Engineers set to convert carbon dioxide into rock

The project will take CO2 produced by an Icelandic geothermal energy plant and dissolve it in water under high pressures. It will then pump the solution into layers of basalt about 400-700m underground Photograph: Paul A Souders/Corbis

Engineers in Iceland are set to convert carbon dioxide to solid rock as a way to tackle global warming.

The experts want to exploit the country’s volcanic origins to dispose of up to 30,000 tonnes of the greenhouse gas each year. They expect the gas to react with layers of volcanic rocks deep beneath the surface to form minerals that will lock the carbon pollution away for millions of years.

“This is a well-known natural process,” said Holmfridur Sigurdardottir, project manager. “We are just trying to imitate what nature is doing.”

The project will take CO2 produced by an Icelandic geothermal energy plant and dissolve it in water under high pressures. It will then pump the solution into layers of basalt about 400-700m underground, and watch what happens.

Laboratory experiments suggest the dissolved CO2 will react with calcium in the basalt to form solid calcium carbonate. Sigurdardottir said: “In the lab it takes a few days to a few weeks. We want to see what happens in the field and whether we can do it on the scale required.”

The project, called Carb-fix, is a form of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Such schemes usually aim to pump the CO2 into deep saltwater reservoirs, where the high pressure is expected to keep the gas dissolved and trapped underground. Mineral storage offers a safer bet, Carb-fix says, because there is less chance of leakage.

Domenik Wolff-Boenisch from the University of Iceland, who works on the project, will tell the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna next week that “storage of carbon dioxide as solid carbonate in basaltic rocks may provide an ideal solution”.

The project is scheduled to begin pumping down the dissolved CO2 in August, Sigurdardottir said. It will take about a year before the team knows whether the gas is converting to minerals as expected.

via Engineers set to convert carbon dioxide into rock | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

Slumdog Millionaire star Rubina Ali who played Latika is offered for sale by dad

THE poverty-stricken father of Slumdog Millionaire child star Rubina Ali plans to become a millionaire himself-by SELLING his nine-year-old daughter.

In a bid to escape India’s real-life slums, Rafiq Qureshi put angel-faced darling of the Oscars Rubina up for adoption, demanding millions of rupees worth £200,000.

As he offered the shocking deal to the News of the World’s undercover fake sheik this week, Rafiq declared: “I have to consider what’s best for me, my family and Rubina’s future.”

Rafiq tried to blame Hollywood bosses for forcing him to put his daughter up for SALE.

As he tried to fix the illegal adoption deal, real-life slum dweller Rafiq declared: “We’ve got nothing out of this film.”

Then, almost embarrassed to speak it out loud, he whispered to an accomplice the price tag he has put on his innocent young daughter: “It’s £200,000!”

That was an astonishing FOURFOLD increase on his opening demand. But Rafiq’s equally demanding brother Mohiuddin insisted: “The child is special now. This is NOT an ordinary child. This is an Oscar child!”

via Slumdog Millionaire star Rubina Ali who played Latika is offered for sale by dad Rafiq Qureshi to the News of the World’s Fake Sheikh | News | News Of The World.

This comment made sense to me:

Hollywood grossed over $200 million from this movie. They could at least donate half of that to improve the poverty conditions that this movie exploited for profit.

Obama, Venezuela’s Chavez shake hands at summit

In case you didn’t know it, Venezuela has a lot of oil. Without oil we not only can’t drive, but we have mass starvation as happened in North Korea. (See below).

U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday greeted and shook hands with Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez during an impromptu meeting with the anti-U.S. leader at the Summit of the Americas.

Photographs released by the Venezuelan government showed Chavez, a fierce foe of former President George W. Bush, smiling and clasping hands with Obama at the start of the summit of Latin American and Caribbean leaders in Trinidad.

“I greeted Bush with this hand eight years ago; I want to be your friend,” Chavez told Obama, according to a Venezuelan presidential press office statement.

Chavez, a staunch ally of Cuba, had became one of the Bush’s administrations most strident critics. In March, he called Obama at best an “ignoramus” after the U.S. leader said Chavez obstructed progress in Latin America.

Ties between Washington and Caracas have frayed under Chavez, who often accuses U.S. officials of trying to topple him. Chavez expelled the U.S. envoy to Caracas in September in a dispute over U.S. activities in Venezuelan ally Bolivia.

Former soldier Chavez says socialist revolution can counter U.S. free-market policies in South America and he has become a standard-bearer for anti-U.S. sentiment in the region. But Washington has branded him a threat to regional stability.

via UPDATE 1-Obama, Venezuela’s Chavez shake hands at summit | Markets | Reuters.

