New sources of energy are constantly being discovered. And some are pretty inventive.  

From soccer balls to pigs to human body heat, here are some of the strangest alternative energy sources we've recently come across.  

A soccer ball

Soccket Inc. created a soccer ball that contains an inductive coil that captures energy when the ball is hit. Fifteen minutes of play provides 3 hours of LED light.

Source: Soccket

Animals' behinds

Farmers are converting the methane from their herds' waste and converting it to energy.

Source: Business Insider 

Inmates

A prison in suburban Sao Paolo, Brazil, is having convicts pedal bikes to power some of the town's street lamps.

Source: TimesLeader.com

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Western forests could be facing a 100-year drought, turning to scrubland by the end of the century – and taking their ability to soak up carbon with them, according to a new study.

The new research, published in Nature Geoscience July 29, suggests the western evergreen forests, which cover an area from southern Canada to northern Mexico, took up a lot less carbon from the atmosphere during the drought that lasted from 2000-2004. That's normal, and expected. The question is what happens after that.

Christopher Schwalm and his colleagues at Northern Arizona University's School of Earth Science and Environmental Sustainability think that there is a good chance the drought could be the new normal. If that happens, a big carbon sink will be lost.

Drought of 2000

The group calculated that during the drought of 2000-2004, the amount of carbon the western forests took up dropped by between 30 million and 298 million metric tons per year. Ordinarily they would take up between 177 million and 623 million metric tons. By comparison, a 2011 study from the U.S. Forest Service estimated the global sink from forests is between 2 billion and 2.8 billion metric tons per year. [Images Reveal Forests' True Colors]

There's a lot of uncertainty in those measurements, but even assuming the smallest loss and the highest carbon uptake — which is unlikely — it still means a non-trivial dent in the amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere.

A lengthy drought will cause a big dieback of the evergreen forests that are familiar to hikers and skiers, bringing in vegetation that will likely more resemble a desert scrubland. Those kinds of plants take up carbon, but not as well as forests do.

Climate change is the likely culprit for such a long drought, or "megadrought" that lasts decades, say the researchers. As the climate warms, many areas that were dry become drier, and some that were wet become wetter. Not only have the last three decades contained some of the hottest years on record, the amount of rainfall in western North America might drop – a lot.

The result is that where mountainous forests previously recovered from long drought events — such as the one in the 12th century that may have resulted in the abandonment of the ancient towns of the southwest — that might not happen again in the future. Or at least, not on a time scale that's helpful to humans. [The Worst Droughts in US History]

If people don't cut back emissions or mitigate the die-off somehow, the result will probably be an increase in the rate of carbon-dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere, leading to greater warming, Schwalm told LiveScience.

Schwalm and his team used several sources of data to get their estimates, such as Fluxnet, a network of sensors run by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory; the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware; and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

What's to come

The idea was to gather all of the best estimates for the carbon flux — the rate at which carbon enters and leaves the atmosphere — in the region in question. For example, the Department of Agriculture measures crop yields, and knowing that gives a good estimate of how much carbon (in the form of food) was sequestered by agricultural land. In the forests, the Fluxnet sensor towers measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in a forest, which can then be compared with other locations.

The study also looked at the severe the turn-of-the-century drought using the "Palmer Drought Severity Index," which measures precipitation, runoff and other factors. Taking a five-year average, and using indicators such as tree-ring data, Schwalm found that this most recent drought of 2000-2004 was as bad as any since about the year 1200.

That doesn't bode well; there is a real possibility given current trends that this drought could be one of those that lasts decades, or even a century, he said.

Even that wouldn't be so bad for the forest, but he noted that it's important that the kind of forests that exist change after each of these drought cycles. The evergreen species we see now in the four corners region are probably different from those that were there 1,500 years ago.

There are several mitigation strategies, such as "industrial forestry" – using specially bred trees, for instance, to re-forest the areas where diebacks occur. And there will be some adaptation on the part of the plants. But there are limits in terms of how "plastic" or amenable to changing these plants will be. "A lot of species are a lot more plastic than we give them credit for," Schwalm said. "But at a certain point the plasticity fails."

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• Dry and Dying: Images of Drought
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The Androscoggin River flows nearly 170 miles, beginning in New Hampshire and continuing through Maine before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean.

In the 1960s, it was considered one of the most polluted rivers in the country.

Paper and textile mills located along the river's banks released oxygen-depleting chemicals that killed fish and led to algae blooms that made some sections of river impossible to swim in. The lingering stench of rotten eggs was another symptom of pollution.

Androscoggin's decline served as a catalyst for the Clean Water Act passed in 1972. One year later, photographer Charles Steinhacker documented evidence of water pollution along the Androscoggin River for the Environmental Protection Agency. The following pictures are from this set taken around June in 1973.  

Although the river is much cleaner than it used to be, it has never met state or federal standards for clean water. Water quality continues to be a key issue. 

The Androscoggin River Flows between the cities of Auburn and Lewiston in Southeastern Maine. Lewiston Is the state's second largest city and textile center.

