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The Scientific Explanation Thread

This article had me in stitches. Some humourous fucking stuff. It's all about the purpose for human beings to have evolved hair that grows so much longer than that of any other species, and the reason it happened. It's a great read for next time you're trying to justify the $200 hair cut you just got :)

Tressed to impress: Our love affair with hair

"GET back upstairs and brush your hair before you go to school. You look like some kind of caveman!" Is this a familiar refrain from your youth? If so, perhaps you raged at the injustice of being born into a species with such unruly tresses, wondering why we have hair that needs so much cutting and combing to keep it in check Maybe, in those far-off, pre-Google days, you went to the library to find out more. You would have discovered that, with the exception of the musk ox, humans are the only mammals with almost continuously growing hair. You probably would have wondered why, and after a further search of the shelves you would have been frustrated to discover that nobody had an answer. How times have changed.

The past couple of years have seen growing interest in the science of human head hair. It began with the publication of a short article in Evolutionary Anthropology by Arthur Neufeld, a physiologist at Northwestern University in Chicago and anthropologist Glenn Conroy from Washington University in St Louis, Missouri (vol 13, p 89). They pointed out that while the fur of other mammals just grows to the required length and then stops, the hairs on our heads stick around for years getting longer and longer. "Have you ever seen a chimpanzee getting a haircut?" they asked. "For that matter, have you ever seen any furry mammal (aside from certain competitive canine contestants) in need of tonsorial grooming?" Of course not. So why then have humans evolved this unique adaptation of almost continuously growing head hair, was the question they posed in their article. "The response was enormous," recalls Neufeld.

This much we know. Our hair comes in two types: terminal hair, which occurs on the scalp, eyebrows and eyelashes, and the usually softer vellus hair, which is found everywhere else. Via complex mechanisms of hormonal control, these two give rise to the nine or ten varieties of hair adults have, from pubic and underarm hair to beards. Whether it's glossy shoulder-swishing locks or the tiniest toe-hair, it all grows at the same rate - about 1 to 1.5 centimetres a month - with only a very short dormant spell before it drops out. What differs is the lifetime of the hair on different parts of the body, and this is what determines its maximum length. Leg hairs, for example, last around two months, armpit hairs left to their own devices make it to six months, but head hairs grow nonstop for six years or more.

Things get more uncertain when it comes to exactly how hair growth is regulated. We have yet to untangle the details, but there are probably hundreds of genes involved and we do know that even a single mutation can have a big effect. Angora mice, for example, owe their long hair to a single mutation in FGF5, a gene that codes for a protein involved in halting growth of the hair shaft. Neufeld and Conroy wondered whether human head hair might also keep growing because it has become insensitive to growth inhibitory factors produced by FGF5 or similar genes.

Another possibly lies with the 10 main genes for the keratin from which our hair is constructed. The duo point out that nine of these are almost identical in humans, chimps and gorillas, but the tenth, phi-hHaA, is notably different. In the other primates it codes for a protein, whereas in humans it is a pseudogene - it is transcribed into RNA but no protein is ever synthesised (Human Genetics, vol 108, p 37). Helmelita Winter of the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg, who reported this finding in 2001, has also calculated that the mutation responsible for this change occurred some 240,000 years ago. "Is that when humans acquired head hair that continues to grow?" ask Conroy and Neufeld.

Bernard Thierry from the French national research agency CNRS in Paris thinks it could be. He points out that 240,000 years ago is also when our ancestors started burning fires in hearths (Evolutionary Anthropology, vol 14, p 5). "Cultural evolution first provided an environment with new selective pressures, then genetic mutations were sorted out," he says. In other words, he believes the driving force of change was culture. It was only after our ancestors invented ways to keep warm without being covered in fur that their hair could become adapted to serve new functions.

There are several good reasons to become less furry. One is that it would have helped fight disease, since fur is a prime habitat for parasites. Another is that it was important for thermoregulation, allowing our ancestors to sweat more efficiently following their move from a forest habitat onto the hot savannah. Some even believe it was an adaptation to a more aquatic phase in our history. Darwin, of course, had an explanation, suggesting that sexual selection was the key: the least hairy of our ancestors were considered the most attractive and so produced more offspring, making the species progressively less hirsute.

But none of this explains why the hair on our heads should have evolved in the opposite direction - something that would have been very costly in terms of the energy needed to make it and to keep it free of parasites. Surely there must have been a payoff?

The idea now emerging is that, precisely because our head hair needs so much care, it makes a perfect billboard upon which individuals can advertise their social standing. Good grooming is a social enterprise, and so shows you are part of the in-crowd, that you have friends and the social skills to keep them. If this is correct, then the corollary is clear:head hair grows simply to be cut and coiffed.

You scratch my head


"It makes so much sense," says Alison Jolly, a primatologist from the University of Sussex, UK, who was one of the first to respond to the original paper (Evolutionary Anthropology, vol 14, p 5). "Neat hair shows someone likes you enough to do the bits around the back." She takes the idea a step further. "You must not only be good enough and skilled enough literally to have time on your hands, but also dexterous enough not to make a hash of this delicate operation." So good grooming also requires reciprocity - to trust and to be trusted. This might explain why long, lank, unkempt locks are traditionally the mark of the outcast, the lunatic and the social pariah.

That seems like an awful lot to deduce from a few strands of coiled keratin. "Yes, but primates have done this for a long time," says Jolly, pointing out that grooming is the glue of primate societies. "Many primates have quite complex natural hairstyles that show the individual's health and social status, as well as telling everyone what species they are," says Jolly. She reels off a list of the well-groomed that includes African baboons (magnificent manes), Amazonian cotton-top tamarins (near-punk head-tufts), the emperor tamarin (imperial moustaches) and India's lion-tailed macaque (general chic elegance).

