Manure: You May Be Walking in it Soon

DETROIT (AP)—Home-buyers of tomorrow could find themselves walking across floors made from manure. Researchers at Michigan State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture insist it's no cow pie in the sky dream. They say that fiber from processed and sterilized cow manure could take the place of sawdust in making fiberboard, which is used to make everything from furniture to flooring to store shelves.



And the resulting product smells just fine.



The researchers hope it could be part of the solution to the nation's 1.5-trillion- to 2-trillion pound annual farm waste disposal problem.



The concept has its skeptics.



“Is this something you're going to bring into the house?'' asked Steve Fowler, an economist with the Composite Panel Association, a fiberboard-makers trade group based in Gaithersburg, Md.



Traditionally, farmers put manure to use by spreading it in their field as a natural fertilizer. But as dairy farms and other livestock operations have gotten larger and more specialized, they can find themselves with too little land for the manure they produce.



Furthermore, people who move into what used to be rural areas often fail to appreciate the odors than can come from manure.



“Farmers are having to put more and more money into dealing with manure,'' said Tim Zauche, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. “This is a huge cost to farmers.''



A dairy farm can spend $200 per cow per year to handle its manure, Zauche said.



Under pressure from regulators and the public, more large livestock operations are installing expensive manure treatment systems known as anaerobic digesters.



The digesters use heat to deodorize and sterilize manure, while capturing and using the methane gas it produces to generate electricity. The systems also separate phosphorus-laden liquid fertilizer from semisolid plant residue.



The solids have some known uses, such as for animal bedding and potting soil. Agricultural scientists would like to find more.



“We really need to think outside the box on what uses for manure are,'' said Wendy Powers, a professor of agriculture at Michigan State University.



Scientists at Michigan State in East Lansing and at the USDA's Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis., are conducting tests on various types of fiberboard made with the “digester solids.''



As with the wood-based original, the manure-based product is made by combining fibers with a chemical resin, then subjecting the mixture to heat and pressure.



So far, fiberboard made with digester solids seems to match or beat the quality of wood-based products.



“It appears that the fibers interlock with each other better than wood,'' said Charles Gould at Michigan State's College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. “We end up with, I think, a superior material.''



Gould and Laurent Matuana, a forestry professor at Michigan State, are working on a final report on their pilot study of manure-based fiberboard, funded by a $5,000 grant from the Michigan Biomas Energy Program.



A draft of the report concludes that fiberboard panels made with processed manure “performed very well in mechanical tests, in many cases meeting or exceeding the standard requirements for particleboard.''



In Wisconsin, the USDA forest products lab has just begun an 18-month, $30,000 study that will test the strength and endurance of the manure-based fiberboard and examine the economic practicality of using digested fiber to make building products.



One good thing about the manure-based fiber is cost, said Zauche, who is working as a consultant on the USDA lab's research project.



“It’s cheaper than dirt,'' he said.



Whether that's enough to overcome the public's squeamishness about using a manure byproduct as a building product remains to be seen, said Craig Adair, spokesman for APA—The Engineered Wood Association, a Tacoma, Wash.-based group that represents the plywood industry.



“If nobody in industry has an interest, it will die,'' Adair said.

The Strangest Little Things in Nature

By Michael Schirber

When small cannot get any smaller, you enter the quantum world of quarks, photons, and space-time foam. You're welcome to take a look at this indivisible side of nature, but just remember to leave your common sense at the door.

People as far back as the Greek philosopher Democritus believed that things were built up from irreducible pieces. Isaac Newton himself thought that light was not a wave, but rather a collection of tiny "corpuscules." Physicists have only recently acquired tools with sufficient resolution to see nature's inherent graininess.

Here's a quick tour of the quantum underbelly of the things around us.

Matter

If you split a banana, and then split it again, and again, and again... you eventually get down to cells, molecules, atoms. Each atom has a nucleus of protons and neutrons, with tiny electrons buzzing around. Both protons and neutrons contain three quarks.
Sea of Particles


Quarks of various flavors—up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom may appear as pairs of quarks and anti-quarks. Up, down and strange quarks are the most common. For instance, a charm quark may appear with its opposite, a charm anti-quark, in tow on what scientists view as a sea of quarks inside a proton.