The third largest river in Maine is a popular destination for kayakers and trout fishers; it also has a history of severe pollution.

From above, the Oxford Paper Company Mill in the town of Rumford on the Androscoggin River.

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A prominent scientist who was skeptical of the evidence that climate change was real, let alone that it was caused by humans, now says he has made a "total turnaround." Richard Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, says he has become convinced that "the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct," and that humans are "almost entirely the cause" of that warming.

Muller co-founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) team two years ago in order to independently assess what he viewed as questionable evidence of global warming. In a series of papers published last year, BEST presented their statistical analysis of 1.6 billion temperature reports spanning the last 200 years, controlling for possible biases in the data that are often cited by skeptics as reasons to doubt the reality of global warming.

Their analysis indicated that global warming is real — that the average global land temperature has risen by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.4 degrees Celsius) since 1750, including 1.5 degrees F (0.9 degrees Celsius) in the past 50 years. The numbers closely agree with the findings of past studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA and others; but finally, they were rigorous enough to satisfy Muller.

Now, in a brand new study that probed the causes of that warming, the BEST team says it has cleared from blame the natural variations in Earth's climate that so often get implicated by skeptics. Muller and his colleagues implicate carbon dioxide emissions by humans as essentially the sole cause of global warming.

"The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we've tried," he wrote Saturday (July 28) in a New York Times editorial. "Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don't prove causality and they shouldn't end skepticism, but they raise the bar: To be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does."

That's a high bar indeed. In graphs released with the new study, a red line representing the atmospheric concentration of CO2 crawls across the decades almost exactly tracing the black line representing the observed warming of the Earth. [What Are Climate Change Skeptics Still Skeptical About?]

By comparison, the study found that natural variability, including variations in the solar cycle, El Niño events and the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (shifts in sea-surface temperatures that run in cycles), could have accounted for no more than 0.17 degrees Celsius of temperature variation — either warming or cooling — during the past 150 years. These natural forces are much subtler than the warming seen during the same time period.

In fact, the new results indicate that humans have been warming the Earth for longer than climate scientists previously thought certain. "In its 2007 report, the [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans," Muller wrote. "It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural."

Not so, according to the new findings; variations in solar activity have a negligible effect on Earth's temperature. The handiwork is almost all our own.

"I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered," Muller wrote. "I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done."

Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover or Life's Little Mysteries @llmysteries. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

• The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted
• 5 Ways the World Will Change Radically This Century
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This woman is Sherry Vargson, and in this video she is lighting her water on fire as it comes out of the faucet. The water is flammable because of increased methane levels, which she says are caused by fracking. Science, though, isn't so sure.

The video was posted by the "Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition" whose mission statement on their YouTube channel says: "We educate people on the negative effects of gas drilling," so obviously they have an agenda. But, this isn't the first, only, or most shocking example of people with flammable water.

A study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in May of last year did find a link between fracking and methane contamination of the drinking water supply. The study specifically looked at the Marcellus and Utica shale formations, throughout the northeast, including Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and West Virginia. Other studies have come to different conclusions.

The woman (and faucet) in this video are at a farm in Granville Township, which is on the Marcellus shale formation. The video description says that "Chesapeake Energy has drilled one well and installed compressor and metering stations and a gathering pipeline," in the area. "She said her water became contaminated with methane after maintenance activities at the site in June 2010."

She says that before the installations, the methane in the water tested at 0.01 milligrams per liter, and now the water tests as high as 64 milligrams per liter. "Obviously something has changed." The video is a part of "The Marcus Shale Reality Tour."

Basically, science isn't settled about methane contamination. A recent story claimed that "The Whole Fracking Debate Is Based On Bad Science," that both gas companies and opponents twist facts and rely on bad science, sometimes misleading the public. From the story: 

Lubell said the situation, which happens on both sides of a debate, is called "motivated reasoning." Rational people insist on believing things that aren't true, in part because of feedback from other people who share their views, he said.

Vengosh noted the problem of spinning science isn't new, or limited to one side in the gas drilling controversy. For example, industry supporters have claimed that drilling never pollutes water wells, when state regulators have confirmed cases where it has. He says the key point is that science is slow, and research into gas drilling's many possible effects are in the early stages, and much more work remains to be done.

"Everyone takes what they want to see," Vengosh said, adding that he hopes that the fracking debate will become more civilized as scientists obtain more hard data.

So, basically, take this video with a grain of salt.

See Also: The Whole Fracking Debate Is Based On Bad Science >

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Sewage is nasty work, but Namon Nassef has built his career on finding innovative ways to clean it up. The 64-year-old engineer is the inventor of the Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) system, a product that will revolutionize how transportation systems dispose of human waste.

The machine uses excess engine heat to break down sewage from boats, buses, recreational vehicles, trains and airplanes and convert that fluid into clean water vapor. Think of it like a miniature wastewater treatment plant, except it leaves behind no odors, solids or other chemicals that pollute the environment. 

