Solar Wind Power: Generating Power In The Future
As the world discovers new ways to meet its growing energy needs, energy generated from Sun, which is better known as solar power and energy generated from wind called the wind power are being considered as a means of generating power. Though these two sources of energy have attracted the scientists for a very long time, they are not able to decide, which of the two a better source to generate power is. Now scientists are looking at a third option as well. Scientists at Washington State University have now combined solar power and wind power to produce enormous energy called the solar wind power, which will satisfy all energy requirements of human kind.
Advantages of Solar wind power.
- The scientists say that whereas the entire energy generated from solar wind will not be able to reach the planet for consumption as a lot of energy generated by the satellite has to be pumped back to copper wire to create the electron-harvesting magnetic field, yet the amount that reaches earth is more than sufficient to fulfill the needs of entire human, irrespective of the environment condition.
- Moreover, the team of scientists at Washington State University hopes that it can generate 1 billion billion gigawatts of power by using a massive 8,400-kilometer-wide solar sail to harvest the power in solar wind.
- According to the team at Washington State University, a1000 homes can be lit by generating enough power for them with the help of 300 meters (984 feet) of copper wire, which is attached to a two-meter-wide (6.6-foot-wide) receiver and a 10-meter (32.8-foot) sail.
- One billion billion gigawatts of power could also be generated by a satellite having 1,000-meter (3,280-foot) cable with a sail 8,400 kilometers (5,220 miles) across, which are placed at roughly the same orbit.
- The scientists feel that if some of the practical issued are solved, Solar wind power will generate the amount of power that no one including the scientists working to find new means of generating power ever expected.
How does the Solar wind power technology work?
The satellite launched to tap solar wind power, instead of working like a wind mill, where a blade attached to the turbine is physically rotated to generate electricity, would use charged copper wire for capturing electrons zooming away from the sun at several hundred kilometers per second.
Disadvantages of Solar wind power
But despite the fact that Solar wind power will solve almost all the problems that we were to face in future due to power generating resources getting exhausted, it has some disadvantages as well. These may include:
- Brooks Harrop, the co-author of the journal paper says that while scientists are keen to tap solar wind to generate power, they also need to keep provisions for engineering difficulties and these engineering difficulties will have to be solved before satellites to tap solar wind power are deployed.
- The distance between the satellite and earth will be so huge that as the laser beam travels millions of miles, it makes even the tightest laser beam spread out and lose most of the energy. To solve this problem, a more focused laser is needed.
- But even if these laser beams reach our satellites, it is very doubtful that our satellites in their present form will be able to tap them. As Greg Howes, a scientist at the University of Iowa puts it, “The energy is there but to tap that energy from solar wind, we require big satellites. There may be practical constraints in this.”
Reference Link
http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/solar-wind-power/
Courtesy
AE News Network
Study finds big decrease in global child mortality
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Fewer children are dying around the world, with deaths among children under 5 falling in almost every country, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday.
Using a new method of calculating mortality that they say is more complete and accurate than previous methods, the team at the University of Washington says the number of deaths of children under 5 has plummeted from 11.9 million in 1990 to 7.7 million in 2010.
The findings are similar to a September report by the United Nation’s children’s fund that showed better malaria prevention and using drugs to protect newborns of AIDS-infected mothers lowered mortality from 12.5 million under-five deaths in 1990 to 8.8 million in 2008.
But the new estimates suggest that 800,000 fewer young children died than UNICEF estimates.
“Previous estimates had shown child deaths falling slowly and neonatal deaths nearly at a standstill,” Julie Knoll Rajaratnam, who led the study, said in a statement.
“We were able to double the amount of data and improve the accuracy of our estimates to find that children are doing better today than at any time in recent history, especially in the first month of life.”
Globally, the team says 3.1 million newborns died in the past year, 2.3 million infants and 2.3 million children aged 1 year to 4.
Writing in the Lancet medical journal, Knoll and colleague Christopher Murray said they found under-5 mortality is falling in every region of the world with increases in only Swaziland, Lesotho, Equatorial Guinea and Antigua and Barbuda.
Every year, mortality goes down more than 2 percent for children, they said.
“One of the biggest achievements of the past 20 years has been this incredible progress in countries that historically have had the highest child mortality in the world,” Murray said.
Some findings, available here:
* In Ethiopia, 202 per 1,000 children born died by age 5 in 1990, one of the highest rates in the world. By 2010, that rate has dropped by half to 101 per 1,000.
