LET'S COPY NATURE: Limpet teeth set new strength record

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31500883

Watch the video by accessing the link above, reproduced from BBC News

By Jonathan Webb

Science reporter, BBC News

Engineers in the UK have found that limpets' teeth consist of the strongest biological material ever tested.

Limpets use a tongue bristling with tiny teeth to scrape food off rocks and into their mouths, often swallowing particles of rock in the process.

The teeth are made of a mineral-protein composite, which the researchers tested in tiny fragments in the laboratory.

They found it was stronger than spider silk, as well as all but the very strongest of man-made materials.

The findings, published in the Royal Society's journal Interface, suggest that the secret to the material's strength is the thinness of its tightly packed mineral fibres - a discovery that could help improve the man-made composites used to build aircraft, cars and boats, as well as dental fillings.

"Biology is a great source of inspiration as an engineer," said the study's lead author Prof Asa Barber, of the University of Portsmouth.

"These teeth are made up of very small fibres, put together in a particular way - and we should be thinking about making our own structures following the same design principles."

[...]

'Bulldozers of the shore'

In terms of man-made materials, the limpet tooth is stronger than Kevlar fibres and almost as good as the best high-performance carbon fibre materials.

The key, Prof Barber said, is that its strength-giving mineral fibres are very thin - the ideal width, in fact, for avoiding holes or flaws that would weaken the structure.

This is something that engineers could learn from.

[...]

DRONE WILL INVESTIGATE EARTHWORKS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS IN AMAZONIA

Drone to scan for ancient Amazonia

Reproduced from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31467619

Scientists are to scan the Amazon forest in Brazil to look for evidence of occupation by ancient civilisations.

A drone will be sent up with a laser instrument to peer through the canopy for earthworks that were constructed thousands of years ago.

The UK-led project is trying to determine how big these communities were, and to what degree they altered the landscape.

The data is likely to inform policies on sustainable forest use today.

Researchers announced the initiative at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose.

It has just won a 1.7m-euro (£1.25m; $1.9m) grant from the European Research Council.

The key quest is to try to understand the scale and activities of populations living in the late pre-Columbian period (the last 3,000 years before the Europeans arrived in the 1490s).

'Cultural parkland'

The international team will endeavour to find more geoglyphs, which are large geometric patterns left in the ground.

More than 450 of these are known in places where the forest has been cleared.

No-one is really quite sure what these earthen circles, squares and lines represent. Perhaps, they were ceremonial centres. But what is certain is that they are evidence of collective behaviour.

"It’s a hot debate right now in New World archaeology," said Dr Jose Iriarte from Exeter University, UK.

"While some researchers think that Amazonia was inhabited by small bands of hunter-gatherers and shifting cultivators who had a minimal impact on the environment, and that the forest we see today is pristine and untouched for thousands of years - mounting evidence is showing this may not be the case.

"This evidence suggests that Amazonia may have been inhabited by large, numerous, complex and hierarchical societies that had a major impact on the environment; what we call the 'cultural parkland hypothesis'," he told BBC News.

Dr Iriarte's project will fly its robotic plane across sample areas of forest.

This vehicle's lidar instrument should reveal how many more geoglyphs remain hidden beneath still-canopied regions of Amazonia.

While some of the light from the lidar scatters back off the leaves, some is able to penetrate to the ground.

A smart algorithm can then be used to separate the two signals, digitally removing the trees to expose anything unusual beneath.

If candidate geoglyphs are confirmed in follow-up inspections, scientists would then move in to characterise signature changes that have been left in the soils and vegetation by the ancient inhabitants.

These "fingerprints" could then be searched for in satellite images, enabling a much broader swathe of Amazonia to be probed than is possible with just a small unmanned aerial vehicle. The arguments over the scale of occupation and its impacts should then be settled.

The project is a partnership between agencies and institutions in Europe and, of course, in Brazil.

The expectation is that lessons learned will feed into policies for the management and sustainable use of the Amazon and its resources.

