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Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Gas prices fall to $3 a gallon in some markets
If your wallet is still hurting from the painfully high fuel prices much of the country experienced over the winter there?s some good news next time you head to the pump.
The average price of a gallon of regular unleaded gas has dipped to just $3.58, a three-cent dip since late last week, 15 cents from a month ago, and 36 cents off of what the typical American motorist was spending this time in 2012.
That?s a sharp turnaround from February when some states saw gas surge to near or all-time records, particularly along the West Coast.
The Detroit Bureau: Are Wagons Ready for Revival?
Buyers are still paying an average $4.359 in Hawaii and $4.027 in Washington, D.C., but California is back under the $4 mark, at $3.998, according to GasBuddy.com, a fuel price tracking service. And it?s down to $3.286 in Montana ? where motorists are paying just $3.261 in Billings.
Some reports indicate that the price has dropped below the $3 mark in a few Rocky Mountain communities near major refineries. And GasBuddy is forecasting still ?more markets? will dip under that break point in the coming days.
The Detroit Bureau: Fisker Fiasco Worsens
While crude prices posted some gains in early Monday trading, petroleum futures have been in sharp decline for several weeks. One key reason, reports the federal Energy Information Administration is that the country?s inventories are now at a 22-year peak.
The U.S. has been rapidly ramping up oil production for several years and is expected to actually be a larger producer than Saudi Arabia and other OPEC providers by mid-decade. That doesn't necessarily translate into lower prices, as petroleum is traded as a global commodity. But despite concerns about Mideast instability ? notably reductions in production in war-torn Syria ? there appears to be a good supply, if not a glut of the black gold now available around the world.
The Detroit Bureau: Germans May Give UAW Breakthrough Chance to Unionize VW "Transplant"
According to Tom Kloza, chief analyst with the Oil Price Information Service, only a major ?disruption in the Mideast? would likely provoke a sharp spike in fuel prices around the world.
That said, analysts warn that Americans can?t be complacent. Traders continue trying to push up the price of crude. And as U.S. motorists have been seeing, regional spikes are becoming more common. That can follow the changeover from summer to winter fuel blends designed to reduce regional air pollution problems. It can also result from maintenance and other issues, such as those that affected large swaths of the Midwest and Pacific Coast over the last year.
Even in areas where prices top the national charts today, the figures are significantly down from year-ago levels ? when California stood at $4.28 a gallon, for example.
The Detroit Bureau: Ford Reveals Alternatives for F-150
The sudden decline in gas prices may be fueling a shift in the U.S. new car market, meanwhile. Sales of pickups, in particular, surged during March and light trucks outsold passenger cars on the whole, despite recent trends moving in the opposite direction.
Copyright ? 2009-2013, The Detroit Bureau
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New 'transient electronics' disappear when no longer needed
Apr. 8, 2013 ? Scientists have described key advances toward practical uses of a new genre of tiny, biocompatible electronic devices that could be implanted into the body to relieve pain or battle infection for a specific period of time, and then dissolve harmlessly.
These "transient electronics," described in New Orleans on April 8 at the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society, could have other uses, including consumer electronics products with a pre-engineered service life.
John Rogers, Ph.D., who led the research, explained that it arises from a view of electronics fundamentally different from the mindset that has prevailed since the era of electronic "chips," integrated circuits and microprocessors, which dawned almost 50 years ago.
"The goal of the electronics industry has always been to build durable devices that last forever with stable performance," Rogers explained. "But many new opportunities open up once you start thinking about electronics that could disappear in a controlled and programmable way."
Those opportunities, he added, include cell phones and other mobile devices that stop working on a timetable corresponding to the time for upgrading to a new model. Instead of adding to the $50 million of so-called e-waste generated every year, the devices would simply break down. Medical implants that are only needed for a few weeks could just disappear, without requiring an extra surgery to remove them from the body. And no one would have to retrieve dozens of transient water-quality sensors from a river undergoing water quality monitoring. They would dissolve without a trace and without harm to the environment.
Although other researchers have developed so-called bioresorbable medical devices that disappear over time in the body, Rogers' team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the first to produce such broadly applicable technology, which has many more potential uses than other devices. The scientists have designed transient electronics as temperature sensors, solar cells and miniature digital cameras, for instance. Moreover, previous bioresorbable devices were made of different materials that only partially dissolved, leaving behind residues, and they did not perform as well as Rogers' current devices.
The electronics are enclosed in material that dissolves completely after a certain period of time when exposed to water or body fluids, somewhat like dissolvable sutures. By altering the number of layers of the wrapping, scientists can define everything about how the device will dissolve in the body or in the environment, including its overall lifetime, said Rogers. The devices perform just as well as conventional electronics and function normally until the encapsulating layer disappears. Once that happens, it takes about 30 minutes for the electronic connections to dissolve away, and the device stops working. Current versions of the devices remain operable for a few weeks. Rogers' team is researching ways to make devices that last a few years.
In his ACS report, Rogers described key advances in the technology. One advance established for the first time that transient electronic devices, implanted into laboratory mice, actually work in battling infections and do, indeed, dissolve when done. Rogers' team previously only thought that would happen. The devices produced localized heat, which prevented bacterial growth and surgery-related infections from developing in the mice. The findings add to the confidence that similar devices can be designed to reduce pain by stimulating certain nerves or facilitate bone growth or wound healing.
The scientists also reported progress in making the devices with conventional manufacturing processes instead of meticulously building the electronics one-by-one by hand in a laboratory. "It's a step toward producing these devices with the kind of manufacturing processes that are already in wide use for traditional electronics like silicon-based microprocessors and memory technology," said Rogers.
