Tidbits

Although Italy, Russia, and many other western nations are not producing enough human babies to maintain their populations, you can not say the same thing about Egypt or most other muslim countries.

Egypt's population has grown by more than 20% in the past decade and has doubled in the last 30 years, the government statistics agency says.

The population, including those living abroad, reached 76.5m in 2006 and one Egyptian baby was born every 23 seconds during the year, the census says.

Cairo's population rose to more than 18m....The 1882 census....showed a population of 6.7m..... nearly one-third of the population was under 15 last year....

Source

It is becoming more clear that biofuel presents a very real promise of substituting for significant amounts of fossil fuel in western countries. Some of the wealthiest people in the world are investing significant amounts of money into biofuels.

Have you ever found yourself daydreaming--you are trying to concentrate but your mind drifts to another world . . . ? I am one of the worst offenders in that area, but our friends at Eide Neurolearning Blog say that for creative people, daydreaming is perfectly normal.

Do you ever have to work quite late--sometimes around the clock? I certainly do. In the early part of my career, 60 hour shifts were not uncommon. You can understand why when I went to sleep, I did not want to be bothered by sounds of the neighborhood. Now, German researchers have invented windows that "block out the noise."

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability LBF and Darmstadt University of Technology have found a solution, namely a new type of soundproof window. “Tests have shown that our windows are capable of lowering noise levels by an average of six decibels at frequencies between 50 and 1000 hertz. The perceived noise indoors is only half as loud,” says Dr. Thilo Bein, who manages the institute’s department of energy, environment and health. “We have even been able to reduce the volume of certain test signals by up to 15 decibels.” The experts have predicted a reduction of up to 10 dB for the engine noise of passenger aircraft in the frequency range below 1000 Hz.

When noise waves meet the walls of a building, they can be propagated to the interior by various routes. One is by causing the windows to vibrate, thus carrying the noise into the building. The other is by transmitting sound waves to the interior via the bridges in the structure where the curtain-wall elements are attached to the frame of the building. In both cases, the researchers have found a way to prevent the propagation of sound energy. Acceleration sensors attached to the window panes measure the vibrations generated by the noise.

A thin chip of piezoelectric material also attached to the window counteracts the vibration by generating an oscillation at the same pitch but in the opposite sense to that measured by the sensor – causing the pane to move in the opposing direction. “We have devised a similar solution for the points where the outer cladding is attached to the frame of the building. In this case, a stack of piezoelectric chips, rather than a single piezoelectric strip, counteracts the impinging force,” says Bein.