Gizmorama - July 8, 2013

Good Morning,

According to a U.S. researcher it appears that electric cars, despite being green, are among the environmentally dirtiest transportation options due to hidden environmental and health hazards. Can it be true?

Learn about this and other interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Study: Electric cars no greener than gasoline vehicles --*
BERKELEY, Calif. - Electric cars, despite their supposed green credentials, are among the environmentally dirtiest transportation options, a U.S. researcher suggests. Writing in the journal IEEE Spectrum, researcher Ozzie Zehner says electric cars lead to hidden environmental and health damages and are likely more harmful than gasoline cars and other transportation options. Electric cars merely shift negative impacts from one place to another, he wrote, and "most electric-car assessments analyze only the charging of the car. This is an important factor indeed. But a more rigorous analysis would consider the environmental impacts over the vehicle's entire life cycle, from its construction through its operation and on to its eventual retirement at the junkyard." Political priorities and corporate influence have created a flawed impression that electric cars significantly reduce transportation impacts, he said. "Upon closer consideration, moving from petroleum-fueled vehicles to electric cars starts to appear tantamount to shifting from one brand of cigarettes to another," Zehner, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, said. Zehner, once an electric car enthusiast who has since changed his position and become an activist looking at a number of so-called green initiatives, is the author of the book "Green Illusions."


*-- New camera yields clues to dramatic events on sun's surface --*
PRESTON, England - British scientists say an innovative new camera on board a sounding rocket has captured the sharpest images yet of the sun's outer atmosphere. Researchers at the University of Central Lancashire, working with U.S. and Russian colleagues, report the NASA High Resolution Coronal Imager they helped develop discovered fast-moving "highways" and intriguing "sparkles" that may help answer long-standing questions about coronal mass ejections that carry billions of tons of plasma into space. If an ejection hits the Earth, it can disturb the terrestrial magnetic field in a "space weather" event that can damage satellite electronics and even overloading power grids on the ground. The discovery and nature of the solar highways captured in the NASA instrument, dubbed Hi-C, may allow scientists to better understand the driving force for these eruptions and help predict with greater accuracy when ejections might take place, the researchers said. "The camera is effectively a microscope that lets us view small scale events on the sun in unprecedented detail," Robert Walsh, director of research at the Lancashire university, said. "For the first time we can unpick the detailed nature of the solar corona, helping us to predict when outbursts from this region might head towards the Earth." Walsh presented the study results Monday at the Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting in St. Andrews, Scotland.


*-- Studies suggest big earthquakes make nearby volcanoes sink --*
ITHACA, N.Y. - Recent large earthquakes in Japan and Chile caused several volcanoes located on land, parallel to the country's coastlines, to sink, studies found. In two unrelated studies, Youichiro Takada and Yo Fukushima of Kyoto University and Matthew Pritchard and colleagues of Cornell University used satellite data to analyze the deformation of Earth's surface caused by the 2011 magnitude 9 Tohoku earthquake in Japan and the 2010 magnitude 8.8 Maule earthquake in Chile, respectively. Following both of those earthquakes, volcanoes situated near the ruptured faults subsided by almost 6 inches, the researchers reported in the journal Geoscience. The effect may occur in most big earthquakes, they said. "There's every reason to suspect this is a widespread feature," Pritchard said. Nobody had noticed the subsidence before because satellite imaging was not sensitive enough to detect it, he said. Pritchard, who studied the Chilean quakes, said he suspects the shaking opens cracks in the rock, allowing water trapped underground to escape to the surface in hot springs, and triggering subsidence. Takada and Fukushima, on the other hand, say they suspect volcanoes' magma chambers can be deformed by quakes, allowing the rock above to settle.

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