Liquefied gas or LNG is a gas that is made nearly completely from methane and is converted by a scientific process to a liquid form for storage purposes. This process reduces the volume of the gas by 600 times and creates a colourless, odourless and non corrosive liquid. The liquid can then be transported and sold to power companies who use it to supply households with gas and electricity.

This liquefaction process is the one that removes all the external components of the gas such as dust, water, helium, water and heavy hydrocarbons. This purer gas is then condensed into a liquid at as close to atmospheric pressure as possible and is cooled at a very low temperature of -162 degrees Celsius. LNG is typically 90 per cent methane, though does contain small amounts of other gases.

LNG density is roughly 0.41 kg/l to 0.5kg/l. This is compare to water which comes in at 1KG/L. The heat value of the gas is dependent on the source of the gas and there is a variation in the higher and lower heating value. The energy density of LNG is comparable to propane or ethanol and around 60 per cent of diesel and 70 per cent of petrol. The higher the energy density of a fuel the more than can be transported by ship and this has a resulting determination on how much the product costs.

This decrease in the size of the gas makes it much more cost effective to transfer as now it can be fitted in to a smaller area such as a pipe, lorry or if over sea where no pipe exists by a cryogenically frozen sea vessel. When the gas gets to an area it is reheated and turned back into gas in its usable form.

The production of gas happens all over the world, yet it is Qatar and other areas in the Middle East that produce the most LNG. The most important piece of infrastructure to produce the LNG is the plant which needs an LNG train. The largest of these trains is currently in Qatar, with the second largest is in Trinidad and Tobago and the third in Egypt. These plants usually are connected directly to independent plants in the surrounding area. There has been a huge growth of these plants worldwide due to lowering in costs of production in the last few years.

This factor alongside the increasing costs of oil has seen a large rise in the amount of this form of gas production around the world. LNG has also followed those of oil prices since 2003 – a far cry from the buyers market of the 1990s. Receiving terminals for the product currently exist in 18 countries, 18 countries, including India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Belgium, Spain, Italy, France, the UK, the US, Chile, and the Dominican Republic and there are plans for many more to receive these facilities.

Here’s how it works: Scientists used a newly-developed method called Steganography by Printed Arrays of Microbes, also known as SPAM, to modify strains of E. coli. Each E. coli bacteria is given the ability to glow in one of seven different fluorescent colors. A code was made that requires a combination of two colors in order to represent a single character of a message. Thus, there are 49 possible characters for the bacteria to represent. This is enough for every letter of the alphabet, digits 0 to 9 and several other special characters. A single message would probably fit about 500 to 1000 characters on a single sheet of paper.

Here’s how it works. The person sending the message, puts dots of bacteria on a lab dish. They have seven different colors, and it takes a combination of two colors to create a single letter or digit. For example, two dots of yellow bacteria next to each other stand for the letter T. Once their message has been written, they lay a piece of what is pretty much your standard paper, over the top of the lab dish. The bacteria is transferred to the paper and is, of course, invisible to the human eye since it’s microscopic in size. The paper is then sent to the recipient.

In order to read the message, the recipient must lay the paper on top of a lab dish, thus transferring the bacteria. Now here is where it gets tricky. The Tufts Researchers created a way to change the agent that will cause the fluorescent effect to become active. It involves using a combination of light and liquid antibiotics. If the wrong antibiotic is used, the message will come out as gibberish. But if the recipient knows the key antibiotic, they will be able to reveal the message and decode it. And what’s even more amazing is that it’s very possible that they will also develop the bacteria so that once it has been activated, it only has a certain amount of life before it destroys itself and the message with it. Tom Cruise would approve.

While this experiment is incredibly awesome, and seems like it comes more from a sci-fi movie than real life, it may take some time before it is used in any kind of practical setting. It’s possible that it could be used for sending and tracking packages. Or, as already mentioned, it could be used to send spy messages. While DNA messaging has been around for several years, it is very impractical. Apparently , carrying around tiny vials of bacteria in the seven different colors and coded to be activated only by a specific antibiotic on the recipients end may be difficult for your standard. Shouldn’t spies already be accustomed to carrying concealed devices on their person? Now if only they could figure out where to conceal that lab dish. . . .

