Green "Volcano" to Power U.K. Town

Most people wouldn't want to live within a stone's throw of a volcano. But the residents of Stockton-on-Tees in the northeastern U.K. may soon rely on their friendly neighborhood "peak" for green power.

With construction due to start in late 2010, a proposed tower of power (pictured above in a design by Heatherwick Architecture) would produce energy and heat for more than a hundred thousand homes, organizers say.

The volcano-shaped biomass station was designed to blend into the surrounding grasslands close to Middlehaven, a derelict former industrial area that is being "regenerated" into a community with striking architecture, said Matthew Day, project director for development at Bio Energy Investments.

Rather than building a small, inconspicuous station, Day said, "we thought, no, we're going to celebrate our power station and do something big and bold."

Palm kernel shells—waste from palm-oil plantations in Malaysia—would run the 279-foot-high (85-meter-high) biomass plant, ensuring that no existing agricultural land is switched to growing biofuels rathern than food.

The waste shells would be delivered by ship to the riverside plant, reducing traffic on local roads.

The plant's entire operations—including fuel transportation from Malaysia—would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by up to 80 percent as compared with running a coal-powered plant, Day said, and no black cloud of smoke would be visible from the "dead quiet" station. (Learn more about biofuels.)

Being so close to a residential area also has a key advantage: Waste heat thrown off during electricity generation can be captured and used to heat nearby houses. This would also be a step in creating lower-carbon communities, Day said, adding that local people have been extensively consulted for the project.

"What we're trying to do is put in a power station that is connecting with an urban area in a much more engaging way than trying to hide it and put it to the side," he said.

AT&T Already Has One Million eReaders On Its Network, Without The iPad

Mobile data devices are a boon for AT&T.  The company reported strong earnings this morning, seeing a 26 percent rise in fourth-quarter profit.  AT&T sold 3.1 million iPhones in the fourth quarter, with the device being called out as one of the key drivers of the success for the telecommunications company. Quarterly earnings increased to $3.01 billion from $2.40 billion from the previous year, matching Wall Street expectation. Revenue from wireless services was strong, rising 9.2 percent with the addition of 2.7 million net subscribers during the fourth quarter.

But another area of growth for AT&T is in wireless eReaders connected to its 3G data network.  Currently, the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader Daily Edition and the Barnes & Noble Nook are all using AT&T for data connectivity. During the fourth quarter, the number of these devices on AT&T’s wireless network increased by more than 1 million in the fourth quarter, which was the strongest quarter in this category to date.  And as we learned yesterday, AT&T will alsoprovide internet connectivity for Apple’s new iPad.

It is expected that this category will continue to grow like gangbusters, especially with the addition of the iPad, which boasts an app called iBooks, Apple’s own collection of digital books formatted for the device. Apple partnered with five publishers to make books available for sale through the iBooks store. Jobs claimed yesterday that the iPad will take Amazon’s Kindle technology to the next level. The iBooks support the ePub format, allows readers to flip through pages and supports pictures, video, and other graphics. The first book available will cost $14.99. It’s expected that the eReader market as a whole will grow by millions in 2010, with Forrester predicting that 10 million e-readers will be sold in the coming year. The firm estimated that 3 million eReaders were sold in 2009.

So what does this mean for AT&T? More money, obviously.  The company said that its earnings were partly bolstered by the rapid growth of the e-reader device. AT&T only recently brought the Kindle on board, after Amazon dropped Sprint last fall for the Kindle 2.  However, while all Kindle’s come with a data plan, not all iPads will come with 3G connectivity.  Only the most expensive ones will.  All models also connect via WiFi.

Running Barefoot Reduces Stress—On Feet

Going barefoot isn't just for strolling on the beach: Running barefoot reduces stresses on your feet and may prevent injuries known to afflict traditionally shod runners, a new study says.

In his bestselling book Born to Run, Christopher McDougal revealed that the best long-distance runners on the planet may be Mexico's Tarahumara Indians, who race barefoot or in thin sandals through the remote Copper Canyons of Chihuahua state.

The new study used high-speed video and a bathroom scale-like device called a force plate to digitally dissect the moment-by-moment stresses on the feet of 63 runners as they ran barefoot.

The research revealed that running barefoot changes the way a person's feet hit the ground.

Runners in shoes tend to land on their heels, so sports shoe makers have spent years designing footwear with gels, foams, or air pockets in the heels to reduce the shock of impact.

But barefoot runners more often land on the forefoot, near the base of the toes. This causes a smaller part of the foot to come to a sudden stop when the foot first lands, allowing the natural spring-like motion of the foot and leg to absorb any further shock.

