Battery Storage Poised to Expand Rapidly

The summer of 2016 was one of dire warnings for Southern California energy consumers.

A massive methane leak from the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility outside Los Angeles had drained the region's natural gas supply, and the word went out that gas shortages could disrupt the region's power deliveries by the summer of 2017.

Amid fears of rolling blackouts across the nation's second-largest metro area and beyond, utilities like Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric latched on to a solution that for years had been quietly deployed, but needed an event like a looming gas shortage to be thrust into prime time.

The solution was large-scale battery storage.

Thanks in part to California's crisis, but also improving economics and new state policies, the technology is preparing for unprecedented growth in the United States over the next several years. As much as 1,800 megawatts of new energy storage — mostly from lithium-ion batteries — is expected to come online by 2021, according to GTM Research, which tracks the sector for the Energy Storage Association.

That's eight times larger than total U.S. installed energy storage capacity in 2016 and should translate into nearly 5,900 megawatt-hours of stored electricity that can be dispatched quickly to address power outages, shave peak demand charges or simply enhance grid reliability, according to experts.

Energy storage is also critical to solving the intermittency challenges associated with renewable energy. That's because batteries can smooth the ebbs and flows associated with wind and solar power by supplementing the grid when those resources are not available.

“One of the trends we're seeing lately, and what could be a game-changer, is the level of utility interest and involvement,” said Anissa Dehamna, a principal research analyst and head of the energy storage team at Navigant Research. “We've had growth of a little over 200 percent [annually] in the past, and we're expecting that trend to continue in the North American market.”

World's largest lithium-ion battery system

By early next year, the two Southern California utilities responding to Aliso Canyon — SCE and SDG&E — will bring 104.5 MW of new energy storage capacity online in one of the largest and fastest deployments of clean energy technology in history, according to Ravi Manghani, director of energy storage at GTM Research.

The projects will also move California closer to meeting a 2013 mandate that the state's three largest investor-owned utilities install 1.3 gigawatts of energy storage capacity by 2020.

“Even by the standards of energy storage, this process has been fast, meaning that successful implementation would be a milestone for energy storage and a clear differentiator when utilities face immediate capacity shortfalls,” Manghani said.

The SCE projects, designed and built by a handful of major firms, including Tesla Motors, General Electric and Greensmith Energy, are part of a utility-backed program to boost its energy storage portfolio to roughly 400 MW, which would make SCE the largest utility owner of storage in the country.

Paul Griffo, an SCE spokesman, said the utility's commitment to storage is based on both performance and cost analyses of the technology. In many cases, officials found that storage is less costly, more nimble, and easier to site and permit than new natural gas peaker plants. “It's tough to find sites that work for peakers in highly urbanized areas,” he noted.

In San Diego, AES Corp. will install what is expected to be the world's largest lithium-ion battery system linked to a utility grid. The 30-MW Escondido project, scheduled to begin operation in January, will be able to deliver up to 120 MWh of power to SDG&E's grid for four hours. It will be joined by a smaller 7.5-MW storage battery at El Cajon, Calif., that will be able to deliver an additional 30 MWh of power.

Roughly 3,000 miles away from sunny Southern California, in Colchester, Vt., Green Mountain Power is also raising the profile of energy storage, but in a completely different market from Los Angeles and with a different set of priorities and desired outcomes.

A “turning point”

The Vermont utility, which serves roughly 265,000 residential and commercial customers, recently began deploying storage technology in the city of Rutland, where a 2.5-MW solar array combined with a 4-MW lithium-ion battery is helping to shave peak demand charges for GMP's customers, in some cases by as much as $200,000 per hour.

The company is also partnering with battery maker Tesla to install hundreds of Tesla Powerwall battery systems in Vermont homes. Customers can lease the batteries for $37.50 a month or purchase the battery through the utility and recover their costs via energy credits, according to GMP officials.

Meanwhile, in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, developers have installed more than 250 MW of energy storage on the PJM Interconnection grid to aid frequency regulation since 2012.

Currently, PJM accounts for 74 percent of all utility-scale storage capacity, but the market is expected to shift heavily toward California as the Aliso Canyon projects come online, combined with broader development spurred by the state's approaching 1.3-GW storage mandate.

