Gizmorama
January 31, 2011
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Good Morning,
With the President's emphasis on technology and energy
advancement in his State of the Union Address last week,
America's media has turned its interests to the potentials.
It is inevitable to investigate what other countries are
doing in compliance to tremendous gas prices and dwindling
resources. The first two articles explore what seem to be
the most effective measures taken by foreign nations, and
how they plan to expand these potential solutions into the
future.
President Obama was animate in stressing the importance of
competing with other nations in producing alternative fuel
sources. I have to say, reading these articles serves up
little hope for our state of competitiveness. However, these
foreign developments help reach a sense of global progress,
which is more important than being the best of nations in
the field.
Until Next Time,
Erin
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China to boost nuclear power
BEIJING - China is likely to boost its 2020 target nuclear
power capacity by 5 percent -- 86 gigawatts -- representing
an annual investment of at least $10.6 billion, officials
said. China will approve an additional 10 nuclear power pro-
jects as part of the country's 12th Five-Year-Plan (2011-15)
due out in the spring, said Zhang Guobao, former director of
the National Energy Administration, China Daily reports.
There are 12 nuclear power plants operating in the country,
with 25 reactors under construction. Nuclear power accounted
for about 2.2 percent of China's electricity generation by
the end of 2009. China, which surpassed the United States in
2009 as the world's biggest consumer of energy, aims to in-
crease the use of non-fossil energy to 15 percent of its
primary energy consumption by 2020. The country now relies
on coal to generate 70 percent of the country's power. For
its part, China National Nuclear Corp, the country's largest
nuclear power company, plans to invest $121.5 billion in
nuclear projects by 2020, the newspaper reports. The company
said investment in nuclear power plants will reach $76 bil-
lion by 2015, which would bring 40 gigawatts of nuclear
energy available to China by 2015, creating a huge market
for nuclear equipment, also estimated at $76 billion.
German wind sector hopes for 2011 comeback
BERLIN - The German wind energy industry expects 16 percent
growth in new installations at home this year after a painful
2010 saw sales of onshore turbines plummet. An estimated
1,800 megawatts worth of new onshore and offshore turbines
will be installed in 2011 in Germany, up from 1,550 MW last
year, the German Wind Energy Federation -- BWE -- said in
figures released Wednesday. This would constitute a much-
needed turnaround from 2010, when two unusually long winters
and the aftereffects of the financial crisis caused new in-
stallations to drop by 19 percent compared to the previous
year. "This was clearly below our forecasts and has really
disappointed us," BWE President Hermann Albers said at a news
conference Wednesday in Berlin. While the 2011 forecast would
translate into only modest growth in the onshore sector,
companies bank on a rapidly expanding offshore market,
Thorsten Herdan, the head of the German Engineering Federa-
tion unit VDMA Power Systems, said at the same news confer-
ence. Installations of offshore turbines will almost triple
to 300 MW in 2011, Herdan said. The German wind industry is
among the world's leading, with companies including Enercon,
Siemens Wind Power, Nordex and REPower selling turbines all
over the globe. Exports accounted for 75 percent of the
roughly $8.2 billion in sales the German wind energy industry
generated in 2010, Herdan said. While this shows that German-
made products remain in high demand, it's also a sign that
the German market, with an installed capacity of 27,214 MW,
is nearing saturation. The industry thus banks on repowering,
the replacement of old turbines with more powerful devices,
as a future growth factor at home. More than 9,500 turbines
would qualify for repowering in 2015, unlocking "potential
investments of $55 billion," Albers said Wednesday. Yet
those are the more optimistic figures.
Astronomers spot farthest, earliest galaxy
WASHINGTON - U.S. astronomers say NASA's Hubble Space Tele-
scope has found the most distant object ever seen in the uni-
verse, at a distance of 13.2 billion light-years. Researchers
at the Carnegie Observatories say the compact galaxy of blue
stars is 150 million more light-years distant than the pre-
vious record holder, a Carnegie Institute release said Wed-
nesday. The distance means astronomers are seeing the galaxy
as it existed only 480 million years after the Big Bang, pro-
viding insight into the birth of the first stars and galaxies
and the evolution of the universe. "We are thrilled to have
discovered this galaxy, but we're equally surprised to have
found only one," astronomer Ivo Labbe says. "This tells us
that the universe was changing very rapidly in early times."
Previous searches had found 47 galaxies at later times, when
the universe was about 650 million years old. The rate of
star birth therefore increased by about 10 times in the in-
terval from 480 million years to 650 million years. "This is
an astonishing increase in such a short period, happening in
just 1 percent of the age of the universe," Labbe says.
Astronomers say every step back in time takes closer to the
early universe's "formative years" when stars and galaxies
were just beginning to emerge in the aftermath of the Big
Bang. "We're moving into a regime where there are big changes
afoot," Garth Illingworth of the University of California at
Santa Cruz says. "And what it tells us is that if we go
back another couple hundred million years toward the Big Bang
we'll see absolutely dramatic things happening."
Study: Humans, orangutans in genetic link
ARHUS, Denmark - Though chimpanzees are our closest rela-
tives, humans have some genes more like those of a more dis-
tant kin, the orangutan, Danish researchers say. Researchers
Mikkel Schierup and Thomas Mailund of Aarhus University in
Denmark set out to examine the genetic variation present in
common primate ancestor species, an article in the journal
Genome Research reported. With the addition of the orangutan
to the collection of sequenced primate genomes, they examined
the DNA sequences contained in them. "There remains signals
of the distant past in DNA," Mailund said, "and our approach
is to use such signals to study the genetics of our ances-
tors." Mailund and his colleagues looked for regions of the
orangutan genome where humans and orangutans are more closely
related than humans and chimpanzees. "[I]n about 0.5 percent
of our genome, we are (more closely) related to orangutans
than we are to chimpanzees," Mailund said, "and in about 0.5
percent, chimpanzees are (more closely) related to orangutans
than us." Because humans and orangutans split millions of
years prior to the human/chimp split, Schierup said, that
suggests the ancestral species of human and chimps maintained
high genetic diversity, in contrast to the genetic bottleneck
humans are believed to have experienced following our diver-
gence from chimps.
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