Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Stuff below the fold

How did tower building termites migrate to isolated Australia?

They floated there on debris... from South America or Asia. And then evolved to eat grass instead of wood

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Chaco Canyon DNA studies

for later reading

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It's more than just climate change... population control needed

again for later reading.

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St Pat's cathedral will now use geothermal energy... ten well dug 2000 feet deep to do this. Can't find what it cost them or who paid for it.

Article on NYC geothermal stuff. as in heat pumps. This article suggests the wells are heat pumps.

One item that won't be completed by the pope's visit is a geothermal heating and air-conditioning system. Workers installing it are using a huge drill to bore 2,000 feet into ground beneath the cathedral, Ritchie said.

Heat pumps are simply running water underground to change the water temperature. This lets you heat or cool your building a lot cheaper, since underground is cooler than summer temperature and warmer than wintertime. We had one of these in our office in Idaho 30 years ago.

so theoretically they are "geothermal" energy, but I suspect that they are using this term because it is a lot trendier than saying heat pump.

Usually, the term  Geothermal energy means using the steam/hot water from underground to run turbans to produce electricity.

Here in the Philippines we get a lot of our energy from geothermal plant
NYC has a concrete base, but also a fault line. I don't know enough about the geology of the area to comment why they needed to dig that deep.

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Aslan, call your office:

Galaxies sing when forming stars


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