“When we combine solar and battery storage, it opens a whole world of possibilities for our customers,” Mary Powell, GMP's president and CEO, said last October. “This is the future of energy, and it's never been more exciting.”

Experts agree. Energy storage — whether applied at the utility scale in California or deployed by individual businesses and homeowners for backup power and peak-shaving in states like Vermont — has emerged as a key component in the nation's clean energy transformation.

“I think this past year has been the turning point for storage,” said Lewis Milford, president of the Clean Energy Group, a nonprofit that advocates for renewables and clean tech solutions. “We've moved from a question of, 'Is this technology ready for the marketplace?' to 'How do we get enough systems out there to prove the economics of it?'”

Reprinted from ClimateWire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.

from Scientific American Content: Global

Read More

To New Illusory Beginnings

Our perceptual and cognitive systems like to keep things simple. We describe the line drawings below as a circle and a square, even though their imagined contours consist—in reality—of discontinuous line segments. The Gestalt psychologists of the 19th and early 20th century branded this perceptual legerdemain as the Principle of Closure, by which we tend to recognize shapes and concepts as complete, even in the face of fragmentary information.

Now at the end of the year, it is tempting to seek a cognitive kind of closure: we want to close the lid on 2016, wrap it with a bow and start a fresh new year from a blank slate. Of course, it’s just an illusion, the Principle of Closure in one of its many incarnations. The end of the year is just as arbitrary as the end of the month, or the end of the week, or any other date we choose to highlight in the earth’s recurrent journey around the sun. But it feels quite different. That’s why we have lists of New Year’s resolutions, or why we start new diets or exercise regimes on Mondays rather than Thursdays. Researchers have also found that, even though we measure time in a continuous scale, we assign special meaning to idiosyncratic milestones such as entering a new decade.   

What should we do about our brain’s oversimplification tendencies concerning the New Year—if anything? One strategy would be to fight our feelings of closure and rebirth as we (in truth) seamlessly move from the last day of 2016 to the first day of 2017. But that approach is likely to fail. Try as we might, the Principle of Closure is just too ingrained in our perceptual and cognitive systems. In fact, if you already have the feeling that the beginning of the year is somewhat special (hey, it only happens once a year!), you might as well decide that resistance is futile, and not just embrace the illusion, but do your best to channel it.

Later today, as midnight approaches, go full steam ahead with your end-of-the-year rituals and traditions. Throw in a few New Year’s Eve superstitions, too (just for fun, of course). Make 2016 go out with a bang. And don’t forget to write your New Year’s resolutions list. Even if it didn’t work out so well last year. Believe that tomorrow is the start of a new era. If you do, you could tilt the scale just enough this time—and trick your brain into making it so.

Here’s to new, illusory beginnings! Have a very happy 2017!  

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

from Scientific American Content: Global

Read More

The Best Wildlife Conservation Stories of 2016

The news about endangered species tends to be pretty bleak. That definitely proved true in 2016, but the past year also saw quite a few successes. Here are some of the best news stories from 2016, as chosen from the “Extinction Countdown” archives and by experts and conservation groups around the globe.

Trafficking and Trade

The illegal wildlife trade affects hundreds of species around the world and has put quite a few on the fast track toward extinction. Luckily, several of them received important support at this fall’s meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which banned or limited international trade for several imperiled species, including pangolins, the African grey parrot, and several kinds of sharks. “Almost all of the decisions were really based on science,” says Susan Lieberman, vice president for international policy for the Wildlife Conservation Society. “You have to celebrate when that happens.”

Of course, what makes the CITES action good news is that we’re stepping up to help species that have become critically imperiled. “It’s good news that governments are recognizing the risks these species are in,” Lieberman says. “It’s bad news because the situation for these species is really horrible.”

Outside of CITES, elephants also got a boost when the U.S. adopted tighter regulations in the trade of ivory. “The new regulations will make it much harder for criminals to use the United States as a staging ground for illegal ivory trade,” Ginette Hemley, senior vice president of wildlife conservation at WWF, said this past June. “They also send a strong signal to the international community that the U.S. is committed to doing its part to save elephants in the wild.”

