Earlier this morning, San Francisco-based mobile app security provider Appthorityannounced? that it has raised $6.25 million in a Series A financing round led by Venrock and US Venture Partners. Gunderson Dettmer also participated in this round. Venrock's Ray Rothrock and US Venture Partners' Steve Krausz will join the Appthority board. The company's product helps businesses manage the risks involved in having their employees bring their own mobile devices to work. Appthority specifically focuses on the apps installed on these devices and screens them for malware and other security threats.
Google and its partner Onix Networking just won a $35 million contract to run the U.S. Department of the Interior's new cloud-based email and collaboration system. This wasn't always a sure bet for Google. In 2010, the Department of the Interior awarded Microsoft a $59.3 million contract to run its email and collaboration system. Google and its Ohio-based partner Onix Networking quickly filed a suit to block this contract. In Google's view, the Interior Department's procurement process unfairly favored Microsoft and never gave it a fair chance. Google finally withdrew its lawsuit last September after the Department scrapped its plans to use Microsoft's solution because its original decision was "now stale in light of new developments in technology and entrants into the market."
Wind turbines have an unusual way of generating hot air. By drawing down warm air from the atmosphere above, they cause temperatures in their immediate surroundings to warm slightly.
Liming Zhou of the University at Albany, State University of New York and colleagues used land-surface temperature data gathered by NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites to examine the effect.
The satellites give temperature measurements with a spatial resolution of roughly 1 square kilometre, which the team matched up with data from the US Federal Aviation Administration on the exact location of 2358 wind turbines in west-central Texas.
They found that the immediate surroundings of wind turbines were on average 0.5 ?C warmer than the rest of the region. The study spanned 2003 to 2011, during which time the region saw a boost in the number of wind turbines, from 111 to 2358.
Good mixer
The warming was particularly pronounced at night. Zhou says the warming was caused primarily by vertical mixing of the air, rather than as a direct result of friction as air passes over the turbines' blades: the movement of the turbines is mixing the cooler ground-level air with warmer air higher up.
Despite the warming effect identified by his team, Zhou points out that the region overall has not got significantly warmer since 2003. This suggests that the wind farms are not having a big effect on regional climate.
He is also keen to emphasise that wind power remains an important part of the solution for tackling climate change. "Maybe we could modify wind turbines or simply think about where we put them, so as to minimise their impact. This research is just the first step."
Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, says: "Wind turbines have to be part of the solution, but it would be naive to think that they don't have an impact. Balancing the impacts of various technologies is key to tackling climate change."
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Student-devised process would prep Chinese shale gas for salePublic release date: 30-Apr-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University
Rice University chemical engineering students' plan would make Chinese gas 'green' and profitable
A team of Rice University students accepted a challenge to turn shale gas produced in China into a range of useful, profitable and environmentally friendly products and did so in a cost-effective manner.
The CHBE Pandas (CHBE stands for chemical and biomolecular engineering) designed a process by which shale gas extracted in the rich Sichuan Basin could be turned into methanol, hydrogen and carbon disulfide, all valuable products in the booming Chinese economy. The Rice team was one of seven groups of students presented similar challenges for locations outside of the United States as their capstone design projects, required of most graduates of Rice's George R. Brown School of Engineering.
For their efforts, the Pandas Apoorv Bhargava, Prachi Bhawalkar, Valicia Miller, Shelby Reinhardt, Kavita Venkateswar and Erte Xi were grand prize winners at the Engineering Design Showcase, part of Rice's UnConvention earlier this month.
"We literally got the last one in the hat," Bhargava said of the assignment handed out for their final semester at Rice. "All of the chemical engineering projects were the same, just in different locations, and how we approached the solution depended on the location."
The team had to deal not only with processing what's known as "sour gas" straight out of the wellhead, but also had to come up with a solid budget for the construction and profitable operation of the plant as well as a strategy to protect the environment.
"We think it's a viable project because of what we're transforming the natural gas into," Venkateswar said. The process they designed would take in the raw shale gas produced in the controversial extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The primary product would be methanol, of which China is the largest user in the world. China blends methanol into gasoline and is developing cars that would run on pure methanol.