Nassef's product was recognized by Popular Science magazine in 2011 as one of the “Top Inventions of the Year.” The model he's working with today is even cleaner and more compact.  

“It’s a green technology because it reuses energy that would be discarded. By making that one gallon of diesel fuel or jet fuel do something more than just move the vehicle — the train, boat or aircraft — you've also eliminated sewage that was generated on board,”  Nassef explains. “This is completely different than anything out there.”

We think so, too.

THE BEGINNING

The first ZLD prototype was about the size of an office desk, dreamed up by Nassef while in graduate school at the University of Oklahoma in the early 1970s.

The objective was to use waste energy to eliminate sewage. But the technology, things like microprocessors and computers, was not readily available. "It took a while for the technology to develop,” he said. 

In the meantime, Nassef got to work on building his own company, Nassef Engineering & Equipment.

He also got around to purchasing a small recreational boat for his family to go water skiing. When the boat broke and needed its engine replaced, Nassef remembered the patent he had worked on in college. He thought, why not adapt the new engine to the ZLD system? So Nassef went back to his office, sketched up a diagram and carried it to a machine shop.

Twenty years, eleven prototypes and several thousand dollars later, the environmental engineer has a production unit that can eliminate up to 300 gallons of sewage per day. The model is about 8 inches tall, 15 inches wide and 24 inches long, or about the size of a medium suitcase. It weighs less than 100 pounds.  

THE ZLD SYSTEM

Any vehicle that’s equipped with a toilet or sink has a sewage holding tank. The tank is used as means of temporary storage before the sewage can be dumped at a municipal plant. By evaporating sewage, the small, lightweight ZLD unit eliminates the needs for large holding tanks (freeing up space and making the vehicle lighter), and in turn, reduces the load on sewage treatment plants.

The only thing the technology depends on is a machine that produces sufficient waste heat. This is heat for which no other application is found, typically produced from generators or the burning of transport fuels (See how the ZLD system turns wastewater into water vapor). 

Thus, the system can be installed anywhere from tour buses and ocean liners (the technology has already been certified by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Environmental Protection Agency for use on ships) to offshore platforms and remote military bases where generators supply power to several hundred men in temporary quarters. But nowhere will the benefits of ZLD be more clearly seen than in the commercial airline industry.

REVOLUTIONIZING TRAVEL

Currently, the only way to get rid of sewage on an airplane is to store it on the aircraft. Keep in mind that waste generated on a plane is about seven times more concentrated than waste dumped at a municipal plant. That’s because it’s typically flushed with urine instead of water. This creates a great deal of work when the plane lands. It requires someone to suck out all the waste from the tank, clean it and finally use a myriad of disinfectants so the waste won’t smell.

Now imagine an aircraft equipped with Nassef’s ZLD unit. If you’re able to eliminate sewage as the plane is flying, that plane gets lighter and lighter (both because the tank is smaller and there’s less stuff in the tank). If that plane could be made lighter, it would get better fuel economy. And now, when the plane lands, it doesn’t need someone to empty the holding tank or chemicals to keep it from stinking up the aircraft. It also increases the capacity of the municipal plant where that load would normally be dumped.

“Airplanes generate so much waste energy from the exhaust that they’re not using. That energy could be used to completely eliminate sewage before the plane ever lands,” Nassef said.

For perspective, a small aircraft engine produces 3 million cubic feet of exhaust gas per minute. The ZLD system only needs around 1,000 cubic feet of exhaust gas per minute to convert solid waste in water vapor.

“If you look at the number of aircraft in the world, it would make a tremendous impact – millions of dollars a year in fuel savings alone.”   

This isn’t even counting the impact of smaller holding tanks, reduced chemical and labor costs, and less time on a tarmac as a result of an easier loading and unloading process.

THE FUTURE

Nassef is currently looking for investors to go into full-scale manufacturing. The first markets he plans to pursue are tour buses and RVs. The next would be the marine industry, including tugs boats, ferry boats and cruise ships. Airplanes would be down the line — although Nassef says if he were able to find investors in the next two months, he could physically put a unit on an aircraft within a year. 

For now, Nassef continues to travel around the country with his demonstration trailer, hoping that other visionaries will see the application of his invention.

“There are no examples where technology is being used right now,” said Nassef. “We have the opportunity to produce a product in United States that nobody else has, but is applicable worldwide.”

See how the ZLD system works >

See our list of Game Changers: 30 Innovations That Will Change The World >

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Namon Nassef's Zero Liquid Discharge system uses engine heat to convert wastewater into water vapor. It's an invention seven years and several hundred thousands dollars in the making that could revolutionize how we dispose of sewage on buses, cruise ships, trains and airplanes.  

Nassef has set up a demonstration trailer (pictured below) to show how the eco-friendly sewage elimination system works.

First, sewage moves through a pipe into a small equalization tank. The equalization tank keeps the waste completely mixed. It also starts the grinding process, which reduces solids down into very tiny particles that are about 0.065 inch or less in diameter.