A Foxy Recovery

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had a number of Endangered Species Act success stories this year, but the best was probably April's announcement that three subspecies of island fox native to California's Channel Islands had recovered and are now no longer considered to be at risk. This marked the fasted recovery under the ESA to date and reflects 12 years of intense conservation efforts by several dedicated partners on the federal, state and local level.

Many Megafauna

Some of the biggest species and most recognizable species on the planet had a few minor victories in 2016. Most recently, the recognition that giraffes are an endangered species made news around the world. That might seem like bad news, but the public outcry may be what we need to finally get conservation efforts moving in the right direction.

Zhou Fei, Head of TRAFFIC’s China Office in Beijing, says one of the best stories of the year is that giant panda populations improved enough that the IUCN Red List now considers the iconic animals to be no longer endangered. (They’re now listed as vulnerable to extinction.) Others have expressed worry that this categorization change will lessen our ability to protect pandas moving forward, but it’s still pretty good news.

Orangutans had a bad year (more on that in our “worst of 2016” article), but there were bright spots. “The best orangutan conservation story of 2016 is the successful continuation of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation's release program,” says Richard Zimmerman, executive director of Orangutan Outreach. “They've now released 250 orangutans into safe, secure forests. The majority of these orangutans were rescued orphans who were rehabilitated over many years. Due to a lack of available forest they were forced to remain in cages and wait to be released.” Several other rescue and release expeditions in other locations helped even more of these imperiled apes, although Zimmerman noted that “there are still hundreds of orangutans waiting to be released and we expect the expeditions to continue in coming years. These releases are quite expensive and require a lot of coordination on the ground.”

Finally, experts from the NRDC pointed to a “decades-in-the-making breakthrough agreement on sonar safeguards for whales and our oceans.” With so many cetacean species in decline, this easing of at least one of the pressures affecting them can only help.

Birds

Our feathered friends got several bits of good news this year. Most notably, five captive-born Hawaiian crows—a species that went extinct in the wild decades ago—made their triumphant return to a protected Hawaiian park a few days ago. Expect to hear a lot more about this story in the coming year.

Another Hawaiian species, the Akikiki, has been immortalized in space, with an asteroid permanently named after the tiny endangered birds. That may not have directly helped efforts to conserve the species, but it did bring them international (if not interstellar) recognition.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, every single kakapo (a large, flightless, critically endangered parrot) has had its genome sequenced, an effort that will help to increase the species’ population in the coming decades. (This year’s record breeding season also gave kakapo numbers a much-needed boost.)

The Little Guys

A few smaller creatures belong on our list, as well. “This year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finally took bees seriously,” says Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Seven species of Hawaiian yellow-faced bees received endangered species status, and similar protection has been proposed for the rusty-patched bumblebee. “That’s pretty big,” Black says. “We’ve never had a bee listed before.”

Amphibians, many of which are being wiped out by the deadly chytrid fungus, had at least one success story this year. “I was really heartened by the study that Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frogs are holding their own against the chytrid fungus,” says Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Meanwhile, desert tortoises and other species benefitted from the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, which promoted clean energy development in the California desert while protecting local wildlife. “This plan will enable us to combat climate change, which is a threat to wildlife, habitat and landscapes worldwide, while preserving important habitats,” said Kim Delfino, California program director for Defenders of Wildlife. “This is a blueprint for other states, the nation and the world to consider as we all work together to fight climate change and race against extinction.”

Land & Seas

On a broader level, many species benefitted from efforts to preserve entire ecosystems. “Globally, protected areas continue to expand, both on land and especially in the ocean,” says Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation at Duke University and president of Saving Species. “There is widespread agreement that these are the best solution to protect biodiversity.” Pimm reports that his own team’s efforts are paying off. “We don’t help our donors buy a lot of land, but we help them buy land strategically.  We are now connecting formerly isolated fragments of habitat to create large, continuous habitats in Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, India, and Sumatra.”

What Else?

Obviously there were other endangered species successes over the course of 2016. What would you add to this list? Add your comments below, or discuss things on Twitter under the hashtag #extinction2016.

from Scientific American Content: Global

Read More

The Worst Wildlife Conservation Stories of 2016

Earlier this year the Bramble Cay melomys—a tiny island rodent species that few people had ever seen or heard of—became the first mammal extinction caused by climate change and sea-level rise.

