Grabbing Moisture from Desert Air

The James Dyson Award winners for 2011 have been announced, and the grand prize winner is a piece of clever biomimicry that sits so perfectly in our wheelhouse that we couldn’t resist the urge to write about it. Edward Linacre of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne has tapped the Namib beetle--a desert dwelling species that survives in the most arid conditions on Earth--to create an irrigation system that can pull liquid moisture straight out of dry desert air.

Airdrop, as the system is known, borrows a trick from the Namib beetle, which can live in areas that receive just half an inch of rain per year by harvesting the moisture from the air that condenses on its back during the early morning hours. A hydrophilic skin helps to snare water molecules passing on the breeze, which then accumulate into droplets of consumable liquid water.

Airdrop mimics this idea, though on a larger scale. The self-powering device pumps water into a network of underground pipes, where it cools enough for water to condensate. From there the moisture is delivered to the roots of nearby plants. Linacre’s math shows that about 11.5 milliliters can be harvested from every cubic meter of air, and further development could raise that number even higher.

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Such a system could provide regular moisture to plants being grown in the world’s driest regions. And because it is low cost and self-powered, there’s not a lot of investment or maintenance involved in deploying Airdrop. The $14,000 award from Dyson (Linacre’s university also gets an additional $14,000) should help speed that along.

This year’s runners up included a quickly deployable divider for medical settings that lets healthcare professionals make the most of available space and an aide for the blind that uses a special cane and location-based social networking apps to help the visually impaired locate their friends. All of this year's entries can be seen here.

Environment Clean Generations

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Posted in: desert,environment,environment clean generations,irrigation systems,moisture,rain

China’s Colossal Structures Confound

There seems to be no end to the  weird and king-sized structures populating China's desert - or to the explanation for these mega-projects.

Take the giant jigsaw-like grids that started the latest wave of interest in these mysteries of the Gobi. Some suggest they are hoaxes perpetrated on the Google Earth-obsessed. Jonathan Hill, a research technician at the Mars Space Flight Facility, notes that the grids can be viewed from space. So maybe they're used to calibrate China's spy satellites. In an  interview with  Life's Little Secrets,  Hill cites a giant white cross, which was created in the 1960s in Casa Grande, Arizona by the US to calibrate their orbiting eyes in the sky.

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But that doesn't explain  this Masonic-looking pair of patterns, etched into the desert. Clearly, there's more going on than just a spy-cam focal point. Some  believe it is the Yaerbashi training airfield of the Chinese air force's  8th Flying Academy, or perhaps China's  Yaerbashi Test Range. Others wonder if it might be a giant joke played on sat-spotters.

"As to what the figure-8 things and the weird glyphs on the northern chevron are, I have no real idea," emails former CIA analyst Allen Thomson. "Although it wouldn't surprise me if the glyphs were made by some people who were bored out of their minds by being stuck out in the middle of nowhere and decided to have some fun with the eyes in the sky." If it's a giant gag, it's not the only one. Check out the gallery to see all the things Wired.com's Danger Room readers have found this week scouring Google Earth's images of the Gobi.    Environment Clean Generations

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Posted in: china,desert,earth,environment clean generations,structures

Sillicon and Solar Power in the Desert

The forbidding sands of the Sahara might seem an unusual place for farming. But if you’re farming silicon to make solar panels, the conditions in the Sahara are more or less optimal. At least, that’s the thinking behind the Sahara Solar Breeder Project. The plan, a joint project proposed by Japanese and Algerian universities, would use the desert’s immense supplies of sunlight and sand to “breed” solar power plants and solar panel factories.

The idea is to start with a small number of silicon manufacturing plants that will churn out the silicon needed to manufacture solar panels. Once those panels are operating, they can be used to power the silicon plants, which in turn churn out more silicon and solar panels, which in turn can be used to power more silicon and solar energy plants. And so on. By 2050, the universities envision breeding enough silicon and solar by 2050 to supply half the world’s energy.

That’s a far more lofty goal than the Destertec Foundation’s goal of supplying just 15 percent of Europe’s energy by 2050. But some have questioned the Sahara Solar Breeder Project’s goal of using high-temperature superconductors to transmit direct current electricity over long distances, claiming that the cost of cooling the lines renders the project unfeasible. Keep in mind that superconductors have to be kept at very low temperatures, so “high-temperature” is a relative term, meaning they "only" have to be cooled to 400 degrees below zero.