There is a reason we went to Iraq.

After the end of the Korean War in 1953, crop yields increased with the utilisation of modern farming methods. Traditional agricultural practices were abandoned for the ‘more efficient’ modern methods employing diesel-based tractors and machinery and chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides.

Around 1990 the Soviet Union collapsed and support was withdrawn from North Korea and all transactions consequently has to be settled with hard cash. The result was a collapse in the economy and a decrease in the energy supply. The fertility of the soil declined with the loss of production. Replanting without fertilisers meant that fields became more and more barren. Traditional farming is too small to replace the losses and animals are in short supply. Tractors, transport and machinery lie rusting (it was estimated that only 20% of all farm machinery was in working order in the late 1990s. In the late 1980s, 25% of the workforce was engaged in agriculture; this has risen to 36% in the mid 1990s. With mainly human power available, harvest time results in crop wastage. Poor yields result in little money and the inability to buy in fertilisers, diesel and animals to help.

… Our economies will also decline with the rise in oil prices. The costs of diesel and petrochemicals will rise, the supply of oil and gas will fall. Walter Youngquist in the Post-Petroleum Paradigm points out:

Approximately 90% of the energy in crop production is oil and natural gas. About one-third of the energy is to reduce the labour input from 200 hours per hectare to 1.6 hours per hectare in grain production. About two-thirds of the energy is for production, of which about one-third of this is for fertilisers alone. [Measurements converted to metric]

We need to replace our modern farming systems with organic while we have the chance. It can take years to replenish the soil with the nutrients that monoculture takes out. We need to grow crops locally, rather than fly them in from across the world, and encourage more allotments and vegetable gardens. Larger countries will have to subdivide into smaller, more autonomous regions, producing the food that they need within their areas. As the “Post-Petroleum Paradigm” notes, we could not support six billion people with traditional farming methods. If we do not reduce the population voluntarily famine will do it for us.

One solution is to work now on growing some of your own food.

As long as you have a porch or balcony that gets sunlight, however, you are actually able to grow quite a variety of fruits and vegetables.

Container gardening is easy, movable, and can be accomplished in a very small space. Save containers in which to plant your vegetables such as coffee cans (place the lid on the bottom to prevent rust stains), water jugs with the top cut off,

deep bowls, plastic nursery planters, flower pots, empty milk jugs, etc. Make sure to put holes in the bottom of your containers for excess water drainage. – ac

New law may make you a Canadian

Tasmania’s wombat poo paper a hit

Wombat droppings are helping an industrial city in Australia fight the effects of the global financial crisis.

Burnie, in the north-west of the state of Tasmania, has been hit by repeated rounds of job cuts.

But despite the gloom, one local industry is thriving by producing handmade paper out of a material no-one else wants – wombat poo.

The novelty paper is a hit with tourists keen to buy a distinctly Australian souvenir from the area.

The wombat, a furry marsupial, lives in the wild only in Australia.

Its characteristic waddle and playful appearance, makes it one of the country’s most endearing native creatures.

‘Nice organic smell’

In recent years, a company in the port city has been experimenting with paper made from kangaroo droppings – but its popularity has been eclipsed by wombat-inspired products. …

Wombats are herbivores and diets loaded with plant fibre make their faeces ideal for making some of Australia’s most unusual paper.

via BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Tasmania’s wombat poo paper a hit.

Vessels still held by Somali pirates

Some 18 ships and over 310 crew members are believed to be held by pirates off the coast of Somalia, according to the International Maritime Bureau, NATO and others. A look at the ships still being held:

_ AUG 4: Pirates seize a Nigerian tug, the Yenagoa Ocean, with 11 crew members.

_ NOV. 10: Pirates hijack a Philippines chemical tanker, the MT Stolt Strength, with 23 crew members.

_ DEC. 16: Pirates seize a Malaysian tugboat with 11 Indonesian crew members.

_ FEB. 22: Pirates take a Greek-owned cargo ship, the Saldanha, with a 22-member crew, off Somalia’s coast. The crew’s nationalities are unknown.

_ FEB. 28: State broadcaster in the Seychelles reports that Somali pirates hijacked the Serenity, a yacht with two Seychelles nationals on board.

_ MARCH 25: Pirates seize Panama-registered, Greek-owned Nipayia with 18 Filipino crew members and a Russian captain.

_ APRIL 1: Tour operator says pirates seized a tourist yacht and its crew of seven near the Seychelles. The Indian Ocean Explorer had dropped off its tourists before it was seized.

