New Thermal Generation Plant in Hawaii Uses Ocean Water to Generate Energy

The concept was first invented in 1881, but it’s taken until August of 2015 for a viable commercial Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) plant to be built. There’s a great article we found over on the Popular Science website on the new plant that is coming online in Hawaii that takes advantage of the temperature difference between the ocean’s surface and its depths.

According to the article, this is how OTEC works:

Inside the system is a liquid that has a very low boiling point (meaning that it requires less energy to evaporate), like ammonia. As ammonia passes through the closed system of pipes, it goes through a section of pipes that have been warmed by seawater taken from the warm (77 degrees Fahrenheit), shallow waters. The ammonia vaporizes into a gas, which pushes a turbine, and generates power. Then, that ammonia gas passes through a section of pipes that are cooled by frigid (41 degrees Fahrenheit) seawater pumped up from depths of around 3,000 feet. The gas condenses in the cold temperatures, turning back into a liquid, and repeats the process all over again. The warm and cold waters are combined, and pumped back into the ocean.

Factiod: Did you know that almost every form of electrical energy generation – even nuclear plants – essentially boil a liquid, usually water, to produce steam to turn a turbine. Generators in dams are one exception, and of course solar cell generation is another.

But who came up with OTEC and why has it taken so long for a small plant to be built?  We answer that next…

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Cougars Could Be A Benefit to Humans?

A somewhat mind-bending study found that reintroducing cougars to Eastern US could be a net benefit for people. As reported by the great folks over at Science News, researcher Sophie Gilbert and her team from the University of Alaska found that it really could be the case:

The key is the big cats’ predation on deer. Deer are huge problems. The animals damage crops and gardens. They transmit diseases. And they get hit by cars, sometimes injuring or even killing people. Cougars eat deer, and if there were more cougars, vehicle collision rates might drop, the scientists figured.

…and that could save lives, lower insurance premiums, and overall be good thing for humans.

But what about the downsides of having these large predators around?  Next, we look at how the team addressed those…

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Climate Change Affected the Evolution of Dogs

We just discovered this incredibly novel research from the scientists at Brown University: it turns out that they’ve compared the North American dog fossil record to climate change data going back 40 million years and here’s what they found:

Old dogs can teach humans new things about evolution. In Nature Communications a new study of North American dog fossils as old as 40 million years suggests that the evolutionary path of whole groups of predators can be a direct consequence of climate change.

“It’s reinforcing the idea that predators may be as directly sensitive to climate and habitat as herbivores,” said Christine Janis, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University, who worked with lead author Borja Figueirido, a former Brown Fulbright postdoctoral researcher who is now a professor at the Universidad de Málaga in Spain. “Although this seems logical, it hadn’t been demonstrated before.”

On the next page, you’ll find out more about how the changing climate affected the evolution of both herbivores and predators like those earlier dogs…

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