Of course, humans do not need hairstyles to distinguish them from closely related species; since the Neanderthals died out around 24,000 years ago, there haven't been any. Nevertheless, throughout the ages and across cultures, we have used hairstyles to signify membership of particular groups:think Roundheads, punks and Rastafarians. Thierry believes that for our prehistoric ancestors, hair care was not simply a matter of individual belonging but was also about group identity. This notion is clearly very important in tribal societies, he says, pointing to the example of 5300-year-old Ötzi the Iceman, found in the Italian Alps in 1991, whose tribal marks included 57 tattoos - although his hairstyle is unknown. Another example reported earlier this year is the 2300-year-old Cloneycavan Man discovered in a bog in County Meath, Ireland, who was apparently wearing gel to make his hair stand on end.

Thierry believes hairdos have acted as gang membership badges since the evolution of modern humans, around 200,000 years ago. That fits broadly with the timing of the phi-hHaA mutation. Unfortunately there are no fossilised topknots to clinch the argument, and the earliest known combs date back barely 8000 years, but some of the most ancient human figurines do have dressed hair. The 23,000-year-old Willendorf Venus is one. Her creator may have given her no facial features, but she did get a complex hairdo. Similarly the oldest known three-dimensional representation of a person, the 25,000-year-old Brassempouy Lady, an ivory statuette from Aquitane in France, has elegant shoulder-length hair.

Undoubtedly it is a big leap back in time from these cultural artefacts to the dawn of our species. Yet despite the lack of older archaeological evidence, many experts believe our ancestors were braiding hair far further back even than this. By looking at genetic variation in the MC1R gene, which is associated with skin coloration, Alan Rogers from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City concludes that we became furless around 1.7 million years ago (Current Anthropology, vol 45, p 105). Around this time Homo erectus was living on the hot savannah, so this fits with the idea that furlessness is an adaptation to allow better thermoregulation. The heads of these bipeds would have been disproportionately exposed to the sun, and long head hair would have been an effective sunshade. While there is no way of knowing whether the crowning glory of Homo erectus was primped and plaited, the fossil evidence does at least suggest that, even this far back, our ancestors had the dexterity for the job.

Coiffured cavemen

So where does that leave the grubby, hirsute caveman of popular imagination? The very fact that we have this image is evidence of hair's cultural importance, says New York-based anthropologist Judith Berman-Kohn. It dates from the late 19th century, she says, when the notion of what it was to be human and civilised was threatened on many fronts - by the discovery of the first Neanderthal remains, the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the American civil war and the spread of European imperialism. The hairy, unkempt cavemen depicted by artists such as Charles R. Knight and Fernand Cormon were not based on fact but reflected the influences of their time. "Hair was both a medium and a metaphor," Berman-Kohn says.

Today we know a lot more about how our cave-dwelling ancestors would have lived. They would certainly have had the time to beautify their hair. "Tribal societies are efficient. Hunting and gathering take up only so much time. There are many hours left over for socialisation," says Thierry. They clearly also had a developed aesthetic. "Even the earliest and most mundane artefacts we have seem to have been made with a feeling for style. I see no reason why, even in cultures with few material goods, hair ornamentation should not have been important," he adds.

And if some people were better at it than others, they would surely have been in demand. The unmistakable conclusion is that, along with warrior and prostitute, one of the oldest professions was probably hairdresser.

Adrian Barnett is a primatologist at Roehampton University in London. The name is his own, not a pseudonym adopted for this article.



Hair-raising facts

You have around 5 million hair follicles, which is on a par with other primates.

The number of head hairs varies with natural hair colour. Blondes have around 140,000, brunettes 105,000 and redheads a paltry 90,000.

Left uncut, the average person's hair would grow to waist-length in about four years.

The first blondes appeared only around 11,000 years ago.

About 90 per cent of the hair on your scalp is growing at any one time.

You lose between 50 and 100 head hairs a day.


From issue 2576 of New Scientist magazine, 04 November 2006, page 39-41

Douglas Adams had it right :)
 
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^ waaayyy too long* but a fast/skim read says:

We are the only species to grow long hair
After some random mutation it stayed 'in darwinistic fashion' because we started to use hairstyles to attract the opposite sex
(much like peacocks use plumage or the lyre bird uses mimicry)

Cool

* mourns the societal value of succinctness
 
zephyr said:
If there was something there that created the universe, what created the thing that created the universe?



Itself !Oneself, Perception of it ! Fools and pedants all ~ we know nothing !!!!


So why do we strive to know more?

Ego tripping ? Genuine curiousity ? Is there a difference under it all ?




Basically I shall be drawn in ~ If there is a creator we are all part of it the earth and stars are all part of it EVERYTHING is the creator and the created ~ One ology only with many names (bit like theology with the theo removed and its eyes burnt out in an act of holy revenge lol, holy war PARADOX supreme !!!!!!!!!!!






Loveology !%) The rest all ego tripping under the mask !


I may be wrong of course I frequently am !=D


White Stripes ~ Black Math


Don't you think that I'm bound to react now?
Well, my fingers are definitely turning to black now
Yeah, well maybe I'll put my love on ice
Teach myself, maybe that'll be nice
Yeah

My books are sitting at the top of the stack now
The longer words are really breaking my back now
Maybe I'll learn to understand
Drawing a square with a pencil in hand, yeah

Ah,ah,ah,ah,ah
Ah,ah,ah,ah,ah

Mathematically turning the page
Unequivocally showing my age
I'm practically center stage
Undeniably earning your wage
Well maybe I'll put my love on ice
And teach myself, maybe that'll be nice, yeah

Listen master, can you answer a question?
Is it the fingers, or the brain
that you're teaching A lesson?
I can't tell you how proud I am
I'm writing down things that I don't understand
Well, maybe I'll put my love on ice
And teach myself, maybe that'll be nice

Yeah,yeah,yeah
 
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Well you've definitely won me over with your in depth, relevant and factual referencing.
 
