The share of U.S. electricity that comes from coal is forecast to fall below 40 percent for the year — the lowest level since the government began collecting this data in 1949. Four years ago, it was 50 percent. By the end of this decade, it is likely to be near 30 percent.
Utilities are aggressively ditching coal in favor of natural gas, which has become cheaper as supplies grow. Natural gas has other advantages over coal: It produces far fewer emissions of toxic chemicals and gases that contribute to climate change, key attributes as tougher environmental rules go into effect.
Natural gas will be used to produce 29 percent of the country's electricity this year, up from 20 percent in 2008.
The shift is because shale gas has increased supplies and made natural gas cheap. It is not because of concerns over health effects. Coal is more harmful for health.
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This is an update of air pollution from coal plants in the United States.
Map of coal power by state. Note: about of third of the air pollution can go thousands of miles from the plant. There is more impact on air quality and health of those near the plants. Air pollution has been improved in the USA since the 1950s and 1960s. There is still a negative effect. 24,000 coal impacted deaths and a total of 60,000 air pollution impacted deaths out of 2.5 million deaths from any cause. Cigarette smoking and obesity have larger negative effects, which is seen in West Virginia's health statistics. The bad air pollution states are ending up at or near the bottom of state health rankings.
The incremental particulate matter from 11 coal plants in Michigan
They have mapped the health effects from particulates from all coal plants based on the measurement of incremental pollution by location. They have the increased levels of health impacts in those same locations.
PM2.5 is 10-12% from coal power plants. So it is not the whole problem but eliminating that pollution source would improve health and save lives.
Analysis of PM10 by metro statistical area.
Source watch has a list of the states with the most coal power plants
Rank State # of Plants Total Capacity 2005 Power Prod.
1 Texas 20 21,238 MW 148,759 GWh
2 Ohio 35 23,823 MW 137,457 GWh
3 Indiana 31 21,551 MW 123,985 GWh
4 Pennsylvania 40 20,475 MW 122,093 GWh
5 Illinois 32 17,565 MW 92,772 GWh
6 Kentucky 21 16,510 MW 92,613 GWh
7 West Virginia 19 15,372 MW 91,601 GWh
8 Georgia 16 14,594 MW 87,624 GWh
9 North Carolina 25 13,279 MW 78,854 GWh
10 Missouri 24 11,810 MW 77,714 GWh
11 Michigan 33 12,891 MW 71,871 GWh
12 Alabama 11 12,684 MW 70,144 GWh
13 Florida 15 11,382 MW 66,378 GWh
14 Tennessee 13 10,290 MW 59,264 GWh
15 Wyoming 10 6,168 MW 43,421 GWh
16 Wisconsin 28 7,116 MW 41,675 GWh
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University of Utah physicists developed an inexpensive, highly accurate magnetic field sensor for scientific and possibly consumer uses based on a “spintronic” organic thin-film semiconductor that basically is “plastic paint.”
The new kind of magnetic-resonance magnetometer also resists heat and degradation, works at room temperature and never needs to be calibrated, physicists Christoph Boehme, Will Baker and colleagues report online in the Tuesday, June 12 edition of the journal Nature Communications.
The magnetic-sensing thin film is an organic semiconductor polymer named MEH-PPV. Boehme says it really is nothing more than an orange-colored “electrically conducting, magnetic field-sensing plastic paint that is dirt cheap. We measure magnetic fields highly accurately with a drop of plastic paint, which costs just as little as drop of regular paint.”
The orange spot is only about 5-by-5 millimeters (about one-fifth inch on a side), and the part that actually detects magnetic fields is only 1-by-1 millimeters. This organic semiconductor paint is deposited on a thin glass substrate which then is mounted onto a circuit board with that measures about 20-by-30 millimeters (about 0.8 by 1.2 inches).
An inexpensive and highly accurate “spintronic” magnetic field sensor developed at the University of Utah is shown here. The entire device, on a printed circuit board, measures about 0.8 inches by 1.2 inches. But the part that actually detects magnetic fields is the reddish-orange thin-film semiconductor – essentially “plastic paint” – near the center-right of the device. Photo Credit: Christoph Boehme, University of Uta
Nature Communications - Robust absolute magnetometry with organic thin-film devices
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New Electronics UK - Nanowires can now be made with a diameter of just 1 nanometer (nm), though researchers tend to work with nanowires that are between 30 and 60nm wide. At these dimensions, materials can acquire properties very different to those they exhibit at larger scales. That is partly because at such tiny scales, quantum confinement effects alter the behaviour of fundamental particles like electrons within the material. Such effects can change how materials conduct electricity and heat, or interact with light.