The mixture of liquid and small particles then moves from the receiving tank to the machine's homogenizer (the white plastic cylinder on the right next to the equalization tank). This component dissolves the tiny particles into even smaller particles. Nothing that leaves the homogenizer is larger than the ball in a ball point pen.

The fluid is then sent to an injection pump (the white plastic module on the left). The injection pump pressurizes the fluid and sends it through a nozzle into the hot exhaust stream of the heat source. In the demonstration trailer, a diesel generator is used for the heat source.

In the final stage, the engine's exhaust heat flash evaporates the fluid, killing 99.9 percent of the bacteria without chemicals. What's produced is water vapor and a little bit of mineral ash, which goes out with the exhaust. There's nothing to dump from the holding tank.  

The current ZLD unit can eliminate up to 300 gallons of sewage per day, which is more than capable of handling the 20 gallons of waste produced on a 65-passenger bus, says Nassef. 

Below is a picture of the current ZLD production unit on its own, equipped for buses. 

Meet Namon Nassef, the man behind the machine >

See our list of Game Changers: 30 Innovations That Will Change The World >

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Facebook has, for the first time, revealed the carbon footprint of its operations and its more than 900m users' likes, photo albums and status updates.

The data, published on Wednesday, shows that despite the social networking's rising star, its carbon emissions are still a fraction of internet rival Google. Facebook's annual emissions were 285,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2011, compared with Google's 1.5m tons in 2010.

The vast majority of the emissions (72%) come from the company's data centres in the US. The annual footprint for each user that's active monthly is 269 grams, or around the equivalent footprint of a cup of coffee, the company calculated.

Facebook also detailed the mix of energy sources that power its data centres. The majority, 27%, comes from coal power, with the rest coming from renewable sources (23%), gas (17%), nuclear (13%) and the remaining 20% uncategorised.

Greenpeace welcomed the move's transparency and hailed it as an important benchmark. Gary Cook, Greenpeace International's senior IT analyst, said: "Facebook has committed to being fully renewably powered, and today's detailed disclosure and announcement of a clean energy target shows that the company means business and wants the world to follow its progress."

In October 2011, Facebook announced it would build a "green" data centre in Sweden, taking advantage of the country's cold climate to keep servers cool – one of the most energy intensive elements of data centre operations.

As computing has moved from local machines to "the cloud", the real world environmental impact of hosting so much data has come under increasing scrutiny from green campaigners. Apple earlier this year disclosed the energy use of its data centre in North Carolina that powers its iCloud service.

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

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John Nelson of IDV Solutions is an expert at turning raw data into visually-stunning risk maps.

You may remember his maps of the the world's earthquakes since 1898 or the biggest tornado risks. 

"Once a really interesting data set pops up, mostly it's just me wanting to see what it looks like," Nelson tells us.  

For his latest masterpiece, the designer culled information from an instrument on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites called Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers. Along with taking images of Earth, the sensors collect thermal information twice a day. It can even detect unusually high temperatures associated with burning fires.   

Click here to see the maps > 

Retaining information of fires greater than 100 megawatts, Nelson mapped the location and intensity of major fires for the last 11 years.

"Each dot represents a moment of pretty extreme heat, down to the one square kilometer level," Nelson explains on his blog. 

The fires' magnitude is compared to the typical summertime output of an American nuclear plant, which is around 1,000 megawats. The colors move from purple to pink to red to orange to yellow as the fires strengthen in intensity.  

A chart in the bottom right-hand corner shows the proportion of fires by year, which illustrates an overall upward trend. Over the last decade, 2011 had by far the largest number of major fires and even though 2012 is less than half way through it seems to be on track to outpace last year.  

2001

2002

2003

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So-called "fire rainbows" are neither on fire nor are they rainbows, but they sure are stunning.

They are technically known as iridescent clouds, a relatively rare phenomenon caused by clouds of water droplets of nearly uniform size, according to a release by NASA. These clouds diffract, or bend, light in a similar manner, which separates out light into different wavelengths, or colors.

That makes them similar to rainbow-colored glories, which are also formed by diffraction, and also produce an oscillating pattern of colors ranging from blue to green to red to purple and back to blue again.

Although iridescent clouds have rainbow-like colors, the way light is scattered to produce them is slightly different. Rainbows are formed by refraction and reflection. When light is refracted, it is bent by passing through mediums of different densities, such as water or a prism. Reflected light bounces off a surface at an angle equal to the angle it hit the surface at. Diffraction, though, involves light waves being scattered into a ring-like pattern.

As with other iridescent objects, like peacock feathers, the color changes depending upon one's position relative to the sun and the object.

Iridescence usually occurs in newly formed clouds. That appears to be the case here as well. According to the Weather Channel, these are pileus clouds caused by a fast-growing thunderstorm that shoved air into the upper atmosphere through a layer of moisture. This created a fog-like cloud that looks like a glowing dome atop the thunderstorm.