^Lol ha ha ha tell me about it then ?
 
If you want to know the theory of life, the universe, and everything that I subscribe to try page 1 about half way down.
 
Someone posted this in Thoughts and Awareness and I thought I'd repost it here because I really enjoyed reading it.

It's a fantastic article/interview(s) outlining some of the world's leading atheists and their methods of attack against religious dogma.

If anyone hasn't heard of Richard Dawkins has been described as Darwin's attack dog. I guess he's sort of a Nietzsche of our age.

I don't really like the author of the article's conclusions at the end but hey, it's all about the journey right.

Also check the Faces of the New Atheism box in the near top-right. Greg Graffin and Penn and Teller are there :)

The Church of the Non-Believers: A band of intellectual brothers is mounting a crusade against belief in God. Are they winning converts, or merely preaching to the choir?
 
lostpunk5545 said:
If you want to know the theory of life, the universe, and everything that I subscribe to try page 1 about half way down.



I read it (quickly) I lost interest as soon as it divulged that the universe shrinks to fuck all , thereby neatly bypassing the question I responded to (or maybe it was a statement , i'm a lazy sod )

Basically you may believe that, but in response to my point (such as it is) it qualifies under a term (probably incorrectly used here ) *do I care if I am a fooooooool*known as semantics !
 
Whilst Howard's response to climate change so far has been deplorable it's nice to see that the individual states are taking action regardless. Howard's solution to climate change is to invent technology to make coal power cleaner. This is a short term, don't do anything solution, and in my opinion is made because of the huge part coal plays in our economy.

There are renewable energy technologies available to us and the time to start using them is now. Here is an article on a huge solar tower that is under construction in Victoria as we speak and a brief mention of Australia's biggest wind farm (in SA) which is currently in stage two of construction:

Power tower

ON THE dusty red dirt of an old sheep station, a 6-hour drive from Melbourne, plans are afoot to build the world's tallest tower. Forget quibbles about whether an antenna or flagpole should count in the final measurement. If this concrete structure makes it off the drawing board it will smash every record in the book. It will stand a staggering 1 kilometre tall, and its base will sit at the centre of a shimmering field of glass and plastic 7 kilometres across.

If the tower's dimensions are awe-inspiring, its aim is breathtaking. The planned structure will be Australia's biggest solar power plant by far. Air heated by the sun will rise up the tower, where 32 turbines will generate about 650 gigawatt-hours of electricity a year, enough to meet the demands of 70,000 Australians. EnviroMission, the company behind the project, hopes to start building work next year and to be supplying electricity by 2008.

Energy experts have mixed views on this audacious project. Some are impressed by the prospect of a power plant that generates electricity from a free, renewable source that emits no greenhouse gases. Others fear the solar tower will be seen as a blot on the landscape that will bring the renewable energy industry into disrepute.

But EnviroMission appears to be winning supporters where it matters. The Australian government has promised to help the company obtain the permits and approvals that will be required. And power company Australian Gas Light has an option to buy the solar tower's entire output once it's up and running.

People have been harnessing the energy of rising columns of air for centuries. In the 17th century, smokejacks were used to turn spits over fires, and before that, Leonardo da Vinci had a bash at sketching a solar tower. But it was structural engineering guru Jörg Schlaich who put solar towers on the map, quite literally. In 1982, with support from the West German government and a Spanish power company, Schlaich built a 50-kilowatt prototype near the town of Manzanares, 150 kilometres south of Madrid (New Scientist, March 6 1999, p 30). His vision was that solar towers would eventually provide electricity to poor nations with plenty of sunshine but no other energy resources.

Rising 195 metres into the air and surrounded by an array of plastic sheeting 240 metres across, the Manzanares tower proved the concept worked. The plastic sunlight collector warmed the air underneath by up to 17° C, enough to draw it towards the central tower, where it created a strong enough updraught to drive a turbine and generate electricity. There were no fuel costs to pay, and no climate-damaging greenhouse-gas emissions. During 30 months of continuous running it contributed 118 megawatt-hours of electricity to the Spanish electricity grid.

This figure underlines an uncomfortable truth about solar towers. As a means of converting sunlight into electricity, they are horribly inefficient: much less than 1 per cent of the energy in the sunlight hitting the plastic was eventually converted to electricity. In the Manzanares tower half the solar energy was lost as heat from the collector, and of the heat that was trapped only 0.7 per cent was converted to electricity by the turbine. The rest escaped as hot air from the top of the tower. By comparison, photovoltaic solar panels convert about 15 per cent of sunlight falling on them into electricity.

But this need not matter. Sunshine comes free of charge, so the key figure is not the conversion efficiency but how much the plant costs to build and maintain for each kilowatt-hour it can generate. One way to reduce this unit cost is to scale the plant up - and that means building the tower tall and spreading the area of the collector wide.

The tower's output depends on the size of the pressure difference between the bottom and the top, and the amount of air passing through. The pressure difference can be increased by using a larger collector to increase the air temperature at the base. And the taller the tower, the lower the ambient atmospheric pressure at the top. "A 1000-metre tower will be five times as efficient as the 200-metre Manzanares tower," says Gerhard Weinrebe who works for Schlaich's engineering firm Schlaich, Bergermann and Partner in Stuttgart, Germany. He expects the overall efficiency of the Australian tower to be around 1.5 per cent.