Dr Iriarte said it was not possible to gauge properly what future changes would be acceptable unless there was a fuller understanding of how the forest had been altered in the past.

"We want to see what is the human footprint in the forest and then inform policy, because it may be the case that the very biodiversity that we want to preserve is the result of the past historical manipulation of this forest," he explained.

What Is Orthorexia?

What Is Orthorexia?

HYDROELECTRIC PLANT-PLATFORM: BETTER COST-EFFECTIVE!? OR UTOPIA!?

Reproduced from: http://www.cerpch.unifei.edu.br/arquivos/revistas/60/hidro-hydro-60-pag-28a30.pdf

When the country began to speak about the implantation of the concept of the plant platform with less impact on the environment, the prediction was to hold the first auction in 2011, with the hydroelectric plant São Luiz Tapajos, with 6,133 MW, with operation beginning in 2016. Three years later and a se- ries of environmental barriers, delays and legal feasibility studies dwindled the hydroelectric participation in recent auctions, the government begins to discuss a bid for a mega-plant located in the Tapajos River (PA) this year.

Project considered structuring and priority by the Council Resolution no. 3 of the Conselho Nacional de Política Energética (CNPE), São Luiz de Tapajos, if it leaves the drawing board, will have considerable weight for the country. Of the 19,917 MW of hydroelectric plant projects included in the Plano Decenal de En- ergia (PDE 2022), the plant will represent more than 30% capac- ity, predicted to begin eight years from now.

Beyond the considerable block of hydroelectric energy, São Luiz de Tapajos will also pose a challenge to Brazilian engineering. The project will be the first of the country to adopt the concept of a plant platform, a solution to preserve the environment of a region where most of the potential of the country, estimated at 260 GW, is located.

“The government works to bid this plant this year,” informed Maurício Tolmasquim, president of the Energy Research Company (EPE) soon after the last energy auction of 2013. Coordinated by Electrobras, the group responsible for the viability studies has until July 31st to conclude the work, according to the deadline set by the National Electrical Energy Agency (Aneel).

The previous deadline to deliver the studies to the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources was November 20th of last year. Studies of São Luiz de Tapajos as well as of the hydroelectric plant at Jotobá (2.338 MW), in the same river, were resumed in August 2013.

It is estimated that, with 6,133 MW, Sao Luiz de Tapajos will produce, per year, almost 30,000 GWh. The plant will have a flooded two thousand square meters area, leaving a protected area of approximately 100,000 square meters.

Plant concept

Environmental barriers to bid new hydroelectric plant projects led the government to make use of the model of the platform plant, which means doing a project stuck in a forest region. The concept seeks to avoid the creation of villages and urban cores around hydroelectric plants, with great mobilization of workers, as usually happens in works of this size.

In the construction phase of the plant-platform model pre- sented years ago by Márcio Zimmerman, executive secretary of the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME), the workers worked in shifts, being transported to the site by helicopter or by land. When operational, the plant would have an automated the whole operation, requiring the work of less people.

“The idea of the plant platform is under human intervention to the surrounding environment. In other words, there is no loss of forests to urbanization, which allows preservation,” explains Leontina Pinto, executive director of Ingenuity, Research, Development Consulting.

Additional costs

According to estimates of the market, the construction of the two hydroelectric plants, in the Tapajós River, should be around R$26 billion, with about R$15 billion to build São Luiz de Tapajos. This value could be even higher since the expansion of the project to 7,880 MW is under review. The final value depends, of course, on other variables that will be incorporated into the final design.

"I don’t know the extra costs associated with the platform concept, but transportation by air must be more expensive than that of conventional construction," says Professor Leontina Pinto. "Like every new concept, I believe that their implementation will have unforeseen adjustments - which will be known only in the long term," she adds.

Although he considers it crucial to the country to explore the hydroelectric potential of the Amazon region, João Carlos Mello, president of the Thymos Energy and Consulting, considers the model of the plant platform utopia. For him, there is still no calculation of the extra cost that a work of such scope would, mainly, by logistics, would involve.

