During their main event bout at UFC 157, Liz Carmouche took Ronda Rousey's back and had her in a neck crank. The crank was so deep that Rousey inadvertently bit Carmouche's arm. But Rousey told the Fuel TV aftershow that she was never worried about submitting to Carmouche. Instead, she was concerned about a wardrobe malfunction.
?On the ground I feel so comfortable in every position, so I never feel in danger and I take a lot of risks. I felt fine with her on my back. I was more concerned with my sports bra staying on while she was choking me because I felt safe and in control," Rousey said.
Rousey won a bronze medal in the 2008 Olympics in judo, so submissions have been part of her life for a long time. In fact, Rousey has spoken often about how her mother taught her judo by waking her up with an armbar. While the neck crank was uncomfortable, it wasn't new.
What is new is having to worry about a sports bra not doing its job. Come on, sports bra. You had one job. Thankfully, it did stay in place, and Rousey went on to submit Carmouche seconds before the end of the first round.
Contact: Caroline Perry cperry@seas.harvard.edu 617-496-1351 Harvard University
Harvard research suggests real-world generating capacity of wind farms at large scales has been overestimated
Cambridge, Mass. February 25, 2013 "People have often thought there's no upper bound for wind powerthat it's one of the most scalable power sources," says Harvard applied physicist David Keith. After all, gusts and breezes don't seem likely to "run out" on a global scale in the way oil wells might run dry.
Yet the latest research in mesoscale atmospheric modeling, published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, suggests that the generating capacity of large-scale wind farms has been overestimated.
Each wind turbine creates behind it a "wind shadow" in which the air has been slowed down by drag on the turbine's blades. The ideal wind farm strikes a balance, packing as many turbines onto the land as possible, while also spacing them enough to reduce the impact of these wind shadows. But as wind farms grow larger, they start to interact, and the regional-scale wind patterns matter more.
Keith's research has shown that the generating capacity of very large wind power installations (larger than 100 square kilometers) may peak at between 0.5 and 1 watts per square meter. Previous estimates, which ignored the turbines' slowing effect on the wind, had put that figure at between 2 and 7 watts per square meter.
In short, we may not have access to as much wind power as scientists thought.
An internationally renowned expert on climate science and technology policy, Keith holds appointments as Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and as Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Coauthor Amanda S. Adams was formerly a postdoctoral fellow with Keith and is now assistant professor of geography and Earth sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
"One of the inherent challenges of wind energy is that as soon as you start to develop wind farms and harvest the resource, you change the resource, making it difficult to assess what's really available," says Adams.
But having a truly accurate estimate matters, of course, in the pursuit of carbon-neutral energy sources. Solar, wind, and hydro power, for example, could all play roles in fulfilling energy needs that are currently met by coal or oil.
"If wind power's going to make a contribution to global energy requirements that's serious, 10 or 20 percent or more, then it really has to contribute on the scale of terawatts in the next half-century or less," says Keith.
If we were to cover the entire Earth with wind farms, he notes, "the system could potentially generate enormous amounts of power, well in excess of 100 terawatts, but at that point my guess, based on our climate modeling, is that the effect of that on global winds, and therefore on climate, would be severeperhaps bigger than the impact of doubling CO2."
"Our findings don't mean that we shouldn't pursue wind powerwind is much better for the environment than conventional coalbut these geophysical limits may be meaningful if we really want to scale wind power up to supply a third, let's say, of our primary energy," Keith adds.
And the climatic effect of turbine drag is not the only constraint; geography and economics matter too.
"It's clear the theoretical upper limit to wind power is huge, if you don't care about the impacts of covering the whole world with wind turbines," says Keith. "What's not clearand this is a topic for future researchis what the practical limit to wind power would be if you consider all of the real-world constraints. You'd have to assume that wind turbines need to be located relatively close to where people actually live and where there's a fairly constant wind supply, and that they have to deal with environmental constraints. You can't just put them everywhere."
"The real punch line," he adds, "is that if you can't get much more than half a watt out, and you accept that you can't put them everywhere, then you may start to reach a limit that matters."
In order to stabilize the Earth's climate, Keith estimates, the world will need to identify sources for several tens of terawatts of carbon-free power within a human lifetime. In the meantime, policymakers must also decide how to allocate resources to develop new technologies to harness that energy.
