Space Sunshade May One Day Reduce Global Warming

Global warming is a reality and increasingly its consequences are upon us. We may think that global warming does not affect us but the fact is it has already started to have disastrous consequences. flash floods, droughts, receding icebergs, cyclones are some of the manifestations of global warming. Although we are aware and worried about it and trying our best to control it but no significant impact could be seen.

Scientists have come up with new strategies to tackle the problem. Now a scientist has suggested an ambitious idea to contain global warming. put sunshades in space. Thats right. University of Arizona astronomer Roger Angel suggests putting sunshades in space and has detailed his idea in a paper Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near L1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He suggests launching a constellation of trillions of small free-flying spacecraft a million miles above Earth into an orbit aligned with the sun, called the L-1 orbit.

This spacecraft would form a long, cylindrical cloud and would have a diameter about half that of Earth, and about 10 times longer. It is suggested that about 10 percent of the sunlight passing through the 60,000-mile length of the cloud, pointing lengthwise between the Earth and the sun, would be diverted away from our planet. This would result in uniformly reduced sunlight by about 2 percent over the entire planet and would balance the heating of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere.

The use of space shade was first mooted by James Early of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1989.

"The earlier ideas were for bigger, heavier structures that would have needed manufacture and launch from the moon, which is pretty futuristic," Angel said. "I wanted to make the sunshade from small 'flyers,' small, light and extremely thin spacecraft that could be completely assembled and launched from Earth, in stacks of a million at a time. When they reached L1, they would be dealt off the stack into a cloud. There's nothing to assemble in space."

Angel proposes to design lightweight flyers made of transparent film pierced with small holes and would be two feet in diameter, 1/5000 of an inch thick and weigh about a gram, the same as a large butterfly. He suggests using MEMS technology mirrors as tiny sails that tilt to hold the flyers position in the orbiting constellation.

The weight of all flyers would be 20 millions tons. But conventional rocket launch system at $10,000 a pound would be too prohibitive. His alternative would cost only around $20 a pound.

He suggests deploying a total 20 electromagnetic launchers launching a stack of flyers every 5 minutes for 10 years. The electromagnetic launchers would use hydroelectric power but even if it uses coal-generated electricity, each ton of carbon used would reduce the effect of 1000 tons of atmospheric carbon.

Once propelled beyond Earths atmosphere the flyer stacks would be steered to L-1 orbit by solar-powered ion propulsion, pioneered by European Space Agency's SMART-1 moon orbiter and NASA's Deep Space 1 probe.

"The concept builds on existing technologies," Angel said. "It seems feasible that it could be developed and deployed in about 25 years at a cost of a few trillion dollars. With care, the solar shade should last about 50 years. So the average cost is about $100 billion a year, or about two-tenths of one percent of the global domestic product."

He added, "The sunshade is no substitute for developing renewable energy, the only permanent solution. A similar massive level of technological innovation and financial investment could ensure that.

"But if the planet gets into an abrupt climate crisis that can only be fixed by cooling, it would be good to be ready with some shading solutions that have been worked out."

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Deepak Purang writes on Science & Technology and edits Science & Technology website http://pressreleasegold.com.

Yoga Meditation

Negative Calorie Foods & Weight Loss

You gain weight when your calorie intake is more than your calorie expenditure. But if this calorie equation is reversed, then it results in "negative calorie" balance in your body. In this negative calorie case, you expand more calories than you take in, resulting in a decrease in the stored calories in the form of body fat, and you experience a weight loss. about 10% of daily caloric intake is used to process foods in the body. You can expand more by doing physical activities.

There are certain foods that show negative calorie effect because the body has to expand more energy to extract calories from these foods. The negative calorie foods need more calories to break down the foods and digest than the calories the foods actually contain. The extra calories are taken up from the stored fat in the body. Thus the negative calorie foods (may also be called as minus calorie foods or fat burning foods) are ideal for reducing the body fat and for losing weight.

Let us take an example. A piece of dessert consisting of 300 calories may require only 150 calories to be digested by our body, resulting in a net gain of 150 calories which is added to our body fat! So if you eat 100 calories of a food that requires 150 calories to digest, then you have burnt an additional 50 calories simply by eating that food. These 50 calories are used up from the stored fat in your body!