Believe it or not, that portent of things to come wasn’t even the worst wildlife conservation story of the year. Read on for more sad news items from 2016, as chosen from the “Extinction Countdown” archives and by experts and conservation groups around the globe. (Don’t get too depressed reading this—a list of the best stories of 2016 is coming tomorrow.)

Other Extinctions (with More on the Way)

In addition to the melomys, the Rabbs’ tree frog also went extinct, something we’ve actually been expecting for a while. The species was down to its last individual, but the death of the final frog, nicknamed “Toughie,” was still a painful reminder and very public reminder of what we’re losing.

Other disappearances were less visible. The IUCN declared 13 newly discovered bird species to be extinct. Two beetle species went extinct after waiting decades for protection. The population of Addax antelopes fell to just three wild animals. And conservationists predicted the Ploughshare tortoise of Madagascar has maybe two years left in the wild due to rampant poaching for the illegal pet trade.

The illegal pet trade, by the way, is just one of the factors behind the massive decline of another Madagascar species, the ring-tailed lemur, which new research—published just this week—reveals has fallen to a population of fewer than 2,500 animals. Other threats include deforestation, habitat loss and the bushmeat trade. There’s hope for this and other species on the island nation, but that hope is admittedly slim. “Generalist species like the ring-tailed lemur can often persist and do okay, even in the face of rapid ecological change or anthropogenic threat, but as we've seen in Madagascar, the threats are just too great, even for these hearty lemurs,” says Marni LaFleur, adjunct professor at University of California San Diego and co-director of Lemur Love.

We also continued to lose the vaquita porpoise, which has seen its population decline to 60 or fewer animals as the animals are caught up in nets targeting a nearby fish called the totoaba. “That’s a 30 percent decline in just 4 years,” says Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “At this rate, we're facing functional extinction by 2022.”

That’s already happened with another species, the Irrawaddy dolphin, which became functionally extinct in Laos in 2016. Experts from WWF picked it as one of the worst news stories of the year.

Elephants and Rhinos

Some of the largest species on the planet also had terrible years—most notably, elephants. According to data from the Great Elephant Census, Africa has lost a third of its elephants in just the past seven years due to rampant poaching for their ivory tusks. Forest elephants, one of the two African elephant species, have been hit the worst, as research published this year revealed it will take the slow-breeding pachyderms at least a century to recover from recent poaching losses. “That’s serious,” says Susan Lieberman, vice president of international policy for the Wildlife Conservation Society. “It’s worse that we would have predicted.”

Rhino poaching also continued nonstop. Numbers released at the beginning of 2016 revealed that 2015 had the highest levels of rhino poaching ever. Things didn’t appear to slow down in the months that followed. I dread what 2016’s numbers, due late next month, will reveal.

Orangutans

Both orangutan species are now considered critically endangered, mostly due to habitat loss for production of palm oil and other agricultural products. Meanwhile, efforts to protect the orangutans that remain suffered some setbacks this year. “The worst orangutan conservation story of 2016 is the recent loss of the court case to protect the Leuser Ecosystem in Northern Sumatra,” says Richard Zimmerman, director of Orangutan Outreach. “This is the only intact forest on earth that is home to orangutans, tigers, elephants and rhinos. The Acehnese government is planning to destroy the entire forest and convert the land into oil palm plantations. In such a scenario the biodiversity will be wiped out, leading to the rapid extinction of all the unique animal species inhabiting the ecosystem. A coalition of NGOs and conservation organizations has been fighting to enforce national Indonesian laws, but the court recently rejected their claims. They will be appealing the decision and continuing the fight in 2017.”

Big Cats

Let’s talk tigers. Populations of the world’s most well-known big cat are reportedly up, but in part that’s just be because we’ve gotten better at counting them. Meanwhile the illegal trade in tigers and their body parts continues to surge. We saw this most clearly during the raids of the infamous Tiger Temple in Thailand this past June.

Some tiger populations definitely are increasing and being well protected, but in general the news remains bleak, especially considering what could happen in the future. Zhou Fei, Head of TRAFFIC’s China Office in Beijing points out that “China revised its ‘Wild animal protection law,’ [meaning] there is a call for removal of the 1993 trade ban and use of tiger bone for traditional Chinese medicine.” That could accelerate the loss of wild tigers.