In doing so, Keith says, "It's worth asking about the scalability of each potential energy sourcewhether it can supply, say, 3 terawatts, which would be 10 percent of our global energy need, or whether it's more like 0.3 terawatts and 1 percent."
"Wind power is in a middle ground," he says. "It is still one of the most scalable renewables, but our research suggests that we will need to pay attention to its limits and climatic impacts if we try to scale it beyond a few terawatts."
###
The research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Contact: Caroline Perry cperry@seas.harvard.edu 617-496-1351 Harvard University
Harvard research suggests real-world generating capacity of wind farms at large scales has been overestimated
Cambridge, Mass. February 25, 2013 "People have often thought there's no upper bound for wind powerthat it's one of the most scalable power sources," says Harvard applied physicist David Keith. After all, gusts and breezes don't seem likely to "run out" on a global scale in the way oil wells might run dry.
Yet the latest research in mesoscale atmospheric modeling, published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, suggests that the generating capacity of large-scale wind farms has been overestimated.
Each wind turbine creates behind it a "wind shadow" in which the air has been slowed down by drag on the turbine's blades. The ideal wind farm strikes a balance, packing as many turbines onto the land as possible, while also spacing them enough to reduce the impact of these wind shadows. But as wind farms grow larger, they start to interact, and the regional-scale wind patterns matter more.
Keith's research has shown that the generating capacity of very large wind power installations (larger than 100 square kilometers) may peak at between 0.5 and 1 watts per square meter. Previous estimates, which ignored the turbines' slowing effect on the wind, had put that figure at between 2 and 7 watts per square meter.
In short, we may not have access to as much wind power as scientists thought.
An internationally renowned expert on climate science and technology policy, Keith holds appointments as Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and as Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Coauthor Amanda S. Adams was formerly a postdoctoral fellow with Keith and is now assistant professor of geography and Earth sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
"One of the inherent challenges of wind energy is that as soon as you start to develop wind farms and harvest the resource, you change the resource, making it difficult to assess what's really available," says Adams.
But having a truly accurate estimate matters, of course, in the pursuit of carbon-neutral energy sources. Solar, wind, and hydro power, for example, could all play roles in fulfilling energy needs that are currently met by coal or oil.
"If wind power's going to make a contribution to global energy requirements that's serious, 10 or 20 percent or more, then it really has to contribute on the scale of terawatts in the next half-century or less," says Keith.
If we were to cover the entire Earth with wind farms, he notes, "the system could potentially generate enormous amounts of power, well in excess of 100 terawatts, but at that point my guess, based on our climate modeling, is that the effect of that on global winds, and therefore on climate, would be severeperhaps bigger than the impact of doubling CO2."
"Our findings don't mean that we shouldn't pursue wind powerwind is much better for the environment than conventional coalbut these geophysical limits may be meaningful if we really want to scale wind power up to supply a third, let's say, of our primary energy," Keith adds.
And the climatic effect of turbine drag is not the only constraint; geography and economics matter too.
"It's clear the theoretical upper limit to wind power is huge, if you don't care about the impacts of covering the whole world with wind turbines," says Keith. "What's not clearand this is a topic for future researchis what the practical limit to wind power would be if you consider all of the real-world constraints. You'd have to assume that wind turbines need to be located relatively close to where people actually live and where there's a fairly constant wind supply, and that they have to deal with environmental constraints. You can't just put them everywhere."
"The real punch line," he adds, "is that if you can't get much more than half a watt out, and you accept that you can't put them everywhere, then you may start to reach a limit that matters."
In order to stabilize the Earth's climate, Keith estimates, the world will need to identify sources for several tens of terawatts of carbon-free power within a human lifetime. In the meantime, policymakers must also decide how to allocate resources to develop new technologies to harness that energy.
In doing so, Keith says, "It's worth asking about the scalability of each potential energy sourcewhether it can supply, say, 3 terawatts, which would be 10 percent of our global energy need, or whether it's more like 0.3 terawatts and 1 percent."
"Wind power is in a middle ground," he says. "It is still one of the most scalable renewables, but our research suggests that we will need to pay attention to its limits and climatic impacts if we try to scale it beyond a few terawatts."