These foods are widely available in nature. Some of the foods from the list of negative calorie foods (about 100 in number) are: asparagus, broccoli, beets, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, cucumber, carrot, garlic, papaya, spinach, turnip, zucchini, apples, oranges, lettuce, grapefruit, pineapples, strawberries, and raspberries.

It is a great idea to eat these negative calorie food items to your full satisfaction without counting calories. Include these foods in your daily diet and plan your diet according to food pyramid. You will be amazed to see the fast weight loss results. You can follow negative calorie diet plan for safe and permanent weight loss.

You have permission to publish this article in your web sites, ezines or electronic publication, as long as the piece is used in its entirety including the resource box, all hyperlinks (HTML clickable) and references and copyright info.

Copyright 2004 P. Mehta, www.fatfreekitchen.com

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For more information on negative calorie foods visit the web site
Negative calorie Foods.
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Cheap Yoga Blocks

Play With the Best Video Game System and Spend Hours of Great Fun

video games are one of the best forms of entertainment today. With it, you can really make your imagination come alive and become an entirely different character that fights monsters from different planets or be a Formula 1 race car driver.

To play these games, you usually go to the mall and play it on the arcade. In the arcade, you will see different games available. Some are even placed on realistic cars or fighter planes that are designed to follow every move you make. For example, if you play in a fighter plane, you will see that the machine will follow the planes movements, when you bank your plane right, you will feel the machine that youre in move right too, if you pull up, you will feel that the machine will also point up.

Some of the arcade games even have a vibration feedback to alert you that youre being hit by the enemy. There are even two player modes where you can go head to head with your friends in a dog fight or you can do cooperative missions where your friend can be your wingman. There are a lot more arcade games available.

However, you cant go to the arcade everyday because doing so can be too expensive. Therefore, you should buy your own video gaming console where you can play right in your own home. Although it wont contain all the realistic machines that you can find in the arcade, you can still have that great graphics and sound quality in the games.

Another great thing about buying your own gaming console is that you can have flexibility in selecting your games. There are a wide variety of games available that is not yet available or impossible to put in arcades.

In order to maximize enjoyment when you buy a video gaming system, you want to get the best. However, you may wonder what makes a good gaming console. With the number of gaming consoles available in the market today, people get confused on which gaming console they should purchase. The competition makes gaming console manufacturers develop the latest graphics and sound technology and integrate them in their systems making all the different kinds of gaming consoles in the market really stand out.

In the past, crude graphics and simple sounds were the ones available in the market. And, it was really popular. Today, quite a few gaming console manufacturers are now manufacturing the latest gaming consoles with integrated features that can even rival the power of your home personal computer.

Sega, nintendo, Microsoft and Sony are four of the big names in the gaming console industry. They create the best gaming consoles in the market and really took the world by storm with each new version released. When you play in these consoles, you will know that it can really give quality entertainment for you and your family. When you have the time, you will spend hours on playing an action packed game with amazing realism and sound quality.

To answer the question on what makes a gaming system the best is not just about the sound quality and the graphics technology integrated on the system. Before you buy a gaming console, make sure that the gaming console has a lot of game titles supported. Besides, people would rather choose a gaming console where thousands of different games are available rather than purchasing a gaming console that only supports a few hundred games. You would eventually grow tired or bored of the only few hundred games available in a particular gaming console.

With thousands of gaming titles you can choose from, you can simply buy another game title if you get bored with your other games.

Another thing you should look for in a gaming console today is if it has additional add-on gadgets that you can connect. Some gaming consoles have memory cards that you can buy for you to save your progress in case you want to continue playing later on. Some have different joysticks that you can plug in for a more realistic feel for the game. For example, if you want your racing game feel more realistic, you can purchase a steering wheel with gas and brake pedals and if you want your fighter plane simulator, you can purchase a joystick that looks similar to fighter plane controls.

There are even gaming consoles that are integrated with a modem. This gaming console can give you the capability to connect to the internet and play with other players across the world.

If you choose a video gaming system that has all these features, you purchased the best video game system available. With the continuing development of different gaming consoles, who knows what other features it may bring.

Harvey Perl

Yoga And Meditation To Eliminate Stress