Image: Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility’s Jefferson Lab

A proton is not necessarily spherical, according to work done by Gerald Miller and Michael Frank of the University of Washington. Depending on the angular momentum of quarks, a proton could be spherical or more like a doughnut, a pretzel or a peanut. Miller says the variety of shapes is nearly limitless and depends on the momentum of the quarks and the angle between the spin of the quark and the spin of the proton.

IMAGE: G. Miller, U. of Washington

But the dissection stops there: electrons and quarks are the smallest pieces of ordinary matter.

How small are they? The electron is sometimes said be a few femtometers across (about a trillionth of a hair's width), but this is misleading. Electrons and quarks are more like puffy clouds than rigid balls.

This puffiness is the result of unavoidable quantum uncertainty: You can't precisely know a particle's motion and position at the same time. If you try to hold a quark still, you would have almost no idea where it is.

Such slipperiness makes exact size measurements meaningless.

Light

If we turn our scalpel on light, we find that its seemingly continuous glow is actually composed of little bundles of energy, called photons. Don't bother squinting your eyes to see them, though: a 100 Watt bulb emits a billion trillion photons per second.

So was Newton right? Light is a particle, not a wave? The answer is yes and no.

Light acts like a wave when you do an experiment looking for a wave property (like scattering through a pinhole). It behaves like a particle if you test for a particle property (like colliding with electrons).

"You get what you ask for" is a common refrain in quantum physics.

Rotation

Particle properties can be "quantized" as well. Probably the weirdest example is particle rotation (what is called spin) which, by the way, is nothing like how a planet or a top moves.

First of all, particles have only one rotation speed—they can't speed up or slow down.

And second, the axis of rotation depends on how you look at it. In an experiment, one detector might report a particle's spin points North, while another detector might say East. And they'd both be right!

Gravity

The force of gravity has largely resisted this quantum tomfoolery. But some physicists believe that Newton's apple fell from its tree thanks to gravitons—photon-like particles that carry the gravitational attraction.

Falling apples would not generate a lot of gravitons, but colliding black holes would. Detectors are currently looking for signals from these distant collisions, but it may be many years before any evidence for gravitons is found.
Planck Units

In 1900, the father of quantum physics, Max Planck, solved a long-standing theoretical puzzle by assuming that the energy radiated by a warm body only came out in discrete chunks, called "quanta." It is perhaps fitting that Planck also devised a set of units that mark the limit of our current quantum theory.

At distances less than the Planck length (10^-35 meters), the gravitational effects of particles become significant, and Einstein's general relativity must be rectified with the quantum paradigm.

Cosmologists describing the Big Bang have no clue what happened in the universe earlier than the Planck time (10^-44 seconds).

Hotter than the Planck temperature (1,032 degrees), the forces of nature are thought to all meld into one.

Vacuum

Even nothing acts strange at the smallest levels. The vacuum is presumably not really empty, but instead filled with "virtual" particles that constantly blink in and out of existence.

This virtual reality follows from a quantum rule that says probable events influence real outcomes. More specifically, it is possible (though highly unlikely) for particles and anti-particles to pop out of nowhere and then quickly annihilate. Nobody ever sees this happen, but the sum of all this quantum probability is a real energy.

Space and time

The above vacuum energy is not constant: it seethes and fizzles with bubbles the size of the Planck length (see box). This foam warps the fabric of space-time, blurring the answers to when and where.

Essentially, the underlying geometry of the world is not smooth. Instead, there are "pixels" that cannot be further resolved. Particles do not move continuously, but instead make little quantum leaps from one pixel to the next.

Such quantized space-time, though not yet observed, is the endpoint of smallness, as well as the end of this tour.

* Life's Little Mysteries
* Getting a Grip on Antimatter
* Ties That Bind Atoms Weaker Than Thought
* Scientists Question Nature's Fundamental Laws
* The Strangest Things in Space

Polar Bears May Be Turning to Cannibalism

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP)—Polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea may be turning to cannibalism because longer seasons without ice keep them from getting to their natural food, a new study by American and Canadian scientists has found.