About the Author

Natalie Clive writes for MyCollegesandCareers.com. My Colleges and Careers is an online resource for students and potential students alike in helping them find the best online colleges and degree programs.

Flowering only very rarely the Corpse Plant is guarenteed to cause a stink in the botanical world whenever it blooms.

However, amongst botany geeks the Corpse Flower appears to be quite a hit; There aren’t many of them to be found outside the plant’s natural habitat, the rainforests of Indonesia, and they rarely flower in the wild, let alone in cultivation, so maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that whenever one of these bizarre organisms blooms in captivity flora-philes come flocking to see the unusual sight, and “experience” its unique scent.

On this occasion it’s the specimen held at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) which is due to flower, and such has been the buzz it’s created that not only have the HMNS set up a webcam, & a “Corpse Flower Watch” on their blog, complete with daily updates on the plant’s progress and measurements of its growth, but, with the fragrant flower due to open its petals any time this week, they’re also planning on opening the museum 24hrs a day while it’s in bloom.

The plant, named Lois, has also become a bit of a celebrity on Twitter, so if you’re a would-be botanist, but not based within travelling distance of the HMNS you can still keep up to date with its progress minute to minute.

The prizes are awarded, each year, by Improbable Research an organisation whose purpose is to highlight scientific “research that makes people laugh and then think”. They operate year round, bringing news of off the wall science to the masses (well, ok, maybe just masses of geeks,) but their big event each year is the Ig Noble prizes, where prizes are given out in a range of categories, much like the real Noble prizes.

The 2010 prizes aren’t due to be awarded until the end of September, but some of the highlights from the 2009 roll of honour include:
VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: to the researchers who discovered that named cows produce more milk than unnamed animals.
CHEMISTRY PRIZE: to the team who synthesised diamonds from tequilla. (I knew there had to be some use for the vile stuff!)
MEDICINE PRIZE: to the man who cracked the knuckles on just one of his hands every day, for 50 years! in order to demonstrate that the activity doesn’t cause arthritis.
LITERATURE PRIZE: to the Irish Police, for issuing over 50 speeding tickets to one “Prawo Jazdy”, a Polish phrase meaning “Driving License”.

Life saving lingerie: a bra which doubles as a gas mask!

Really, I’m not making this up, SEE -even the BBC reported it!

I guess the idea is that most woman wear bras most of the time, which I suppose means that the “life saving” lingerie is always likely to be available, should the need arise, &, even better, each woman in the area of the attack would be able to offer a hand (or should that be cup?) to someone less well prepared.

My mother used to tell me to change my pants in case I got hit by a bus, which always struck me as odd since I imagine that, even if the pants were clean that morning, the no doubt frightening ordeal of being hit by a large, heavy vehicle would ensure that they were no longer clean by the time the paramedics arrived.
In the future are young woman going to have their mothers telling them to make sure their underwear is clean? Just in case there’s a gas attack and they’re forced to share half their bra with a stranger -imagine the embarrasment of having to offer a stranger a slightly soiled bra-come-gas mask! never mind that they may be more concerned by life threatening gas, or somewhat distracted by the spectacle of women around them frantically removing their tops!
In fact it might end up making gas attacks a somewhat salacious affair, which I suppose, in it’s own right, might not be a bad deterrent to the evil doers of this world, or at least those who hold strong views about women showing as little skin as possible.

I also wonder if this lingerie-lifeline is merely the tip of the iceberg, in future are we to be treated to a whole range of everyday items which double as emergency equipment? Maybe household furniture which can be quickly converted into a nuclear bunker? (scarily not so far from official govt advice, during the cold war era, as to how the public should protect themselves in the event of the 4 minute warning sounding.) Or perhaps M&S will start stocking little black party dresses which, in the event of a terror attack, quickly convert into a full NBC suit?

In anycase it looks like the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit is set to be a massive failure; We’ll probably get some kind of ineffectual, face-saving agreement pulled out of the fire at the very last moment, but the chances that it amounts to anything substantive, let alone does enough to combat the dangers which climate change pose to all of us, not to mention future generations, are in my opinion very depressingly slim indeed.