The second product, hydrogen, would be a feedstock for ammonia in fertilizer production, which has great value in the Sichuan Basin, the largest agricultural area in China. The third would be carbon disulfide, widely used in the Sichuan textile industry. The team said 99 percent of the recovered fracturing fluid would be purified into water and fed into methanol production. A small amount of crystallized sludge from fracturing chemicals would be sent to a landfill.
Team advisers Kenneth Cox and Richard Strait were inspired to issue the assignment by a Department of Energy-funded 2011 study on shale gas and U.S. national security by Rice's Baker Institute for Public Policy. The report details the rapid development over the last decade of technology to extract natural gas from shale, an increasingly rich resource in the United States, and the resulting shift in the world's energy economy.
"The world of shale gas presents a real interesting situation," said Strait, an adjunct professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice and former director of coal monetization and CO2 management at KBR. "We're in boom times if you want to produce gas at what are now historically low prices. You make no profit." He said energy producers are considering ways to turn raw shale gas into products that will better serve the market's needs.
"We tried to give the students problems for which there's no current solution," said Cox, a Rice professor in the practice of chemical and biomolecular engineering. "Major companies are looking at ways to upgrade shale gas, but no one's built a plant to do that yet."
Also, Cox said, "There are a lot of issues associated with the public perception of fracking, and part of the assignment was to help change that perception by offering something that was environmentally friendly, gave benefit to the community, helped clean up the water and was still able to pull a profit at the end of the day."
He said the Pandas' solution was "very imaginative" for their handling of the high concentration of highly toxic hydrogen sulfide found in Sichuan shale gas. "It's 8.38 percent of the incoming feed," said Venkateswar. "Usually natural gas feeds have it on the order of several hundred parts per million."
"The ability to make carbon disulfide provides us a solution to the high hydrogen sulfide content," Xi said.
Building the Pandas' plant with the team's innovative assembly of known technologies would cost the Chinese government $5 billion, Bhargava said. "Chemical engineering design in the real world, the way we understand it, works in three phases," he said. "You start off with a preliminary design analysis, as we did. Then we move into another stage where the chemical engineers meet up with the mechanical engineers and start designing it in more detail: 'What pipes do we need to go from here to there?'
"And then we meet with the architects for the final design stage: 'OK, what is this going to look like when we build it? Is it going to look terrible in someone's backyard?'"
Bhargava said the Pandas designed a process that would generally take as many as 15 engineers six or seven months to accomplish. The team spent long hours using simulation software at Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, where the students aligned components and tested for the desired chemical reactions. "But a computer can tell you only so much," Bhargava said. "A chemical engineer has to make the decisions. Our design is very, very close to what a real chemical engineer does in his or her job. We were working in a very realistic setting."
###
View a video about the CHBE Pandas at http://youtu.be/h2IsAkv1F8Y
Members of the CHBE Pandas designed the process that would turn shale gas extracted into China into a range of marketable materials with low environmental impact. From left, Apoorv Bhargava, Kavita Venkateswar, Valicia Miller, Shelby Reinhardt, Prachi Bhawalkar and Erte Xi. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is known for its "unconventional wisdom." With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 4 for "best value" among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/Rice.pdf.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Student-devised process would prep Chinese shale gas for salePublic release date: 30-Apr-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University
Rice University chemical engineering students' plan would make Chinese gas 'green' and profitable
A team of Rice University students accepted a challenge to turn shale gas produced in China into a range of useful, profitable and environmentally friendly products and did so in a cost-effective manner.
The CHBE Pandas (CHBE stands for chemical and biomolecular engineering) designed a process by which shale gas extracted in the rich Sichuan Basin could be turned into methanol, hydrogen and carbon disulfide, all valuable products in the booming Chinese economy. The Rice team was one of seven groups of students presented similar challenges for locations outside of the United States as their capstone design projects, required of most graduates of Rice's George R. Brown School of Engineering.
For their efforts, the Pandas Apoorv Bhargava, Prachi Bhawalkar, Valicia Miller, Shelby Reinhardt, Kavita Venkateswar and Erte Xi were grand prize winners at the Engineering Design Showcase, part of Rice's UnConvention earlier this month.
"We literally got the last one in the hat," Bhargava said of the assignment handed out for their final semester at Rice. "All of the chemical engineering projects were the same, just in different locations, and how we approached the solution depended on the location."