As bad as things are for tigers, the news about leopards may be even worse. These often-ignored big cats are also in crisis, most notably the Indochinese subspecies, which has lost more than 94 percent of its range (compared to 75 percent for all leopards). The cats are expected to become extinct in Cambodia in as little as two years, mostly due to the trapping crisis that is converting every living thing in Southeast Asia into food for the wild meat market.

Wolves & Bears

A lot of people are howling about wolves lately, and with good reason. Experts at Defenders of Wildlife called this year’s plan to pull most red wolves out of the wild “disastrous.” Fewer than 45 of these rare animals remain the wild right now. Mexican gray wolves aren’t much better off, with 97 animals in the U.S. and fewer than 25 in Mexico. The state of New Mexico has sued to block further reintroductions of captive-bred wolves, something that Defenders is fighting. Expect big developments on this story starting in January.

Meanwhile, last member of Yellowstone National Park’s well-known Druid wolf pack was shot and killed—legally—by a hunter in Montana. The pack was a popular sight for tourists and was seen by at least 100,000 Yellowstone visitors over the past two decades. That’s now gone.

Sticking with Yellowstone, experts from the NRDC identified the ongoing efforts to remove the grizzly bear population there from the protection of the Endangered Species Act one of the worst conservation stories of the year.

Forests

It’s not all about animals. Ecosystems matter, too. Bill Laurence, distinguished research professor at James Cook University and director of ALERT Conservation, said one of the worst bits of news for the year was a study that found the world’s forests, especially remote, “core” forest areas that are important for biodiversity, are disappearing faster than ever.

Politics & the Election

On a broader level, here in the U.S. the Endangered Species Act faced dozens of legislative attacks to reduce its strength and effectiveness. Other laws also took aim at wildlife. A rider attached to the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) targets protections for salmon and the Delta smelt. Defenders of Wildlife president and CEO Jamie Rapport Clark said politicians “cynically used the Flint community's need for clean water to gut environmental protections for fish and wildlife. However, this was a false choice created by opportunistic politicians who have signaled that they will use any means at their disposal to roll back important environmental protections. If this is the new way of business for the next Congress, we will fight them every step of the way, because voters did not vote to roll back protections for water, air and wildlife.”

Is that just the shape of things to come? “The number one story of the year has to be that electors in the USA voted in a president who is openly hostile to science, didn’t answer any of the questions posed to him by Science Debate, and denies human caused global warming,” says Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation at Duke University and president of Saving Species. “So, too, do two key members of his administration—the proposed heads of EPA and Interior.” That could spell trouble for all of the world’s wildlife—something we’ll explore in another article looking ahead at 2017. Look for that in the coming weeks.

What Else?

Obviously there were other bad news stories endangered species over the course of 2016. What would you add to this list? Add your comments below, or discuss things on Twitter under the hashtag #extinction2016.

from Scientific American Content: Global

Read More

Best Science Books of 2016

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at http://ift.tt/1WP0kx9). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers.

from Scientific American Content: Global

Read More

Need Help with Portion Control? Don't Ask a Dog for Help

You might not know how much food is on your plate. That's okay. Neither do I. That’s because it depends on the plate.

See. The inner black circle on the left appears larger than the black circle on the right, but both black circles are actually the same size.

Credit: Miletto Petrazzini et al. 2016

Meet the Delboeuf illusion, where we misperceive the size of a central circle because of what’s surrounding it. In the image above, the black circle on the left is surrounded by a smaller circle, giving it the appearance that it’s larger than the black circle on the right, which is surrounded by a larger circle.

Which brings us back to plates of food. It is the Delboeuf illusion that tricks us into thinking we have more food when it is on a smaller plate. That is why a search for the Delboeuf illusion on the Internet produces hits for weight loss this and weight loss that. Select the right plate, you are told, and you could consume less food. (I write that while eating frosting with a spoon. Am I even qualified to cover this topic? I digress.)