* Singapore had a child mortality rate of eight per 1,000 in 1990, but now has the lowest rate in the world with two under-5 deaths per 1,000.
* The United States ranks 42nd in the world with a 2010 under-5 mortality rate of 6.7 per 1,000.
* This is about the same as Chile, with a 6.5 per 1,000 mortality rate and far below Portugal, with 3.3 and Sweden with 2.7.
In April, the same group reported that AIDS, smoking and obesity were reversing progress made in helping people live longer around with adult mortality rates worsening over the past 20 years in 37 countries.
Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64N0PM20100524?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100
Courtesy
Thomson Reuters
Prisoners turn over a new leaf with eye on environment
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- Ecology professor taught inmates environmental lessons
- One prison saved $200,000 by recycling trash instead of having it dumped
- Officials surprised by prisoners’ enthusiasm for program
- Inmate hopes to get job with forestry service after he is paroled
Aberdeen, Washington (CNN) — The organic vegetables travel a short distance from the well-tended garden to the table where they are eaten.
Waste is carefully picked through and recycled, saving thousands of dollars.
The close-cropped lawns are maintained by push mowers to cut down on carbon emissions and gas expenses.
This is not some new designer eco-hotel where the rich and environmentally conscious can be pampered free of guilt.
It’s a prison.
At the Stafford Creek Corrections Center, a few yards from the garden where strawberries and cucumbers grow looms a tower where guards watch inmates, high-powered rifles at the ready. A jungle of razor wire surrounds the facility.
// // When ecologist and professor Nalini Nadkarni first pitched the idea of Washington prisons going green she didn’t know how her proposed partners — convicted criminals — would respond.
“Would they be full of tattoos with shaved heads? How would I connect with them?” Nadkarni recalled thinking, “They turned out to be the easiest audience to connect with. They have been so open so wanting to learn, so desirous to connect with the environment.”
With the programs that Nadkarni and other instructors from the Evergreen State College helped devise, hundreds of inmates not only have a positive impact on their prison environment but on the world beyond the walls confining them.
Washington state inmates are restoring local protected but disappearing grasslands by hand planting thousands of seedlings in a prison greenhouse.
–inmate Tyson Prater
Inmates at another state prison raise an endangered species of frog. The inmates work for less than a dollar an hour and as a result of their incarceration are able to take on time consuming and labor intensive projects. But the inmates are not just doing grunt work, Nadkarni said.
“They are observing, taking notes, what they are doing is science,” she said.
Both ecologists and prison officials have been surprised by the passion and seriousness of the prisoners involved with the project, Nadkarni said. The inmates raising the frogs had better results than a group of scientists conducting a similar project in a lab. Nadkarni coauthored a scientific paper with one inmate.
Another surprise has been the savings involved in the project.
“In the beginning a lot of the motivation is just around the money,” said state deputy director Dan Pacholke, who green-lit Washington’s first environmental programs behind bars seven years ago. Just at Stafford, officials saw savings of close to $200,000 a year just by recycling trash instead of paying to have it hauled to a landfill.
The benefits have gone far beyond fiscal savings, Pacholke said.
“When you get into it you find there’s a lot you can do to get inmates involved in other programs whether it be gardening or recycling. Over time you are trying to connect offenders with something that is meaningful or with purpose that they feel is valuable and give them activities that offset the costs of prisons themselves.”
Pacholke said officials have seen a drop in violence among prisoners participating in the program and the state plans to expand the program from four prisons to all 13 institutions. Inmates volunteer for the program and can’t have any infractions or they get kicked out.
Inmate Toby Erhart, halfway through an 18-year sentence for rape and incest, said his work in a prison garden allows him to contribute something to society.
“Just because I am incarcerated it doesn’t have to be a negative thing,” Erhart said. “I see a lot of people being affected negatively and it doesn’t have to be like that. I look forward to coming to work ever day. How many people can say that on either side of the fence?”
As he added scraps of food from the prison mess hall to a compost heap, inmate Tyson Prater said he too feels fortunate.
“This has helped me get my head back on and stay out of trouble,” he said.
Prater said he is hoping to pick up the skills that would allow him to work for the U.S. Forestry Service when he is released from prison in three years.
Prison officials say that the program prepares inmates to work in certain sectors of the growing green jobs field. It also makes them environmentally conscious citizens who know about recycling, sustainable farming and conservation when they are released, they said.
