A high-speed train linking Rome and Milan, which opened last year, is the first of a series of high-speed links which are soon to open or begin construction.

The new Red Arrow train between Rome and Milan travels at up to 300 kilometres per hour and completes the 475 kilometre journey in about three and a half hours. Travelling from Rome to Milan by air takes a little over two hours - but it can take another hour to get from the centre of Rome or Millan to the airport.

Another high speed line from Amsterdam to Brussels is scheduled to open later this year. It will cut the rail travel time between the two cities from 2 hours 40 minutes to 1 hour 44 minutes. Belgium already has high-speed tracks linking to the German and French high-speed train networks The French TGV trains travel at speeds of up to 320 kilometres per hour in commercial use and have reached 574 kilometres per hour on test runs.

With falling air passenger numbers and rapidly increasing high-speed rail passenger numbers, airlines are becoming interested in providing rail services. Air France-KLM is planning a new high-speed train service from London to Paris, beginning next year, which it says will complete the journey is less than 2 hours; and another service from Paris to Amsterdam  And Virgin Atlantic is also believed to be planning a high-speed European rail service.
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Stuart Strand of the University of Washington has proposed making bales of crop residue, such as stalks, and sinking them into the deep ocean in order to sequester carbon.

Strand calculates that the the process of harvesting, transporting and sinking bales of crop waste, weighed down by stones, in ocean waters below 1,500 metres, would be 92 percent efficient at sequestering carbon for thousands of years. In comparison, leaving the residues on the ground is 14 percent efficient and using them to make ethanol is 32 percent efficient.

If 30 percent of the world’s crop residue was treated in this way - with the remainder being left to condition the soil - it would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 15 percent.

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Using the energy of children at play to help solve one of the world’s great problems - a billion people without sufficient water - seems too good to be true. But the PlayPump does just this - and it’s already in more than 1,000 schools in South Africa, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zambia.

The Playpump is a playground merry-go-round that pumps water out of the ground as children play on it. Take a look at this National Geographic video to see how it works:

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Sean Duffy, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University, has conducted a study to find out what makes people fail to recycle.

He concluded that "People fail to recycle for a number of reasons, including misinformation and forgetfulness; however, it is also a design problem."

When he examined different types of recycling bins and what ended up in them, he found that "Regardless of the receptacle’s label, recycling bins with little holes in the lids contained recyclables and almost nothing else, while those that lacked those holes were basically used as trash cans."

In fact, the presence of variously shaped holes increased the recycling rate by an amazing 34%.

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Coca-Cola Enterprises (US) has announced that it is more than doubling the size of its hybrid electric delivery fleet, Coca-Cola will have the largest hybrid delivery fleet in North America with 327 hybrid trucks on the road. The new hybrid trucks will be comparable in capacity to the company’s current large delivery trucks, with a gross weight of about 25 tonnes. But they will consume 30% less fuel.

Meanwhile, the US Arrmy has announced that it will lease 4,000 electric vehicles. The electric vehicles will be used in non-tactical roles on Army bases for passenger transport, security patrol, and maintenance and delivery services. The first of the "NEV’s" (Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles) will be four-passenger sedans, and utility vehicles able to carry two passengers and a 450 kilogram load. They will have a top speed of 40 kilometres per hour and a range of about 50 kilometres on a full, 8-hour charge.

The Army expects that fuel costs for the electric vehicles will be about one third of the cost for equivalent petrol vehicles and that their use will reduce the Army’s fuel consumption by about 44 million litres over six years.

The Army is also developing eight new types of hybrid-electric armoured vehicles for battlefield deployment. These are intended to reduce the Army’s dependence on fossil fuels and reduce the number of refueling convoys exposed in combat.

Senior Energy Executive for the Army, Paul Bollinger, stated that "The Army will continue to leverage new and emerging technologies to ease its dependence on fossil fuels…The Army can and will be a catalyst for greater production and innovation by renewable and alternative energy producers."

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Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, the University of Delaware and Yeshiva University, have developed a new catalyst that could make ethanol-powered fuel cells feasible.

Hydrogen fuel cells convert hydrogen and oxygen into water and, as part of the process, produce electricity. However, efficient production, storage and transport of hydrogen for fuel cell use is difficult. Researchers are, therefore, looking for ways to use hydrogen-rich compounds, like ethanol, rather than pure hydrogen.

“Ethanol is one of the most ideal reactants for fuel cells,” said Brookhaven chemist Radoslav Adzic. “It’s easy to produce, renewable, nontoxic, relatively easy to transport, and it has a high energy density. In addition, with some alterations, we could reuse the infrastructure that’s currently in place to store and distribute gasoline.” Click here to read the rest of this entry.

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In an interview in New Scientist magazine, the British environmentalist and author of the Gaia hypothesis which treats the Earth as a single organism, argues that unless we remove significant amounts of carbon dixide from the atmosphere, temperatures will increase by as much as 4ºC by the end of the century.

He claims that at these temperatures, the Earth could only produce enough food for about one billion people. The current population is 6.7 billion and, on current trends, it will be more than 9 billion by the end of the century.

The only way of avoiding this situation, according to Lovelock, is to remove carbon dixide from the atmosphere - reducing new releases of carbon dixoide by switching to renewables will be inadequate. And the only way to remove sufficient carbon dioxide is through biochar production.

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A new approach to converting heat into electricity using solar cells could make a technology called thermal photovoltaics more practical.  A Boston company, MTPV Corp, claims it can deliver "an order of magnitude" more power than regular thermal photovoltaics.

Thermal photovoltaics use solar cells to convert the light that radiates from a hot surface into electricity. A conventional solar panel absorbs light from the entire spectrum but it only converts certain colours efficiently.  As a result, the maximum theoretical efficiency of a conventional solar cell is 30 percent. If the sunlight is first concentrated using mirrors, 41 percent efficiency is possible.  In a thermal photovoltaic system, light is concentrated onto a material to heat it up. The material is selected so that when it gets hot, it emits light at wavelengths that a solar cell can convert efficiently. As a result, the theoretical maximum efficiency of a thermal photovoltaic system is 85 percent.

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First beer went green, now it’s scotch whisky’s turn.

Scottish authorities have given planning permission for a consortium of distillers to build a biomass-fueled combined heat and power plant for the whisky industry in Speyside. Helius Energy Plc and the Combination of Rothes Distillers Ltd will build the plant, which will use distillery by-products and wood chips to generate 7.2 megawatts of electricity.

The Combination of Rothes Distillers includes the producers of The Famous Grouse, Cutty Sark, Chivas Regal, Glen Grant, Hankey Bannister, BenRiach and J&B whiskies.

The solid grain waste, called "daff", which is removed from the still prior to fermentation of the liquor, will be used as biomass for producing heat and power. Surplus electricity may be fed into the national grid.

The project will also turn pot ale - the high-protein liquid residue from the still - into concentrated organic fertilizer and animal feed for local farmers.

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A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist, Hashem Akbari, is poised to launch a campaign to paint the world white.

Inspired by the whitewashed villages around the Mediterranean, he argues that if we turn enough of the world’s dark urban landscape white, it would reflect sufficient sunlight to delay global warming and give us some precious breathing space in the global struggle to control carbon emissions.

Ola-Santorini Greece
(by Rambling Traveller via Wikimedia)

As well as reflecting more sunlight, buildings with white roofs stay cooler during the summer. The change also reduces the way heat accumulates in built-up areas - known as the urban heat island effect - and reduces the need for air-conditioning.

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