###
The research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Technology developed for World War I is nearly a century old. You'd think the latest-and-greatest developments from 1914 had no purpose in today's world. On the contrary, they're actually en vogue.
Researchers at Cal-Berkeley have created a new fuel derived from a process the British used to manufacture explosives during WWI. Fermenting sugars and transforming them into acetone, butanol and ethanol, they've created a biodiesel that could replace gasoline and drastically reduce greenhouse gases.
"It's a much more efficient ... than many of the other products being considered," Harvey Blanch, a Cal-Berkeley professor of chemical engineering, tells The San Francisco Chronicle. "This product is one that may be closest to commercialization."
In recent years, volatile gasoline prices and worries about long-term supply have sent consumers and entrepreneurs alike searching for alternate fuels and alternate energy sources to power their cars.
Here's a look at some wacky, yet plausible, fuel alternatives that are in the process of development right now that could eventually find their way into your car's gas tank:
Chicken guts and pork lard
Mazda is pioneering the use of a synthetic diesel fuel made from leftover animal fats, like chicken guts and pork lard, that are left over from Tyson Foods' slaughtering process. The fuel is going to be tested during an upcoming race at Daytona.
"We're not taking food off the table or feedstock away from animals," James O'Sullivan, president and chief executive of Mazda North American Operations, tells Forbes.com. "This would end up in a landfill."
Think it's far fetched? Alamo and National Rental Car shuttle buses are already using the fuel, as is the U.S. Navy. Yes, animal guts have a role in our national defense.
Perhaps most optimistically, synthetic diesel can be blended with regular diesel and is often drop-in ready for regular diesel pumps at gas stations. And there's more infrastructure in place. Dynamic Fuels opened a $150 million refinery in October 2010 that's capable of processing 1.5 million pounds of "meat remnants" every day, according to Forbes, which can produce 75 million gallons of synthetic diesel every year.
Thin air
This is the stuff of science fiction. A small British company is making fuel out of thin air, developing a process that uses air and electricity to manufacture a synthetic fuel that has already powered a Lotus in test drivers.
This one is still a ways away. The company behind the technology, Air Fuel Synthesis, wants to build a full-scale refinery, but that could take 15 years. Still, don't bet against it. Britain's deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, recently visited AFG's testing facility and came away saying, "I feel I've glimpsed the future."
Weeds
As the largest consumer of energy in the government, the Department of Defense has run all sorts of experiments using biofuels in ships, cars and, perhaps most intriguingly, airplanes. The Air Force has powered F-16s with a 50-50 blend of biodiesel derived from camelina plants and regular JP-8 jet fuel.
There has been almost no noticeable difference in jet performance, according to reports, and by 2016, the Air Force is aiming to have its entire domestic fuel use consist of a a 50-50 blend of biofuel and conventional fuel.
Wasted spaces
Critics of biofuel development say that production of these fuels use valuable resources like farmland and crops that otherwise would be food. This increases the price of groceries and livestock feed.
Fine, one researcher said. Instead of using farmland, he'll plant biofuel crops in unusual places, like the side of the highway, abandoned assembly plants and fields adjacent to airport runways. Places where farming can't be sustained.
Dennis Pennington, a researcher at Michigan State University, says it would take roughly 200,000 acres to supply enough crops for a processing plant that makes 50 million gallons of biodiesel per year.
In Michigan, he estimates there are 4.5 million acres of "marginal land" that's unable to be farmed. That could translate into 1.125 billion gallons of biodiesel, roughly the same amount the currently flows through the U.S. each year.
If just a fraction of that potential could be tapped, it would "create infrastructure to handle it, crush it and get it into a plant to refine it into a fuel," Pennington tells a public-radio project. "That's job creation and economic development."
Garbage
There's that classic scene toward the end of Back To The Future where Marty McFly and Emmett "Doc" Brown power their DeLorean time machine with the Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor, which runs on garbage like the banana peel and a Miller beer can found in the McFly family trash can.
Fusion technology hasn't been perfected since the movie opened in 1985. Garbage as fuel? That's another story.
Coskata, Inc., a company that received investment from General Motors, said it has pioneered a technique that can turn anything from wood chips to municipal trash into ethanol. It already has an ethanol plant running in Madison, Pa.