Pacholke said the greatest dividends the program may provide may actually take place outside of prison.
“[About] 97 percent of the people in here are getting out some day and are going to ride next to you or I on inter city transit,” he said “So what’s the experience you want them to have when they come back out to the communities?”
Reference Link
http://us.cnn.com/2010/US/05/20/ost.green.prisons/index.html?hpt=Mid
Courtesy
Cable News Network
World Bank boosts focus on reproductive health
A Sudanese woman carries her child in their home outside Sudan’s capital Khartoum April 17, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Mohamed Nureldin
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The World Bank said on Tuesday it will focus more on tackling high fertility rates and maternal deaths in poor countries, warning that family planning and other reproductive health services have fallen off the radar of many governments, donors and aid agencies.
In releasing a new 5-year Reproductive Health Action Plan, the World Bank said it would increase lending to reduce high fertility rates and prevent deaths of mothers and their children in 58 developing countries.
It will do this by increasing access to contraceptives, encouraging more frequent prenatal visits for pregnant women, expanding education on the subject and investing more in training new health workers.
Bank health financing tripled to a record $4.1 billion in fiscal year 2010 ending June, a 40 percent increase over the previous year’s record.
That said, lending to reduce high fertility or improve access to family planning accounted for only 4 percent of the Bank’s health portfolio over the last decade, dropping by two-thirds between the first and second half of the decade.
“A mother’s unnecessary death in childbirth is not just a human tragedy, it is also an economic and social catastrophe” said Julian Schweitzer, acting vice president of human development at the World Bank.
Some 350,000 women die each year, mainly in developing countries, due to complications associated with pregnancy and child birth.
Many women in poor countries use abortions as a last-resort means of birth control. Some 68,000 women die each year due to unsafe and illegal abortions, while another 5.3 million suffer temporary or permanent disability, the Bank said.
Meanwhile, new World Bank figures show that while development aid for health skyrocketed almost five-fold to $14 billion in 2007 from $2.9 billion in 1995, funding for population and reproductive health services increased by just $1.9 billion from $901 million during the same period.
In the 35 highest-fertility countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, funding for women’s family planning and reproductive programs began at $150 million in 1995 and increased to $432 million in 2007. Meanwhile, overall aid for health in the same countries went from $915 million in 1995 to $4.9 billion in 2007.
Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64A53620100511?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100
Courtesy
Thomson Reuters
Dreamers: Hunks of Junk
Two college kids cart trash to make some cash–and end up creating an empire.
It’s the universal cry of parents, generally heard by the second day of college breaks: “Get a job!” Omar Soliman’s mother joined the chorus; she was not about to have her son hanging out at the neighborhood pool all summer. “You have to do something,” she told him.
Soliman’s friends had nailed down prestigious internships in his hometown of Washington, D.C. But Soliman liked to party; he couldn’t imagine sitting at a desk all day. After years of delivering furniture for his mother’s store, he remembered that a lot of people had stuff they wanted to get rid of. If he borrowed his mom’s van, he could make a little beer money carting their trash away for them.
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That night, Soliman came up with a name for his new business: College Hunks Hauling Junk. He distributed flyers the next day, and within hours, his phone was ringing. He asked his buddy Nick Friedman to help out. They made $220 in three hours cleaning out a woman’s garage.
Soliman and Friedman pocketed $10,000 that summer. And now, just four years later, they run a nationwide company that pulled in $3 million in 2008. College Hunks employs 130 people and has 16 franchises in 10 states and D.C. They cart away everything from tattered sofas to ancient computer parts, and plan to expand to 80 franchises by 2012. “People love the idea of friendly, clean-cut guys slinging junk,” says Friedman.
But the two weren’t ready to become full-time trashmen after graduation. “We were trained to finish college and get a good job,” says Soliman, who first went into marketing at a research firm. Friedman became an economic analyst for a consulting company. Within months, says Friedman, “we were pretty antsy. I sent Omar an e-mail: ‘What’s your timeline for the business?’ He replied: ‘RIGHT NOW.’ ” They quit their jobs but had trouble finding a bank willing to lend them money. “We didn’t have much of a credit rating,” says Soliman.
After five turndowns, one bank decided to gamble $50,000 on their idea. They put together another $60,000 from their parents and their own savings. To jump-start the business, they bought a truck, hired a graphic artist to design a logo, ran newspaper and radio ads, and recruited haulers on campuses. Wearing their new uniforms—green polos and khakis—they made presentations at county fairs, chambers of commerce, and real estate offices.