Visual illusions are not just for humans. Male bowerbirds not only construct elaborately decorated structures (bowers) to attract mates, they do so in a way that creates the illusion that they are bigger, thus potentially increasing mating success. Felicity Muth of Not Bad Science explains that if a sneaky researcher moves objects within a bird’s bower and disrupts the illusion, males will reposition the objects to fix the disturbed illusion. Don’t mess with my stuff. Bowerbirds are not alone. Numerous other animals also use, and are fooled by, visual trickery.

But it is not always easy to tell if another species picks up on illusions. In recent years, researchers turned to different methods to find out, such as the ‘spontaneous preference paradigm.’ Here’s how it works: Step 1: in control trials, determine whether animals spontaneously select the larger quantity of food when presented with two options. If they do, great. That sets a precedent for the next part. Step 2: in test trials, present them with food on plates in such a way that implements the Delboeuf illusion—the same amount of food is on each plate, but the plates differ in size. Those who initially went for more food would reveal themselves as susceptible to the illusion if they then select the smaller plate—the one that, according to the Delboeuf illusion, appears to have more food on it. Using this design, Parrish and Beran (2014) found that three chimpanzees fell for it, selecting the larger portion in control trials and then selecting food on the smaller plate in test trials. More recently, capuchin monkeys and rhesus monkeys were found to be generally fooled by the illusion.

What about the hounds? Bring in the hounds. Researchers from the University of Padua in Italy recently investigated the Delboeuf illusion in dogs. A total of thirteen dogs, both pet dogs and those residing at an animal shelter, participated in the study by Maria Elena Miletto Tetrazzini and colleagues, which appeared online this month in Animal Cognition. The dog study was modeled after Parrish and Beran’s 2014 study with chimpanzees, first determining whether the dogs preferred larger quantities of food and then presenting equal amounts of food on two different-size plates.

Like the chimpanzees, dogs preferred more food, but unlike the chimps, when dogs were presented with equal amounts of food on different-size plates, dogs did not show a preference for the smaller plate. They went to either plate. The Delboeuf illusion, it appears, is not for dogs.

Humans see more food on the plate on the left, even though the amount on both plates is the same. Dogs see food. Credit: Miletto Petrazzini et al. 2016

If bells are going off in your head, let me guess: are you wondering about smell? In the control trials, did the dogs go to the plate with more food because they smelled the difference in quantity? On the other hand, in the test trials could dogs smell that the quantities were the same, so plate-schmate, it’s all the same?

A number of studies, including one I participated in, find something surprising: “Dogs’ ability to discriminate between two quantities of food items by using olfactory cues is surprisingly poor,” summarizes Miletto Petrazzini.

No one, of course, is suggesting that dogs can’t use olfactory information to discriminate between amounts. Around the globe, trained dogs show off this ability daily. Instead, the studies suggests that average, untrained dogs are not necessarily attending to minute differences in olfactory cues. Additionally, in the Delboeuf test, the plates were about 5 feet from the dogs. Close olfactory investigation and comparison prior to making a decision, like in this video, was not possible.

The Delbouef story does not end here. A second study, also online this month in Animal Cognition, investigated the Delboeuf illusion with an entirely different procedure and also concluded that most dogs do not pick up on it. Here, Sarah-Elizabeth Byosiere and colleagues at La Trobe University in Australia first used a positive reinforcement protocol to train eight dogs—in this case all Lagotto Romagnolos—to discriminate large from small circles presented on a computer screen. Then, dogs were tested on their susceptibility to different visual illusions. Again, Delboeuf was not in the cards for most dogs, although the two dogs who did pick up on it did so in the opposite direction as humans; in other words, the inner circle that appears larger to humans appeared smaller to dogs, and the inner circle that looks smaller to humans looked larger to dogs. 

Nowadays, studies and news reports often highlight the similarities between dogs and people, as if we are two peas in a pod. "Dogs do it like we do," reports seem to say. "We're on the same page." But upon closer inspection, dogs often reveal their own dog-like way of processing and attending to the world. Understanding our differences, I’d argue, only strengthens our collective pod.

References

Byosiere SE, Feng LC, Woodhead JK, Rutter NJ, Chouinard PA, Howell TJ, Bennett PC. 2016. Visual perception in domestic dogs: susceptibility to the Ebbinghaus–Titchener and Delboeuf illusions. Animal Cognition, First Online: 22 December 2016.