“Certainly, there will be a high cost,” he says. For him, if the planning wants to return a bit of the reservoirs, Tapajós, with a set of seven plants that add up to a potential of 14,000 MW, is a good way. The professor, Leontina Pinto reinforces, affirming that  the model platform does not imply giving up reservoirs. According to her, the construction and operation of the plant platform only eliminates the environmental cost of the implan- tation of urban cores. "It does not prevent the construction of reservoirs, because you can have a huge flooded area without roads or towns done for the accommodation of workers," says the director of Ingenuity. For her, it is more than time for the country to discuss the energetic model it wants.

Must we give up the Amazonian potential and face a possible shortage, including the environmental cost of heavy thermoelectric generation? Should we seek a more balanced solution?” she questions.

Data from the article "Why Brazil is swapping hydroelectric plants and their reservoirs for more expensive and polluting energy?" written by Márcio Tancredi, and Omar Ahmed Abbus, the Legislative Advisory of the Senate, shows how the ability of the electric sector to accumulate water reservoirs is falling in the mills auctioned between 2000 and 2012.

Of the 42 projects bid in the period, with a total of 28,800 MW, only 10 plants, with 1,940 MW, have reservoirs. With 26,800 MW, the other 32 work with the flow of the river. Or, only 6.73% of the capacity of generation comes from plants with reservoirs.

Socioeconomic pressure

However, even with the proposed construction of the model that will be adopted, it would have to face the environmental and indigenous matters in the region. As with the Belo Monte Hydro- electric Plant (11,300 MW), on the Xingu River, social and environ- mental pressures will be part of the daily lives of the whole process of elaboration and bid of São Luiz Tapajós, located in the region of the Mundurukú Indians. In the Federal Public Prosecutor of Pará there are already actions against the installation of the plant.

"The difficulties to build hydroelectric plants on the Tapajos and Xingu rivers are the same. And similarly, there is no way to determine if the rule of optimum utilization was fulfilled in stud- ies of the Tapajos basin. It is possible that self-restriction of the reduction of costs and the ease of environmental licensing are usually induced have influenced the inventory of the basin," points out the article from the Senate Legislative Advisory.

BRAZIL NUT IMPROVES COGNITIVE FUNCTION IN ELDERLY PEOPLE

Does the scene reproduced above, keep occurring? A chestnut tree, which can produce 1000 kg of nuts per year, gives way to the cattle that will generate, at most, a few hundred pounds of meat per hectare/year.

The scene above shows a few Brazil nut trees left after deforestation. They will survive for less than twenty years! 

 Look at the results of the research on the effects of selenium on human health, as reported on DIÁRIO DA SAÚDE.

Selenium deficiency is compensated by daily consumption of just one from Brazil nut which  brings improvement of cognitive functions. USP (University of São Paulo) researchers found these effects working with elderly people with mild cognitive impairment (CCL, in Portuguese), considered an intermediate stage between normal aging and the dementias such as Alzheimer's disease.

The nutritionist Barbara Cardoso explains that the CCL (mild cognitive impairment) is characterized by cognitive loss (case involving attention, perception, memory, reasoning, judgment, imagination, thinking and language) higher than expected for his/her age.The analysis done by the nutritionist showed an association between levels of selenium and oxidative stress, excess free radicals compared with system protector of each cell-95% of seniors who participated in the research presented selenium deficiency.

For six months, the nutritionist accompanied two senior groups. The first ingested a Brazil nut per day and the other received no intervention. After the period, all participants in the group that consumed the daily nut did not present the selenium deficiency. The two groups were also submitted to neuropsychological assessment before and after intervention with the Brazil nuts, to assess factors such as verbal fluency, ability to copy drawings, recognition of figures, among others.

The results showed that the consumption of Brazil nuts mitigated the cognitive decline, with the group that ingested chestnut featuring systematically better results.

According to nutritionist, "just a Brazil nut supplies 288.75 micrograms of selenium daily, increasing the consumption of selenium in addition to the RDA (55 micrograms / day).