"This form of landing causes almost no collision force," lead author Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, said in an email.

Not that the benefits of barefoot running should be a surprise, he added: "Humans were able to run for millions of years without shoes or in just sandals."

The work, published online today by the journal Nature, is "really interesting and useful," according to coach, exercise physiologist, and author Jack Daniels.

"There is no doubt impact is a major source of injury," Daniels said via email, and reducing injuries is a key goal of all runners and coaches.

Daniels himself has done much of his own running barefoot.

"I eventually got to where I could go barefooted for five miles [eight kilometers] on a concrete sidewalk," he said, though he admits he prefers grass and well-cushioned tracks.

Even the latter, he added, takes practice.

"One main problem is the abrasion factor," he said. "You have to toughen up the skin on the bottom of your feet."

Luckily the choice won't be between shoes or no shoes for long. Shoe companies have been scrambling to design "minimalist" footwear that still protects the feet from rocks, thorns, and broken glass while allowing people to run more naturally.

"If you start with a thick shoe and slowly whittle down, at what point does the person start to run like they're barefoot?" pondered Sean Murphy, manager of advanced products engineering and sports research for shoe maker New Balance.

"We've completed those studies and come up with some pretty solid lines of thinking on how you make the foot work as naturally as possible and at the same time protect [it] from the elements," Murphy said.

"I'm pretty confident you're gong to see more and more products in that vein."

Save the Ozone Layer, Give Global Warming a Boost?

While most of the world has warmed, parts of the southern hemisphere have remained stubbornly cold—oddly enough because of a gaping hole in the ozone layer. Now new research shows that all the efforts made by scientists and environmental advocates to close the hole may actually increase warming throughout the entire southern hemisphere.

That's because, for decades, brighter summertime clouds, created by the hole, have reflected more of the sun's rays, acting as a shield against global warming.

As the ozone layer heals and the clouds dissipate, this “will lead to a rise in temperature [in parts of the southern hemisphere] faster than currently predicted by models," said study leader Ken Carslaw of the U.K.'s University of Leeds.

In 1985 scientists from the British Antarctic Survey discovered a giant hole in theozone layer in the upper atmosphere over Antarctica. Ozone in the upper atmosphere absorbs harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun.

The subsequent global agreement to ban chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)—the chemicals largely responsible for the thinning of the ozone layer—reversed the growth of the ozone hole and was deemed one of the biggest environmental success stories of the 20th century.

But the healing process is slow: Since the early 1980s changes in the upper atmosphere caused by ozone depletion have intensified circumpolar winds that whistle around Antarctica.

Using a computer model and two decades worth of meteorological data, Carslaw and colleagues discovered that the fiercer winds whip up more sea spray. This throws more salt particles into the air and encourages the formation of brighter clouds, which reflect sunlight back into space and have a cooling effect.

The summertime cooling caused by the ozone hole since 1980 has approximately cancelled out the warming caused by rising carbon dioxide emissions, Carslaw said.

Many people will dub today Cyber Monday, a horrendous marketing term that refers to yet another one of the busiest days of the year for retail.

And while Microsoft has been making many online shoppers happy the past few days with the Bing Cashback system, Google has now set up a special ‘Checkout Deals’ page where you can get discounts on products purchased using Mountain View’s Internet payment system.

Savings range from $5 to $20 and involve hundreds of participating stores, including Buy.com, Petco and Toys”R”Us.

New Google Chrome Release Adds Support For 1,500+ Extensions, Bookmark Sync

PC users, rejoice, for Google has just announced that there’s a fresh, stable release of Google Chrome for Windows, with added extensions and bookmark sync features.

You can check for the new version manually if you’re already using Google Chrome for Windows (go to Settings > About Google Chrome), or you can wait for the new release to be automatically updated within the next week.

Google previously launched extensions on the beta channel, and says over 1,500 have now made their way to the extensions gallery. The other new feature baked into the Chrome browser for Windows, Bookmark sync, is particularly useful if you use more than one computer, as it enables you synchronize your browser bookmarks on all of your machines.

To those using Google Chrome on Linux, extensions are enabled on the beta channel only for now. As for Google Chrome for Mac, the search giant requests you keep hanging tight: extensions, bookmark sync and more should make their way to the beta ’soon’. Or, you could use the dev version of Chrome for Mac, which already supports extensions.

Web developers and designers might want to dive into the new features of this Chrome release on the Chromium Blog, as it includes a number of fresh HTML and JavaScript APIs.