"There are a host of niche applications within the electronics sector, such as solar cells and sensors, where nanowires could have a significant impact in the medium term and rapid advances are being made. You could say nanowires have taken on some of the attention that a few years ago was being spent on nanotubes."
A key question about nanowires concerns how best to manufacture them: building them from the bottom up, or from the top down? A top down approach involves taking the material that will form the nanowire and reducing it until you reach nanoscale dimensions. As its name suggests, the bottom up approach is an assembly process where the nanowire is 'grown', by adding particles gradually.
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Advanced Materials Journal - Using atomistic simulations, this work indicates that cement nanotubes can exist. The chemically compatible nanotubes are constructed from the two main minerals in ordinary Portland cement pastes, namely calcium hydroxide and a calcium silicate hydrate called tobermorite. These results show that such nanotubes are stable and have outstanding mechanical properties, unique characteristics that make them ideally suitable for nanoscale reinforcements of cements.
Nanowerk has coverage
The problem with carbon nanotubes is that they are water insoluble. In order to make them compatible with water chemistry, they must be functionalized in advance. Inorganic oxide nanotubes would be a natural means of reinforcements of cement pastes, in view of their chemically compatibility with the cement-water system. The team focused on cement-based nanotubes fabricated from calcium silicate hydrate gel and calcium hydroxide precipitates. They succeeded in demonstrating the feasibility of these cement nanotubes in view of their stability at room temperature, with strain energies in agreement with values previously obtained for other nanotubes compounds.
Portlandite nanotubes have tensile strength of 8.4 GPa, which is about 10% of the Young's modulus. 8 GPa greatly exceed the tensile strengths of cement pastes and are at least an order of magnitude higher than those of typical reinforcing materials such as structural steels ( which is about 0.5 GPa).
They are now determining that the cement nanotubes survival in different water solutions.
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Design Spark - a Raspberry Pi ($39) can be used to emulate a mainframe which would have filled a large computer room, and to run the same software which it would have run. Of course, the only reason you would do this is for fun, learning or perhaps as part of computer conservation efforts, e.g. in providing continued access to old computer software and/or data. A modern mainframe would massively outperform a Raspberry Pi and offer many benefits beyond simple processing power.
Having configured a mainframe on a Raspberry Pi, it was time to try out a Raspberry Pi on a mainframe! The image below shows the Pi sat on top (centre) of the CPU from an IBM 4381.
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ABI Research - More than 208 million phablets, a hybrid device that is larger than a smartphone but smaller than a tablet, like the Samsung Galaxy Note, will be shipped globally in 2015. The category includes smartphones and tablet devices in the 4.6 to 5.5 inch screen size range.
We recently covered the Samsung Galaxy S3 (4.8 inch screen) and the expected Samsung Galaxy Note 2 (5.5 inch screen)
Despite the slow start for phablet smartphones in 2011, the market is at the dawn of the phablet era. HTC, LG, and Huawei will each introduce phablet smartphones in 2012, joining the ranks of Samsung’s Galaxy Note and Nexus.
The 5.3 inch Galaxy Note beside an iPhone 4S
By ABI Research’s definitions, many recent Android smartphones would fall into the ‘phablet’ category, such as the LG Optimus Vu, HTC One X, the HTC One XL on ATT, the HTC EVO 4G LTE on Sprint, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and the Samung Galaxy S III.
Gigaom - With rich media consumption on the rise on mobile devices — particularly as we get faster 4G networks and more Wi-Fi networks to supplement them — a larger display is desirable. The same can be said for Web browsing, which is one of the most popular activities on a mobile: Why scroll and zoom when a larger display minimizes such efforts?
Provided these handsets are still pocketable, consumers will adopt them because they combine the portability of a smartphone with the more immersive experience found in a tablet. That’s not to say 10-inch slate sales will fall; these fit a totally different use case for most, as they are less portable and are better suited for casual computing or consumption in a given location. A recent Viacom study, for example, found that 74 percent of tablet use is in the home.
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