Iridescent clouds are not to be confused with circumhorizontal arcs, which form bands of color parallel to the horizon.

The phenomenon was captured in a photo taken on Tuesday (July 31) in the clouds over South Florida.

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• Weirdo Weather: 7 Rare Weather Events
• Video: Double Rainbow, Now With Lightning!
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Scientists have previously suggested that climate change leads to heavy rain and flooding. A new study provides more evidence of this link. 

The study, "When It Rains, It Pours: Global Warming and the Increase in Extreme Precipitation from 1948 to 2011," analyzed more than 80 million daily precipitation records from weather stations across the United States and found that extreme downpours are now happening 30 percent more often nationwide than in 1948.

The alarming research suggests that humans curb emissions to hold off a public health crisis.

Nevertheless, there seems to be no chance of passing climate change legislation.

A warmer atmosphere evaporates water more quickly and holds more moisture, which increases the frequency and intensity of the biggest rain and snow storms.

Large rain or snowstorms that happened once every 12 months, on average, in the middle of the 20th century now happen every nine months.

New England has experienced the greatest change – the frequency of intense rain or snowstorms nearly doubled in Vermont and Rhode Island, and more than doubled in New Hampshire since 1948.

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Gawker's Neetzan Zimmerman came across this photo posted by Oklahoma's KFOR-TV to its Facebook page.  

Yes, those are street lights — melting!

The photo is from Stillwater, Oklahoma, where AccuWeather.com says it is currently 103°F. But if feels like 113°F.

Oklahoma, like many parts of the country, continues to swelter under record-breaking heat. The mercury hit 112°F in Oklahoma City on August 1, tying a record set in 1936.  

UPDATE: A commenter pointed out that the bulbs are melting due to a nearby dumpster fire. Still, Patrick Hunter, the reader who sent in the photos believes the drooping was caused by the combined effects of the sun's heat and the close-by fire. He writes on KFOR-TV's Facebook page:

Being the person that actually took this photo, I'd say that this was due to a fire semi-close by coupled with the unbelievable heat we are experiencing. Still an amazing photo and not fake as many are saying on here. Enjoy!

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A virtually tasteless gelatinous mass doesn't sound that great, does it? That's why they call it the miracle noodle instead. This latest diet-food craze is being used as a replacement for traditional noodles and rice in some American homes, but originally came from Japan. They are called shirataki.

From Rocket News 24:

It’s produced in warm subtropical regions of Asia made from a plant that goes by many names and kind of resembles a yam. The plant is then ground into a powder and made into a gelatin like substance.  Naturally this gelatin is white colored but because hijiki is added it gains a rather unappealing grey hue.

Although the healthy nature of Konjac is well known in Japan, its general lack of taste relegates it to simply adding texture to dishes like sukiyaki.  It’s hardly considered a food that stands on its own.  Depending on the dish it’s either added in its slab form or in a thin noodle form called Ito Konnyaku (Thread Konjac) or Shirataki.

Leave to the US to take this food stuff and sexify it to the nth degree.  Goodbye Shirataki, and hello “Miracle Noodles!”

These noodles are calorie-free, all natural. They have barely any flavor, similar to a rice noodle. They are available in many different styles: angel hair, fettuccine, even as a 'rice' substitute. They don't need to be cooked, really just rinsed off. They can be used in warm or cold dishes, from pasta salads to Ramen.

Because they don't have calories, but they do have fiber and fill you up, replacing regular pasta with "miracle noodles" would help lower the glyceimic index of a meal, which is very important for diabetics.

Be sure to mix them with lots of veggies, since they have no vitamins or minerals. They do have lots of fiber (they are practically Metamucil tubes), so be careful about how much you eat in one sitting — in Japan they are known as a "stomach broom" because of their high fiber content.

The news from the internet on this new fad is mixed.

Snack Girl doesn't like the texture:

How did they taste? They don’t taste like anything which is what you would expect. They do remind one of pasta, but not enough to convince you that you are eating real pasta.

They are far too gelatinous for me. The Miracle Rice is like eating little squid eyeballs (not that I’ve ever eaten squid eyeballs).

Now, I know that these noodles have saved people’s diets because they convince you that you are eating zero calorie carbs. I’m just not sure they are worth it but I don't think they are unhealthy.

Annie Lowrey of Slate was also left with a queasy feeling, saying the so called-miracles fall into pasta's own "uncanny valley":

It is pasta; it is not pasta. The noodles are the same, and yet different. The feeling is of recognition and alienation, attraction and repulsion. Freud called it Das Unheimliche—the uncanny. I have never yet found another foodstuff to cause cognitive dissonance, and yes I have eaten a Chicken McNugget.

That lesson is the important part of eating shirataki, though not one they tell you on the package: It is not pasta, and any attempt to eat it like pasta will just leave you feeling queasy. So dieters dying for something, anything noodle-like, have at it with gleeful abandon! Everybody else, well, you might just want to eat a little less of the real thing.