When it comes to details of its planned tower, EnviroMission is not giving much away. But one thing is clear: where Schlaich's original scheme was driven by idealism, this one is being planned as a money-making venture, able to hold its own against conventional power stations fired by Australia's plentiful supplies of fossil fuel. The site chosen for the tower, near the unassuming town of Mildura, Victoria - which lies in the aptly named Sunraysia region - not only has plentiful sunshine but is also less than 30 kilometres from an access point to the national electricity grid. That will keep connection costs and line losses to a minimum. Mildura will provide the workforce needed to build the tower.

Schlaich's firm has made a name for itself with elegant structures such as the glass roof at the German Historical museum in Berlin. It is also involved in the Mildura tower, but here the watchwords will be cheapness and practicality. "You don't need to build a Rolls-Royce when a Passat will do the job," says Roger Davey, executive chairman of EnviroMission. So most of the solar collector will be made of plastic, rather than more expensive glass. Only the central section will use glass, as design studies show that only glass is strong enough to withstand wind speeds inside the collector of up to 54 kilometres per hour and the force of the updraught near the base of the tower.

Solar towers have the edge over many other renewable power sources because they generate electricity smoothly and continuously, rather than flipping on and off as the wind rises and falls or clouds block the sun. During the day, heat from the sun is trapped in the air under the collector and in the ground beneath it. The temperature of the air entering the tower reaches a maximum a few hours after the hottest part of the day, neatly matching peak consumption hours in the early evening. But the heat energy will be dissipated before the sun comes up again, and to provide electricity 24 hours a day, the plant will need some kind of system for heat storage. This is not in the current plans, but may be added at a later date. The Schlaich team has developed and tested a system of black, water-filled tubes that soak up heat during the day to provide hot water that can be used at night to heat air for the tower.

One aspect of the design that experts can only speculate on is how the structure itself will be built. EnviroMission has let on that it intends to stiffen the tower at several points with cables strung across its interior like the spokes of a wheel. Apart from that, few details are known, but there seems little reason to doubt that a 1-kilometre tower is feasible. "People are going higher and higher. Building a supertower 1 kilometre or higher is not technically impossible," says Bijan Samali, director of the Centre for Built Infrastructure Research (CBIR) at the University of Technology in Sydney. But it will certainly be challenging, as it will be almost double the height of what is currently the world's tallest building, the 553-metre CN Tower in Toronto.

One problem will be protecting the tower from high winds. At 1 kilometre above ground, wind speeds of 200 kilometres per hour are not uncommon. As air flows past the solar tower it will create vortices, first on one side then on the other. That sideways pull combined with swaying in a gusty wind could quickly transform the world's tallest tower into its biggest pile of rubble.

On industrial smokestacks, spiral stiffening is often used to break up the vortices. But the vast size of the solar tower will demand additional measures. One option, Samali says, would be to rig guy wires from high up on the tower to anchor points in the ground, to stabilise it from outside. Any remaining oscillations could then be neutralised by a damper - which could be as simple as a chain wrapped in a shock-absorbing material hung inside the tower. From the dimensions of the tower, engineers can work out the frequency at which it will oscillate. They can then set the length of the chain so that it will swing at a frequency that ensures it hits the inside of the tower as it oscillates in a way that dissipates some of the tower's energy.

The material used to build the structure will also be key. "We will be pouring concrete 24 hours a day, seven days a week for two years," says Davey. The tower will take an estimated 700,000 cubic metres of high-strength concrete. "With a structure of this magnitude, subject to major wind loads, you will have much tighter tolerances on all the material properties," says Aleksandra Samarin, a materials engineer at CBIR and former research director at the construction materials company Boral. "With such huge volumes of concrete, economically you want to use local materials." So concrete made from local stone and water will have to be put through at least a year's worth of lab tests to check how it deforms and fractures.


Hot idea or hot air?

Clearly, building costs will be substantial. EnviroMission won't comment on the price tag but experts speculate the total investment will be around A$1 billion (US$720 million). But to offset those costs, the tower will have access to more sources of revenue than a fossil-fuel power station. For a start, EnviroMission intends to trade the renewable energy certificates that are being divvied out by the Australian government to suppliers of green energy. Then there are the naming rights to the tower. "It could be the 'TAG Heuer sundial', the biggest sundial in the world," Davey suggests. "Or the 'Viagra tower'." He won't disclose the asking price, but says that "more than one" potential sponsor has expressed interest. "It will be an icon, a renewable energy first, a global first."

EnviroMission is also looking into the possibility of using the collector as a giant greenhouse to grow fruit and vegetables or to dry locally produced fruit. This might have the additional advantage of making the air more humid and less dense, so it rises more rapidly and enables the turbines to extract more energy. Then there are plans to offer trips to the top of the tower. As a tourist attraction it could outdo another local favourite - the bar at the Mildura Working Men's Club, which until recently laid claim to being the world's longest.

Alternative revenue streams aside - and assuming EnviroMission manages to raise the money to go ahead with construction - will the solar tower fulfil its purpose and generate electricity as predicted? The sheer size of the project means that doubts inevitably creep in. The only experience to go on is the Manzanares tower, built over 20 years ago - but the planned output of the Mildura plant is 4000 times that of its Spanish forerunner. "It's a huge scale-up," says Keith Lovegrove, a solar energy expert at the Australian National University in Canberra and vice-president of the Australian and New Zealand Solar Energy Society. "They are shooting for the top without an intermediate-sized prototype." The vision of the project has to be admired, he says. But he suspects that cold reality may force the company to rein back ambitions for its plan: "I think they will get a certain amount of money and then build a smaller one."

