As of this past Saturday, Mount Washington was a staggering 7.4 degrees (F) warmer than the average November, 6.71 inches of liquid precipitation dryer then the average November and a whopping three feet of snow behind  where we should be.

OK, so we can’t connect particular weather events to climate change - after all, last winter at this time, we were way ahead of the usual snowfall and well below average temperature.

Still, speaking as somebody who thinks it is *wrong* to be wearing shirtsleeves outside when it’s almost December, I demand a scapegoat!

Casuarina trees colonizing a lava field on La Réunion island in the Indian Ocean. Photo by Y. Dommergues, courtesy UNH

University of New Hampshire microbiologist Louis Tisa has received two grants totaling $498,115 to advance understanding of the actinorhizal plants, widespread woody plants with potential to enrich nutrient-poor and contaminated soils.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) awarded Tisa, a professor of molecular, cellular and biomedical sciences, $399,000 to explore the symbiotic relationship between the bacteria Frankia and Casuarina, an actinorhizal plant. Frankia forms root nodule structures on Casuarina that convert atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia, allowing Casuarina to access nitrogen from the air and to thrive in areas with nitrogen-poor soil.

Working with colleagues at the Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement in Montpellier, France, Tisa is researching the signaling process in the relationship between Frankia and Casuarina that lets each organism identify as beneficial.

“The plant has to know that the microbe is a friend, not a foe, and the microbe needs to tell the plant, ‘build me a structure,’” Tisa says. “What we’re interested in is, what are the words? How are they talking?” Tisa and his collaborators, who together will have sequenced 10 Frankia genomes, know that the signal is chemical but not whether it is secreted or exists on the surface.

The USDA grant will help fund five graduate students and one undergraduate student working with Tisa. “We’re excited. There are lots of preliminary results,” he says. “If we can figure out how these things communicate, we can figure out how to enhance the performance of these trees.” Tisa notes that actinorhizal plants pose a more sustainable solution to stabilizing and enriching soils than the introduction of chemicals.

His second grant, $99,115 from the U.S.-Egypt Science and Technology Joint Research program through the USDA Foreign Agriculture Service, will fund outreach, exchange and collaboration with Egyptian scientists to study Egyptian Frankia strains and their relationship with Casuarina, which is being used in Egypt to reclaim desert areas. The three-year grant supports collaboration with Samira Mansour from Suez Canal University in Egypt, who was a visiting scientist in Tisa’s laboratory.

Tisa’s work receives additional funding from the Agricultural Experiment Station and the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture at UNH.

I wrote in June about one bit of debunkery from Dartmouth College geography professor emeritus Vincent Malmström, who pointed out that the supposed end-of-calendar date in December 2012 is an estimate. I’d link to the article, but we’ve changed our Web host and many old links have broken, and I can’t figure out how to make new permanent links - so instead you can click here to read his paper, titled “The Astronomical Insignificance of Maya Date 13.0.0.0.”

(Info-graphic spotted via Bad Astronomy)

As long as we’re talking about traditional audio stuff, take note that the ever-quirky David Sedaris has released his latest audiobook on vinyl. (NY Times item here.) This is so weird a move that I figure it’s done for publicity alone - and hey, it worked!

I have recorded virtually all of my few-hundred LPs into digital, complete with pops and hisses because it’s too much of a pain to clean them up. As a result, I have listened to that music more than I have since early post-college days, when having a record playing at virtually all times was a requirement for daily life.

Speaking of disappointment, it’s too bad that an article this well done confused kilowatts and kilowatt-hours, as so many people do. (Including me, if I’m not paying attention. We really need to think of better units.)

Since it’s carbon-free and very large-scale (Seabrook can generate roughly half the total electricity output of all New Hampshire’s power plants), many people say it should be central to our future. Since we have no way to handle radioactive waste, it can contribute to the spread of nuclear arms, and since the plants cost mind-boggling amounts of money to build, many people say we should forget it and charge hard at alternative sources.

It’s very complicated. I’m pro-nuclear, but I’m ready to waffle at the drop of an isotope.

We have a miniature version of this debate in New England, concerning the future of the relatively small and dilapidated Vermont Yankee site, which is seeking to extend its operating permit past 2012, when it expires. (Its wikipedia article has a reasonable summary of its history, although some might find it slightly anti-VY; here’s a Reuters story about some recent developments)

Anyway, the issue is so contentious that now there’s a push to take the ultimate New England action: Put it before town meeting!

