Monday 28 September 2015

INTRODUCING NEW SERIES:-

AMAZING PICTURES OF THE WEEK-

    1. BAT TONGUES



Cays Mark The Spot
The Bahamas is home to more than 700 islands, islets, and cays. A NASA astronaut took a picture of a chain of island cays just west of Great Exuma Island that helps astronauts recognize the area in the Atlantic Ocean. Though the cays are separated by deep tidal channels, the rest of the surrounding water is less than 25 meters deep.


2.
Ultra-Exclusive Movie Screening

Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) were treated to a private early screening  of The Martian” before its
official U.S. release date of October 2. Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko are currently aboard the ISS on a one-year mission 
to study the effects that living in space has on human health. Directed by Ridley Scott, “The Martian” stars Matt Damon in 
the role of an astronaut left behind after a mission to Mars.

3. Busy in the Dark

A tiny Lebbeus polaris shrimp perches on a blade of kelp in the Arctic Ocean. Scientists recently discovered that arctic 
marine life does not go quiescent during the long polar winter. Instead, zooplankton, scallops,  crabs and other animals 
 ate, reproduced and flourished through the cold months.

4. Macro/Micro-Scopic
Part of NASA’s One Year mission is studying how the microbiome of a human changes in space, which could have big 
impacts on an astronaut’s health. Coincidentally, microbes and galaxies look pretty similar. Can you tell which image in 
each pair is a microbe and which is a galaxy?
5. The Plethora of Puggles

This rolly-polly puggle is the result of a successful breeding program collaboration between the University of Queensland 
in Australia and the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary. Scientists have bred 14 short-beaked echidna, a relative of the platypus, 
over the last five years and are currently nurturing five new eggs. While the short-beaked echidna is still relatively common 
in Australia, its long-beaked relative is endangered.

6. The Better To Pollinate You With,My Dear


In a study published in Science this week, researchers found that two bumblebee species in the Rocky Mountains evolved 
shorter tongues in response to declines in flowering in local plants. Shorter tongues may allow the bumblebees to feed on 
more plants, as climate change and rising temperatures disrupt flowering in alpine habitats worldwide.

7. Secret London Marijuana Forest

Police in the London suburb of Kingston found a cannabis forest on September 25. Located in a private lot, some plants 
reached 5 feet tall, resembling Christmas trees. According to officer Sarah Henderson, the land was the size of a soccer field
and  was only reachable after “a 20 minute walk through wasteland”. The field will be destroyed by the police.

8. That's so Maven

NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission celebrated one year around Mars on Monday. The goal 
of the $671 million mission is to investigate the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere in hopes that it may hold clues about how 
Mars lost its liquid water and most of its once-thick atmosphere. Recreating Mars’s climate history might help scientists 
assess how habitable the planet is.

9. It's All in the Tongue

Researchers have observed bats using a tongue-pumping technique to drink nectar, a strategy that has never been seen in 
mammals before. Most vertebrates drink by lapping their tongues, but orange-nectar bats slurp up 150 percent of their 
body weight each night while barely moving their tongues. Using high-speed cameras to watch orange-nectar bats 
(Lonchophylla robusta) suck nectar from test tubes, the scientists found that the bats use muscles in their grooved tongues 
to push nectar up to their mouths, similar to the movements our bowels make.

10. Volcano vs. Man

An eruption at Iceland’s Bárðarbunga volcano last year emitted on average three times as much sulfur dioxide gas as all 
European industry combined, according to a new study from a team of European scientists. The eruption, which lasted for 
six months, was the biggest to strike Iceland in more than 200 years and produced enough lava to cover the size of 
Manhattan. Sulfur dioxide, which is produced by volcanoes and industrial processes like smelting, can cause acid rain and 
respiratory problems.




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Sunday 27 September 2015

Volkswagen's appalling clean diesel scandal, explained



Since 2009, Volkswagen had been installing elaborate software in 482,000 "clean diesel" vehicles sold in the US, so that the cars' pollution controls only worked when being tested for emissions. The rest of the time, the vehicles could freely spew hazardous, smog-forming compounds.
Suffice to say, regulators were livid once they caught on. Last Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that Volkswagen had very flagrantly violated the Clean Air Act. Not only did the EPA order the German firm to fix the affected vehicles — which include diesel TDI versions of the Golf, Jetta, Beetle, and Passat — but the agency could end up levying fines as high as $18 billion. The Department of Justice is also contemplating criminal charges.
The scandal has only widened from there. On Tuesday, Volkswagen admitted that some 11 million clean diesel cars sold worldwide contain software to fool regulators, with the vast majority of cars likely to be in Europe.
Volkswagen, in other words, is in deep shit. The CEO, Martin Winterkorn, announced his resignation on Wednesday. The company has halted US sales of its 2015 and 2016 clean diesel vehicles and now has to fix millions of existing cars. It has already set aside $7.3 billion to deal with the problem. Meanwhile, VW's stock price has been plummeting, with the company losing one-third of its market cap in the last week:


This scandal raises a few larger questions, though: Why did Volkswagen cheat in the first place? And why was it so easy for the company to evade regulators for years? To get a better handle on the story, we need to take a brief trip through the tangled history of clean diesel vehicles — the specific cars that VW was selling.


