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Source: http://www.today.com/id/7358550/ns/today-entertainment/
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Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Where the Most Important Part of Your Battery Comes From
Lithium's kind of a big deal. It powers everything from our gadgets to our cars?really our entire modern world. And that's not changing any time soon; some analysts estimate that demand could grow up to 25% over the next several years. But how does one harness the power of a metal that bursts into flame every time it gets wet? How do you even get it out of the ground?
What is Lithium?
Lithium (Greek for "stone") is the third element on the periodic table, a silvery-white alkali metal that's soft enough to be cut with a table knife. It's also the lightest metal on Earth, as well as the least-dense solid element. It has the equivalent density of a plank of pine wood, and half that of water. It floats in oil (and water too, though that'd end very badly since, you know, alkali go boom), and since it's reactive with moisture in the air, pure lithium is typically stored in anaerobic conditions and covered in either mineral oil, petroleum jelly, or some other such non-reactive liquid.
That's not to say that you can just dig a hole and pull out a chunk of lithium. No, it's far too corrosive and reactive for that; in fact, lithium never occurs freely in nature. Instead it's always found as a compound, often in pegmatitic minerals, as well as in ocean water, brines, and clays. Problem is, even though lithium is relatively abundant?it is the 33rd most common element?it's very diffuse throughout nature, which means that collecting and concentrating it into a commercially viable form is a massive pain.
How Did We Discover It?
Johan August Arfwedson first isolated lithium from petalite?a crystalline substance?in 1817. Over the next few decades, a number of researchers teased out the basic physical conditions of the metal. By 1855, chemists Robert Bunsen and Augustus Matthiessen had discovered a means of precipitating large amounts of lithium from lithium chloride via electrolysis, which led to small-scale production in 1916 and commercial-scale lithium production by 1923.
Lithium was used in WWII as a high-temperature grease for aircraft engines, thanks to its high melting point and the fact that it's significantly less corrosive than the calcium soaps used previously. Lithium also played a major role in the Cold War. The lithium-6 and lithium-7 ions were used to create tritium, a boosting compound used to increase the efficiency and yield of hydrogen bombs, as well as a solid fusion fuel itself.
From the late 1950s until the mid-1980s, the US was the dominant global lithium producer. Over roughly a quarter century, the US amassed a stockpile of 42,000 tons of lithium hydroxide from production sites in Nevada and North Carolina. America supplied 80% of the global demand for lithium in 1976, and continued its dominance until 1984, when one of the largest deposits on the planet was discovered in Chile (and again in 1997, when mining began on another massive deposit in Argentina).
So, What Do We Do When We Find It?
Turns out, the US only holds a fraction of the massive lithium deposits of Chile and Argentina. They're the two largest producers, in that order, churning out 60 percent of the world's annual supply. Australia and China combine for another 30 percent. The remaining 10 percent accounts for smaller producers like the US and Russia. The US Geological Survey estimates total worldwide lithium reserves at 13 million tons. interestingly, half of that supply is thought to actually reside in Bolivia, along the eastern face of the Andes. Overall, the USGS estimates there's at least 5.4 million tons of lithium in them thar Bolivian hills.
Historically, lithium has either been mined from brines or from hard rock mining. Hard-rock lithium mining is just like other traditional mining operations: Dig a big hole, pull out the rocks you want, send them off for processing. The problem with applying that to lithium is that extracting the substance from solid rock is an incredibly time-, energy-, and cost-intensive ordeal. Since lithium is so diffuse, you've got to pull a lot of rock out of the ground just to get a little bit of of the good stuff.
Instead, far more economically efficient, brine-based extraction methods have been developed. Both Chile and Argentina (as well as China, Russia, and the US's only operating lithium mine in Clayton Valley, Nevada) use the brine pool method. Brine itself is, as Western Lithium explains:
The brines, volcanic in origin, are present in desert areas and occur in playas and salars where lithium has been concentrated by solar evaporation. In the salars (saline desert basins sometimes known as salt lakes or salt flats), the brine is contained at or below the surface and is pumped into large solar evaporation ponds for concentration prior to processing. When the basin surfaces are predominantly composed of silts and clays with some salt incrustation, they are referred to as playas. If the surface is predominantly salt they are called salars. Although the fundamental character of the deposits is similar, there is great variability in size, surface character, stratigraphy, structure, chemistry, infrastructure and solar evaporation rates.