But here’s a great example, from this story in the Burlington Free-Press: IBM’s semiconductor plant near Burlington, Vt., has single-handedly caused water used in the regional water district to fall 20 percent in a decade. It didn’t do it to be “green” but to save $3 million a year in the cost of pumping and disposing of that water. Even for a big company and big factory, that’s real money.

Speaking of conservation and money, however, the federal fumbling over a national cap-and-trade carbon emissions bill, plus the nation’s lowered energy needs in the recession, are driving the futures price for RGGI allotments down and down. From CarbonPositive.net: “The benchmark December futures RGGI contract closed at $2.21 on Thursday on the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange after eight days of falls. There may now be little to stop prices falling to a minimum level set by regulators of $1.86, one market analyst said.”

The system was chosen by an audience vote in New Hampshire’s high-tech product lineup for “innovation, performance, functionality, value, uniqueness and ties to the Granite State.”

As the NHHTC has done in the past, it got named a panel of judges to choose four finalists, then had the companies give seven-minute pitches to the audience at its annual dinner, after which the audience members voted. It’s an interesting hybrid approach.

The 2006 winner was Nanocomp Technologies‘ material made from woven carbon nanotubes. The 2007 winner Ultravisions’ UltraSensor, a motion detector that uses ultra-wideband (UWB) technology. The 2008 winner was Insight Technology’s night vision goggles

Cooper, of UNH’s department of molecular, cellular and biomedical sciences, received his grant to help better understand beneficial mutations in bacteria by engaging high school students in data collection. White, of the mechanical engineering department, will research flow dynamics of liquefied biomass.

Read the full press release.

The conclusion: There are too few rocket launches to make any significant difference to ozone depletion or global-warming gases, but there isn’t enough information about what’s exactly in the fumes released by various rocket fuels to determine the overall effect of microscopic particles.

So I guess if I win a flight to the ISS, I can take it and not feel guilty.

If you’re an Apple fan, New Hampshire now has bragging rights over Maine (just one store) and Vermont (none at all). On the other hand, Massachusetts has a half-dozen.

LAST week’s NIE resource on Science questions answered by CSIRO incorrectly stated that there are 12 zeros in one billion billion. There are 24 zeros if a million times a million is doubled. Many now regard a billion as a thousand times a million. This would be 18 zeros when doubled.

So let’s take solace in looking at this physics paper - one of the finest I’ve read in ages - which analyzes the movement over time of moguls on a ski hill, and finds that they move uphill:

A specific representation for the erosion–deposition wave W at position x created by a skier n may be given by the sinusoidal form W_n(x) = a sin(2πx/2r_n + ϕ_n), with positive W corresponding to deposition.

Anyway, the result is that as a skier turns on a mogul, snow is scraped from the bottom of one mogul to the top of the next one, having the overall effect of “moving” the moguls uphill over time. And this, my friends, is the kicker:

Measurements show that recreational skiers expend about 20–25 kilocalories per minute. Skiers spend roughly 20 seconds of actual time skiing (as opposed to huffing and puffing) when traversing a 100-m mogul field such as the one shown here, at Riflesight Notch in Colorado. That means a skier expends 8 kcal in a run. About 10 skiers go down Riflesight Notch each hour, and the mogul field is open 50 hours per week for five months. So there are about 10 000 runs down Riflesight Notch per season and 80 000 kcal expended. The field has about 200 moguls; that comes to 400 kcal per mogul each season. Since moguls move about 10 m uphill over the course of a season, each one requires 40 kcal/m to move uphill. More prosaically, skiers expend half a light beer for every meter of uphill mogul movement

Good news for the island: Electric rates will fall. Environment will benefit. Tourists will gawk.

Bad news for the island: A “small but not insignificant” number of folks say the turbines are louder than people expected, in a particularly annoying way. Analysis is ongoing.

Here’s a vaguely related story from Xconomy about iRobots‘ new “healthcare” division, which among other things is aiming at in-home helper robots for sick folks, which could bring us our medication on schedule, and stuff like that.

This year's leaves in front - last year's (back right) - and the previous year's (back left)

We all know that piles of stuff gets smaller as it decays, but don’t usually get to see the difference. I have a graphic example every fall, however, in my leaf pile.

