The Oyster’s Garter

It’s Coral Week over at Deep Sea News, and I have many coral-related thoughts. Unfortunately, I have been bitten by something poisonous and tropical and my right hand is the size of a grapefruit, which really cuts down on the typing speed. So please enjoy DSN’s many coralline delights and stay tuned. There’s lots of pretty pictures on the way once the swelling goes down.

Imagine it: Paintable solar panels! Not yet, of course, but scientists at several universities have discovered ways to put chemicals into paint that would generate electricity. The theory is simple: paint fades with sunlight, right? Therefore, the paint is already reacting to the sunlight in some way. The trick then is to use the energy getting dumped into the paint and convert it into electricity.

Here are a couple of companies and scientists with more specific applications:

* Nanosolar, in sunny California, has devised a kind of film that can be applied directly to steel. They’re not profitable yet, but they began commercial production in November.

• Scientists at the University of Swansea, in jolly old England, have invented a kind of paste that can be rolled onto steel panels of the sort that’s often used for bridges, and similar to aluminum siding. They think they’re 2.5 years away from mass production.

• Our friends to the north, or in my case to the north east, at the University of Toronto, has devised a way to capture specific wavelengths of light using “quantum dots”. I’m not certain of the technology here, but Ted Sargent, the primary investigator, thinks he can tune his dots so they capture specific wavelengths of light, including the infrared spectrum, a part of the suns energy that no solar cells currently capture. He thinks he can put the dots into paint that we could spray on to any surface. He’s a good decade away from production, but I can already envision great, electricity generating murals painted onto the sides of buildings.

My question that remains unanswered for all of these, though, is I’m not clear how the engineers actually extract the charged up electrons from the paint. Do you just attach some copper wire to it or something? Any engineers out there have a guess?

[Via Treehugger, and thanks to inhabitat for the picture.]

When penguins get old and bald, the feather comb over just doesn’t provide enough insulation. What’s an elderly penguin gentleman to do? Wear a fetching custom wetsuit, of course. The article does not discuss whether a penguin’s natural tux promotes the wetsuit to formalwear.

Thanks, Aunt Sharon!

Some days, you find your experimental organisms and make the science. Here’s my ear (and the rest of me) with my tunicate. They’re the bluish blobs halfway down the far left side. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to be allowed to sample there, as it’s right outside of a dive resort with a very carefully tended house reef. I hope I find it elsewhere. Of course, if I don’t find it elsewhere, I can assume it’s not invasive and I can just go home.

And some days, you find that your study site is occupied - BY A GIANT OIL DRILL! Seriously, it’s right on top of the study site, drilling away. I had no idea they drilled this close to shore. Unsurprisingly, this was outside a fishing village far away from the eyes of tourists.

Sorry for this totally bragging post, but Miriam’s 2007 post on why it’s difficult to photograph the North Pacific Gyre and why it will be difficult to clean it up is a reference for the Wikipedia entry on North Pacific Trash Heap. I just think that’s awesome.

Check out Kate Wing’s post on a recent paper in Nature discussing how fishing destabilizes fish populations, making them more variable and unpredictable.  Not only is it a super-cool finding, but the first author on the Nature paper is my brilliant classmate Christian Anderson, who is only in his third year of grad school. First author on a Nature paper before he even qualifies! I’m all verklempt.

Today, I did not spend the day in a mighty scientific effort. I did not spend the day lounging luxuriously on the beach. No, I spent the day sitting with four giant fish traps in various bleak commercial strips as my partner hunted for bungee cords.

To backtrack a bit, Ayana, my partner on this trip and a fellow graduate student at SIO, is trying to build a better Antilles fish trap. Curacao’s fisheries have declined significantly over the past few decades for the usual reasons - climate change, coral sickness, better technology - and Curacao is very interested in trying to institute some regulation in order to make their fisheries more sustainable. So Ayana is working with the Curacao resource managers to test various ways to exclude non-target species and juveniles from traps.

The traps are made of stick and chicken wire, so they’re very light, but they are quite large - perhaps the size of a dining room table. [I'll post pictures soon.] We managed to cram four traps in our truck, and thought we tied them in securely. They were indeed secure - until the rope broke. We recovered the traps from the side of the road (fortunately still intact!), were heartily mocked by passers-by, jury rigged a precarious setup using the broken rope, and limped to a grocery store. Freshly supplied with bright orange nylon cord, we tied the traps again. This time, we only got one block before the nylon slipped off the traps and the @#$%&#$%^#$%^#$%^!!! traps fell off again. So we unloaded all the giant traps in the parking lot of a bank, and I sat there with them while Ayana hunted for bungee cords. Between the dearth of bungee cords on Curacao and an unfortunate traffic jam, I sat in that parking lot with those traps for two hours. Fortunately, I had a book - the Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. Unfortunately, I still don’t really like Margaret Atwood (except for Oryx and Crake). Behold, the glamor of SCIENCE!