The study reviewed three examples of polar bears preying on each other from January to April 2004 north of Alaska and western Canada, including the first-ever reported killing of a female in a den shortly after it gave birth.
Hot Topic

The Controversy

* Global Warming Differences Resolved
* Conflicting Claims on Global Warming and Why It's All Moot
* Baffled Scientists Say Less Sunlight Reaching Earth
* Scientists Clueless over Sun's Effect on Earth
* Greenhouse Gas Hits Record High
* Key Argument for Global Warming Critics Evaporates

The Effects

* Seas to Rise
* Greenland Melts
* Ground Collapses
* Glaciers Disappear
* Allergies Get Worse
* Animal DNA Changing
* Animals Change Behavior
* Rivers Melt Sooner in Spring
* Increased Plant Production
* Hurricanes Get Stronger
* Lakes Disappear

The Possibilities

* More Rain but Less Water
* Ice-Free Arctic Summers
* Overwhelmed Storm Drains
* Worst Mass Extinction Ever
* A Chilled Planet

Strange Solutions

* Space Ring to Shade Earth
* Longer Airline Flights



Polar bears feed primarily on ringed seals and use sea ice for feeding, mating and giving birth.

Polar bears kill each other for population regulation, dominance, and reproductive advantage, the study said. Killing for food seems to be less common, said the study's principal author, Steven Amstrup of the U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center.

"During 24 years of research on polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea region of northern Alaska and 34 years in northwestern Canada, we have not seen other incidents of polar bears stalking, killing, and eating other polar bears,'' the scientists said.

Environmentalists contend shrinking polar ice due to global warming may lead to the disappearance of polar bears before the end of the century.

The Center for Biological Diversity of Joshua Tree, Calif., in February 2005 petitioned the federal government to list polar bears as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Cannibalism demonstrates the effect on bears, said Kassie Siegal, lead author of the petition.

"It's very important new information,'' she said. "It shows in a really graphic way how severe the problem of global warming is for polar bears.''

Deborah Williams of Alaska Conservation Solutions, a group aimed at pursuing solutions for climate change, said the study represents the "bloody fingerprints'' of global warming.

"This is not a Coca-Cola commercial,'' she said, referring to animated polar bears used in advertising for the soft drink giant. "This represents the brutal downside of global warming.''

The predation study was published in an online version of the journal Polar Biology on April 27. Amstrup said print publication will follow.

Researchers in spring 2004 found more bears in the eastern portion of the Alaska Beaufort Sea to be in poorer condition than bears in areas to the west and north.

Researchers discovered the first kill in January 2004. A male bear had pounced on a den, killed a female and dragged it 245 feet away, where it ate part of the carcass. Females are about half the size of males.

"In the face of the den's outer wall were deep impressions of where the predatory bear had pounded its forepaws to collapse the den roof, just as polar bears collapse the snow over ringed seal lairs,'' the paper said.

"From the tracks, it appeared that the predatory bear broke through the roof of the den, held the female in place while inflicting multiple bites to the head and neck. When the den collapsed, two cubs were buried, and suffocated, in the snow rubble.''

In April 2004, while following bear footprints on sea ice near Herschel Island, Yukon Territory, scientists discovered the partially eaten carcass of an adult female. Footprints indicated it had been with a cub.

The male did not follow the cub, indicating it had killed for food instead of breeding.

A few days later, Canadian researchers found the remains of a yearling that had been stalked and killed by a predatory bear, the scientists said.

Federal protection of bald eagle challenged

LAWSUIT: A state group seeks to have the birds of prey taken off the endangered-species list.

A California group on Tuesday filed a lawsuit seeking to force the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove the bald eagle from the federal endangered-species list, six years after President Clinton announced a proposal to do just that.

While Bald Eagle have surely made a significant rebound, putting our national birds status in peril doesn't seem wise to me.

Inland Eagles Decline

While eagles are rebounding in some states, they appear to be on the decline in the Inland mountain ranges, Stamer said. In all, there are about two dozen or so eagles that return every winter, he said. However, Stamer said, four eagles -- two at Lake Hemet and two at Big Bear Lake -- stay year-round, which is a good sign that there is enough foraging available to them.

