Allspace in a Notshall

Forget about a dirty or nuclear bomb or another 9/11. This is what we should really be worried about, Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

There are two problems to face. The first is the modern electricity grid, which is designed to operate at ever higher voltages over ever larger areas. Though this provides a more efficient way to run the electricity networks, minimising power losses and wastage through overproduction, it has made them much more vulnerable to space weather. The high-power grids act as particularly efficient antennas, channelling enormous direct currents into the power transformers.

Click the link above to read the entire article, if you dare.

This is what I feel will lead to what everyone currently refers to as a zombie apocalypse.  But in this case, it’d be entirely real, and not that the zombies would be the undead, but rather just humans who have lived their entire lives in cities with power and electricity 24/7.  Now cut them off from it and you’ll see “society” and “civilization” quickly dissolve into every disaster movie you’ve ever seen or any post-apocalyptic book you’ve ever read.

Forget about terrorism, flying planes into buildings, blowing up planes, etc.  Start worrying about a world-wide blackout.

Related articles by Zemanta

• US Preps Cyber Outfit To Protect Electric Grid (it.slashdot.org)
• Pike Research Launches Smart Grid Advisory Service (eon.businesswire.com)
• Tantalus Closes $14 Million Funding Round to Deliver Proven Smart Grid Technology to Utilities (newswire.ca)

I just found a fascinating article while browsing LiveScience.com: Slime Mold Beats Humans at Perfecting Traffic Networks

The scientists let the mold organize itself and spread out around these nutrients, and found that it built a pattern very similar to the real-world train system connecting those cities around Tokyo. And in some ways, the amoeba solution was more efficient. What’s more, the slime mold built its network without a control center that could oversee and direct the whole enterprise; rather, it reinforced routes that were working, and eliminated redundant channels, constantly adapting and adjusting for maximum efficiency.

“The model captures the basic dynamics of network adaptability through interaction of local rules, and produces networks with properties comparable to or better than those of real-world infrastructure networks,” Wolfgang Marwan of Otto von Guericke University in Germany, who was not involved in the project, wrote in an accompanying essay in the same issue of Science.

Has everything already been done before?

There is a fascinating article in this month’s issue of Mother Jones about the brilliant and inspriring work of fungi-fanatic/mycologist Paul Stamets.  I’ve been a subscriber to Mother Jones for a few years and I was excited to see on the cover this month the headline “Flu-Fighting Fungi.”  I knew it was going to be an article about Stamets and I was correct.

I actually got to see him give a talk about a lot of what’s featured in the article at the Denver Green Festival earlier this year. It was an amazing speech and I’m glad I was there.

I was also able to pick up his latest book, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World and am still plowing through it.  It’s incredibly dense with mycology terminology but makes up for it with its beautiful photography and artwork.  It’s a must buy.

The article itself is a well-done 5-page layout.  I tried searching around for it on the net but it’s simply too new to link to anything.  So I’ll go ahead and type out a few small subjective highlights.

In the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest grows a bulbous, prehistoric-looking mushroom called agarikon. It prefers to colonize century-old Douglas fir trees, growing out of their trunks like an ugly mole on a finger. When I first met Paul Stamets, a mycologist who has spent more than three decades hunting, studying, and tripping on mushrooms, he had found only two of these unusual fungi, each time by accident–or, as he might put it, divine intervention.

A few months earlier, the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Institute for Tuberculosis Research sent Stamets its analysis of a dozen agarikon strains he’d cultured in his own lab. The institute found the fungus to be extraordinarily active against XDR-TB, a rare type of tuberculosis that is resistant to even the most effective drug treatments.

Stamets began distancing himself from the magic mushroom crowd about nine years ago. “The problem with the psychedelic scene,” he told me while driving near his vacation home on Cortes Island, the Grateful Dead playing on the stereo, “is that people contemplate their belly buttons and don’t get anything done. I wanted to save lives and the ecosystem.”

I’ll provide a link to the article as soon as it becomes available on the Mother Jones website.  But I highly recommend it, especially if you’re into the psychedelic scene, mushrooms, and people who are on the cutting edge of actually accomplishing  amazing things, especially with regards to the stigma-filled world of mushrooms.

***Update (03/02/10) – Read the full article here.***

I previously wrote a post on the Tennessee coal spill that happened a few days before Christmas last year and just came across an interesting article on Scientific American which updates the situation.  I’ll post a few noteworthy excerpts below, though you should probably read the entire article, it’s pretty good.

But some area residents aren’t so sure that they are safe from the effects of the spill, which is estimated to have been over 40 times bigger by volume than the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. Calling it an “environmental disaster of epic proportions,” Carol Kimmons, a local resident who works at the non-profit Sequatchie Valley Institute, told reporters that the nasty black ash flowed into “the water supply for Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.” She added that the spill was 70 percent bigger than a similar one in Kentucky in October 2000 (306 million gallons) that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) referred to at the time as “one of the worst environmental disasters in the Southeastern United States.”

“Coal contains huge amounts of heavy metals, and when coal is burned, the organic matter burns off, but many of the nasty chemicals stick around, in higher concentrations,” said Kimmons. “Also, coal is ‘washed’ using some really nasty chemicals, which are also left over in coal slurry.” The bottom line, she concluded, is that “coal slurry is really, really toxic stuff.”

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tennessee Coal Sludge Spill: 48 times larger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill (iflizwerequeen.com)

A huge coal ash spill occured in Tennessee on Monday.  2.6 million cubic yards, equivalent to 525.5 million gallons and almost fifty times more (and worse) than the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.

Here are a few links to the story:

• At the Huffington Post
• At TreeHugger

Here’s some commentary on the event, including talk about the BS that is “clean coal”.  Remember Biden yammering on about “clean coal” in the VP debates? Video at the end of the section.

Coal ash contains mercury, lead, and arsenic. Nearly 800 Olympic-size swimming pools of that toxic mix are flowing into the waterways of Tennessee right now. As the Knoxville Sentinel News reported today:

“Viewed from above, the scene looked like the aftermath of a tsunami, with swirls of dirtied water stretching for hundreds of acres on the land, and muddied water in the Emory River.

The Emory leads to the Clinch, which flows into the Tennessee. Workers sampled river water Monday, with results expected back today, but didn’t sample the dunelike drifts of muddy ash.”

For the millions of people downstream in Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky, a spill estimated to be several times bigger than the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska is creeping into their waterways and aquifers.

Here are a few videos of the event, some terrible, terrible pictures:

How come this isn’t in the mainstream press and news sites? It happened on Monday and I’m only now hearing about it today, Christmas eve and only because it was posted in a forum I’m a member of.