Horowitz A, Hecht J, Dedrick A. 2013. Smelling more or less: Investigating the olfactory experience of the domestic dog. Learning and Motivation, 44, 207—217.

Miletto Petrazzini ME, Bisazza A, Agrillo C. 2016 Do domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) perceive the Delboeuf illusion? Animal Cognition, First Online: 20 December 2016.

Parrish AE, Beran MJ. 2014. When less is more: like humans, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) misperceive food amounts based on plate size. Animal Cognition, 427–434.

Prato-Previde E, Marshall-Pescini S, Valsecchi P. 2008. Is your choice my choice? The owners’ effect on pet dogs’ (Canis lupus familiaris) performance in a food choice task. Animal Cognition, 11, 167—174.

from Scientific American Content: Global

Read More

South Korea on the verge of unlimited energy breakthrough

(NaturalNews) Scientists in South Korea have reportedly made a breakthrough toward harnessing an unlimited source of safe and clean energy via nuclear fusion.

The Korean Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) reactor apparently set a world’s record recently by holding superheated plasma in a steady state for 70 seconds.

If implemented into widespread use, the nuclear fusion process — which is an alternative to nuclear fission and the radioactive waste that accompanies it — could revolutionize the energy delivery system by among other things also presumably eliminating reliance on fossil fuels and all the geopolitical, economic, environmental, and social ramifications that go with it.

Deploying the nuclear fusion technology in residential and commercial settings won’t happen tomorrow or the next day but it is no longer in the realm of science fiction because “research such as KSTAR proves that the burning of star-like fuel can be achieved and contained using current technology,” the Daily Mail claimed.

The KSTAR facility is located about 100 miles south of Seoul, and the reactor is capable of generating temperatures of up 300 million degrees Celsius (approximately 540 million degrees Fahrenheit) for plasma blobs.

Plasma blobs are held together by magnetic fields, according to Interesting Engineering, thereby creating helium atoms. The energy thus released is theoretically capable of generating “unlimited” power.

“Containing this ultra-hot type of matter is key to unlocking nuclear fusion, so it’s a big step forward in our attempts to make this clean, safe, and virtually limitless source of energy something we can rely on,” Science Alert explained, adding that this mode of operation could conceivably generate nuclear waste-free power for a millennium using just seawater, as long as the appropriate safety and sustainability controls are in place. Moreover, there is apparently far less risk of a plant meltdown using nuclear fusion technology.

“To put it simply, nuclear fusion is the process that makes the sun shine, with the nuclei of small atoms, such as hydrogen, squeezed together and heated to an extreme degree such that they fuse to form larger nuclei and release a burst of energy…Conventional nuclear power plants depend on materials such as uranium or plutonium to create the fission to generate energy, but the radioactivity of the resulting fragments are considered a crucial drawback. In a nuclear fusion reaction, however, problems about waste disposal are greatly minimized,” The Korea Times explained.

As Natural News has chronicled previously, traditional nuke plants here and abroad have introduced hazardous waste into the environment, so any discussion of nuclear power, conventional or otherwise, is bound to become immediately controversial.

Nuclear waste disposal is a hot-button issue, as it were, and has long been at the heart of opposition to nuclear power by environmental groups, suggesting that fusion process, if it fully proves out, might be a solution acceptable to all constituencies.

Parenthetically, Australia is reportedly considering building a gigantic nuclear waste storage facility in the sparsely populated southern part of the country. Some people believe that gathering nuclear waste together in one site makes it easier to secure, control and keep track of, minimizing the possibilities of widespread radiation exposure across multiple cities, and reducing the chances of these dangerous materials getting into the wrong hands and used in a dirty bomb. Others feel that the health concerns of radiation exposure are simply not worth it.

In a statement about what appears to be a new nuclear fusion benchmark, South Korea’s National Fusion Research Institute lauded the KSTAR reactor record as being in the “forefront in steady-state plasma operation technology in a superconducting device. This is a huge step forward for realization of the fusion reactor.”

Sources:

DailyMail.co.uk

InterestingEngineering.com

ScienceAlert.com

World-Nuclear-News.org

M.KoreaTimes.co.kr

NaturalNews.com

from NaturalNews.com

Read More