When conservative species make use of marginal habitat, declines are inevitable. One of the flaws of the Endangered Species Act is that no distinction is made between optimal and marginal habitat (All are treated equally). The presense of a listed species alone does not warrant protection for that habitat especially with highly motile birds. High quality, critical habitat needs to be identified and thus protected.

Eagle Lawsuit

The lawsuit seeking to remove eagles from the protection of the U.S. Endangered Species Act was filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf a Minnesota landowner who cannot build on his 7.4 acres because it contains an active eagle nest and wetlands that cannot be filled in.

Damien Schiff, an attorney for the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation, said the government should stop dragging its feet and make a decision. The bald eagles are still considered a species threatened with extinction despite former President Clinton's remarks that they have recovered, Schiff said.

I suppose if the Greenies idol, Bill Clinton, says they have recovered, then they must have recovered. While the population has rebounded to a large degree, the small population size still exposes them to threats of extinction. Genetic variability is very low and leaves them venerable to any environmental change.

Species Protections

Schiff said that protections for the bird under the Endangered Species Act prohibit his client from building within a 330-foot radius of the eagle's nest. Under the two bird acts that would protect the eagles once off the endangered list, only the bird and its nest would be protected and not the surrounding habitat.

While I am not a fan of infringing of private property rights, a 330-foot buffer around the nest does not seem unreasonable. However, given the bald eagle's ability to live and breed in relatively urban environments, perhaps the restriction zone should be reevaluated.

At the time of Clinton's announcement in 1999, two days before July 4th, the government estimated that 5,748 nesting pairs lived across the country. When America adopted the bird as its national symbols in 1782, the service said, as many as 100,000 nesting eagles lived in the lower 48 states. By 1963 only 417 were found, a result of the birds eating fish contaminated by pesticides used along coast and wetlands to control mosquitoes.

Again, while the eagle population has significantly rebounded from 417 breeding pairs, they are anything but stable with viral disease, pollution, and inbreeding depression still a threat. While the level of protection is certainly open for debate, I think everyone agrees that the symbol of our freedoms and liberties should be assured a place on both public and private land.

Deer Decreasing Forest Bird Population

Large populations of deer are edging out forest birds in North America, report scientists in this month's issue of the journal Biological Conservation. The study is the first to evaluate the impact deer grazing can have on nest quality and food resources in areas unaffected by human activities such as forestry or hunting. It also offers general rules for predicting the influence these animals could have on bird ecosystems in the future.

The decline of forest birds has been blamed mostly on such factors as disease, loss of habitat and an increase in the number of animals that prey on bird nests. But according to biologist Sylvain Allombert of the Center for Functional Evolution and Biology in Montpellier, France, and colleagues, few studies have considered the overabundance of deer, whose populations are reaching historic peaks. The white-tailed deer population, for example, is ecologically excessive in 73 percent of its range in North America, and other deer species tip the scales in up to 41 percent of their range. These animals can devastate a forest understory, which is used by some birds for nesting and also serves as a home to insects, worms and other invertebrates that birds rely on for food.

Allombert's team examined the relationship of deer and forest birds on six islands in the Haida Gwaii archipelago, a chain of about 350 islands off the coast of British Columbia. Here, the Sitka black-tailed deer thrives, having been introduced by colonists in the late 19th century. To obtain a solid comparison, the researchers studied islands with a range of deer history: two of the islands had no deer at all, two had deer populations for about 20 years and two had deer for more than 50 years. They also surveyed the birds that were typically dependent on the forest understory, such as warblers, wrens, sparrows, woodpeckers and hummingbirds, and ranked their dependence on the vegetation. Lastly, the scientists took into consideration an existing study of 31 islands that detailed the impact of deer on vegetation.

The team found that the more a bird species relied on the forest understory for nesting and food, the more it was adversely affected by a sizable deer population. For example, on the islands browsed by deer for more than 50 years, bird abundance was 55 percent to 70 percent lower than on the deer-free islands. For those species that had the highest dependence on forest-floor plants, the numbers were dramatic. The fox sparrow and the rufous hummingbird, for instance, were common on deer-free islands but missing on the islands with a long browsing history.