So we get the bungee cord and tie up the traps again and make it back to our rented house this time. And…there was enough time for a quick fun dive on the house reef! My first warm water dive ever! Here’s my train of thought:

Oooh! Clear water! Warm, so warm! Coral reefs pretty. Like pretty fishes. Like pretty wormies. Like pretty visibility. YAY CORAL. Ok, must think about science. Oh, good, my invasive tunicate is everywhere on all these convenient dying coral heads! This will make a great study site! *pause* Why aren’t there any fish bigger than my hand? *pause* CORAL REEF SO PRETTY! Will look for stomatopods and resident green moray eels tomorrow. *pause* Coral, please don’t die. I just got here.

Post title from “Hallelujah” by Jeff Buckley and totally stolen from Sam.

Eric’s Apocalypse Averting Plan No. 1: Use electricity to power as many devices as is reasonably possible. Electricity, once you’ve got it, runs totally cleanly. No carbon output, less noise, fewer moving parts required, and therefore less maintenance needed. And the first machine that should go all electric would have to be our cars, right? Even though the Tesla is technically on the market, the cheapest way to use an electric motor in everyday driving is through the use of conventional hybrids or plug-in hybrids. Conventional hybrids use the gas motor and braking action to recharge, while plug-ins recharge by plugging into the wall at night. Plug-ins also have a small gas motor to extend their range.

But when I start spouting on about electricity and cars, I often get the same response: “But Eric, sure you eliminate tailpipe emissions, but you’re just adding to the pollution at the power plant. We’d have to burn even more nasty, dirty coal to power those snazzy machines.” It’s a major flaw in EAAP1, you know?

Thankfully the Electrical Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense council also got tired of hearing that argument, so they did some research. The study (PDF) compares the CO2-per-mile of normal gas-powered cars, regular hybrids (like Priuses), and plug-in hybrids. The results were most gratifying: the plug-in hybrid produces far less greenhouse gas than conventional cars, even if all the electricity they slurp up at night is produced at a sooty old coal plant. The MIT magazine Technology Review used the study to generate the table I’ve included after the jump. It shows that conventional cars produce 452 grams of CO2/mile, about 28% more than plug-in hybrids, even if the plug-ins get all their electricity from coal-burning power plants.

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Raise your hand if despite the “wireless” world we live in, your house is littered with cables. C’mon, I know I’m not the only one, fess up. Miriam’s and my apartment has cables everywhere, whether they run to the fan or the speakers, or they form a terrifying mass near the lone desktop. I’ve often wished for wireless electricity, but you know, I was always convinced it would create massive fields of invisible electrical death.

An MIT professor, Marin Soljačić, has devised a way to make wireless electricity, only without the death. He uses the principle of magnetic resonance.

A classic example is a set of wine glasses, each filled to a different level so that it vibrates at a different sound frequency. If a singer hits a pitch that matches the frequency of one glass, the glass might absorb so much acoustic energy that it will shatter; the other glasses remain unaffected.

He uses the same principle for electricity.

He took two copper coils and hung them about six feet apart. He plugged one coil into a wall outlet. then he attached a 60W lightbulb to the second coil. Since the two coils were “tuned” the same (I’m not certain how one tunes a coil) the light bulb lit up.

The application here would be to walk into your house and have your electronics charge automatically - iPod, cell phone, laptop whatever. No more low-battery beeps. No more losing a call to low battery power! No more tripping over the extension cord to the fan, pulling down the fan onto a startled cat causing it to yowl at 2 a.m.! Or is that last one just me?

UPDATE: I’m adding this because Sam asks such an excellent question in the comments below. I’m thinking it will be bad for your electric bill. It’s not clear form my googling whether the transmission coil will be on all the time or not, though I expect you can fix that by turning it on when you come home or something. But the article does mention a 70% efficiency rate, which means you’re losing 30% of your electricity via the transmission over the air. So electric bills will certainly be higher for wireless luxury (though not 30% higher unless you power everything in your house wirelessly).

You might wonder - I rather hope you wonder - why the Oyster’s Garter has been so silent this week. I have been running frantically about preparing for a month-long research trip to Curacao, off the coast of Venezuela. (as well as helping Eric host our Very First California Seder.). I’ll be studying an invasive tunicate, Trididemnum solidum, that is overgrowing Curacao’s coral reefs. I will also be serving as a dive buddy for a classmate studying traditional Curacao fish traps.

I’m not sure how frequently I will have internet access, but I will post on my adventures as much as possible. And I’ll be contributing a mighty deuterostome-related entry to Coral Week. I’ve never been diving in warm water before, and I expect to be spoiled utterly rotten. I also expect to come back totally jacked, since I’ll be filtering liters and liters of water (for particulate organic carbon, if you’re curious) with a hand pump.