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Making wind turbines safer for birds

September 18, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

There are people who oppose the installation of wind turbines for a variety of reasons. It is true that wind turbines can be dangerous to birds. Estimates are that about 250,000 birds are killed flying into wind turbines each year in the U.S.

However, this data needs to be looked at in comparison to bird deaths from flying into electrical lines (25 million), vehicles (214 million), and building glass (at least 600 million). And even these figures pale in comparison to the more than 2 billion birds killed by domestic cats each year.

Despite these facts, it would still be great if fewer birds died from flying into wind turbines. Researchers at Oregon State University are part of a team looking at reducing bird collision risks from wind turbines by painting a single blade of the turbine black.

Recent research in Norway found that painting a single turbine blade black reduced the number of bird collisions by nearly 72%. Why should this work? The hypothesis is that the black-painted blades disrupt the visual uniformity of the airspace around the turbines and makes them more noticeable to birds, which prompts avoidance behavior.

The Norwegian data is based on a relatively small sample size and the Oregon State researchers as well as others in Spain, Sweden, and South Africa are working on more rigorous and comprehensive studies.

The hope is that this rather simple strategy could make windfarms safer for birds. Unfortunately, this approach is not likely to be very effective with bats, which rely more on auditory cues rather than visual cues.

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Scientists studying impact of painting wind turbine blade black to reduce bird collisions

Photo, posted May 21, 2024, courtesy of Roy Harryman via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Saving Our Soil | Earth Wise

July 14, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The majority of food we eat is grown in topsoil, that carbon-rich, black soil that nurtures everything from carrots to watermelons. The fertility of this soil has developed over eons.

But over the past 160 years, the Midwestern United States has lost 63.4 billion tons of topsoil due to farming practices. In fact, Midwestern topsoil is eroding between 10 and 1,000 times faster than it did in the pre-agricultural era. The rate of erosion is 25 times greater than the rate at which topsoil forms.

According to new research from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, this rapid and unsustainable rate of topsoil erosion can be drastically reduced by utilizing an agricultural method already in practice: No-till farming. This method, which is currently practiced on 40% of cropland acres in the Midwest, can extend our current level of soil fertility for the next several centuries.

In the study, which was recently published in the journal Earth’s Future, the research team looked at the current business-as-usual method, under which approximately 40% of the midwestern U.S.’s acres are no-till farmed, all the way up to 100% adoption of no-till methods.

If the U.S.’s current agricultural practices remain largely unchanged, approximately 9.6 billion tons of topsoil will be lost over the next century alone. However, approximately 95% of the erosion in the business-as-usual scenario could be prevented by adopting 100% no-till farming practices.

Saving our soil by improving our farming methods has implications for everything from food security to climate change mitigation.

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Saving Our Soil: How to Extend U.S. Breadbasket Fertility for Centuries

Photo, posted January 19, 2022, courtesy of Terri Dux via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Colorful Solar Panels | Earth Wise

September 22, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

More and more buildings and public spaces are incorporating solar panels and not only just on rooftops. Some buildings are incorporating power-generating structures all over their facades.

Using solar panels in this way puts some design constraints on buildings because solar panels are typically a deep black color. This is because solar panels need to absorb light and making them any other color decreases their ability to do so and generate power. But the problem is that people don’t necessarily want a black building.

One alternative to traditional solar panel design is to use structural sources of color that include microscopic shapes that only reflect specific light frequencies, like the scales on butterfly wings. But this approach generally leads to iridescence – which might not be what is wanted – and is often quite expensive to implement.

A team of researchers at a university in Shanghai has now demonstrated a way to give solar panels color that is easy and inexpensive to apply and that does not reduce their ability to produce energy efficiently.

The technique involves spraying a thin layer of a material called a photonic glass onto the surface of solar cells. The photonic glass is made of a thin, disorderly layer of dielectric microscopic zinc sulfide spheres. Even though most light can pass through the photonic glass, certain colors are reflected back, depending on the sizes of the spheres. By varying that size, the researchers created solar panels that were blue, green, or purple with only a very small drop in solar panel efficiency.

The solar panels made this way maintained their color and performance under durability testing. With this new technology, there may soon be colorful solar panels on our buildings.

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Colorful solar panels could make the technology more attractive

Photo, posted December 15, 2021, courtesy of Pete via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Sea Urchins And Climate Change | Earth Wise

August 1, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

There is a thriving population of black sea urchins in bubbling volcanic vents off the coast of Ishia, a small island in the Gulf of Naples. The oceanic environment there is very acidic, high in carbon dioxide, and very warm. The environment represents a proxy for what is gradually happening to oceans around the world.