The study has implications for understanding bird populations in such regions and for managing deer abundance. "These trends, when put together with results from this and previous studies, underline the potential role of deer abundance as a factor explaining negative population trends in forest songbirds, a role probably still under-estimated," the authors write. And by monitoring the understory and keeping tabs on bird populations, biologists will have a better means for regulating deer numbers.

Tracy Staedter Scientific American

Lawmaker Tells Realtors(r) Endangered Species Law Needs Reform

To: National Desk, Congressional Correspondent, Real Estate Reporter
Contact: Linda M. Johnson of National Association of Realtors(r), 202-383-7536 or lmjohnson@realtors.org
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 30 /U.S. Newswire/ -- U.S. Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.), addressing Realtors(r) at a forum here, said the current endangered species law needs reform because it is failing the habitats and the species its supposed to protect.
Cardoza also updated Realtors(r) on other federal issues at a legislative and political forum held yesterday during the REALTORS(r) Conference & Expo here, Oct. 28-31.
Cardoza has cosponsored legislation with Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) that balances the need to protect endangered species with the need to support private property rights and economic development. The Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act, which was approved by the House of Representatives with bipartisan support last month, would reform and improve the 1973 Endangered Species Act.
The bill, H.R. 3824, addresses many of NAR's policy principles on new and better ways to recover and protect endangered species. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, only 10 of 1,264 endangered species have recovered and been removed from the list over the act's 30-year history.
"The Endangered Species Act, which was enacted during the Nixon administration, provides a roadmap to preserve endangered habitat and species. But aspects of it are failing species and failing all of us who live in a bureaucratic environment," Cardoza said.
"I've been working with my colleague Richard Pombo on a plan that replaces critical habitat with recovery habitat. Our bill will designate a recovery plan before we designate habitat. You need to figure out what it takes to save a species before you take land. If the government does take private land, it must properly compensate the property owner," Cardoza said.
Cardoza also addressed President Bush's federal tax reform panel's expected recommendation to make several changes to the mortgage interest deduction (MID). "There's a proposal to change the way we tax ourselves. Changing the mortgage interest deduction is a really bad idea. I don't think it's going to pass Congress, but that doesn't mean they're not going to try," Cardoza said. "With the mortgage interest deduction fight, you've got to kill it so dead that they never, ever offer it as an alternative again."
Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.) also opposed altering the mortgage interest deduction. "When you talk about changing the mortgage interest deduction, you're talking about revising a tax deduction for families," Davis said.
Davis also weighed in against the recent Supreme Court Kelo v. City of New London decision that allows local governments to seize private property in the name of enlarging their tax base and promoting economic development. "To take a person's private property for use by another private group-I don't think the Constitution supports that. Personal property rights are one of the most important things our Constitution is based on. It's clear the Supreme Court made the wrong decision," Davis said.
Cardoza said, "I believe if the government takes the extraordinary step of taking property under eminent domain, the owner should not have to pay capital gains tax on the property, and that's why I've introduced a bill that does just that."
"The real estate industry help drives the economy and provides opportunity for citizens," said Cardoza, who used to be a Realtor(r). "Real estate is a great primer for serving in Congress-you have to adapt quickly, think on your feet and work hard."
Cardoza also praised NAR's political operation. "Realtors(r) have the most effective lobbying corps in all of Congress bar none. You're the cream of the crop. One of things Realtors(r) do well is respect both Democrats and Republicans and not be manipulated by the party in power," he said.
Cardoza said he fought to make it easier for families living in high-cost markets to purchase their own homes by supporting efforts to increase the conforming loan limits for high-cost areas under the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act, H.R. 1461. In addition, he is a sponsor of the Community Choice in Real Estate Act, H.R. 11, that would keep banking conglomerates out of real estate, and the Community Homeownership Tax Credit Act, H.R. 1549, that would enact an affordable housing production tax credit.
Mor than 26,000 Realtors(r) from across the United States are expected to attend the four-day conference.
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The National Association of Realtors(r), "The Voice for Real Estate," is America's largest trade association, representing more than 1 million members involved in all aspects of the residential and commercial real estate industries.
Information about NAR is available at http://www.realtor.org . This and other news releases are posted in the Web site's "News Media" section in the NAR Media Center.
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