On the other hand, many people swear by them. Hungry-girl likes the tofu variety, saying, "Yes, this low-carb pasta swap is a bit "bouncier" and slightly more slippery than conventional noodles... But if you eat lots of pasta (or want to eat lots of pasta!), give these noodles a try."

Mike Adams At NaturalNews.com says:

I then used the noodles in a few recipes, including a soup recipe and an Italian pasta recipe. My verdict? They're great!

But you have to understand the context here: They don't taste like wheat noodles or grain pasta. In fact, they have virtually no taste at all.

Perhaps the difference is in the brand? You can probably find them at a local specialty food store, or they are available online at miraclenoodle.com. You can find tofu varieties on House Foods.

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On Aug. 6, 1945, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The blast killed around 140,000 people and ravaged 90 percent of the city. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. An estimated 40,000 more perished.

That was 67 years ago today. More than half a century later the threat of nuclear weapons remains a challenge.  

Jump straight to the pictures > 

In order "to keep the reality of our post-atomic era fresh and omnipresent," Los Angeles-based photographer Clay Lipsky created a series of photographs in which he imagines a world where people gather to watch atomic bomb explosions. Tourists flood the Internet with cell-phone images of close-up mushroom clouds, in turn, bringing "new levels of desensitization" to the threat of nuclear weapons.   

"I am not trying to be 'shocking' in fact I feel my series is more sarcastic than anything else," Lipsky told us in an email. "We live in an interesting time and our perceptions are very much influenced by visual media. Hopefully people will see deeper into 'Atomic Overlook' and not just take it for face value."

The composite photos use shots taken over the last eight years as the artist traveled around the world.

No tourists were harmed in the making of this series, Lipsky jokes.  

You can see Lipsky's full artist statement here and more of his work on his website. 

[via io9]

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Gold and other valuable metals hidden within mountain ranges can now be discovered through 3D computer models, says an Israeli researcher who developed the software for them.

Mountain ranges are notoriously difficult environments in which to hunt valuable minerals, but the new approach already has revealed a deposit of more than 500,000 tons of metals on the southern slope of the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian seas. The reserve includes copper, zinc, lead, aluminum, and a mixture of gold and silver, investigators say.

The 3D models are based on data gathered from other methods already used to hunt for such underground resources as metals, oil, gas or water, researcher Lev Eppelbaum, a geophysicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, explained. There are a number of ways to detect the presence of metals — for instance, measuring how magnetic fields vary over the Earth's surface.

Scientists also can look for gravitational variations. The strength of Earth's gravitational field on any point of the planet's surface varies on the density of the underlying matter, and the density of polymetallic ore, which consists of more than one metal, exceeds that of the surrounding rocks. Satellites can provide a measure of how the Earth's gravitational field varies over its surface by the changes in their orbits as they pass overhead.

However, when it comes to mountain ranges, the mapping of magnetic and gravitational fields can easily get thrown off by changes in the altitude of the landscape, surrounding temperature, and air pressure, Eppelbaum said.

To analyze such complex, rough terrain, Eppelbaum and colleague Boris Khesin of Ben Gurion University in Israel developed new mathematical approaches to process the information gathered from already existing methods. Their specially designed software then allows researchers to interpret all this data in a cohesive 3D model.

"This 3D combined modeling software, which we programmed ourselves, enables scientists to see the buried targets more clearly," Eppelbaum said.

The system essentially focuses on eliminating different types of "noise" from multiple sources of data to get a clearer picture of anomalies underground.

"This interpreting system has been specially developed for complex geological environments," Eppelbaum told InnovationNewsDaily.

In addition to the Caucasus, Eppelbaum said, the software could be applied to mountainous regions such as the Appalachian Mountains in the United States and Canada or the Alps in Europe. He now plans to collaborate with geophysicists worldwide to discover new mineral reserves around the world. [Shortage of Rare Metals Could Threaten High-Tech Innovation]

"These reserves are very valuable resources for countries to discover," Eppelbaum said.

Gaps in geophysical data remain a major hurdle for researchers, however. For instance, when it comes to the Caucasus, some valuable information is not available, such as on uranium deposits of the northern Caucasus. "The last data on oil and gas developments in the Caucasian region are also unacceptable," Eppelbaum said.

The findings by Eppelbaum and Khesin, who died in 2010, were detailed at the European Geosciences Conference in Vienna in April and in their book "Geophysical Studies in the Caucasus."

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A massive typhoon that hit Manila, Philippines' capital city, has brought torrential rainfall and floods, affecting more than 1.2 million. Rivers swelled and landslides have engulfed a large part of the area.

In the picture below, a military helicopter is looking for trapped residents in a suburb just east of the city.

Over 800,000 residents have been displaced, according to Democracy Now. Many have been left to fend for themselves in water that is muddy and at least waist high.

The AP reports that 23 have been killed from the flooding, and over 50 have died over the past week from the flood and the Typhoon, according to Time. Rains briefly subsided today, allowing rescue boats to enter the city to try and bring some of the displaced residents to safety.

