Hawaiian Islands weather details & Aloha paragraphs / September 14-15, 2010

Interesting: A magnitude-5.0 earthquake struck near a small town on the Arizona-Mexico border early Tuesday morning. The U.S. Geological Survey says a magnitude 5.0 earthquake struck near the border of Arizona and Mexico the 3:52 a.m on Tuesday. The epicenter was approximately 42 miles southwest of San Luis, Arizona in Yuma County.

The quake was initially reported as a magnitude 5.4 but has since been revised to to 5.0 by the USGS. San Luis police dispatcher Elias Gonzalez told the Associated Press that he felt the quake and said residents telephoned to report feeling the quake, which also set off some burglar alarms. There are no reports of damage or injury at this time.

Interesting2: Scotland is the hot spot for tidal power in all of northern Europe, with the Pentland Firth often described as the "Saudi Arabia of tidal power." The U.K. and Ireland also feature among the best tidal sites in the world, because they are relatively close to people. Some from these islands near the European coast may argue with this assessment, but when compared to the U.S. — where 95% of the nation’s tidal resources rise and fall off the coast of remote Alaska — it becomes clear it is all a matter of perspective.

Tidal stream turbines often look suspiciously like wind turbines placed underwater. Tidal projects comprise over 90 percent of today’s marine kinetic capacity totals, but the vast majority of this installed capacity relies upon first generation "barrage" systems still relying upon storage dams.

Pike Research will be issuing a revised forecast of ocean energy technologies next year, with lower capacity totals given the lack of progress on carbon regulations and the lingering recession, but this 2009 forecast shows how tidal systems dominate the near-term market for ocean energy technologies.

The basic selling points for tidal as follows:

-Tidal resources have the highest power density of any of the marine renewable technologies, hence the lowest cost estimates.
– Unlike many renewable resources including solar and wind power, tidal resources can be accurately predicted literally years in advance.
– Tidal devices are typically sited below the ocean surface: they can’t be seen; can’t be heard; and, in most instances, would not interfere with shipping or other maritime uses.

Interesting3: A comet is an icy small Solar System body that, when close enough to the Sun, displays a visible coma (a thin, fuzzy, temporary atmosphere) and sometimes also a tail. Occasionally, they will collide with planets such as the Earth. New research from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists shows that comets that crashed into Earth millions of years ago could have produced amino acids — the building blocks of life. Amino acids are critical to life and serve as the building blocks of proteins, which are linear chains of amino acids.

Comets are often described as "dirty snowballs". Comets also contain a variety of organic compounds; these may include methanol, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, ethanol and ethane, and perhaps more complex molecules such as long-chain hydrocarbons and amino acids. In 2009, it was confirmed that the amino acid glycine had been found in the comet dust recovered by NASA’s Stardust mission. Amino acids are molecules containing an amine group, a carboxylic acid group and a side chain that varies between different amino acids.

These molecules contain the key elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Amino acids are critical to life, and have many functions in metabolism. One particularly important function is to serve as the building blocks of proteins, which are just linear chains of amino acids. Just as the letters of the alphabet can be combined to form an almost endless variety of words, amino acids can be linked together in varying sequences to form a vast variety of proteins.

Due to their central role in biochemistry, amino acids are very important in nutrition and are commonly used in food technology and industry. Most amino acids can form via natural chemical reactions unrelated to life, as demonstrated in the Miller—Urey experiment and similar experiments, which involved simulating some of the conditions of the early Earth, in a scientific laboratory. In all living things, these amino acids are organized into proteins, and the construction of these proteins is mediated by nucleic acids.

Which of these organic molecules first arose and how they formed the first life is the focus of origin of life debates. In the September 12 online edition of the journal Nature Chemistry, Livermore’s Nir Goldman and colleagues found that simple molecules found within comets (such as water, ammonia, methylene and carbon dioxide) just might have been instigators of life on Earth. His team discovered that the sudden compression and heating of cometary ices crashing into Earth can produce complexes resembling the amino acid, glycine.

Comet computer simulations show that long chains containing carbon-nitrogen bonds can form during shock compression of a cometary ice. Upon expansion, the long chains break apart to form complexes containing the protein building amino acid glycine. "There’s a possibility that the production or delivery of pre-biotic molecules came from extraterrestrial sources," Goldman said. "On early Earth, we know that there was a heavy bombardment of comets and asteroids delivering up to several orders of magnitude greater mass of organics than what likely was already here."

Comets range in size from 1.6 kilometers up to 56 kilometers. Comets of these sizes passing through the Earth’s atmosphere are heated externally but remain cool internally. Upon impact with the planetary surface, a shock wave is generated due to the sudden compression. Shock waves can create sudden, intense pressures and temperatures, which could affect chemical reactions within a comet before it interacts with the ambient planetary environment.

The previous general consensus was that the delivery or production of amino acids from these impact events was improbable because the extensive heating from the impact would destroy any potential life-building molecules. However, Goldman and his colleagues studied how a collision, where an extraterrestrial ice impacts a planet with a glancing blow, could generate much lower temperatures. "Under this situation, organic materials could potentially be synthesized within the comet’s interior during shock compression and survive the high pressures and temperatures," Goldman said.

Interesting4: The number of global hungry has declined by nearly 10 per cent, the first drop in the number of undernourished since 1995, the UN food agency said in its annual report today. A total of 925 million people are undernourished in 2010 compared with 1.023 billion last year, revealing a drop of 9.6 per cent, according to the FAO report to be published in full in October. "But with a child dying every six seconds because of undernourishment related problems, hunger remains the world’s largest tragedy and scandal," said the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Director-General Jacques Diouf.

Some 98 per cent of the world’s hungry live in developing countries, and over 40 per cent of those in China and India alone. Mr Diouf, who introduced the report in Rome, said the continuing high global hunger level "makes it extremely difficult to achieve not only the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) but also the rest of the MDGs". He said the target to halve the world’s hungry by 2015 was "at serious risk," adding that recent increases in food prices could hamper efforts to pare down the number further.

Recent food crises like that which hit Niger in West Africa, where seven million people are threatened by famine, have also affected the downward trend. Other flashpoints include Pakistan, where floods devastated much of the country’s farmland, and Russia, where drought destroyed a quarter of crops and forced the world’s number three exporter of wheat to ban grain exports.

The Rome-based food agency urged governments to "encourage increased investment in agriculture, expand safety nets and social assistance programs, and enhance income-generating activities for the rural and urban poor". "Lack of appropriate mechanisms to deal with the shocks or to protect the most vulnerable populations from their effects result in large swings in hunger following crises," it said.

The FAO said the decline in the number of hungry could be explained mostly by a more favorable economic environment in 2010, particularly in developing countries, as well as a drop in both international and domestic food prices since 2008. However, "the fact that nearly a billion people remain hungry, even after the recent food and financial crises have largely passed, indicates a deeper structural problem," the FAO report said.

Leading global aid agencies and charities were reserved in their response to the report, warning that there was still much work to be done to achieve the 2015 figure. "This is no time to relax. We must keep hunger on the run to ensure stability and to protect lives and dignity," said World Food Program director Josette Sheeran. ActionAid said the goal to halve hunger "is decades off track".

Oxfam said the decline in the number of global hungry was due to "luck". "We know it is possible" to achieve the 2015 goal, Oxfam said, but "political will is the only element missing." The Asia and Pacific region has the highest number of hungry people, but with a 12 percent decline from 658 million in 2009 to 578 million, it also accounts for most of the global improvement expected in 2010.