Saturday, July 31, 2010

[tech4all] Innovative Desalination plant opens in Chennai

 

30 July 2010
Innovative India water plant opens in Madras
By Swaminathan Natarajan BBC Tamil
New water desalination plant in Madras The plant could provide a template for solving India's water problems

 

A desalination plant which begins operating in Madras on Saturday will provide some of the cheapest drinking water in India, backers say.

They say that the plant will supply 1,000 litres of drinking water for just over $1 and could well be a "template" for other coastal Indian cities.
The company behind the plant says that it is the biggest in South Asia.
It will provide 100 million litres of water a day to the city by filtering sea water under high pressure.
In comparison, the government-run water board supplies about 650 million litres of water to the city's seven million residents.
Competitively priced
"We are using the advanced reverse osmosis technology. We are purifying the water by filtering it under high pressure. Unlike other desalination plants we are not boiling the water and as a result we are saving a lot of energy," Natarajan Ganesan, Joint General Manager of the Chennai Water Desalination company told the BBC.
Flooded street in Calcutta India's monsoon is notoriously erratic
 
Mr Ganesan said that because the plant used "energy recovering technology", electricity consumption was reduced - making water produced there arguably the most competitively priced in India.
"It can be competitive even when compared to supplying water from natural sources like lakes. One has to spend lot of money on transport water from lakes," he said.
The plant will process 237 million litres of sea water per day.
An initial treatment will remove solids present in the water, before it is passed through a membrane under high pressure.
The plant - which cost $140m - is the joint venture between an Indian company IVRCL and Befessa of Spain. It is built under the "deboot" system - design, build, own, operate and transfer.
The government-run Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (CMWSSB) will buy the purified water for the next 25 years.
"We have agreed to buy the water from them at 48.66 rupees for 1,000 litres - meaning that it costs us just over one dollar for 1,000 litres," CMWSSB Managing Director Shiv Das Meena said.
"The water is purified and demineralised. This takes away salt, lime and other particles. The purified water meets the government standards. It tastes just like ordinary water and above all it is cheap," he said.
Chennai has been suffering from a chronic water shortage for decades. Its water needs are primarily met by lakes situated around the city. But these lakes depend on the erratic north-east monsoon.
On an average year, the monsoon brings about 100cm (39in) of rainfall, but most of this arrives over a short period - resulting in a massive run-off into the sea.
Another desalination plant with similar capability is expected to be commissioned by 2012.
 

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posted by Bharath @ 1:10 AM 0 comments

Thursday, July 29, 2010

[tech4all] Cure for Diabetes Approaches Reality

 

Cure for Diabetes Approaches Reality

By Teresa Shipley | Wed Jun 30, 2010 12:32 PM ET

Pig-medicine
In the medical world, pigs have provided a host of opportunities for humans, from heart transplant material to cancer therapies.
Now pigs have come to the rescue once again -- this time for diabetes.
Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis say they've managed to eliminate the disease in rats using transplanted pig cells -- and here's the kicker -- without the need for anti-rejection drugs.
The results appear in the American Journal of Pathology.
In a sort of one-two punch, researchers injected embryonic pancreatic pig cells into rats. The cells grow to become the pancreas, the organ responsible for producing insulin and regulating blood sugar. Several weeks later, the scientists injected a second dose of cells, this time from adult pigs.
The rats' bodies accepted the transplant and began producing enough insulin to regulate their systems, all without the need for anti-rejection drugs.
"While human islet transplants have cured diabetes in some people, there are so few donors that only a small percentage of patients get transplants," senior author Marc Hammerman MD, the Chromalloy Professor of Renal Diseases in Medicine, told ScienceDaily.
"Moreover, those who receive human islet transplants must take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives, so essentially they are trading daily insulin shots for immune-suppression drugs, which carry their own risks. Our research paves the way for a new approach to treating diabetes, one that features a virtually unlimited supply of islets and no need for immune suppression," he said.
Hammerman and his colleagues are now beginning experimentation using the same methods on non-human primates. If that works, he says he hopes to introduce the therapy to humans.
 