Andreas Luzzi, incoming director of the Institute for Solar Technology at the University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil, Switzerland, has no such concerns about the magnitude of the scale-up. "There are so many similarities with the energy-conversion technology used in hydropower stations," he says. "The turbines are similar, the fluid dynamics is similar, so the risks are quite manageable."

But Luzzi also concedes that the vast greenhouse at the foot of the tower might subtly alter the area's microclimate, by changing the reflectivity or albedo of the surrounding surface. This could lead to shifts in local humidity, temperature and wind that could affect the tower's capacity to generate electricity - for better or worse. "The effect of changing the albedo is still a big question," says Luzzi. "But it might - and I want to emphasise might - increase the ambient temperature outside the tower, altering the pressure difference between the top and the bottom." EnviroMission is seeking government funding to run a number of research projects, including a microclimate impact analysis.

And then there are more mundane issues, such as how to keep some 4000 hectares of greenhouse clean enough to trap solar radiation in the first place. Legions of squeegee-wielding window cleaners will clearly not be the answer. And there are worries that the plastic sheets used to build the collector might deteriorate under the glare of the Australian sun, as they did in Manzanares.

Ken Brown, an expert on wind energy at Melbourne University, has another concern. Sure it might be possible to use alternative energy streams, such as naming rights to make a single 1 kilometre tower profitable. But solar towers are not financially viable in the long run he says. "They are a long way from being able to sell electricity at a profit," says Brown. "This is not a solution to our energy needs." And he is not alone in doubting that solar towers can generate electricity at a profit.

Until EnviroMission reveals more details of its plans, the jury is out over whether Australia's solar tower will make the grade. Either way, it's unlikely to be the last we hear about this form of energy generation. The promise of a soaring tower that generates electricity from sunlight, attracts tourists, and grows fruit and vegetables to boot has a way of capturing the imagination. South Africa, Morocco, Egypt and India have all been considered as possible sites. And last month, EnviroMission said it would be applying to the Chinese government for approval to set up a company to build solar towers in China. Anyone for the Tsingtao Beer tower?

Click on these pictures for a clearer look.

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From issue 2458 of New Scientist magazine, 31 July 2004, page 42

News: Construction starts on nation's biggest wind farm

November 8, 2006

Energy Minister Patrick Conlon today visited the Lake Bonney wind farm in the state’s South East to mark the start of construction on stage 2 of the project.



The construction of another 53 wind turbines, 3m wide and 80m high, will increase the capacity of the site by 159MW to 240MW – the largest operational wind farm in Australia.



“Today is another significant step in this state’s push for renewable energy,” Mr Conlon said.



“The construction here – and other works at Hallett in the state’s mid-north – will help us reach our original State Strategic Plan target of 15 per cent renewable energy consumption by 2014.



“The Premier has since increased that target to 20 per cent and I’m confident we will continue to lead the nation and meet that benchmark as well.”



South Australia currently provides more than half of the nation’s wind power, as well as 44 per cent of Australia’s grid connected solar power.



“Climate change continues to be the greatest challenge facing world leaders,” Mr Conlon said.



“The State Government has supported the progressive installation of solar power to key government buildings, including the Art Gallery, the South Australian Museum and Parliament House.



“This Government is proud that South Australia continues to lead the way.”



Lake Bonney 2 is expected to be completed by mid 2008.

Link
 
^^^That is the most awesome thing I have read in weeks :)
I have an enormous smile on my face due to that :)
 
I read that article while on a plane to SA in 2004. Great to see its now under construction.
 
Yeah I heard about it on JJJ the other day and it jogged my memory about that article. It's due to be finished by 2013.
 
Thats completely misleading. They're 2 completely unrelated articles.

The uber-tower still hasnt got any real funding as far as i could ascertain.

Tbh, that article makes it sound like a bunch of geeks with a 'cool idea' and nfi what they're doing.
 
Sorry you're right. I misheard the announcement on the radio, which is for another solar project in Victoria.

World's biggest solar plant for Australia

Thursday, 26 October 2006

by Lawrence Bartlett


SYDNEY: Australia has announced plans to build the world's biggest space-age solar power station as part of an A$500 million radical rethink on climate change.

The government said it would contribute A$75 million towards the cost of the photovoltaic solar power plant in the first of a series of projects aimed at reducing the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.

Australia, like the United States, has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the government is facing increasing criticism of its environmental policies in the face of the worst drought in living memory.

Australian Treasurer Peter Costello said the plant near Mildura in the southern state of Victoria would be the biggest of its kind. "The project aims to build the biggest photovoltaic project in the world," Costello told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.

The 154 megawatt power station will cost a total of A$420 million and will be built by Melbourne-based company Solar Systems, which says it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 400,000 tonnes a year.

The plant will generate clean electricity directly from the sun to meet the needs of more than 45,000 homes with zero greenhouse gas emissions, the company said in a statement.

It will use high performance solar cells originally developed to power satellites, with fields of mirrors focusing sunlight on the cells. "Solar Systems has developed the capability to concentrate the sun by 500 times onto the solar cells for ultra-high power output," the company said.

A spokesman for the company said that there was one bigger solar power station in the world, in the Mojave desert in California, but it used thermal solar technology.

"Thermal stations use concentrated sunlight to heat water to make steam and use steam to run a turbine," said technical director John Lasich. "In this case we use concentrated photovoltaics where you take concentrated sunlight and convert it directly into electricity, which is much more efficient.

"This is a new generation of solar technology."

The project, which will receive an additional A$50 million grant from the Victorian state government, will start in 2008 and reach full capacity by 2013.

Costello said the government would also put A$50 million into an A$360 million pilot project to reduce, capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from a coal-fired power station in the same state.

