Carbon Farms Reverse Global Warming?

A recent study by German researchers presents the possibility of "carbon farming" as a less risky alternative to other carbon capture and storage technologies. It suggests that a significant percentage of atmospheric CO2 could potentially be removed by planting millions of acres of a hardy little shrub known as Jatropha curcas, or the Barbados nut, in dry, coastal areas.

But other experts raised doubts about the study's ambitious projections, questioning whether the Barbados nut would be able to grow well in sandy desert soils and absorb the quantity of carbon their models predict.

The researchers behind the study say Barbados nut plantations could help to mitigate the local effects of global warming in desert areas, causing a decrease in average temperature and an increase in precipitation. If a large enough portion of the Earth were blanketed with carbon farms, they say, these local effects could become global, capturing between 17 and 25 metric tons of CO2 per hectare each year over a 20-year period.

"All the other techniques we know about just prevent emission, nothing else," said lead author Klaus Becker of the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany. "Only plants are able to extract carbon dioxide from the air."

The study, published in the journal Earth System Dynamics, states that if 730 million hectares of land -- an area about three-quarters the size of the United States -- were devoted to this method of carbon farming, the current trend of rising atmospheric CO2 levels could be halted.

Carbon farms would not compete with food production if they were concentrated in dry coastal areas, the researchers said. In their scenario, oceanside desalination plants, partially powered by biomass harvested from the plantations themselves, provide a low-emissions irrigation method.

Could huge plantations change weather patterns?
The study states that the Barbados nut is uniquely suited to growing in regions inhospitable to other crops. The plant, which produces a nonedible seed that can be used to create biodiesel, is comfortable growing at temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It can also withstand high levels of contamination in the soil, making wastewater another potential source for irrigation.

Additionally, the plant grows rapidly and develops "pretty large roots below the soil, which is important for carbon binding," said co-author Volker Wulfmeyer, also of the University of Hohenheim. As part of their research, Wulfmeyer and Becker traveled to a Barbados nut plantation in Luxor, Egypt, to collect physical samples from the plants to estimate their carbon-storing potential.

There are about 1 billion hectares of desert land in coastal areas that could be used for Barbados nut plantations, the researchers estimate, located in countries such as Mexico, Namibia, Saudi Arabia and Oman. If the entirety of this land were used for carbon farming, the study found, atmospheric carbon dioxide could be reduced by 17.5 parts per million over two decades, or 16.6 percent of the CO2 increase since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

But less ambitious projects may also have an impact. Using models, the researchers projected that 100-square-kilometer plantations in Oman and Mexico's Sonoran Desert could cause temperatures to fall by more than 1 degree Celsius. The model also saw a precipitation increase of 11 millimeters per year in Oman and 30 millimeters per year in the Sonoran.

Paradoxically, this is because plantations are darker than the surrounding desert, explained Wulfmeyer, retaining more heat during the daytime. As a result, a low-pressure system develops over the carbon farm, causing changes in wind patterns that allow clouds to develop and precipitation to increase.

Chrome 30 beta whats new?.. what to except..

The Chrome 30 beta has one of the longer lists of new features we've seen from the browser in quite some time. One of the most immediately visible will be a new option to search by image when you right-click or long-press on one. It'll use your default search provider to perform the task, but chances are you'll be using Google's own top-notch photo-mining service. The Android edition is also revamping its various gestures to make them easier to perform and lessen the chance of accidentally triggering them. Now all the gestures are performed in the top tool bar: swipe left or right to switch tabs, down from the middle to initiate the tab selector or down from the upper right-hand corner to open the menu.

As if that wasn't enough, the back-end tech is getting a slew of new features on both the desktop and mobile sides. The Android version of the Chrome beta now supports WebGL, the MediaSource API and DeviceMotion, for making use of the accelerometer in the browser. MediaSource is particularly useful for generating dynamic streams of content that can adjust bit-rates on the fly, based on the quality of the connection. On the desktop, a load of new APIs have been added to the Chrome App framework, including support for in-app payments and downloads. WebRTC and speech recognition have also received improvements across all platforms. You can find out more details at the source and download the new Chrome beta and try them yourself........

Why Does Food Taste So Delicious?

Taste is not what you think. Every schoolchild learns that it is one of the five senses, a partner of smell and sight and touch, a consequence of food flitting over taste buds that send important signals—sweet or bitter, nutrient or poison?—to the brain. Were it so simple.