The largest such brine pool resides in the world?s largest salt flat, Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni.
The Foote Mineral company used to operate a lithium brine pool in Silver Peak, Nevada and provides this deeper look as to how lithium is extracted:
The Foote Mineral Company is recovering lithium from solar evaporated saline brines at Silver Peak, Nevada. The brines are pumped from beneath a playa surface inside a closed basin. The playa deposits consists of mixtures of clays, silts, sands, and evaporites, many of which are saturated with saline brines down to known depths of 600 feet. Brines are probably present below this depth, for gravity studies have indicated the unconsolidated sediments reach depths of 1500 feet. The genesis of the Silver Peak deposit is apparently related to volcanic activity and the area is characterized by hot springs, cinder cones, and lava deposits. The brine pumped from wells contains 300 ppm of lithium and 10-15 wt. % of other dissolved solids. The playa surface is well suited for solar evaporation. The brines are pumped into a series of solar evaporation ponds and after they reach saturation a series of salts are precipitated. The sequence of salts precipitated is NaCl, a mixture of NaC1 and glaserite (KNa(SO4 )2 ), and then these two plus Ka As a consequence of the evaporation, the lithium concentration is increased to approximately 5000 ppm. The effective evaporation season at Silver Peak begins in April and commonly continues through October. It is necessary to accumulate sufficient brine by October to operate the processing plant through the winter months. Lithium is recovered from the brine by precipitating lithium carbonate.
Just four companies?Talison Lithium, Rockwood Holdings, Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile, and FMC?account for 95 percent of worldwide lithium production and all use the industry standard method of precipitating pure lithium from molten lithium chloride (LiCl) using electrolysis. This process is of course performed in an air and water free environment to avoid a reaction.
Where Do the Batteries Come In?
In the video above, Leyden Energy offers us a view inside their li-ion battery plant and a behind the scenes tour of its production facility.
The Science Channel's How It's Made series also walks us through a more general form of the battery production process in the clip above.
Meeting Demand
We've got roughly 900 million vehicles on the road worldwide, and not enough lithium reserves to replace very many of them with battery-powered alternatives. "Since a vehicle battery requires 100 times as much lithium carbonate as its laptop equivalent, the green-car revolution could make lithium one of the planet's most strategic commodities," says Mary Ann Wright of Johnson Controls-Saft, a lithium-ion battery producer.
"To make just 60 million plug-in hybrid vehicles a year containing a small lithium-ion battery would require 420,000 tons of lithium carbonate - or six times the current global production annually," William Tahil, research director at Meridian International Research, told Barrons. "But in reality, you want a decent-sized battery, so it's more likely you'd have to increase global production tenfold. And this excludes the demand for lithium in portable electronics."
To span that supply shortage, numerous alternative sources for lithium have been explored. One promising system is to use the brine pulled up by geothermal pumps. A cadre of seven geothermal plants in the Salton Sea have been able to pull about 16,000 tons of lithium (as well as a fair amount of zinc) from their pipes annually. It's simply a matter of filtering the dissolved minerals from the water.
[Wikipedia - NBC News - Daily Mail - Rodinal Lithium - Salt Institute - BC Institute of Technology - About - Resilience - Western Lithium - Hardrock mining image: Kamzara / Shutterstock, salt pile image: Vladimir Melnik / Shutterstock, all other images: AP Images]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/where-the-most-important-part-of-your-battery-comes-fro-586442784
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The Feminist Pagan: PBP- M is for Magical Timing | adadkaso
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Source: http://adadkaso.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-feminist-pagan-pbp-m-is-for-magical.html
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Monday, July 1, 2013
Cancer is a result of a default cellular 'safe mode,' physicist proposes
June 30, 2013 ? With death rates from cancer have remained largely unchanged over the past 60 years, a physicist is trying to shed more light on the disease with a very different theory of its origin that traces cancer back to the dawn of multicellularity more than a billion years ago.
In this month's special issue of Physics World devoted to the "physics of cancer," Paul Davies, principal investigator at Arizona State University's Center for Convergence of Physical Sciences and Cancer Biology, explains his radical new theory.
Davies was brought in to lead the centre in 2009 having almost no experience in cancer research whatsoever. With a background in theoretical physics and cosmology, he was employed to bring fresh, unbiased eyes to the underlying principles of the disease.
He has since raised questions that are rarely asked by oncologists: thinking about why cancer exists at all and what place it holds in the grand story of life on Earth.