“At first, we lost money,” says Friedman, “because we underbid the jobs.” One customer hired them to dispose of a dozen trash cans filled with construction debris. They measured the job by volume instead of by weight and charged just $130. “The containers were so heavy, it took us two and a half hours,” says Soliman. “And it cost us more than $250 in fees to dump the load.”
But the tough hands-on experience taught them what—and what not—to do. They minimized the cost of unloading at landfills by recycling metals and electronics and donating to charities over 60 percent of what they collected. They hired consultants to help establish national franchises, bought a toll-free number, set up a website, and established a call center in Maryland. Last year, they relocated to Tampa, where the rent is cheaper.
These days, Soliman, 26, is the visionary, and Friedman, 27, the nuts-and-bolts guy. The pair are shopping around a book that encourages young entrepreneurs to take risks.
“I didn’t realize I was an entrepreneur until I started driving the van,” says Soliman. “Neither did Nick. I just knew that I wanted to do something on my own. I figured if Nick and I failed, we’d learn more from failing than from not trying at all.”
Getting Ahead with Soliman and Friedman
Q. What did friends say when you quit your jobs to start College Hunks?
A. Nick Friedman: They thought we were crazy. They said, “What about your résumé?”
Q. Any regrets?
A. Nick Friedman: No. I felt like I was stuck in a rat race at the consulting company. There was just too much time in the workday. Now that Omar and I have our own business, there isn’t enough time in the day to do everything we want to do.
Q. What’s the strangest thing you’ve found in someone’s junk?
A. Omar Soliman: There was the very long boa constrictor. We’ve also picked up World War II ammunition, a vintage set of Playboy magazines from the 1960s [the employee who found the collection sold it on eBay for $300], and baseballs signed by Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, which we keep on our desks.
Q. What’s the most important thing you’ve learned?
A. Omar Soliman: People don’t fail-systems do. If something goes wrong, you can’t blame an employee. You ask, What in our system went wrong?
Q. What are the pros and cons of hiring college kids?
A. Omar Soliman: They’re energetic, not as likely to complain or file grievances. The con is they’re likely to go out partying the night before and not show up for work.
Q. What’s the toughest part of your job?
A. Omar Soliman: Combating the too-many-ideas syndrome. We get off on tangents, like thinking about rolling out a recycling service. We need to stay focused on the job at hand. We are looking for a partner, though, for our next business-College Foxes Packing Boxes.
Reference Link
http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/dreamers-hunks-of-junk/article122214.html
Courtesy
Reader’s Digest
U.S. to accept H-1B applications from April 1
WASHINGTON, United States: The United States will start accepting applications for H-1B visas, most sought after by Indians, from April 1 for the fiscal year 2011.
In a statement, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said it would accept petitions for 65,000 H-1B visas as mandated by Congress.
“Cases will be considered accepted on the date that it takes possession of a properly filed petition with the correct fee, not the date that the petition is postmarked,” the statement said.
The first 20,000 H-1B petitions filed on behalf of individuals who have earned a U.S. master’s degree or higher are exempt from this 65,000 cap. If needed, the USCIS will randomly select the number of petitions required to reach the numerical limit from the petitions received on the final receipt date, the statement added.
Petitions for new H-1B employment visas are exempt from the annual cap if the beneficiaries will work at institutions of higher education or related, or affiliated non-profit entities, non-profit research organisations or governmental research organisations.
U.S. businesses use the H-1B programme to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise in specialised fields — such as scientists, engineers, or computer programmers.
Last year, mainly attributable to the recession, the cap on the H-1B visa was reached on December 22. This was unlike previous years, when the cap was reached within the first few days of the USCIS starting to accept H-1B petitions. As a result, the USCIS had to resort to a computerised draw of lots to determine successful applicants. Official figures reveal that because of stringent monitoring provisions and the recession, there has been a sharp drop in the number of Indians receiving H-1B visas in the last few years.
For instance, Infosys — which received as many as 4,559 H-1B visas in fiscal 2008 and was on top of the list of companies receiving the coveted work visa for professionals — received just 440 visas in 2009 , according to latest figures released by the USCIS. — PTI
Reference Link
http://www.hindu.com/2010/03/10/stories/2010031056101500.htm
Courtesy
The Hindu
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