICIAN'S CONE SNAIL Found in tropical waters it produces a highly toxic venom which it uses to paralyse passing fish. The same poison can block pain signals in the human brain and it has been used to create a very powerful painkiller. It is designed for chronic pain sufferers who cannot tolerate treatments like morphine.
Honorable Mentions:
1. Welsh Car Could be the Future of Motoring
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/news/wales-news/2008/03/05/welsh-car-could-be-the-future-of-motoring-91466-20558312/
Mar 5 2008
by Robin Turner, Western Mail
IT COSTS £15,000 ($29,911.17 US) has a top speed of 56 mph, costs just 1.12p (2.1 cents) a mile to run, and takes around 10 hours to recharge. This is the Zecar – an entirely electrically driven car produced by a father and son team based in a steel plant in Port Talbot.
Its makers claim the car is not only cheap – an average petrol driven car costs around 10p (20 cents) a mile to run at current pump prices – but is also one of the most environmentally friendly vehicles on the road.
The Zecar, which will be produced at a factory on the ECM2 business site within the Port Talbot Steel Works, is the brainchild of veteran car designer Professor Tony Stevens, who has worked in the motor industry for nearly 50 years.
During his career he has been involved in the engineering, design and marketing of dozens of cars including the Hillman Hunter and the Sunbeam Rapier. Working alongside him for Stevens Vehicles Ltd is his son Peter, an international banker who is overseeing the investment, day-to-day running and sales side of the business.
The eccentric looking Zecar, which costs £15,000, can be charged overnight (a full charge takes between eight and 10 hours) by plugging an on-car lead into the mains. At 5ft 9in tall it might not be the roomiest, but it is aimed at the “green” market and is designed as an urban runaround.
Its maximum speed is 56mph and with standard batteries the range is, at best, only 56 miles. At £15,000 it is also a lot more expensive than small cars produced by motoring giants like Ford and Vauxhall.
The father and son Stevens team are hoping the car will not go the same way as a series of other infamous electric vehicles.
The battery-run Sinclair C5 – devised by Sir Clive Sinclair, and built in Merthyr – launched in the 1980s with a top speed of 15mph, quickly became an object of ridicule and was a commercial disaster, selling less than 17,000 vehicles.
But they claim the Zecar’s exemption from road-fuel taxation, combined with the fact that electricity costs are a fraction of petrol or diesel mean it will save motorists “thousands”.
He says it will cost less than 2p per mile to fully charge and while the car will use electricity from conventional electricity sources as well as renewables, on the road its emissions are zero.
Also, “back-up battery solutions” are available as optional extras – future technologies under development include non-hydrogen fuel cells and bio-diesel hybrids – and, for potential London buyers, electrically driven cars include exemption from various parking and congestion charges.
In-house tests and feedback from the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) have allowed the company to claim “world class safety standards”, although the Zecars have not yet been subjected to NCAP (New Car Assessment Programme) crash tests.
For the Stevens team, coming to South Wales has been a case of rediscovering their roots as Peter Stevens’s grandparents are originally from Port Talbot. He said, “We wanted to invest in a plant in the UK as the Ze in Zecar stands for zero emissions. It would be crazy to have a site, say, in India and bring the vehicles in by ship.
“In the UK we found the National Assembly most accommodating and we found a suitable plant within the Tata Corus site at Port Talbot. “It’s difficult to say how many jobs we could create... it depends on the level of orders we get. But our website has had more than 25,000 hits this week and there is a lot of interest in a car which can be run at a fraction of the cost of conventional cars.”
Stevens Vehicles Ltd is considering producing the Cipher, a 70mph electric car first devised by Tony Stevens in the 1980s as a concept and the company also plans to produce a Zevan as a commercial vehicle.
2. Hogs Help Battle Beetle in Apple Orchard
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2004261631_apfarmscene.html?syndication=rss
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
By JAMES PRICHARD
Jim Koan has gone hog-wild in his battle against a beetle that threatens his 120-acre organic apple orchard.
As part of a research experiment believed to be among the first of its kind, Koan is using pigs to help protect his fruit from the plum curculio, a tiny insect that is among the most destructive apple pests.
More than two dozen porkers patrol his orchard, gobbling down fallen, immature apples containing the beetle's larvae. After a successful trial run late last spring, he and some researchers at Michigan State University are preparing for year two of the experiment at AlMar Orchards and Cidery in eastern Michigan.
They hope their work will someday help fruit growers throughout the world reduce the use of pesticides while diversifying their agricultural operations, as he is doing. He plans to periodically sell off the offspring of his four original hogs, keeping only those he needs.
"I'm not ready to say that everybody should run out and do this but I'll tell you, after the first year, I'm a whole lot more optimistic and excited by the possibilities," said Dave Epstein, a tree fruit pest-management specialist at the university and the project's lead researcher.
The quarter-inch-long plum curculio is particularly difficult for growers like Koan to control because no good organic controls have been developed for them. The beetle can be controlled conventionally, often with the pesticide azinphos-methyl. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is phasing out the powerful pesticide, marketed under the trade name Guthion, because of the risks it poses to farm workers and to the environment.
Adult female curculios cut crescent-shaped flaps in the skin of newly formed apples and lay their eggs inside, where they hatch. The beetle larvae burrow into the center of the young fruit, making it drop prematurely in late June or early July.
After spending about two weeks inside, the larvae migrate from the fallen fruit into the soil, where they pupate for 10 to 12 days before emerging as adults to attack the remaining fruit and start the cycle all over again.
Koan decided to try to find an animal that would eat the fallen apples as they lay beneath the trees, before the bugs became adults, but he had a few misses before he settled on pigs.
First, he tried using some chickens. "All they did all summer long was lay around under the trees when it was hot and just sunbathe, you know, kind of like on the beach," he said. Then a neighbor's dogs got to the birds. "So that was a bad idea."
He next tried guinea fowl, an energetic wild chicken. They did a "fantastic job" _ until some birds of prey discovered them at the orchard. Then Koan remembered how his grandfather would drive his pigs into his orchard so they could feed on fallen apples.
So Koan obtained some Berkshire pigs, with the idea of breeding them not only so they would eat the fallen apples and kill the beetle larvae but also for slaughter as organically raised meat. He bought a boar and three sows, and now has 27 pigs.
When the infested apples fell in June, the pigs were released into three one-acre sections of the orchard. The researchers compared those three plots with three other one-acre plots where the swine didn't go, and found that the pigs did even better than expected.
Left in the orchard for three days, the pigs gobbled down 98 percent of the fallen apples. Tests showed virtually all the larvae were digested. "The little guys moved through like a pack of Hoover vacuums," Epstein said. The researchers found that in the plots where no pigs were allowed, five times as many plum curculios were counted.
Epstein got a one-year grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study the effect of the pigs on the orchard last year and has applied for a four-year grant.
Koan, 60, took over the farm in Clayton Township, near Flint, from his parents. In the past 15 years or so, while trying to diversify his business, he has moved into organic production, phasing out most chemicals to fight off the pests, weeds and diseases that could harm his fruit.
"I think if my granddad was alive today and he saw how excited I am about doing this and this information that we're gaining on this," said Koan, "he would just look at me and say, 'Jeez, you're stupid. You didn't know that?'"
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