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From the Toilet to the Tap

Cloacina was the ancient Roman goddess of sewers. Think about that for a minute. To the Romans, the ability to take vile,... more

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Mice With Two Mothers and No Father Live Longer

What happens when mammals have two mothers? In the case of mice, it seems that they live longer than mice with one male and one... more

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Big Freeze: Earth Could Plunge into Sudden Ice Age

In the film, "The Day After Tomorrow," the world gets gripped in ice within the span of just a few weeks. Now research... more

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Magnified Image of Brain Cells!

2 December 2009 This firework display is actually a magnified image of brain cells taken from a fetus as part of research on... more

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Low-carbon future: We can afford to go green

TACKLING climate change will cost consumers the earth. Those who campaign for a green revolution are out to destroy our western lifestyles. Such are the cries of opponents of emissions cuts, and their message has political clout: a number of surveys, including one by New Scientist in 2007, have found that the enthusiasm of voters for policies to alleviate climate change falls off as the price tag increases.

However, a new modelling exercise conducted exclusively for this magazine suggests that these fears are largely unfounded. It projects that radical cuts to the UK's emissions will cause barely noticeable increases in the price of food, drink and most other goods by 2050 (see the figures). Electricity and petrol costs will rise significantly, but with the right policies in place, say the modellers, this need not lead to big changes in our lifestyle.

"These results show that the global project to fight climate change is doable," says Alex Bowen, a climate policy expert at the London School of Economics. "It's not such a big ask as people are making out."

Although it is impossible to precisely predict prices four decades from now, the exercise is one of the most detailed examinations yet of the impact of climate change policies on UK consumers. It provides a useful rough guide to our economic future.

Though its results speak directly to the UK consumer, previous research has come to similar conclusions for the US. In June, one study found that if the US were to cut emissions by 50 per cent by 2050, prices of most consumer goods would increase by less than 5 per cent (Energy Economics, DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2009.06.016). The findings are also consistent with analyses by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Washington DC. "Even cutting emissions by 80 per cent over four decades has a very small effect on consumers in most areas," says Manik Roy of the Pew Center. "The challenge is now to convince consumers and policy-makers that this is the case."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends that wealthy nations cut their emissions to between 80 and 95 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050 in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The UK government aims to reduce its contribution by 80 per cent and leaders of the other G8 nations have discussed following suit. To meet this goal, industries will have to slash fossil fuel consumption, and low-carbon power sources will have to massively expand. Companies will have to pay increasingly higher prices for the right to emit greenhouse gases.

How will this affect the average citizen's wallet? To gauge the impact of the 80 per cent target on the UK population, New Scientist approached Cambridge Econometrics, a consultancy known for its modelling of the European economy. The firm used historic economic data to predict the impact of emissions reductions on prices in over 40 categories of goods and services (see "How the model works"). It compared the impact of the 80 per cent cut with a baseline scenario in which the government takes no action other than the limited emissions restrictions already in place as a result of the Kyoto protocol.

See the figures

Most of the price hikes are a consequence of rising energy costs, in part because coal and gas are replaced by more expensive low-carbon sources. The price of electricity is projected to be 15 per cent higher in 2050 compared with the baseline. In today's prices, that would add around £5 onto typical monthly household electricity bills. It will also result in higher prices elsewhere, as every industrial sector uses electricity.

Click link to continue: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427373.400-lowcarbon-future-we-can-afford-to-go-green.html?full=trueTACKLING climate change will cost consumers the earth. Those who campaign for a green revolution are out to destroy our western... more

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Extreme oil: Scraping the bottom of Earth's barrel

EIGHTY-FIVE million barrels. That's how much oil we consume every day. It's a staggering amount - enough to fill over 5400 Olympic swimming pools - and demand is expected to keep on rising, despite the impending supply crunch.

The International Energy Agency forecasts that by 2030 it will rise to about 105 million barrels per day with a commensurate increase in production (see graph), although whistle-blowers recently told The Guardian newspaper in London that insiders at the IEA believe the agency vastly over-estimates our chances of plugging that gap. The agency officially denies this.

Wherever the truth lies, it is widely expected that by 2030 we will have passed the peak of conventional oil production - the moment that output from conventional oil reserves goes into terminal decline. A report from the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) published in August said there was a "significant risk" it would happen before 2020. And that means we will soon be staring down the barrel of the ultimate oil crisis.