The team had to deal not only with processing what's known as "sour gas" straight out of the wellhead, but also had to come up with a solid budget for the construction and profitable operation of the plant as well as a strategy to protect the environment.
"We think it's a viable project because of what we're transforming the natural gas into," Venkateswar said. The process they designed would take in the raw shale gas produced in the controversial extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The primary product would be methanol, of which China is the largest user in the world. China blends methanol into gasoline and is developing cars that would run on pure methanol.
The second product, hydrogen, would be a feedstock for ammonia in fertilizer production, which has great value in the Sichuan Basin, the largest agricultural area in China. The third would be carbon disulfide, widely used in the Sichuan textile industry. The team said 99 percent of the recovered fracturing fluid would be purified into water and fed into methanol production. A small amount of crystallized sludge from fracturing chemicals would be sent to a landfill.
Team advisers Kenneth Cox and Richard Strait were inspired to issue the assignment by a Department of Energy-funded 2011 study on shale gas and U.S. national security by Rice's Baker Institute for Public Policy. The report details the rapid development over the last decade of technology to extract natural gas from shale, an increasingly rich resource in the United States, and the resulting shift in the world's energy economy.
"The world of shale gas presents a real interesting situation," said Strait, an adjunct professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice and former director of coal monetization and CO2 management at KBR. "We're in boom times if you want to produce gas at what are now historically low prices. You make no profit." He said energy producers are considering ways to turn raw shale gas into products that will better serve the market's needs.
"We tried to give the students problems for which there's no current solution," said Cox, a Rice professor in the practice of chemical and biomolecular engineering. "Major companies are looking at ways to upgrade shale gas, but no one's built a plant to do that yet."
Also, Cox said, "There are a lot of issues associated with the public perception of fracking, and part of the assignment was to help change that perception by offering something that was environmentally friendly, gave benefit to the community, helped clean up the water and was still able to pull a profit at the end of the day."
He said the Pandas' solution was "very imaginative" for their handling of the high concentration of highly toxic hydrogen sulfide found in Sichuan shale gas. "It's 8.38 percent of the incoming feed," said Venkateswar. "Usually natural gas feeds have it on the order of several hundred parts per million."
"The ability to make carbon disulfide provides us a solution to the high hydrogen sulfide content," Xi said.
Building the Pandas' plant with the team's innovative assembly of known technologies would cost the Chinese government $5 billion, Bhargava said. "Chemical engineering design in the real world, the way we understand it, works in three phases," he said. "You start off with a preliminary design analysis, as we did. Then we move into another stage where the chemical engineers meet up with the mechanical engineers and start designing it in more detail: 'What pipes do we need to go from here to there?'
"And then we meet with the architects for the final design stage: 'OK, what is this going to look like when we build it? Is it going to look terrible in someone's backyard?'"
Bhargava said the Pandas designed a process that would generally take as many as 15 engineers six or seven months to accomplish. The team spent long hours using simulation software at Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, where the students aligned components and tested for the desired chemical reactions. "But a computer can tell you only so much," Bhargava said. "A chemical engineer has to make the decisions. Our design is very, very close to what a real chemical engineer does in his or her job. We were working in a very realistic setting."
###
View a video about the CHBE Pandas at http://youtu.be/h2IsAkv1F8Y
Members of the CHBE Pandas designed the process that would turn shale gas extracted into China into a range of marketable materials with low environmental impact. From left, Apoorv Bhargava, Kavita Venkateswar, Valicia Miller, Shelby Reinhardt, Prachi Bhawalkar and Erte Xi. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is known for its "unconventional wisdom." With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 4 for "best value" among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/Rice.pdf.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
When was the last time you read the instruction manual that came with anything? Maybe never—they're usually worth tossing. Unless, of course, you're going to pilot and kill someone with a Predator drone. In that case, read this. More »
Earlier this morning, San Francisco-based mobile app security provider Appthority announced? that it has raised $6.25 million in a Series A financing round led by Venrock and US Venture Partners. Gunderson Dettmer also participated in this round. Venrock's Ray Rothrock and US Venture Partners' Steve Krausz will join the Appthority board. The company's product helps businesses manage the risks involved in having their employees bring their own mobile devices to work. Appthority specifically focuses on the apps installed on these devices and screens them for malware and other security threats.
Google and its partner Onix Networking just 
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Public release date: 30-Apr-2012
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