Another advance involved the materials for making and powering the devices without an external electricity source. Rogers said, for instance, that the latest transient electronic devices incorporate zinc oxide, which is "piezoelectric." It means that thin, flexible devices made with zinc oxide could produce electricity when bent or twisted -- perhaps by movement of muscles in the body, pulsation of blood vessels or beating of the heart.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by American Chemical Society (ACS).
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
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Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Major Dell shareholder favors recent buyout offers
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) ? A major Dell shareholder is urging the slumping personal computer maker's board to scrap a $24.4 billion deal to sell the company to a group including CEO Michael Dell and pursue two competing bids instead.
The request made in in a Tuesday letter from Southeastern Asset Management isn't a surprise. The Memphis, Tenn., investment firm stated its opposition to Dell Inc.'s plan to sell itself to Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners shortly after the terms were announced two months ago.
This is the first time that Southeastern has communicated with Dell's board since buyout specialist Blackstone Group and billionaire investor Carl Icahn submitted alternative proposals in late March.
Southeastern says both of those bids are better than the current deal. The firm owns an 8.4 percent stake in Dell.
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Gulf of Mexico can 'self-deep-clean'
8 April 2013
Last updated at 21:41 ET
New details have emerged about "self-cleaning" effects in the Gulf of Mexico witnessed in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Researchers reporting at the American Chemical Society conference revealed details of a cascade of micro-organisms that spring into action to degrade oil.
Research has also outlined how chemical "dispersants" used in clean-up efforts actually frustrate these processes.
However, the long-term effects of the weeks of oil exposure remain unknown.
And concern was expressed about the ultimate resilience of the Gulf.
Terry Hazen of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has been studying oil-degrading microbes in greater and greater detail since the disaster, even discovering some that had never been seen before.
They can break down the long-chain carbon-based "alkane" molecules present in oil - and in isolated conditions will even move towards oil.
"They're really oil-seeking missiles," he told the meeting.
'Deep cleaning'In a sense, it is no surprise that the seas should host oil-hungry microbes; natural seeps from the ocean floor have been releasing oil into the world's waters for millions of years.
A 2003 US National Academy of Sciences report put the annual average of this seepage in the Gulf at 140,000 tonnes.
Continue reading the main story?Start Quote
End Quote Terry Hazen University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleI think the Gulf of Mexico is cleaner than you would expect, not only from the oil but from everything else that goes into it?
But Prof Hazen's research has revealed more of the complex web of microbes that feed on oil - and are in turn fed on.
Through recent studies, most recently in Frontiers of Microbiology, he and collaborators have begun to map the genomes of these microbes and determine which genes contribute to oil-degrading properties when oil concentrations rise.
A release like that of Deepwater Horizon contains a rich mix of carbon-containing molecules - alkanes, methane and what are called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), each presenting its own risks to the environment.
The new finding is about methanotrophs, which feed on methane - among the last compounds to be degraded.
Prof Hazen said that the sudden release of methane, rather than slow seeps, created a lucky effect.
"All of a sudden the [methanotroph populations] go up to really high densities and they're fat and happy - and then [the methane is] gone." he told BBC News.
"At that point, they degrade anything else that's there fortuitously, and they'll degrade it down below what would be usable as a carbon and energy source - so it's really sort of a 'deep-cleaning' effect.
"That's why I think the Gulf of Mexico is cleaner than you would expect, not only from the oil but from everything else that goes into it."
'Dramatic traumas'Back on shore, Gabriel Kasozi, now of the Makerere University of Kampala in Uganda, studied the sediments in coastal areas of Louisiana after the disaster.
"We took samples 3m and 15m from the shores? followed that for about a year and did some modelling. We found that the half-life of the half-lives of the alkanes was about 70 days and PAHs was 100 days," he told the meeting.
"After a year, the concentrations had pretty much reduced to background levels."
What is becoming clearer with time is that the chemical dispersants typically used in clean-up efforts to break masses of oil up into small droplets does more harm than good.
A study in Environmental Pollution in February found that the toxicity of the oil-dispersant mix was 52 times more toxic to bacteria that are important to the ecosystem than either component alone.
But Dongye Zhao from Auburn University in the US said that the dispersants also caused sediments to absorb more of the harmful compounds, lengthening their effects on the environment.
"Preliminary results show us that adding dispersants induces a series of hystereses," he told the meeting.
"That means it's really going to? increase absorption, which is quite counterintuitive."
The group's work presented here also showed that dispersants interfered with other natural processes that degrade oil, including effects from sunlight and ground-level ozone.
Prof Hazen said that while the Gulf was cleaner, faster than was once assumed, the effects of spills are yet to be fully quantified.
"There was a lot of oil out there for 84 days," he told BBC News.
"Fish and bacteria and plankton and everything else were swimming through that oil, and we don't know what long-term effects that'll have.
"I am quite worried about how resilient the Gulf of Mexico is," Prof Hazen said.
"She's had some pretty dramatic traumas, and I'm worried how much the ecosystem can actually tolerate."
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22075182#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
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Nantucket Mini Easel from Levenger
Levenger has developed an impressive line of iPad accessories, and they’ve been expanding their line to include some accessories designed specifically for the smaller iPad mini. ?Their new Nantucket Mini Easel Stand for the iPad mini is sized to be just right for the smaller iPad, other small tablets, or even a smart phone. ?It’s [...]
Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2013/04/08/nantucket-mini-easel-from-levenger/
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