The Breeder project thinks it can still make its energy cost-competitive, even with the added cost of cooling the transmission lines. Maybe they’re right; after all, it should only cost them some extra energy, and as long as that energy is supplied by their own solar panels it really shouldn’t add too significantly to costs. That’s assuming, of course, that the project can reach the critical mass needed to become an energy exporter that doesn’t consume all the energy it creates.

Still, it’s an interesting idea: Plant a solar power collector and a solar panel manufacturing plant in the desert and watch them grow, symbiotically. An organic, biologically-inspired notion of both manufacturing and power generation sounds attractive, and if the partners can make it thrive in the middle of the desert, more power to them.

 by "environment clean generations"

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Posted in: desert,energy,environment,sahara,Sillicon and Solar Power in the Desert,solar panel,sunlight

Dust Level High

There is twice as much desert dust in the atmosphere now than a century ago. Particles of dust in the air affect climate and ocean ecology. A better understanding of changing dust levels should help scientists make more accurate climate predictions. 

The amount of dust in the atmosphere has doubled over most of the planet since the last century, finds a new study.

As wind blows through the world's deserts, it whisks dust up into the air and down into the oceans and can significantly affect climate and the environment in all sorts of ways. 

Understanding the changing patterns of dirt particles in the atmosphere could help scientists improve the accuracy of climate predictions. Tracing swirls of dust to their roots could also lead to better land management practices that might mitigate the flow of dust from Earth to sky and sea.

But first, researchers need to figure out why dust levels are rising in the first place. 

"We don't know," said Natalie Mahowald, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "It's probably a combination of agriculture and pasture-usage as well as climate change because a lot of regions are getting drier, and that would increase desert dust."

"We put big uncertainty bars on everything," she added. "We need more data."

Climate researchers have spent a lot of time worrying about the effects of particles that human actions release into the atmosphere. Known as anthropomorphic aerosols, these include sulfates from coal-fired power plants and nitrogen oxides from automobile exhaust. 

Mahowald is more interested in desert dust, which can also affect climate in a number of ways. For one thing, particles of soil that are suspended in the air alter the way the atmosphere absorbs and reflects energy from the sun. Dust also changes the properties of clouds, which play a big role in climate patterns. Overall, rising levels of dust tend to cool the atmosphere down.

Dust also affects the chemistry of the oceans. That's because dust contains iron, which boosts growth of plankton, allowing the oceans to pull a little more carbon out of the air. 

To piece together a history of Earth's blowing dust, Mahowald and colleagues compiled a wealth of published data, which included analyses of layered ice cores and sediment samples taken from more than a dozen sites around the world. Most of these cores held specks of dust that had blown in from somewhere else. 

In ice cores from Antarctica, for example, scientists identified soil from South America. Lake sediments in Colorado's San Juan Mountains contained soil particles originally from the Mojave Desert in California, 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) away. Each layer was dated so the researchers could tell how the levels of blowing dust changed over time. 

For the 100-year span from about 1900 to 2000, levels of dust fluctuated quite a bit and patterns differed in different regions, the researchers reported in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Overall, though, levels of dust around the globe doubled everywhere except above North America, where levels dropped a little bit. 

By comparing dusty periods with periods that weren't so dusty, the researchers were able to show that dusty skies lead to lower temperatures -- masking some of the warming effects of greenhouse gasses. As dust accumulates in the air, it also affects clouds enough to move storms away from desert areas, possibly propelling droughts that, in turn, lead to even more dust. 

In the oceans, dust boosts productivity and sucks up more carbon from the air, which can also cool the climate. But that may be offset by erosion and the loss of plant cover on land.

In satellite images of Earth, you can see three obvious colors, said Joseph Prospero, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Miami in Florida: The blue of oceans, the white of clouds and the brown of massive desert dust storms. 

Those images, Prospero said, clearly show that dust is a major player that needs to play a more significant role in climate models as one of a multitude of fluctuating and complicated factors. 

"When climate changes, you get a tremendous amount of variability in dust output," he said. "There is a strong possible loop where the climate becomes drier and windier causing more dust, and more dust affects radiation, so it feeds back on climate."

"There is a lot of uncertainty about how that works," he added. "That's why we focus on dust."

 by "environment clean generations"

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Posted in: air,desert,drought,dust,earth,Mahowald,ocean,particles,satellite