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HANOI (Reuters) - The United States and Vietnam on Thursday began cleaning up the toxic chemical defoliant Agent Orange on part of Danang International Airport, marking the first time Washington has been involved in cleaning up Agent Orange in Vietnam.

The U.S. military sprayed up to 12 million gallons of the defoliant onto Vietnam's jungles over a 10-year period during the Vietnam War, and the question of compensation for the subsequent health problems is a major post-war issue.

Respiratory cancer and birth defects amongst both Vietnamese and U.S. veterans have been linked to exposure to Agent Orange.

The U.S. government is providing $41 million to the project which will reduce the contamination level in 73,000 cubic meters of soil by late 2016, the ruling Vietnam Communist Party's mouthpiece Nhan Dan daily said.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has awarded contracts to two U.S. companies to work on the project along with Vietnam defense ministry officials, the U.S. embassy said.

Danang in Vietnam's central region is a popular tourist destination. During the Vietnam War, that ended in 1975, the beach city was used as a recreational spot for U.S. soldiers.

Agent Orange was stored at Danang airbase and sprayed from U.S. warplanes to expose northern communist troops and destroy their supplies in jungles along the border with Laos.

(Reporting by Ho Binh Minh; Editing by Michael Perry)

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Wild geoengineering schemes may aim to reverse global warming by reflecting sunlight into space or storing excess carbon dioxide, but they won't spare humanity from living through climate change in the next several decades. That means humans must adapt to life in a world where droughts hit harder, floodwaters rise higher and entire island nations may sink beneath the waves.

Some adaptation ideas resemble science fiction made real — growing crops inside city buildings, floating villages and genetically engineered crops. Other solutions, such as floating agriculture and traditional species cross-breeding, draw upon the long history of human adaptation rather than futuristic technologies.

Waterworld homes: When the waters rise, tomorrow's buildings may rise with them as floating structures. Koen Olthuis, head of Waterstudio.NL, has begun working on projects ranging from floating apartments in the Netherlands to a floating mosque in the United Arab Emirates. The Netherlands firm has also designed a series of floating hotels, conference centers and other buildings for the Maldives, an island country in the Indian Ocean that faces complete submersion by 2080.

Another pioneering Dutch firm, Dura Vermeer, has already made floating buildings such as a greenhouse and an entire amphibious village in the Netherlands — all using many layers of plastic foam arranged into floating grids that are able to support concrete structures. Such technologies provide a new twist to the ancient human practice of building homes on stilts in perennially flooded countries such as Bangladesh.

Underground cities: Mucking about like imaginary mole people may sound unappealing, but moving more cities underground could offer added protection from the harsher extremes of climate change. Putting power lines underground has already made the difference for many cities between having electricity and seeing the lights go out in the aftermath of severe storms — and megacities such as Hong Kong also see the added bonus of saving on space by moving power stations and water reservoirs below the surface.

Life underground could even resemble more of a pastoral paradise rather than a grim dystopian film. One group of U.S. entrepreneurs has proposed building a "LowLine" park in an abandoned trolley station in New York City. A fiber optic cable could not only direct sunlight into the underground area to help trees and plants grow, but also screen out harmful ultraviolet rays — and electric lighting could help out during cloudy days or at night. [5 Skyscrapers for a Greener Future]

Floating farms: Bangladesh's 140 million people have already learned to live with climate change the hard way in a country where much of the land is less than 16 feet above sea level. Floods cover one- fourth of the country in an average year, and as much as 60 percent every four or five years. That has forced Bangladesh's farmers to create a homegrown adaptation to live in a world of rising seas and worse flooding — floating agriculture.

Farmers build floating rafts out of straw, rice stubble and a weed called water hyacinth, before adding upper layers of decaying waterworts to act as manure. The rafts become moveable floating surfaces that replace flooded agricultural land and can actually produce much more crops than traditional fields — an idea other countries might adapt with their own local twists.

Smart energy: A warming planet means many homes and businesses will use more energy and spend more on electricity bills to keep cool. Tomorrow's power grids must not only connect to new sources of clean energy — such as renewable solar, wind, tidal or geothermal power — but also become smarter to juggle the mix of old and new energy sources and respond quickly to changing energy demands at different times of day.

Some smart grids may represent more intelligent versions of the huge, central power grids that dominate industrialized countries. Others may pop up as smaller microgrids based on local energy sources such as solar or wind power, but are still capable of networking together to send energy to where it's needed.

Vertical farms: Many farmers can expect more severe droughts and a growing swarm of crop-damaging pests in a warmer climate. One possible solution comes from a formerly fringe idea that has begun to catch on across the world — vertical farms that consist of many levels reaching skyward (or even underground).

The vertical farms provide an indoor, controlled climate to grow crops in a space-saving setup that can prove more efficient than growing crops in open fields, said Dickson Despommier, a microbiologist and ecologist at Columbia University who helped pioneer the vertical farm movement. Countries such as the U.S., Sweden, the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea and Singapore have all begun experimenting with their own vertical farms.

