Enemy of Entropy

Archive for 15 June 2008

Water from Stone?

15 June 2008, 9:34 am. Comments Off. Filed under Health, News.

Water From Rock, Eas­ier Than Blood From Stone

Gyp­sum, a rocky min­eral is abun­dant in desert regions where fresh water is usu­ally in very short sup­ply but oil and gas fields are com­mon. Writ­ing in Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Global Envi­ron­men­tal Issues, Peter van der Gaag of the Hol­land Inno­va­tion Team, in Rot­ter­dam, The Nether­lands, has hit on the idea of using the untapped energy from oil and gas flare-​​off to release the water locked in gyp­sum.
(snip)
Chem­i­cally speak­ing, gyp­sum is cal­cium sul­fate dihy­drate, and has the chem­i­cal for­mula CaSO4.2H2O. In other words, for every unit of cal­cium sul­fate in the min­eral there are two water mol­e­cules, which means gyp­sum is 20% water by weight.

van der Gaag sug­gests that a large-​​scale, or macro, engi­neer­ing project could be used to tap off this water from the vast deposits of gyp­sum found in desert regions, amount­ing to bil­lions of cubic meters and rep­re­sent­ing tril­lions of liters of clean, drink­ing water.

That is so cool! And not the kind of thing I expect to read in the Med­ical News Today newslet­ter. There’s always some­thing inter­est­ing in it, though. This was also in it.

Body Clocks Dic­tate The Beat Of Life

Body clocks deter­mine whether peo­ple are early birds or late ris­ers, “home­bod­ies” or “party ani­mals”. As Pro­fes­sor Hanspeter Herzel (Insti­tute for The­o­ret­i­cal Biol­ogy, Hum­boldt Uni­ver­sity Berlin, Ger­many) now reported at the inter­na­tional con­fer­ence “Com­pu­ta­tional & Exper­i­men­tal Mol­e­c­u­lar Biol­ogy” in Berlin, Ger­many, these bio­log­i­cal watches not only reg­u­late the sleep-​​wake cycle, but also blood pres­sure and blood tem­per­a­ture. “They are con­trolled by a mas­ter clock which con­sists of 20,000 neu­rons in the brain,” Pro­fes­sor Herzel illu­mi­nated, “where they oper­ate together to adapt us to the chang­ing demands of day and night.”

So much for those idiots who think that being a morn­ing per­son is a char­ac­ter issue.

I must have slept wrong. My right arm isn’t work­ing prop­erly. It’s annoying.

But Sam fixed a great break­fast (yes, on Father’s Day). And we’ve got Firefly.

 

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