A spokesman for environmental group Greenpeace, Danny Kennedy, welcomed the announcement and said the government was starting to bow to growing public pressure and concern about climate change.

With soaring temperatures and bushfires marking the start of another hot summer on the driest inhabited continent on earth, critics have stepped up their attacks on the government's environmental policies, blaming global warming for exacerbating the drought.

Last week, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard announced that A$500 million would be spent on a series of clean energy projects, and on Wednesday Costello said he accepted the scientific evidence on global warming.

"I accept the scientific evidence, which is that global warming is taking place, that it is caused by carbon emissions, that restraining the increase in carbon emissions will counteract that process of global warming and that we should play our part."

Australia produces more carbon dioxide per person than any other country in the world and is a major exporter of fossil fuels, which produce the gases blamed for rising temperatures worldwide.

Source

This project actually won the government grant over the solar tower project by Enviromission. You can read about it in this pdf: Enviromission: Trading Halt Clarification

Any further announcements about the feasibility and likeliness of the project will be announced on their website I assume: Enviromission.
 
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Snippet of info about Dark Energy
From http://www.technewsworld.com/story/54306.html

The Hubble Space Telescope has shown that a mysterious form of energy first conceived by Albert Einstein, then rejected by the famous physicist as his "greatest blunder," appears to have been fueling the expansion of the universe for most of its history.

This so-called "dark energy" has been pushing the universe outward for at least 9 billion years, astronomers said Thursday.

"This is the first time we have significant, discrete data from back then," said Adam Riess, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and researcher at NASA's Latest News about NASA Space Telescope Science Institute.

He and several colleagues used the Hubble to observe 23 supernovae -- exploding white dwarf stars -- so distant that their light took more than half the history of the universe to reach the orbiting telescope. That means the supernovae existed when the universe was less than half its current age of approximately 13.7 billion years.
Onto the Science Scrap Heap
Because the physics of supernova explosions is extremely well-known, it is possible for the astronomers to gauge not just their distance, but how fast the universe was expanding at the time they went off.

"This finding continues to validate the use of these supernovae as cosmic probes," Riess said.

He and his colleagues describe their research in a paper that is scheduled for publication in the Feb. 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal.

The idea of dark energy was first proposed by Einstein as a means of explaining how the universe could resist collapsing under the pull of gravity. But then Edwin Hubble -- the astronomer for whom the NASA telescope is named -- demonstrated in 1929 that the universe is expanding, not a constant size. That led to the big-bang theory, and Einstein tossed his notion on science's scrap heap.

There it languished until 1998, when astronomers who were using supernova explosions to gauge the expansion of the universe made a shocking observation. It appeared that older supernovae, whose light had traveled a greater distance across space to reach the Hubble telescope, were receding from Earth more slowly than simple big-bang theory would predict. Nearby supernovae were receding more quickly than expected. That could only be true if some mysterious force were causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate over time.

Cosmologists dubbed the force "dark energy," and ever since, they've been trying to figure out what it is.
Wrinkle in Laws of Gravity?

"Dark energy makes us nervous," said Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved in the supernova study. "It fits the data, but it's not what we really expected."

Answers may come once NASA upgrades the Hubble Space Telescope in a space shuttle mission scheduled for 2008. NASA and the Department of Energy are also planning to launch an orbiting observatory specifically designed to address the mystery in 2011.

Dark energy could be some property of space itself, which is what Einstein was thinking of when he proposed it. Or it could be something akin to an electromagnetic field pushing on the universe. Finally, there's the possibility that the whole thing is caused by some hitherto undiscovered wrinkle in the laws of gravity.
 
Australians to demo 10 gigabit wireless data link

We're not exactly sure how we got along before the advent of WiFi (wait, nevermind, we were tethered to our desks), but today we can't wait for the next generation of wireless technology. Well, leave it to Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation to come out of the blue and develop gigabit (yes, gigabit) wireless technology. According to CSIRO's website, the new wireless protocol will use the 55GHz band and will transfer at 10Gbps -- the organization will be showing of this tech by transmitting 16 streams of DVD-quality video over a distance of 250 meters (820 feet), which will apparently only be "one-tenth of the capacity of the link." We've got no idea how long it'll be until our friends Down Under send us some of that gigabit love, although they might want to settle those lawsuits against nearly every American wireless hardware firm first.
From: http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/06/australians-to-demo-10-gigabit-wireless-data-link/

If its not smoke and mirrors - this'll be sweet!
 
Hmmm... What's that beautiful smell? It kind of reminds me of the time, as a child, that I... that I... watched DVDs! It smells like... SONY!

It's long been known that smells are directly linked to memory and an emotional response. It's how we know to avoid poisonous things in the wild. But now (and who didn't really see it coming) it's being used to bypass our conscience and give us a direct emotional response to a product. Advertising! Marketing! In our fucking noses!

Whilst I agree that this is likely to be a highly effective tactic, on a moral level I think this is heinously wrong. At least with visual and sonic media you have a chance to ignore advertising. But when it's triggering a direct emotional response in your brain, how do you beat it?

Recruiting smell for the hard sell

* 16 December 2006
* From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
* Bijal Trivedi

THE AIR in Samsung's flagship electronics store on the upper west side of Manhattan smells like honeydew melon. It is barely perceptible but, together with the soft, constantly morphing light scheme, the scent gives the store a blissfully relaxed, tropical feel. The fragrance I'm sniffing is the company's signature scent and is being pumped out from hidden devices in the ceiling. Consumers roam the showroom unaware that they are being seduced not just via their eyes and ears but also by their noses.