We have long maintained a compost pile for leaves, at one end of our old chicken house. It’s a three-pile system; each fall I rake the leaves into a big pile (the kids are gone to college, so nobody plays in it, alas) - call that location A. The next fall I move that semi-composted pile over into location B and pile that year’s leaves into location A. The next fall I move the two-year-old pile from location B to location C, move the year-old leaves from A to B, and put the new leaves in A. By the following spring, the stuff in C (now 2 1/2 year removed from trees) is composted enough to be distributed in flower beds and the like.

As a result, every fall I have a pile of fresh leaves, one-year-old leaves and two-year old leaves, side by side. You can see a picture of it above (a crummy picture, I’m afraid - I’m no photographer and my point-and-shoot is old). It doesn’t show all of this year’s leaves, but it gives a sense of how much they shrink in volume in the first year. I’ve estimated that over the course of one year the leaf pile reduces in volume by 90%-95%, and over the following year, they reduce in volume by another 50%.

In case you’re wondering, that yellow board behind the old compost is a hollow-core sliding door that was on some closets when we moved here. On the far side of it, not visible in the picture, is the kitchen compost. I keep it separate so that if anybody wants to play in the leaves, they won’t encounter old coffee grounds and eggshells.

Geocache.com

When the kids were little and GPS units were still a gee-whiz novelty, we went geocaching a few times. (That’s the hobby where people hide trinkets outdoors and post the coordinates online, then you try to find them, leaving a trinket or notebook comment of your own when you do.) It was fun -  particularly hunting for one under three feet of snow in Joe English Reservation, even though we never did find it - yet the novelty quickly wore off.

Not for lots of people, though: The screen shot above shows the first four geocaches that come up at 03061 zip code (Nashua’s downtown) at geocaching.com. There are at least 5000 caches listed in New Hampshire, although I don’t know how many are still active.

The hobby has a drawback, however: Law enforcement gets nervous when folks stumble across mysterious cans or containers (ammo boxes are favorites because they’re water-right) tucked away behind rock walls or under park benches, and tends to call in bomb squads. The Washington Post has a story today about it. As Geocaching.com puts it: “Please use common sense when choosing a location for your cache. Do not design your cache such that it might be confused with something more dangerous.” The company has even started a system where police departments can get alerts when new caches are placed in their jurisdiction.

The National Park Service has gone so far as to forbid geocaching on federal parkland, largely because of concerns that people will stomp all over fragile ecosystems, looking for cool places to hide their cache. On the other hand, the number of people involved in outdoor activities is fading nationwide as we become a land of pudgy suburbanites, so anything that lures folks out of cars or buildings should be encouraged.

They have just announced construction of a 20-megawatt “flywheel frequency regulation plant” in upstate New York. Beacon Power’s flywheels are designed to provide one megawatt of power for 15 minutes. The company’s press release includes:

Beacon’s 20 MW plant has been designed to provide frequency regulation services by absorbing electricity from the grid when there is too much, and storing it as kinetic energy in a matrix of flywheel systems. When there is not enough power to meet demand, the flywheels then inject it back into the grid, thus helping maintain proper electricity frequency (i.e., 60 cycles/second). Thanks to its ability to recycle electricity efficiently and act like a “shock absorber” to the grid, the flywheel plant will help also support the integration of greater amounts of intermittent wind and solar power resources.

Beacon will start initial site work while continuing to progress toward closing a $43-million loan with the Federal Finance Bank, with the support of the U.S. Department of Energy and a loan guarantee commitment that Beacon received earlier this year. The loan is intended to support construction of the plant.

Of course, ways to store electricity are vital if alternative-energy is going to become a big part of the power supply. Flywheels probably will never be a huge part of that - unlike, say, hydropower dam storage- but their quick response times and relatively low operating cost make them a useful part of the whole.

• They don’t ask female employees, partly for logistical reasons (urination posture is the one area where nobody can deny the superiority of the male physique) and partly because female urine is more acidic.
• They don’t do it when people are visiting - Britain isn’t ready to see “pee bales” in action, I guess.
• They estimate large water savings by reduction of “loo” flushes

This idea is old hat to organic gardeners, it seems. A quick Google-ing of “urine compost” finds a zillion discussions - including  this one, which has the delightful sentence “heck, I pee all over the place”.