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posted by Bharath @ 4:27 AM 0 comments

[tech4all] Time is running out - literally, says scientist

 

Time is running out - literally, says scientist

 
By Tom Chivers and Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Published: 7:56AM GMT 18 Dec 2007
 
Scientists have come up with the radical suggestion that the universe's end may come not with a bang but a standstill - that time could be literally running out and could, one day, stop altogether.
 
The idea that time itself could cease to be in billions of years - and everything will grind to a halt - has been set out by Professor José Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raül Vera of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, and University of Salamanca, Spain.
 
The motivation for this radical end to time itself is to provide an alternative explanation for "dark energy" - the mysterious antigravitational force that has been suggested to explain a cosmic phenomenon that has baffled scientists.

A decade ago, astronomers noticed that distant supernovae - exploding stars on the very fringes of the universe - seemed to be moving faster than those nearer to the centre, suggesting that they were accelerating as they shot through space.
Dark energy was suggested as a possible means of powering this acceleration of the expansion of the cosmos.
The problem is that no-one has any idea what dark energy is or where it comes from, and theoreticians around the world have been scrambling to find out what it is, or get rid of it.
The team's proposal, which will be published in the journal Physical Review D, does away altogether with dark energy. Instead, Prof Senovilla says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock that needs winding.
 
"We do not say that the expansion of the universe itself is an illusion," he explains. "What we say it may be an illusion is the acceleration of this expansion - that is, the possibility that the expansion is, and has been, increasing its rate."
 
Instead, if time gradually slows "but we naively kept using our equations to derive the changes of the expansion with respect of 'a standard flow of time', then the simple models that we have constructed in our paper show that an "effective accelerated rate of the expansion" takes place."
While the change would be infinitesimally slow from an ordinary human perspective, from the grand perspective of cosmology - in which scientists study ancient light from suns that shone billions of years ago - this temporal slowing could be easily measured.
Astronomers are able to discern the expansion speed of the universe using the so-called "red shift" technique.
The principle is the same as that of an ambulance siren which gets higher as it comes towards the listener but lower as it moves away. Similarly, a star moving away appears redder in colour than one moving towards us.
Scientists look for exploding stars - supernovae - of certain types that provide a benchmark to work against.
However, the accuracy of these measurements depend on time remaining invariable throughout the universe.
If time is indeed slowing down, so that according to this new suggestion our solitary time dimension is slowly turning into a new space dimension, then the far-distant, ancient stars seen by cosmologists would therefore, from our perspective, look as though they were accelerating.
"Our calculations show that we would think that the expansion of the universe is accelerating," says Prof Senovilla.
The group bases its idea on one particular variant of superstring theory, a so called theory of everything, in which our universe is confined to the surface of a membrane, or brane, floating in a higher-dimensional space, known as the "bulk".
 
In some number of billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether - and everything will stop.
 
"Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever," Prof Senovilla tells New Scientist magazine. "Our planet will be long gone by then."

However, he adds that the team is only assuming there is one dimension of time. Itzhak Bars of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles has put forward the bizarre suggestion that there are two dimensions of time, not the one that we are all familiar with.

Prof Senovilla says: "One thing that is definitely not included in our models is the possibility of having more than one time dimension."
 
While the theory is outlandish, it is not without support. Prof Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, believes the idea has merit. "We believe that time emerged during the Big Bang, and if time can emerge, it can also disappear - that's just the reverse effect," he says.
"The wonderful thing about these explanations is that, strange as they sound, the Large Hadron Collider could provide evidence for extra dimensions in the universe," comments Dr Brian Cox of Manchester University, referring to the atom smasher in Geneva that will start up next year.
"If that happens, then these kind of theories will move out of the realm of speculation and into the mainstream."
 
 

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posted by Bharath @ 12:44 AM 1 comments