You can expect more aromatic encounters as you browse the stores this festive season. Scent, marketeers say, is the final frontier in "sensory branding". Of all our five senses, smell is thought to be the most closely linked to emotion because the brain's olfactory bulb, which detects odours, fast-tracks signals to the limbic system, which links emotion to memories. Retailers hope that making this direct link to our emotions may seduce us into choosing their products over a competitor's. "Branding is all about how a customer feels about a company or product - it's an emotional connection with the customer," says Randall Stone, a New York-based marketing expert at branding consultants Lippincott Mercer, who helped create the Samsung scent.

To date, there is no conclusive evidence to prove that scenting a product will persuade a shopper to buy it, but it may tip the balance in favour of a particular brand or product. As a result, more and more marketeers, gadget makers and retailers are turning to scent in the hope it will help forge long-term relationships between consumers and their brands, and ultimately sell more stuff.

Scenting stores to sell products such as electronics or clothes not normally known for their aroma is a recent development. There are about 20 scent-marketing companies in the world, collectively worth around $80 million, says Harald Vogt, co-founder of the Scent Marketing Institute in Scarsdale, New York.

A decade ago, marketeers tried to scent stores in Europe. The attempt backfired - in part because fragrance is considered an individual experience and scenting public spaces is regarded as "polluting the atmosphere", says Vogt. European and American retailers were also concerned that pumping chemicals into stores could give some shoppers breathing problems, leaving companies vulnerable to prosecution.

These worries haven't deterred everyone, though. The appearance of cheap technologies to disseminate scents has spurred casinos, hotels and spas to experiment with pumping them out to make consumers feel more pampered. Early this year Westin Hotels & Resorts began scenting its hotel lobbies with a signature fragrance called White Tea. "We wanted to make an emotional connection," says Nadeen Ayala, senior PR director for the chain. The response from guests has been enormous, she says, prompting the company to launch a line of White Tea scented candles.

Westin and Samsung are not alone in using scent to tap into consumers' psyches. Diamond retailer De Beers scents its sparkling Manhattan and Los Angeles showrooms with an aromatic blend that includes floral, citrus and green tea; cellphone company Verizon Wireless recently used chocolate-scented displays to market the new LG Chocolate phone; and Sony is raising the stakes by not only scenting its Sony Style stores but also sending its signature scent home in scented sachets in shopping bags. Sony is also considering impregnating the hard plastics used in its gadgets with the fragrance, says David Van Epps, CEO of North Carolina-based ScentAir, developer of Sony's signature scent.

These companies are among the few that have gone public with the practice. Most retailers are still reluctant to admit they use scents in their stores, says Vogt, so it's hard to get any firm figures on the impact of scent on profits. It is only within the past couple of years that independent researchers have begun measuring the impact on sales. However, several studies have shown that pleasant scents encourage shoppers to linger over a product, increase the number of times they examine it and in some cases increase their willingness to pay higher prices too.

In one recent study, accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Research, Eric Spangenberg, a consumer psychologist and dean of the College of Business and Economics at Washington State University in Pullman, and his colleagues carried out an experiment in a local clothing store. They discovered that when "feminine scents", like vanilla, were used, sales of women's clothes doubled; as did men's clothes when scents like rose maroc were diffused.

"Men don't like to stick around when it smells feminine, and women don't linger in a store if it smells masculine," says Spangenberg, who led the research and has been studying the impact of ambient scents on consumers for more than a decade. Spangenberg says this most recent study underscores the importance of matching gender-preferred scents to the product. Both men and women browsed for longer and spent more money when a fragrance specific to their gender was used to scent the store atmosphere. "Scent marketing is a viable strategy that retailers should consider," says Spangenberg. "But they really need to tailor the scent to the consumer."

Anticipating which scents will be most appealing to the broadest audience is tricky, because there is no such thing as a pleasant aroma that everyone will agree on, says Rachel Herz, a visiting lecturer in psychiatry at Brown University Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island: "A universal hit does not exist." That's because there are distinct geographic and cultural preferences for certain scents, and also gender-specific preferences within each culture (see Diagram). Samsung's signature scent took a year to develop and candidates were tested in the US, Germany, China, Brazil, Thailand, Korea and Russia to find one with broad appeal.

Maureen Morrin of the school of business at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in Camden, and colleagues tested the effects of smell on the spending habits of mall shoppers. They pumped a "pleasant, citrusy" odour throughout a mall in Montreal, Canada, then intercepted shoppers on their way out of the mall and quizzed them on their spending.

They divided the shoppers into two categories: the "contemplative" ones who said they normally only purchased planned items, and "impulsive" purchasers, who claimed to be more whimsical in their spending. Morrin was surprised to find that the light, pleasant odour had no impact on the impulse buyer, but it did boost the spending of the contemplative shoppers by about 14 per cent compared to others who browsed without the scent. While the result was not dramatic, marketeers viewed it as a positive trend (Journal of Service Research, vol 8, p 181).

Direct link to emotion

Exactly how scent exerts its effects is only beginning to be understood. When odour information travels from the olfactory bulb and reaches the primary olfactory cortex it activates the limbic system at an earlier stage of processing than do the other senses, says Pamela Dalton, who studies cognitive and sensory psychology at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This triggers an almost instantaneous emotional response in mammals. It is this initial reaction that marketeers hope to exploit by using scent in products or stores.

Dalton's research, originally funded by a Gulf war medicine programme, was at first directed at exploring how odour could trigger flashbacks in war veterans and whether these associations could be altered or decoupled. But the studies are also of great interest to Monell's many corporate sponsors.

"Every smell triggers a friend-or-foe reaction," says Avery Gilbert, chief scientist at the Scent Marketing Institute. We shouldn't underestimate our ability to evaluate smells consciously either, he says. When we choose a scented product such as a shampoo we check if we like the smell, evaluate what others might think of it, and whether it is worth its price tag.