If you’re using a version of Chrome with extensions support, also make sure to install the TechCrunch one. It works like a charm.

Strongest Hurricanes May Triple in Frequency, Study Says

The U.S. Southeast, Mexico, and the Caribbean will be pounded by more very intense hurricanes in the coming decades due to global warming, a new computer model suggests.

Warmer sea surface temperatures—which fuel hurricanes—and shifting wind patterns are expected to strengthen the storms, the study says.

At the same time, rising temperatures should result in fewer weak or middling hurricanes in the western Atlantic.

The study considered what would happen if people kept emitting more greenhouse gases until about 2050 and then started cutting emissions.

"Some refer to this as a middle-of-the-road scenario" for tackling greenhouse gas emissions, said study co-author Thomas Knutson, a research meteorologist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

In this scenario the world became about 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 degrees Celsius) warmer than today.

In turn, the western Atlantic Ocean—from Mexico and the Caribbean Sea up to the Carolinas—saw a doubling of category 4 and 5 storms, the most powerful kinds, by 2100. The number of these very intense hurricanes jumped from 24 per decade to 46.

Category 4 storms have sustained wind speeds of 131 to 155 miles (211 to 249 kilometers) an hour. Category 5 hurricanes have winds exceeding 155 miles (249 kilometers) an hour.

"I was quite surprised," said Morris Bender, also a NOAA research meteorologist and the lead author of the new study, to be published tomorrow in the journal Science.

"I didn't expect a doubling. I didn't expect we'd see this much response."

What's more, the most intense hurricanes—category 5 storms—tripled by 2100 in the model.

The new model is perhaps the most sophisticated yet to predict how hurricanes will change as the world warms, study co-author Knutson said.

The researchers combined state-of-the-art global climate simulations with "the hurricane prediction models used by weather forecasters and the [U.S.] Navy," he said.

Combining three models into one tool, the scientists were able to simulate the entire Earth's climate, with realistic hurricanes of all categories romping across the Atlantic.

The modeling method is a first, according to Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study. "This is an important paper," she said.

Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, said there's still a lot of room for improvement in how all of today's climate simulations represent hurricanes and the oceans.

Even so, the new study does bolster an emerging consensus on how climate change will affect hurricanes, added Trenberth, who also was not involved in the research.

"The best information we have now supports the view that tropical storms will likely decrease in number," he said. "But the risk of category 4 and 5 storms could increase."

Strange "Comet" May Be Asteroid Collision Debris

A curious, comet-like object recently found in pictures from a ground-based telescope might actually be fallout from a high-speed asteroid collision, planetary scientists report.

If these suspicions are confirmed, the object would represent the first time astronomers have witnessed the immediate aftermath of such a cosmic smashup.

Dubbed P/2010 A2 (LINEAR), the fuzzy, tailed mystery object is about 130,000 miles (210,000 kilometers) to 190,000 miles (305,000 kilometers) long, stretching across part of our solar system's main asteroid belt.

The belt contains thousands of asteroids that orbit between Mars and Jupiter, some 250 million miles (402 million kilometers) from Earth.

It's believed most comets come from the cold, distant reaches of the solar system and travel on long, elliptical orbits, which keep the icy bodies far from the sun most of the time.

As a comet nears the sun, heat turns the comet's volatile ices into gases, and solar radiation pushes on those gases to create a tail.

But the newfound object suddenly appeared within the warmer asteroid belt and may even have originated there, puzzling astronomers.

"We're still trying to really figure out what it is," said University of Arizona planetary scientist Jim Scotti, who is part of one of the teams observing the object from the Kitt Peak National Observatory outside Tucson.

The object's oddities have some astronomers, including Scotti, thinking that the bright "tail" is actually a debris field created just after a small asteroid had smashed into a larger one. (See pictures of comets and asteroids.)

A 650-foot-wide (200-meter-wide) space rock apparently still sitting near the object's head could be one of the collision victims.

Odds are that the smaller impactor would have been only a few meters across, since asteroids of this size are far more common in the main belt.

If a collision occured, it's most likely that the space rocks didn't meet head on, Scotti said. Still, the impact speed could have ranged from 0.6 to 6 miles (1 to 10 kilometers) a second—fast enough to create a debris field visible from Earth.

Astronomers have yet to witness an actual asteroid collision. But there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the smashups happen all the time.

For instance, all known asteroids display telltale scars in the forms of impact craters. And some groups of asteroids are thought to have been born from collisions that fragmented their original "parents."

"With such evidence of collisions in the asteroid belt, it's not surprising that eventually we will see one," Scotti said.