In the past decade our understanding of taste and flavor has exploded with revelations of the myriad and complex ways that food messes with our consciousness—and of all the ways that our biases filter the taste experience. Deliciousness is both ingrained and learned, both personal and universal. It is a product of all five senses (hearing included) interacting in unexpected ways, those sensory signals subject to gross revision by that clump of nerve tissue we call the brain.

Let's start at the beginning: Food enters your mouth, meets your teeth and begins to be broken down by enzymes in your saliva. The morsel soon moves over your papillae, the few thousand bumps that line your tongue. Each papilla houses onionlike structures of 50 to 100 taste cells folded together like the petals of a young flower about to bloom—taste buds, we call them. These cells have chemical receptors attuned to the five basic tastes—bitter, sweet, sour, salt and umami, the last a word borrowed from Japanese that describes the savory flavors of roast meat or soy sauce.

These five tastes are enough to help determine if the thing we just put into our mouth should go any farther—if it's sweet or savory and thus a probable source of nutrients or if it's bitter and potentially poisonous. Yet they can't get close to communicating the complexity of the flavors that we sense.

For that, we turn to the nose. As you take in a piece of food, a little air is forced up passageways at the back of the mouth, where scent receptors in the nasal cavity detect thousands of volatile chemicals that add up to complex flavors [see interactive]. This retronasal olfaction, as it's called, has almost nothing to do, physiologically, with the act of sniffing your food. Your brain knows where your smell signals are coming from—through your nostrils or from your mouth. And in the case of the latter, it ropes them together with the signals from the taste buds. Retronasal olfaction produces a completely unique sense—neither smell nor taste alone but a hybrid that we call flavor. It's a process as transformative and irreversible as turning fuel and oxygen into flame.

Our sense of taste doesn't end at the mouth. In recent years scientists have found taste receptors all over the body, discoveries that have solved some long-standing mysteries. For 50 years scientists had been trying to figure out why eating glucose produces a much sharper insulin release than injecting the same amount of glucose directly into the bloodstream. In 2007 they discovered that cells lining the small intestine also contain taste receptors. When these intestinal sweet sensors detect sugar, they trigger a cascade of hormones that ultimately ends with a squirt of extra insulin into the bloodstream.

Our sense of taste isn't just limited to the gut. For example, your nose is lined with cells that sense bitter chemicals. If there's poison in the air, they reflexively stop you from pulling it into your lungs. If the poison does get to the throat, bitter detectors in the trachea trigger cilia to help clear the airway.

This physiology may explain what we mean by flavor—but anatomy doesn't much help us understand what we like. Our flavor preferences take shape over a lifetime, beginning while we are still in the womb. Babies whose mothers consume garlic while pregnant are more likely to enjoy the flavor of garlic in breast milk. Pregnant women who drink carrot juice are more likely to have kids who like carrots. The evolutionary justification is simple enough: If Mom ate it, it's safe.

Indeed, we use our friends and loved ones in much the same way that medieval monarchs used food tasters—let them try it first, then let's see how they are doing in 20 minutes. The principle holds all the way down the food chain. Rats hate the taste of cocoa, yet some enterprising scientists recently separated a rat from its brood and coaxed it to eat some anyway. The rat then returned to its group. When the other rats smelled the cocoa on its breath, they changed their minds and suddenly couldn't get enough cocoa.

Children are harder to convince—they have to try an unfamiliar food about nine times, on average, before they begin to like the taste. As any parent will attest, so much of the eventual enjoyment rests on how well Mom and Dad sell it. Moreover, the same holds true for adults, as decades of increasingly sophisticated food-marketing campaigns have demonstrated.

The environment sends many cues about how food should taste. In one experiment, researchers connected volunteers' tongues to a low-voltage electrical device, showed them pictures of food items and then sent a mild shock across their taste buds—a sensation not unlike licking a battery. The shock was supposed to impart a neutral taste. Asked afterward to rate how pleasurable the shock was, those volunteers who saw photographs of sweet or fatty foods rated the stimulus far more pleasurable than those who saw a low-calorie food.

The visual and auditory triggers can be so obvious as to appear comical. Potato chips taste crisper if you hear a crunch over headphones. White wine with a drop of red food coloring tastes like red wine—even to experienced wine tasters. People will eat less food off of a red plate. A block of cheese with sharp edges tastes sharper than one with round corners.

It's not all from our mouth, or our mouth and the back of our nose, or our mouth, and nose, and taste cells in the intestine. Deliciousness comes from our mother, our childhood, the room we are eating in, the plates we are eating on and the friends we are eating with. It's mental as much as chemical.