Pete Bigelow is an associate editor at AOL Autos. He can be reached via email at peter.bigelow@teamaol.com and followed on Twitter @PeterCBigelow.
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In Mexico?s drug-war-torn cities, a small number of Twitter users affected by narco violence are acting as war correspondents to the masses, providing a public-safety alert system of sorts, according to a recent research paper from Microsoft, called ?The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare.?
These ?curators,? tweeting with hashtags like #mtyfollow, #reynosafolllow, #saltillo and #verfollow, produce an inordinately high number of tweets compared to other users, informing people about recent violence, clashes and other news in regions where traditional news outlets have engaged in self-imposed blackouts to avoid narco violence.
?Twitter in particular and social media in general have become important elements of the information ecosystem. They have not replaced traditional news media, but they have certainly extended it in new ways,? Andr?s Monroy-Hern?ndez, one of the report researchers, tells TechCrunch. ?Social media is more participatory and democratic than the existing mainstream media, which is one of the reasons why it has emerged as a form of public sphere ? like a networked version of the public plazas.?
The report noted that of the 34 million people with Internet access in Mexico, 20 percent use Twitter. About 4.2 percent of Mexico?s online population has posted about the drug war on Twitter, according to the report. These users tend to use Twitter on desktop, and occasionally mobile, Monroy-Hern?ndez says.
Twitter?s adoption in the cities most affected by violence and studied in the report ? Monterrey, Reynosa, Saltillo and Veracruz ? paralleled the rise of violence there. And the volume of tweets in these cities continues to mirror violence-related events there, according to the report.
Because the use of Twitter in these cities revolves around the drug war, a big chunk of tweets are actually retweets, users notifying their networks about the danger. Hence, the importance of the core group of ?curators? who work independently, or with their own sources, to tweet out information to the masses. For example, in Monterrey one Twitter user was responsible for 3 percent of the city?s total tweets, two users responsible for 2 percent and seven users who were each responsible for 1 percent of the city?s tweets.
Yet, because of the nature of these tweets, curators are also anonymous, which at times means it is difficult to ascertain the veracity of the information in the tweets. This legitimacy issue is something Monroy-Hern?ndez sees as part of the evolution of social media in Mexico.
?I see an emerging trend of civic media technologies playing a central role in public life, especially those technologies that build on everyday social media practices,? he said. ?I expect this is going to become a very rich space ? not only in Mexico, but across the world.?
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- A Republican state lawmaker on Friday publicly urged Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett to support an expansion of Medicaid eligibility, a sign that Corbett may be facing a split in his own party as several other Republican governors of heavily populated states embrace the expansion.
House Human Services Committee Chairman Gene DiGirolamo said in a statement that rejecting an offer of increased federal funding to expand Medicaid threatens hospital finances and ensures many low-income Pennsylvanians will miss out on primary health care.
DiGirolamo, R-Bucks, said he understands Corbett's present stance against going along with the expansion. But DiGirolamo also made a vigorous argument for accepting it.
"New jobs, employees of small businesses gaining health care coverage, new tax revenues based on federal monies, improved health care for our citizens, savings on emergency treatment and putting our federal tax dollars to work here in the state ? these are the benefits of the Medicaid Expansion," DiGirolamo wrote.
Republican governors of three other heavily populated states, Florida, Michigan and Ohio, say they're going along with the expansion that begins in 2014.
Corbett first said two weeks ago that he would not take part in the expansion unless Pennsylvania gets more ability to shape Medicaid's insurance plans and make the program more cost effective.
Corbett's insurance commissioner, Michael Consedine, reiterated that position to senators Thursday during an Appropriations Committee hearing.
"We're not willing to build on a system that we think is broken," Consedine said.
Administration officials also complain that they are waiting for answers from the federal government to their questions about how the expansion would work.
In a separate Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday, Corbett's budget secretary, Charles Zogby, added that the federal government cannot necessarily be trusted to follow through on its promises of delivering funding to states and that it will be difficult to afford the costs the administration foresees being associated with the expansion.
Democratic lawmakers say that the Corbett administration is overestimating the costs associated with the Medicaid expansion and that it would be a net tax benefit to the state.
Meanwhile, leaders of the Republican-controlled Legislature have made no public move to embrace the expansion, and conservative lawmakers have publicly opposed it.
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Public release date: 25-Feb-2013
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