His new theory, drawn together with Charles Lineweaver of the Australian National University, suggests that cancer is a throwback to an ancient genetic "sub-routine" where the mechanisms that usually instruct cells when to multiply and die malfunctions, thus forcing the cells to revert back to a default option that was programmed into their ancestors long ago.
"To use a computer analogy, cancer is like Windows defaulting to 'safe mode' after suffering an insult of some sort," Davies writes.
The result of this malfunction is the start of a cascade of events that we identify as cancer -- a runaway proliferation of cells that form a tumour, which eventually becomes mobile itself, spreading to other parts of the body and invading and colonizing.
Orthodox explanations suppose that cancer results from an accumulation of random genetic mutations, with the cancer starting from scratch each time it manifests; however, Davies and Lineweaver believe it is caused by a set of genes that have been passed on from our very early ancestors and are "switched on" in the very early stages of an organism's life as cells differentiate into specialist forms.
The pair suggests that the genes that are involved in the early development of the embryo -- and that are silenced, or switched off, thereafter -- become inappropriately reactivated in the adult as a result of some sort of trigger or damage, such as chemicals, radiation or inflammation.
"Very roughly, the earlier the embryonic stage, the more basic and ancient will be the genes guiding development, and the more carefully conserved and widely distributed they will be among species," Davies writes.
Several research teams around the world are currently providing experimental evidence that shows the similarities between the expression of genes in a tumour and an embryo, adding weight to Davies and Lineweaver's theory.
Davies makes it clear that radical new thinking is needed; however, just like ageing, he states that cancer cannot generally be cured but can be mitigated, which we can only do when we better understand the disease, and its place in the "great sweep of evolutionary history."
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/p6KiNvaRN-s/130630225413.htm
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Garcetti in charge: Los Angeles' new mayor faces tough agenda, more jobs , fewer potholes
LOS ANGELES ? Eric Garcetti will take the oath of office Sunday to become Los Angeles' 42nd mayor, with a promise to do the basic things right while getting the city's economy rolling again.
The 42-year-old Ivy Leaguer who often talks of the simple pleasures of growing up in the city's San Fernando Valley ? little league baseball, riding bikes and eating ice cream ? officially takes over the job leading a sprawling city of nearly 4 million people on July 1.
He replaces fellow Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa, 60, who exits after two terms during which he pushed to improve schools and expand rail lines in a city notoriously choked by cars.
The early evening inaugural will include some celebrity sparkle, with Jimmy Kimmel and musician Moby scheduled to participate in the festivities.
"This inauguration won't be highlighted by a black-tie gala. We're having a party in the park. We want this day to be about celebrating Los Angeles," Garcetti said in a statement.
The new mayor takes charge of a city with problems all too familiar: knotted freeways, an unemployment rate hovering around double digits, many struggling schools, battered roadways.
Garcetti has said he will focus on the economy "like a laser beam" and try to recover jobs lost in the recession. His goals range from getting all city workers to contribute to costly health care to dealing with long-standing gripes about potholes and cracked sidewalks.
"We have to fix the basic things," he says.
He will be the city's first elected Jewish mayor, and his background reflects the city's diversity: he often refers to his Italian and Mexican roots. Garcetti has a temperate, wonky style ? he was a Rhodes Scholar, after attending Columbia University ? that will be a change from Villaraigosa, who was known for his outsized personality and ability to make headlines about his nightlife and dating.
It also will be a generational change. Garcetti is just a few years older than Villaraigosa's eldest daughter.
Garcetti was elected with a yawn from most residents ? not even one in four voters cast a ballot in his May runoff against Controller Wendy Greuel. Los Angeles is known for mostly ignoring the scrum of local politics.
Source: http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/213749371.html
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Official: 19 firefighters die in Ariz. blaze
YARNELL, Ariz. (AP) ? An Arizona fire chief says a wildfire that killed 19 members of his crew was moving fast and fueled by hot, dry conditions.
Prescott Fire Chief Dan Fraijo said in a news conference that the department is grieving the loss of so many of its members.
The flames from the blaze lit up the night sky in the forest above the town, and smoke could be smelled for miles.
The fire started with a lightning strike on Friday and spread to 2,000 acres on Sunday amid triple-digit temperatures. It burned several homes about 85 miles northwest of Phoenix.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/official-19-firefighters-die-battling-ariz-fire-033422890.html
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