Climate-adapted crops: Crops don't have to move indoors to survive if they can adapt to the droughts and temperature shifts of climate change. Drought-resistant corn that is able to grow with less water has already debuted in different versions from companies such as Monsanto, DuPont and Sygenta. The agribusiness giants have begun investing billions of dollars in genetically engineering "climate-ready" crops to resist drought, flooding, heat, cold and salt — an effort spanning 1,633 patents as of 2010, according to a report by the ETC Group.

Climate-adaptation can also come from identifying ideal traits in existing crops without genetic engineering, changing breeding tactics for crops, and planting a more diverse range of resilient crops. The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the University of California-Davis used marker-assisted selection to identify a flood-tolerant gene in an Indian rice variety and move it to other rice crops. In another case, the African Rice Center has cross-bred Asian and African rice species to create more heat- and drought-tolerant crops.

You can follow InnovationNewsDaily Senior Writer Jeremy Hsu on Twitter @ScienceHsu. Follow InnovationNewsDaily on Twitter @News_Innovation, or on Facebook.

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Double rainbows had their fifteen minutes of fame on the Internet. Now get ready for their even more mysterious cousins: twinned rainbows. New research has suggested an explanation for these exotic shows of color.

Rainbows are known to form when sunlight interacts with tiny water drops in the atmosphere. As sunlight gets both reflected and refracted within the drops, it gets separated into its basic color components. Still, all the secrets of the more complex behavior of rainbows have long remained a puzzle.

The most common rainbow has a single arc. The less common double rainbow, which consists of two separate, concentric arcs, has inspired Internet memes. Triple and quadruple rainbows have even been spotted. Even rarer, however, is the twinned rainbow, where two arcs split from a single base rainbow.

"Everyone has seen rainbows, even double rainbows, and they continue to fascinate the scientific community," said researcher Wojciech Jarosz, a research scientist at Disney Research in Zürich. "Sometimes, when the conditions are just right, we can observe extremely exotic rainbows, such as a twinned rainbow. Until now, no one has really known why such rainbows occur."

Accidental discovery

Computer models of these natural wonders are helping Jarosz and his colleagues explain how twinned rainbows arise. The discovery was unintentional.

"In the course of us investigating and researching rainbows for graphics applications, we were really surprised to ultimately find out that rainbows were not fully understood," Jarosz told OurAmazingPlanet. "We are really excited that we were able to actually give some insight into a more purely scientific puzzle."

The international team of researchers studied the virtual rainbows for use in applications such as animated movies and video games, considering the physical shape of water drops and their complex interactions with light.

"Previous simulations have assumed that raindrops are spherical. While this can easily explain the rainbow and even the double rainbow, it cannot explain the twinned rainbow," Jarosz said.

Actual raindrops flatten as they fall because of air resistance. This flattening is more pronounced in larger drops. Such large water drops end up resembling the shape of hamburgers, earning them the name "burgeroids."

"It's not a very mathematical term, but we like to use it," said study researcher Henrik Wann Jensen, a computer graphics researcher at the University of California, San Diego.

The key to the mystery of twinned rainbows is the combination of different sizes of water drops falling from the sky.

"Sometimes two rain showers combine," Jarosz said in a statement. "When the two are composed of different sized raindrops, each set of raindrops produces slightly deformed rainbows, which combine to form the elusive twinned rainbow."

"We are the first to present an accurate simulation of twinned rainbows," said team member Iman Sadeghi, a software engineer at Google in Santa Monica.

Rainbow array

The software not only reproduced twinned rainbows seen in photographs, but a vast array of other kinds of rainbows as well.

"This goes beyond computer graphics," Jensen said in a statement. "We now have an almost complete picture of how rainbows form."

Although these simulations appear to explain twinned rainbows, "we have not validated this physically," Jarosz cautioned. "It would be nice to actually show that by manually producing showers with two raindrop sizes does in fact produce this effect."

The scientists will detail their findings Aug. 8 at the SIGGRAPH 2012 conference in Los Angeles.

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About 1.7 billion people rely on aquifers that are rapidly being depleted and would take thousands of years to refill, according to a new study in the journal Nature. 

The report, "Water balance of global aquifers revealed by groundwater footprint," identifies aquifers in the U.S., Mexico, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India and China as crisis zones where groundwater resources and/or groundwater-dependent ecosystems are under threat because the use of water vastly exceeds the rate at which aquifers are being refilled by rain. 

The underground reservoir in northwestern India, for instance, would need 54 times more rainfall to replenish the water that’s currently being used by farmers and the local population.

In the map below, the blue areas mark where rain can replenish the amount of water being used by humans. Orange or red areas indicate places where people draw out more for irrigation and drinking water than rain can refill.

The gray areas show the extent of the "groundwater footprint" by representing how much water people are drawing from the aquifers compared with how much water each holds.

SEE ALSO: The Global Water Crisis Will Shake Humanity To Its Core [Charts] >

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