Green Machine: Sucking carbon dioxide out of the air

Think of it as a chemical vacuum cleaner for sucking greenhouse gases out of the air.

Air capture, in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere, has been touted as a potentially promising way to tackle climate change. That's because unlike carbon capture from power plant flue gases, the technology has the potential to reduce existing CO₂ levels, rather than simply slowing the rate of increase.

To demonstrate that the technology works, Christopher Jones at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta tested a CO₂ absorbent based on amines - the chemicals predominantly used in power plant carbon capture trials - on gases with CO₂ concentrations similar to those found in ambient air.

He found the material was able to repeatedly extract CO₂ from the gas without being degraded, which will be vital if the technology is to be used economically on a wide-scale.

However, unlike the liquid amines typically used in power plant carbon capture, which consume large amounts of energy as they must be heated to very high temperatures to re-release their stored CO2, Jones' team has developed a new class of the material called hyperbranched aminosilica, in which the amine is held on a solid porous silica substrate.

Solid amines release the stored CO2 when heated to just 110 degrees Celsius - much lower than the temperatures required by the water-based liquid amine solutions - reducing the amount of energy required by 75 per cent.

This also means the energy needed could be supplied by widely available sources such as waste heat from industrial plants, says Peter Eisenberger of air capture company, based in New York. The energy could also be supplied by renewable sources such as solar power, he says. The captured CO2 could then be fed to algae, which absorb the gas to produce biofuel and biochar.

Jones is working with the company to test a pilot air capture plant in Menlo Park, California, which is absorbing 2 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each day. A commercial plant could absorb 1 million tonnes of CO2 per day, says Eisenberger.

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$$$Men in Blue v/s Men in Green$$$

India will Take on Ireland!!!!

After disapointement ...India will take on Ireland ..where men in green are looking for some upsets.

Sunday, Bengaluru

2:00 p.m



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Match Was GOOD for EYES not FOR Heart!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It Was an ultimate experience to watch matches like these....but if you are an Indian supporter your Heart will never feel good after Watching ...what happens today.

Match Tied !!!!!!India-338             (49.5ovr)  Sachin-120

England-338      (50.0ovr)   Strauss-158

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Musical genius

The demise of Bhimsen Joshi on January 24 in Pune marked the end of an era in Hindustani classical or, more accurately, Margiya music. He was 89.

As a singer, he was a true star whose popularity cut across a wide variety of listeners, from the rasikas, or connoisseurs, to the uninitiated who were enthralled by his marvellous voice. I remember being thrilled by hid robust and miraculously honey dripped rendering of the raaga Kalashree on All India Radio(AIR) over 40 years ago. It took me some time to realise it was a long playing record courtesy HMV(his master's voice), now Saregama, broadcast by the radio satation. It must not be forgatten that he had been an AIR Lucknow staff artiste in 1941-42, doing three 10-minute broadcasts every week as a bhajan singer. He then shared a room with the not-yet-famous shehnai maestro Ustad Bismillah Khan.

It was not untill 1946 that the limelight shone on him.

In 2008, he was awarded the Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in the country. It was a distinction that he was to share with Bismillah Khan, his former roommate, who was honoured six years later.

He had served his gods and loyal listeners through music, and to music he belonged.

May his soul rest in peace.

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Emerging technology is not the answer to the world's social and economic problems!!!!!

Emerging technology is not the answer to the world's social and economic problems!!!!!

I've been reading news reports about how Technology is advancing so rapidly that by the year 2050, we're supposed to be able to download our entire consciousness into our laptop computers. That right, just plug in your brain, and apparently you can download your memories and all the data in your head.

Now, what's wrong with this? First of all, the brain does not store information in bits and bytes. The brain is not a digital storage system. The brain, and more importantly, the mind, is holographic in the way that it stores and retrieves information. And, by the way, the information that the brain stores isn't even really stored with perfectly accuracy anyway.

Peoples' perceptions are distorted; peoples' memories are distorted. They're fuzzy. They waver in and out. They can be created on the fly, so it's not like you have a databank in your head that's just sitting there waiting to be downloaded. All the memories and perceptions in your head are shifting around all the time. What you think you remember today may not have happened that way at all. In fact, very little of what you remember actually happened that way.

In other words, we don't see reality. We experience a very tiny interpretation of the world around us. The universe out there, and what's encoded in our head, is really just an experience; a holographic representation of various sensory inputs, emotions and experiences at that time. This it not just some data, and this is not like a zip file. You can't just download it into a computer or slap it onto a flash drive.

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