NASA are finally working on the problem of low-gravity effects on the body during long service in space. They are calling it artificial gravity, but it's not the stuff of Star Trek, it's the big 'centrifugal' wheel that generates a centripital force simulating gravity. That's right. Just like the one you've seen on '2001: a Space Odyssey'.
A major undertaking in artificial gravity research is being prepared at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, overseen by NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Starting next year at UTMB, a corps of individuals will partake in bed rest studies that reproduce the effects of weightlessness, with half that group also rotated once a day on a centrifuge.
The new centrifuge has been built for NASA by Wyle Laboratories, headquartered in El Segundo, California, for use in studying the effects of artificial gravity as a countermeasure to the negative effects of long-term microgravity on the human body. That newly-built centrifuge has recently been installed at UTMB. "It's a really beautiful device," Young said. Young is co-investigator for the work, teamed with William Paloski, principal scientist, in the Human Adaptation and Countermeasures Office at the NASA Johnson Space Center.
The NASA-sponsored research is divided into two phases. The first phase is using the short radius centrifuge -- which has a radius of 10 feet (three meters) radius to support NASA's Artificial Gravity Pilot Study. A second phase will include significant enhancements to the centrifuge design to provide support for a multinational artificial gravity project that would involve Germany and Russia, Young added. The Artificial Gravity Project Pilot Study involves test subjects being placed in a six degree head-down bed-rest position which simulates the effects of microgravity on a human body. The test subjects are then positioned in the short radius centrifuge and subjected up to 2.5 Gs at their feet to simulate a gravity environment.
"As far as I'm concerned," Young concluded, "the purpose of all these studies is not to show how to use artificial gravity. Rather, it is to determine whether or not artificial gravity is an acceptable solution."
There used to be a a piece of graffiti somewhere: "There is no such thing as Gravity; the Earth Sucks".
Somehow it never left my mind.
A New Style Of Pumping Gas In Texas
This is interesting. They are finally sequestering carbon into disused oil mines, presumably from whence they came. Active sequestration, if successful is a good idea (Obviously, if it doesn't produce more Carbon gasses than it sequesters). There some problems with it, but it's worth trying.
In the depleted South Liberty oil field near the town of Dayton, a University of Texas team successfully pumped 1,600 tonnes of carbon dioxide -- the principal greenhouse gas -- into the reservoirs of briny water more than 5,000 feet underground.
Scientists say those porous rock formations, which extend for hundreds of miles from Mexico to Alabama, could be ideally suited to storing the greenhouse gases widely blamed for global warming.
"We have lot of oil and gas fields in this area that are in decline," Susan Hovorka, a University of Texas geologist and the lead researcher on the pilot project told Reuters. "The Gulf Coast is one of the best places on earth for this." The technology,
known as carbon sequestration, has attracted global attention from industries and governments that are eager to capture and bottle up the gas that can linger in the atmosphere for decades. The gases released by burning fossil fuels, scientists say, are the main cause of global warming, which is expected over time to lift the planet's temperatures and sharply alter weather patterns, raising sea levels and causing devastating storms.With Russia's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol earlier this month clearing the way for the environment pact to come into force in February and the start of the European Union's carbon dioxide emissions trading market just a month away, demand for methods for eliminating or storing the gas are on the rise.
Then there's this bit:
So there you go. Concrete, practical steps. We are not done for... yet. :)Hovorka said a preliminary estimate of the amount of carbon dioxide storage
capacity along the coast regions of the Gulf of Mexico put the figure at about 300 billion tons -- enough to hold 1,000 years of pollution from the region at the current rate.Many hurdles -- both technical and economic -- remain before carbon sequestration can develop as a viable enterprise, Christopher said, but much of the expertise and at least a limited transportation network already exists.
Since the 1970s, oil and gas drillers have injected carbon dioxide into oil wells in a process called enhanced oil recovery that increases the output from those sites.
"This is something we know how to do. We've been doing it for 30 years in West Texas," he said. Houston-based energy company Kinder Morgan Inc. ships a billion cubic feet a day of the gas through its 1,100 miles pipeline network, much of it from Colorado into the West Texas oil fields.
That pipeline system would need to be vastly expanded to reach the major carbon dioxide emitters on the other side of the state -- an expensive and complicated endeavor but one the company has considered.
"If the opportunity is there and it's attractive, we want to be a part of it," said Rick
Rainey, spokesman for Kinder Morgan.
- Art Neuro
No comments:
Post a Comment