_ APRIL 4: Pirates hijack German freighter Hansa Stavanger. It has 24 crew members: five Germans, three Russians, two Ukrainians, two Filipinos and 12 Tuvalus.

_ APRIL 4: Pirates seize Taiwanese ship, Win Far 161, near the Seychelles islands. It has a crew of 30, including 17 Filipinos, six Indonesians, five Chinese and two Taiwanese.

_ APRIL 5: Pirates hijack Yemeni fishing boat with 13 crew members in the Gulf of Aden.

_ APRIL 6: British-owned bulk carrier, the Malaspina Castle, hijacked in the Gulf of Aden. It is carrying a crew of 24 from Bulgaria, the Philippines, Russia and Ukraine.

_ APRIL 6: Pirates seize Taiwanese fishing boat with 30 crew off eastern Somalia.

_ APRIL 11: Pirates seize Italian tugboat off Somalia’s north coast. Ten of the 16 crew members are Italian. The others are five Romanians and a Croatian.

_ APRIL 14: Officials say two Egyptian fishing boats have been hijacked with a total of 36 crew. Boats seized either April 12 or 13th, it is not clear.

_ APRIL 14: Pirates seize Greek-managed bulk carrier, the MV Irene E.M., in a rare overnight attack. The St.-Vincent and Grenadines-flagged ship with at least 21 Filipino seamen was sailing from Jordan to India.

_ APRIL 14: Pirates capture the Lebanese-owned cargo ship the MV Sea Horse with 19 crew aboard.

_ APRIL 18: Pirates seize a Belgian dredger, the Pompei, with two Belgians, a Dutch, three Filipinos and four Croatians onboard.

via The Associated Press: A look at vessels still held by Somali pirates.

Woman races against time to obtain sperm of dead fiancé

A grief-stricken woman whose 31-year-old fiancé died suddenly pulled off a race against the clock through a Bronx court and hospital yesterday to save her lover’s sperm for a second child.

Gisela Marrero, 32, needed a judge’s order by 4 p.m. or the sperm of her beloved boyfriend, Johnny Quintana, 31, would be useless, said her lawyer, Nelson Stern.

Bronx State Supreme Court Judge Howard Sherman quickly granted the petition — which had to be signed by Marrero and Quintana’s parents — and the sperm was extracted with just three hours to spare.

“Oh, my God, he would be so pleased,” Marrero said. “This is definitely what he would have wanted.” Quintana, who worked for 10 years as a concierge on the Upper West Side, died after suffering an apparent heart attack at home at 4 a.m. Thursday.

“He was watching videos with his brother and he just collapsed,” Marrero said.

Marrero, who has a 2-year-old son, Lucas, with Quintana, said they had wanted more children. But since they hadn’t tied the knot yet, she needed the consent of his parents, Johnny Quintana and Carmen Moreno, to save his sperm.

The parents readily agreed, but there was a new hurdle. Jacobi Hospital, where Quintana’s body was taken, said she needed a court order — and fast. Doctors say sperm deteriorates quickly after death — but there have been reports of viable specimens being retrieved up to 36 hours later. As soon as Bronx Administrative Judge Barry Salman heard of the case, he assigned it to Sherman for a quick hearing.

Marrero was in tears during her brief testimony.

“Time is of the essence,” her court petition said. The sperm “must be harvested and frozen” within hours of his death “or it will be useless.” Sherman quickly signed the order, and the family rushed a certified copy to the hospital, where the procedure began at 12:30 p.m.

Marrero will have to wait until next week to know if the sperm was obtained in time.

“They [doctors] don’t expect a problem but they won’t know until Tuesday,” said Liss .

via SEED IS OF THE ESSENCE – New York Post.

Is this a good thing? It would be interesting to know that your father was dead when you were conceived.  How would you feel about that?

Woman finds strange man in tennis attire at her table

A Salem Street homeowner came home Thursday to find a man dressed in tennis attire eating at her kitchen table police said. The homeowner told police she got home about about 11 48 a.m. to find the man in her kitchen. “After he made some bizarre irrational statements to her she went outside to her car and called police ” Lt. James Hashem said. Police checked the area and found Adamis Ortiz 22 of 3 Fernview Ave. North Andover walking away from the house in tennis gear and carrying a tennis racket. Ortiz told police he had been playing tennis at Phillips Academy. Police checked with school officials who told them no one had been playing on the courts recently. Ortiz was arrested and charged with breaking and entering in the daytime with intent to commit a felony and trespassing. “It appears he has some mental health issues ” Hashem said of Ortiz.

via Woman finds strange man in tennis attire at her table – EagleTribune.com, North Andover, MA.