Is it possible to get a scent to evoke positive feelings in those who smell it? Dalton is now trying to find this out. One of her ongoing experiments investigates whether an odour initially paired with a stressful or relaxing stimulus will trigger the same physiological response when volunteers are exposed to the smell the next day or a few days later. The experiments take place in a metal chamber containing a giant plasma screen, a device for turning scent into an aerosol, a heart-rate monitor and a computer monitor to communicate with the participant. Dalton's test odour is galbanum - an aromatic oil derived from the Ferula gummosa plant that grows in northern Iran and is an ingredient in many Asian perfumes. To me, it smells like wet dirt. Once in the room, the participant has a pulse monitor clipped to their finger and is left alone while the plasma screen inflicts bloody, violent scenes from the horror film Saw II on them. Characters in the movie are strapped into harnesses and endure mind-warping forms of physical and psychological torture that is very stressful to watch.

If a participant's heart rate rises 10 per cent above their resting rate during the experiment they are considered a "responder". Responders are invited back to the chamber to experience the galbanum odour without the hair-raising videos. Dalton finds that a second exposure is enough to set the pulse racing even without the images. "Our olfactory system is first and foremost a warning system for things we should avoid, not things we should approach," she says. Thus when an odour is tied to a negative event, the association forms quickly.

The same type of experiment is also done with relaxing stimuli. When the odour is tied to a pleasant experience - dimmed lights, a reclining chair, relaxing images and deep breathing - the association is much slower to form: many more encounters are needed before the volunteer responds to the odour with a drop in heart rate, blood pressure and breathing. Nonetheless, even if the participants didn't demonstrate a physiological reaction to the odour alone after a pleasant experience they still rated the odour more favourably than on their initial evaluation. "So odour can have an effect and just one exposure can shift your preference," says Dalton. That's a promising, if preliminary, result for manufacturers who want to embed signature scents in specific products.

Even though positive associations may take longer to establish, preliminary results from Morrin's latest experiment suggest that scent enhances the consumer's memory for the product better than visual cues such as colour, but only after two or more weeks have elapsed. For example, if volunteers are given a scented toothpaste or one packaged in a blue wrapper, they were much more capable of recalling the characteristics of the scented product six weeks later than of the one in the plain wrapper. "Over time you are re-exposed to that colour in many different contexts, so its connection to toothpaste is weakened, but the scent was probably unique so it is a better memory trigger," speculates Morrin.

Dalton agrees that this experiment does seem to support the idea of scenting products so they will sell well, but cautions that it doesn't prove that odours are necessarily more powerful than visual cues.

Smell, but don't tell

In many stores, scent marketing is fairly crude. The choice of scents is rather hit or miss, says Spangenberg, and is rarely tailored to the consumer or tested before it is used in the store. "It is a little snake-oilish in that respect," he says. He expects its popularity to increase all the same. Some companies are developing ways to target scents at individual consumers (New Scientist, 3 April 2004, p 22).

Spangenberg thinks that scent marketing is already much more prevalent than most consumers realise. One reason companies keep it secret is that they want the association between scent and brand to form almost subconsciously. Many refuse to acknowledge that their stores are scented for fear of destroying the effect. International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF), one of the biggest players in the industry, concocted the Samsung scent but has refused to reveal any components of the fragrance or what features of the Samsung brand it was supposed to reflect.

Much of retailers' "hush-hush" attitude stems from fears that they will be accused of subliminal marketing, says Gilbert. They don't want to admit they are manipulating the store environment to trigger an almost Pavlovian response in customers, adds Spangenberg.

Others are concerned the chemicals used in these scents may cause runny or burning eyes, sneezing, coughing and asthma in sensitive individuals, says Leonard Bielory, an asthma and eye-allergy expert at New Jersey Medical School in Newark. "Scent marketing is a great idea for the general public but if done surreptitiously it could cause discomfort or harm." There should be signs notifying that air is scented to protect vulnerable individuals, he adds.

Another caveat to using scent is that because its impact is not immediately obvious there might be consumer protection issues, says Morrin. "For example, if a casino were to start pumping in some pleasant odour and it did have the impact of making consumers stay and play longer - and potentially lose more - then they should be notified when some of these types of things are being used."

Mark Peltier, co-founder of the Minnesota-based AromaSys, which scents most of the casinos in Las Vegas as well as hundreds of hotels and spas around the country, says that fear is unfounded. "Scent is no different to chairs or lighting: they may increase your comfort and make you stay longer, but there is no scent that will make you gamble more."

"Smells don't work like drugs," explains Herz. They only have effects through learned associations, and though there is cultural consistency to a degree, there is also individual variation. What ultimately determines an individual's reaction to a particular scent depends largely on their initial introduction to that aroma.

A spokesman from IFF revealed that the company has developed technology to scent materials from fibres to plastic, suggesting that we can expect a more aromatic future, with everything from scented exercise clothing and towels to MP3 players with a customised scent. As more and more stores and hotels use ambient scents, however, remember that their goal is not just to make your experience more pleasant. They want to imprint a positive memory, influence your future feelings about particular brands and ultimately forge an emotional link to you - and more importantly, your wallet.

25821801.jpg



Bijal Trivedi is a science writer based in Washington DC

From issue 2582 of New Scientist magazine, 16 December 2006, page 36-39
 
^^ Interesting.. I've just been reading about this subject as i'm trawling through 'Fast Food Nation' again. I's goign to be a very interesting planet in the next 20 years or so and it'll either go the way of corporation controlled masses or a there will be a mass revolution.
 
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