Some governments and corporations are waking up to the idea and beginning to develop alternatives to keep the world's transport systems moving when cheap oil runs out. These include biofuels, more energy-efficient - or electric - cars, and hydrogen. But none of these is likely to make up the global shortfall in time. The pressure is on to keep the black stuff flowing and so the next two decades will see an unprecedented effort to exploit increasingly exotic and unconventional sources of oil. They include tar sands (a mixture of sand or clay and a viscous, black, sticky petroleum deposit called bitumen), oil shale (a sedimentary rock containing kerogen, a precursor to petroleum) and synthetic liquid fuels made from coal or gas.

Purely in terms of geological abundance, these sources look more than sufficient to meet global demand. According to the IEA, taken together, they raise the remaining global oil resource to about 9 trillion barrels (see map) - almost nine times the amount of oil humanity has consumed to date. The trouble is that the name "non-conventional oil" hides several dirty little secrets and a whole host of huge challenges.

Conventional oil refers to liquid hydrocarbons trapped in deep, highly pressurised reservoirs, which means that when the wells are drilled, the oil usually gushes to the surface of its own accord. Non-conventional oils are not so forthcoming, and need large amounts of energy, water and money to coax them from the ground and turn them into anything useful, like diesel or jet fuel.

As a result, non-conventional oil production to date has been slow to expand - with current output of just 1.5 million barrels per day. Not only that, because they take so much energy to produce, they are responsible for higher carbon emissions per barrel than conventional oil.

But, slowly, things are beginning to change. Growing awareness of the impending oil shortage and its ramifications - Deutsche Bank predicts a barrel price of $175 by 2016, for example - has driven a surge of investment in new technologies to recover non-conventional oil more effectively. "Canada could eclipse Saudi Arabia," says Julie Chan, vice-president of finance at E-T Energy, a Canadian company developing a new technique to extract oil from tar sands. So are non-conventionals poised to swoop in and confound the peak-oil doomsayers? Can we expect a new era of expensive, technologically demanding and environmentally damaging oil?

The most famous of the non-conventional resources are the Canadian tar sands, where proven reserves are second only in size to Saudi Arabia's conventional crude. Today, production stands at 1.2 million barrels per day.
Click link to continue: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427375.900-extreme-oil-scraping-the-bottom-of-earths-barrel.htmlEIGHTY-FIVE million barrels. That's how much oil we consume every day. It's a staggering amount - enough to fill over... more

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Transparent universe reveals hidden galaxies

THE universe is far more transparent at high energies than we thought. This discovery - based on sightings of unexpectedly bright objects that should be too far away to see so clearly - may call into question our understanding of how galaxies are born and evolve.

Most light travels through the cosmos unimpeded. But photons with very high energies of more than 100 gigaelectronvolts can collide with intergalactic infrared light. The longer these photons have to travel, the greater their chances of colliding and the less likely they are to reach Earth. As a result, distant blazars - galaxies with gluttonous black holes at their centres whose flares are pointing directly at Earth - are supposed to be much dimmer at higher energies than those that are not so far off.

Based on estimates of the amount of infrared light pervading the universe, blazars more than a billion years old were expected to be mostly invisible to telescopes looking for very high-energy gamma rays, says astrophysicist Simon Swordy of the University of Chicago.

But in 2006, the HESS telescope in Namibia reported the discovery of two unexpectedly bright blazars that are more than 2 billion years old. What's more, bright light from a blazar called 3C279, spotted one night in 2007 by the MAGIC telescope on La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands, survived some 5 billion years of travel. "We can see significantly further than we thought we could," says Swordy.

The mystery grew last month, when the VERITAS telescope in southern Arizona, following up on observations made by NASA's orbiting FERMI telescope, reported the discovery of yet another blazar that glows unusually brightly with very high-energy gamma rays. The new source, named 1ES 0502+675, is 4 billion years old. While it is not as distant as the one discovered by MAGIC, it could provide more useful information as it is bright, sits at a well-established distance and has been observed steadily for more than a month.

These blazars suggest that the amount of infrared light between galaxies must be quite low. This infrared background is light left over from star formation processes that occur early in the life of galaxies. We can estimate the background by counting galaxies in deep space, but now astrophysicists are beginning to question these estimates. "The amount of infrared is really right at the minimum you would expect from what we know about star formation and evolution," says Rene Ong of the University of California, Los Angeles, and spokesperson for VERITAS. "It's becoming a problem."

Continued observation of 1ES 0502+675 could help solve the puzzle. "This source could produce better and more reliable constraints on the extragalactic background than any source that has come before," says Ong.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427373.800-transparent-universe-reveals-hidden-galaxies.htmlTHE universe is far more transparent at high energies than we thought. This discovery - based on sightings of unexpectedly bright... more