Millionaire lotto winner opens nude dude ranch

You’ve heard of nude beaches, but how about a nude dude ranch?

A multi-million-dollar lottery winner is riling some by opening up his own. Tim Clements of Brooksville hit a $3.3 million jackpot in 2004, and wanted to return to the farm life he grew up in.

He and David Jennings, co-owner of the ranch, say the farm is secluded enough to be in the buff.

But they have two big problems — local zoning laws and a nudity ban in Hernando County.

Clements says they’ll try to get the necessary paperwork, but if they can’t get approval he’ll close the CJ Ranch again to all but friends.

Though their Web site says clothing is optional, there is a caveat: Everyone “must wear pants and boots to ride the horses.”

via Giddy-eh? Brooksville lotto winner opens nude dude ranch | WFTS-TV.

The Woman Who Can’t Forget and the Man Who Can’t Remember

It’s a Monday afternoon in November, and I’m driving down Ventura Boulevard with Jill Price, the woman who can’t forget. Price, who is 43, has spent most of her life here in Los Angeles, and she remembers everything. In the space of two minutes, she tells me about the former motel lodge with a bear in front, the Courtyard hotel that used to be a Hilton, and a bowling alley—since replaced by a Marshalls—where a Nicolas Cage film was shot.

All this comes pouring out so fast, I wonder aloud whether Price has had too much coffee. She laughs, says no, pulls slightly at her blond hair, and starts up again. Right over there, she says, is a car wash: “I was talking to the guy there last summer, and I was telling him about the first time I ever went to the car wash—on August 30, 1978. And he was freaking out.”

Soon, Price, generally a gentle soul, has moved on to a rant about a TV program she just saw: “It was about an event that happened in 2002. So they kept going back to Saturday, June 19, 2002. Well, June 19, 2002, was not a Saturday! It was a Wednesday. It was pissing me off.” Diane Sawyer interviews Jill Price on ABC News. I first saw Price last May in a YouTube clip of her on 20/20. Diane Sawyer asks Price, an avid television viewer, to identify certain significant dates in broadcast history. When did CBS air the “Who shot JR?” episode of Dallas? When was All in the Family’s baby episode shown? And so on. Price nails every question.

She not only gives the date for the final episode of MASH but describes the weather that day. The most remarkable moment comes when Sawyer asks Price when Princess Grace died. She immediately answers, “September 14, 1982—that was the first day I started 12th grade.” For once, it seems that the memory lady has blown it. Sawyer laughs nervously and tries gently to right her guest: “September 10, 1982.” Price misunderstands, thinking she’s being prompted to identify another event—the possibility that she’s being corrected apparently doesn’t occur to her.

No, Sawyer says, she has made a mistake; according to the book that 20/20’s producers were using as a source, Princess Grace died on September 10. Price stands her ground, and not 60 seconds later, a producer breaks in: “The book is wrong.” Price is right after all! Until recently, no one had ever heard of Jill Price. Her friends and family knew her memory was remarkable, but nobody in the scientific community did.

Her road to stardom started in June 2000 (Monday, June 5, to be exact), when she stumbled upon a Web page for James McGaugh, a UC Irvine neuroscientist who specializes in learning and memory, and decided to send him an email describing her unusual ability to recall the past. McGaugh wrote back 90 minutes later. He tells me he was skeptical at first, but it didn’t take long for him to become convinced that Price was something special; he soon introduced her to two of his collaborators, Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker. The three researchers interviewed Price many times over the next five years, but they kept the story to themselves.

Finally, McGaugh and company were ready to share what they had found. In February 2006, their article, “A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering,” appeared in the journal Neurocase. Shortly thereafter, the UC Irvine press office peddled the story to The Orange County Register—and Price’s world was turned upside down. The newspaper article, which identified her only as “AJ,” appeared on March 13, 2006.

Within hours, UC Irvine was besieged with inquiries. Four weeks later, the story went national: Price was interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition (still under the AJ pseudonym). An editor at Free Press eventually tracked her down, and a book deal followed; Price would tell her own story, this time under her own name.

The media played along, withholding further news on the woman who couldn’t forget until the book’s release. Since then, Price has been on a nonstop media junket. Diane Sawyer actually had her on twice in one day (on Good Morning America and 20/20). By the time I met Price, she had been interviewed by Oprah and had been featured in every major newspaper from USA Today to The Wall Street Journal. Often the pieces focused on the pain she felt because of her inability to forget difficult moments.

