Understanding Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking) - Multidisciplinary Session Held By The Geological Society of America (GSA)

How Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking) Works
Credit: NPR, GRAPHIC BY PROPUBLICA/CREATIVE COMMONS

A multidisciplinary session on understanding the science and the water, air, and health issues behind fracking was set up by The Geological Society of America (GSA) in Denver. The goal of the session is to present to researchers and the general public, the state of the science of facking.

Hydraulic Fracturing or Fracking is the use of water, sand, and chemicals at high pressure to fracture rock for the purpose of obtaining natural gas trapped below the surface of the Earth. There are environmental and health concerns raised with fracking. Some of the risks that are attributed to fracking are water and air contamination, resulting toxic waste products, and increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (C02) levels.

The sessions held in Denver covered topics such as outdoor air emissions from fracking, and specific health risks from exposure to the process.

The sessions of note are:

• Session 064: Energy and Health: The Emergence of Medical Geology In Response to the Shale Gas Boom
• Session 022: Geochemistry of Flowback and Produced Waters From Hydraulically Fractured Black Shale
• Session 299: A Comprehensive Look at Hydraulic Fracturing For Hydrocarbon Recovery and Other Purposes

Improving Gas Mileage For Better Fuel Economy

Gas mileage is the ratio of the distance a vehicle travels to the amount of fuel used. Gas mileage has been an important factor when it comes to evaluating a vehicle specially with fuel prices going up. These are three simple ways to improve gas mileage.

There is a rising awareness for fuel economy because of increasing gas prices. Alternative energy and the green movement have contributed to the rise of hybrid cars and electric cars. Although these vehicles have still ways to go to reach its potential, vehicles like the Tesla and the Prius are now in the public eye and reaching mainstream status.

In an early 2012 study, MIT came out with a study that shows that even with advances in vehicle and fuel technology, it has barely increased the mileage per gallon of current vehicles. This is because current vehicles are bigger and more powerful than vehicles thirty years ago.

The average gas mileage in 1980 was 23 miles per gallon (mpg) compared to the current 27 mpg. Despite this, there are ways to improve gas mileage and increase savings on fuel costs.

Bi-Functional Alkane Producing Enzyme Developed For More Efficient Biofuel Production

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a bi-functional or dual enzyme that can continuously produce alkane. This can lead to using the enzyme in bacteria, algae, or plants to produce biofuels that need no further processing.

Alkanes are highly combustible chemical compounds made up of hydrogen and carbon atoms. These compounds are called hydrocarbons, more specifically, saturated hydrocarbons because they are saturated with hydrogen atoms (every carbon atom is attached to at least two hydrogen atoms). Hydrocarbons naturally occur in crude oil, where decomposed organic matter provides an abundance of carbon and hydrogen.

The first four alkanes from the group are methane, ethane, propane, and butane. Alkane can be identified because of the "-ane" suffix which is paired up with a number prefix such as dec (decane), hec (hecane), oct (octane).

When alkanes burn, they form H₂O and CO₂ - water and carbon dioxide. Because of this, they are highly valued as clean fuels. The first four alkane are used directly as fuels. A mixture of other alkanes also produce fuel. Gasoline is a mixture of alkanes from pentane up to about decane.

Aside from being used as a fuel source, alkanes are also used in other products such as plastic, paint, cosmetics, detergent and various others.

Studying The Physics Behind An Investment Bubble

An investment bubble is a situation where goods or services are traded in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values. It could also be described as a trade in products or assets with inflated values.

An investment bubble happens when groups of like minded investors rush to invest in goods or assets with inflated prices. This further inflates the prices until an event triggers a crash, metaphorically, bursting the investment bubble that built up over a period of time.

An investment bubble is hard to explain. There are various factors that cause a bubble and there is no one particular reason to trigger it. This is so because bubbles appear without any certainty, speculation, or rationality. It has also been suggested that bubbles might ultimately be caused by processes of price coordination or emerging social norms.

Because it is often difficult to observe intrinsic values in real-life markets, bubbles are often conclusively identified only in retrospect, when a sudden drop in prices appears. Such a drop is known as a crash or a bubble burst.

Prices in an economic bubble can fluctuate erratically, and become impossible to predict from supply and demand alone.

Inequality and investment bubbles: A clearer link is established

"Money, it's a gas," says the sixties rock group Pink Floyd in their song "Money." Indeed, physics professor Victor Yakovenko is an expert in statistical physics and studies how the flow of money and the distribution of incomes in American society resemble the flow of energy between molecules in a gas. In his lectures delivered on April 19 at New York University and April 20 at the New School for Social Research, Yakovenko brought his physics-of-incomes study up to date, including a report on the correlation between levels of income inequality and the appearance of financial downturns, such as the dot-com bubble of 2000 and the more recent housing bubble of 2008.