Researchers from the University of Sydney have determined that the ability of sea urchins to prosper in such an environment means that these animals, which are already abundant in the Mediterranean Sea are likely to spread further afield as oceans continue to warm and become more acidic. The Mediterranean Sea is warming 20% faster than the global average.

Sea urchins are already an environmental problem in many places around the world. When their numbers increase disproportionately, they decimate kelp forests and algae, leading to the demise of other species that depend on these things for food or shelter. The result is something called an urchin barren, which is a rocky, sandy, urchin-filled seafloor devoid of other life.

Urchin barrens are increasingly common in many places, including the east coast of Australia and the coastline in the Americas stretching from Nova Scotia to Chile.

In Australia, for example, sea urchin populations have multiplied, and their range has expanded considerably, overgrazing kelp and damaging abalone and lobster farms.

Tests run by the Sydney researchers found that it is difficult to stress sea urchins. They appear to tolerate conditions that other creatures simply cannot. The only real positive is that understanding the urchins’ remarkable survival abilities might offer insights into adaptations that other animals might need in order to survive as the oceans become warmer and more acidic.

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Colonising sea urchins can withstand hot, acidic seas

Photo, posted January 31, 2010, courtesy of Anna Barnett via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

The Search For Lingering Ash | Earth Wise

January 12, 2021 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Ash trees are some of the most important plants along riverbanks and in wetlands. There are three ash species in North America: the white, green, and black ash. Unfortunately, all three species are critically endangered because of the emerald ash borer.

The emerald ash borer is an exotic beetle from Asia that first showed up in the U.S. in southeastern Michigan in the summer of 2002. The adult beetles do little damage but the larvae feed on the inner bark of ash trees and disrupt the tree’s ability to transport water and nutrients. The beetles are now found in 35 states and 5 Canadian provinces and have killed hundreds of millions of ash trees.

The greatest hope for preserving ash tree species relates to lingering ash, which are those rare trees that have managed to survive the onslaught of the emerald ash borer. The idea is that those trees have some natural genetic resistance to the borer. Getting seeds and cuttings from lingering ash and propagating them at nurseries may be the only way to get ash trees back into the natural landscape.

Lingering ash are extremely rare and therefore very hard to find. As a result, researchers are reaching out to the public to help with the search and report the presence of these surviving trees in woodlands.

Researchers want to find large, mature trees left among those that were killed by the invasive insect and therefore display great resilience. In Kentucky, university and Division of Forestry researchers are making use of software tools to engage the assistance of the public. An app called TreeSnap allows people to provide data on trees that they find in their community, on their property, or out in the wild.

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Researchers Ask Public for Help Finding Lingering Ash Trees

Help Our Nation’s Trees!

Photo, posted May 31, 2014, courtesy of Katja Schulz via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

The Bitter Truth About Caffeine

January 7, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Black coffee has a bitter taste. Bitterness evolved as a natural warning system to protect the body from harmful substances. By the logic of evolution, we should therefore want to spit coffee out, but obviously it doesn’t work that way.

Caffeine itself has a particularly bitter taste. Surprisingly, a new study at Northwestern University has found that the more sensitive people are to the bitter taste of caffeine, the more coffee they drink. That sensitivity is actually a genetic variant.

So, one would think that people who are especially sensitive to the bitter taste of caffeine would drink less coffee. The counter intuitive result suggests that coffee consumers acquire a taste or an ability to detect caffeine as a result of the learned positive reinforcement (in other words, the buzz) elicited by caffeine. People with a heightened ability to taste coffee’s bitterness learn to associate good things with it.

The study also found in contrast that people sensitive to the bitter flavor of a different compound called 6-n-propylthiouracil (known as PROP)avoided coffee as well as red wine.

The study made use of applied Mendelian randomization, a technique commonly used in disease epidemiology, to test the causal relationship between bitter taste and beverage consumption in more than 400,000 men and women in the United Kingdom.

These results shed some light on the disdain many coffee drinkers have for decaf coffee. It may not be just the lack of buzz that turns them off. Some of them with the right genes may be missing that extra bit of bitterness that alerts them that something good is about to happen.

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Why we shouldn’t like coffee, but we do

Photo, posted May 22, 2009, courtesy of Olle Svensson via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.