Clean diesel cars were supposed to offer great mileage and low pollution — a tricky task


One basic fact to understand here is that there are two main types of combustion engines widely available today: diesel and gasoline. And there are real trade-off to each.
Diesel engines have long been popular in Europe, and one of their major advantages is fuel economy. Diesel fuel contains more energy per gallon than gasoline, and the diesel engines work more efficiently. Put it together, and the typical diesel car can travel up to 30 percent farther on a gallon of fuel than its gasoline counterpart.
But there's a catch. While diesel cars get better mileage and emit fewer carbon-dioxide emissions, they also emit more nitrogen oxides (NOx), which help form smog, and particulate matter, which can damage lungs. Both types of pollution can have serious health effects.

Historically, Europe has dealt with this trade-off by imposing relatively looser emissions standards on diesel cars in the pursuit of better fuel economy. Roughly one-third the passenger cars in Europe now run on diesel, and it's one reason cities like Paris have a serious smog problem. In the United States, by contrast, we've imposed far stricter rules around smog and other conventional pollutants since the 1970s, which is why diesel cars haven't caught on widely here: until recently, few could pass America's stringent NOx standards.

DUE TO HIGHER NOX EMISSIONS, DIESEL CARS DIDN'T CATCH ON IN THE US FOR MANY YEARS

Since 2009, however, things have changed. The Obama administration has been ratcheting up fuel-economy standards in the United States, which puts a higher premium on mileage. At the same time, diesel technology has been gradually getting cleaner through a combination of lower-sulfur fuel, advanced engines, and new emission-control technology. So automakers have shown a renewed interest in "clean diesel" cars that, in theory, don't suffer from that trade-off between performance and pollution.
These vehicles have proved increasingly popular in the United States, even if they still represent less than 1 percent of the market. Since 2009, Volkswagen has sold more than 482,000 clean diesel cars containing a four-cylinder turbocharged direct injection engine. This included versions of the Passat, Jetta, Golf, Beetle, and Audi's A3.
Except, as it turns out, VW was lying about its clean diesel cars.

Volkswagen couldn't balance performance with low pollution. So it cheated.




Since 2009, we now know, Volkswagen had been inserting intricate code in its vehicle software that tracked steering and pedal movements. When those movements suggested that the car was being tested for nitrogen-oxide emissions in a lab, the car automatically turned its pollution controls on. The rest of the time, the pollution controls switched off.

Volkswagen hasn't explained exactly why it cheated, but outside analysts have a good guess. The NOx emission controls likely degraded the cars' performance when they were switched on — the engines ran hotter, wore out more quickly, and got poorer mileage. Some experts have suggested that the emission controls may have affected the cars' torque and acceleration, making them less fun to drive. (Indeed, some individual car owners have been known to disable their cars' emission controls to boost performance, though this is against the law.)

The VW scandal exposes problems with current emission tests



Part of the problem here is that regulators usually test these vehicles under laboratory conditions, placing them on giant treadmills and requiring them to do a series of maneuvers. Because this process is predictable, it's easier to game. Combined with the fact that automakers are developing ever-more-elaborate software that can control and fine-tune engines, there are ample opportunities for fraud.

EUROPEAN REGULATORS WILL SOON START REQUIRING ON-ROAD EMISSIONS TESTING

Volkswagen is now facing serious blowback


At this point, Volkswagen has been caught red-handed and has to face the consequences. The company straight-up lied about its cars and knowingly evaded pollution limits. (Getting a precise estimate of the health damages caused by the extra pollution that resulted could be difficult, since it would depend on where the cars were located, how much extra smog actually resulted, and so forth.)

This episode also raises questions about the future of clean diesel vehicles. Clean diesel appears to be a genuinely promising technology — in theory, such vehicles could get both excellent mileage and lower emissions. But this whole scandal raises serious questions about how well automakers can actually achieve both goals in practice.

Further reading

-- This Bloomberg tick-tock by Dana Hull and Jeff Plungis on how VW's fraud was uncovered is worth your time. So is this piece by Brian Fung and Andrea Peterson on how Volkswagen's cheating software actually worked.
-- Here's an earlier study by the International Council on Clean Transport comparing emission tests vs real-world performance for a number of clean diesel cars in Europe. A great many models had far higher exhaust emissions under realistic driving conditions.
-- Back in 2001, the National Research Council took an in-depth look at some of the ways that US vehicle emissions testing programs could be gamed. For those who want to get deep into the weeds.

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