As I followed Price’s story, I was fascinated but doubtful. I am a cognitive psychologist, and to me something didn’t smell right. Everyone seems to have an uncle or cousin with “photographic” memory, but damned if they can actually give you a phone number to reach that person. The only serious scientific paper documenting photographic memory was published nearly 40 years ago, and that study has never been replicated. Price, however, is eminently real. I spent the better part of two days with her, meeting her friends and family and watching her at the office. At the end, I can honestly say that in my decade as a professor of psychology, I’ve never encountered anyone remotely like Jill Price.

Ordinary human memory is a mess. Most of us can recall the major events in our lives, but the memory of Homo sapiens pales when compared with your average laptop. It takes us far longer to store data (you might have to hear a phone number five to 10 times before you can repeat it); it’s easy for us to forget things we’ve learned (try reciting anything from your sophomore history class); and it’s sometimes hard to dislodge outdated information (St. Petersburg will always remain Leningrad to me). Worse, our memories are vulnerable to contamination and distortion. Lawyers can readily fool us with suggestive questions; false memories can easily be implanted. The fundamental problem is the seemingly haphazard fashion in which our memories are organized. On a computer, every single bit of information is stored at a specific location, from which it can always be retrieved. Human recall is hit or miss.

Neuroscientific research tells us that our brains don’t use a fixed-address system, and memories tend to overlap, combine, and disappear for reasons no one yet understands. The one thing we do know is rather vague: Memories live in the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. After that, the entire question of how memory works is up for grabs. For example, where precisely in the hippocampus (or prefrontal cortex) is my memory of reading Kurt Vonnegut for the first time? If I try to summon that experience, I am likely to wind up with a blur—a half dozen indistinct recollections. And no brain-scan technology will help me bring it into better focus. So when I hear about Price’s feats, my mind boggles.

From the perspective of evolution, finding a human being with memory that works with the precision of a computer would be like finding someone with bones made of steel. The type of memory system we have—in technical terms, context-dependent rather than location-addressable—has been around for several hundred million years. The existence of a human brain that works completely differently is astronomically unlikely.

The article goes on to explain that her abilities result from a constant obsession with and rehearsal of her past. She is always taking notes. Still amazing, but she doesn’t have major brain differences.

… The difference is that she scans her past relentlessly. Every time we think about something, and especially how it connects to something else, we get better at remembering it—a phenomenon that psychologists call elaborative encoding. Price has spent her whole life ruminating on the past, constructing timelines and lists, and contemplating the connections between one February 19 and the next. Dates and memories are her constant companions, and as a result she’s really good at remembering her past. End of story.

Here is another person with an unusual memory:

Clive Wearing (born 1938) is a British musicologist, conductor, and keyboardist suffering from an acute and long lasting case of anterograde amnesia. Specifically, this means he lacks the ability to form new memories, dubbed the “memento” syndrome by laypeople and the media, after a film of the same name based on the subject. … On March 29, 1985, Wearing, then an acknowledged expert in early music at the height of his career with BBC Radio 3, contracted a virus which normally causes only cold sores, but in Wearing’s case attacked the brain (Herpes simplex encephalitis). Since this point, he has been unable to process new memories. He has also been unable to control emotions and associated memories well.

Despite having retrograde as well as anterograde amnesia, and thus only a moment-to-moment consciousness, Wearing still recalls how to play the piano and conduct a choir–all this despite having no recollection of having received a musical education. This is because his cerebellum, responsible for the maintenance of procedural memory, was not damaged by the virus. As soon as the music stops, however, Wearing forgets that he has just played and starts shaking spasmodically. These jerkings are physical signs of an inability to control his emotions, stemming from the damage to his inferior frontal lobe. His brain is still trying to fire information in the form of action potentials to neurostructures that no longer exist. The resulting encephalic electrical disturbance leads to fits.

In a diary provided by his caretakers, Clive was encouraged to record his thoughts. Page after page is filled with entries similar to the following:

8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.
9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.
9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.

Earlier entries are usually crossed out, since he forgets having made an entry within minutes and dismisses the writings–he doesn’t know how the entries were made or by whom, although he does recognize his own writing.^[1] Wishing to record the important life event of “waking up for the first time”, he still writes diary entries as of 2007, more than two decades after he started them.

Wearing can learn new practices and even a very few facts–not from episodic memory or encoding, but by acquiring new procedural memories through repetition. For example, having watched a certain video recording multiple times on successive days, he never had any memory of ever seeing the video or knowing the contents, but he was able to anticipate certain parts of the content without remembering how he learned them.^[2]