The trick is, "I'm not sure we know what an asteroid collision really would look like in detail," he admitted.

"We have some ideas, but I'm not sure anyone has really sat down and modeled the size and velocity of the debris, or where all that debris goes and how long it would remain potentially observable."

For now, scientists can only wait and watch to see if P/2010 A2 (LINEAR) slowly dissipates, like debris from an explosion, or continues to act like a comet—which would pose a new round of puzzling questions.

A rare handful of comet-like bodies are known to orbit in the main asteroid belt. But if P/2010 A2 (LINEAR) is actually a comet, how did it conserve its water ice so close to the sun for some 4.5 billion years—roughly the age of the solar system—only to begin releasing gases now due to some unseen event?

"That's a long time to bake an object," Scotti said.

"It's hard to imagine how an object would maintain a reservoir of volatiles that it could use to suddenly start producing a tail. But you know, stranger things have happened."

High-Tech Energy "Oasis" to Bloom in the Desert?

A renewable-energy "oasis" slated to be built in 2010 may serve as a proving ground for new technologies designed to bring green living to the desert.

The planned research center is part of the Sahara Forest Project—but that doesn't mean it'll be built in Africa. Sahara means "desert" in Arabic, and the center is meant to be a small-scale version of massive green complexes that project managers hope to build in deserts around the globe.

Experts are now examining arid sites in Australia, the U.S., the Middle East, and Africa that could support the test facility.

"The Sahara Forest Project is a holistic approach for creation of local jobs, food, water, and energy, utilizing relatively simple solutions mimicking design and principles from nature," said Frederic Hauge, founder and president of the Norwegian environmental nonprofit the Bellona Foundation.

For instance, special greenhouses would use hot desert air and seawater make fresh water for growing crops, solar energy would be collected to generate power, and algae pools would offer a renewable and easily transportable fuel supply.

In addition, planting trees near the complex would trap atmospheric greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide while restoring any natural forest cover that has been lost to drought and timber harvesting.

"From my perspective as an environmentalist, this could be a game changer in how we produce biomass for food and energy, and how we're going to provide fresh water for the future," Hauge said. "I've never been so engaged and fascinated as I am now."

But not all experts are as enthusiastic about the project.

In terms of the reforestation plans, "trying to grow trees in the Sahara desert is not the most appropriate approach," said Patrick Gonzalez, a forest ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Forestry. After all, even though it was literally green in the past, the Sahara was never heavily forested. 

"I can imagine that this scheme and type of technology in limited cases might work in certain areas like Dubai, where they're used to making palm-shaped islands and 160-story-tall buildings," Gonzalez said.

If the goal is restoring a desert's natural ecosystem, however, "it would be more effective, but less flashy, to work with local people on community-based natural-resource management."

The Bellona Foundation's Hauge counters that replanting trees—even in a desert—is an uncontroversial measure for stopping desertification and combating climate change.

In fact, tree-planting is one of the strategies that the foundation and its partners have carefully studied as part of their efforts to make the Sahara Forest Project more than a mirage.

The project's members are conducting feasibility studies in several countries, the initial results of which were presented in December 2009 at theCopenhagen climate conference.

And the testing center slated for imminent construction should provide even more data on how well the project's suite of green technologies might work in real life.

So-called seawater greenhouses, for example, are basic and cheap, making them a cornerstone of the project.

Hot desert air going into a greenhouse is first cooled and humidified by seawater. This humid air nourishes crops growing inside the greenhouse, then passes through an evaporator, where sun-heated seawater flows. When the now warm humid air meets a series of tubes containing cool seawater, fresh water condenses as droplets on the outsides of the tubes and can be collected.

The process mimics a natural process: Sun-heated seawater evaporates, cools to form clouds, and then falls as precipitation.

Only 10 to 15 percent of the humid air gets condensed into fresh water. The rest flows outside to water surrounding trees, so that the "greenhouse will create a large area around it that will be become green," according to Hauge.

The center will also test the use of concentrated solar power, which uses mirrors to focus sunlight on water pipes and boilers. The concentrated light creates superheated steam inside the pipes that can power conventional steam turbines, generating electricity.

Any power not used to run the complex can be sent to local communities.

Likewise, biomass-based fuel from the center's photobioreactors would be easy to export, Hauge said.

The ponds would cultivate algae through photosynthesis in open, shallow saltwater pools. The algae's fatty oils could then be harvested as energy-rich biofuel.

Lab-grown algae have been shown to generate up to 30 times more oil per acre than other plants used to make biofuels, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. And farming algae in pools doesn't take up valuable agricultural land, Hauge said.