A big sticking point seems to be the Kyoto protocal; it seems like everyone who didn’t sign up for it wants to keep it, while those who did would rather sort out a new agreement which includes those who didn’t. To be honest I have more sympathy with the Kyoto signatories, it seems stupid to try and insist that a group of developed nations, which don’t include the US, should abide by an agreement when the world’s two largest pollutors, the US and China, aren’t to be bound in the same way; frankly we need them on board if we’re to achieve the kinds of CO₂ reductions which the science suggests are necessary.

Ultimately I wonder if this is where humanity demonstrates that it is an evolutionary dead end; short-sighted greed seems to be stymying attempts at taking longer term action to solve a problem which stands to effect us all, or rather the next generation. The impacts of climate change are already being seen in some of the world’s poorest regions, and yet relatively petty arguments between nations look set to make a farse of the Copenhagen Summit.
Faced with such monumentally selfish stupidity I guess we just have to hope that, against the vast weight of evidence to the contrary, it turns out that the climate sceptics are right, and it’s not going to be too great a problem.
Not a comforting thought at all!

However, as the show progresses it would appear that it’s not all doom and gloom for the aviation industry. It seems that this year’s big winner will most likely be the military hardware sector, and it’s no surprise that companies which produce military aircraft are lining up to take part in the show, one consultancy recently estimated that Middle Eastern spending on military aircraft would top £100bn by 2014.
Amid all the clamour and competition it’s nice to see a British company, BAE, managing to grab it’s share of the sales. It would appear that so far they’re having a pretty good show, as part of the consortium which makes the Eurofighter Typhoon they’ll no doubt have been buoyed up by how much interest the jet fighter has generated from Gulf States during the airshow.

BAE have also generated quite a bit of buzz with the annoucement that their unmanned Mantis aircraft completed it’s maiden test flight recently. This is particularly significant since the Mantis is the first ever fully autonomous, twin-engined UAV. It hasn’t all been military hardware for BAE though, their Avro Business Jet has also proved popular; not only has it been selected by the governments of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Dubai as their VIP aircraft, it’s also won orders from the British firm Infinite Engineering Services.

Another big piece of news from the show is the annoucement by the UAE’s national carrier, Etihad, of a £750m investment package to enhance their operations across the board; no doubt they’ve got a few quid to splash around after all the flights to Dubai which they sold to those attending the airshow.

So, maybe the doom mongers are wrong; some sections of the civilian aviation industry might still be looking a little flat but overall it’s obviously far from penniless, and military spending never seems to go out of fashion. Overall it looks like the speculation that the Airshow would be a complete and utter flop may have been a little premature.

It also quite clearly reveals that the govts objections to cannabis and ectasy seem to come down to “drugs are illegal because they’re bad, and they’re bad because they’re illegal”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that these drugs are 100% harmless, but if an expert, whose job it is to know, is stating that they’re less harmful than substances which are legal and freely available then surely that has to be a pretty good arguement for their legalisation?
OK, you could take the opposite tack and say that maybe tobacco and alcohol should be made illegal instead, but apart from being a non-starter in terms of getting the populace to accept such a move, not to mention how much it would cost the exchequer in terms of lost duty, there comes a point where govt has to butt out and let people make their own choices (and take responsibility for them) even if there is some risk involved; Else we’ll eventually end up as a society of joyless wage slaves whose only purpose is to be good little workers. I mean, if you want to start talking about banning anything which is dangerous then lets start by looking at privately owned vehicles; how many deaths and injuries do they cause each year on our roads? By contrast we’re talking about cannabis & ectasy, susbstances which routinely kill less people each year than bed related misadventures!

There’s also the fact that history has shown that prohibition doesn’t work, where someone stands to make a profit you’ll just get a black market economy spring up to meet consumer demand for prohibited goods. As things stand in this country millions of otherwise perfectly law abiding, productive members of society are criminalised because they want, and choose, to smoke cannabis. If the govt truly represented the people they’d accept that for most users cannabis is a relatively benign substance with minimal knock on effects for wider society, and they’d legalise it.
Yes I said legalise it, forget decriminalisation, although it’s often touted as an acceptable method for govt to look the other way and quietly accept that maybe cannabis isn’t such an evil drug after all, decriminalisation is in fact the worst of both worlds from a societal point of view. Users are still forced to interact with the black market, organised criminals, in order to get the stuff, and this has a number of wider implications. It means that there aren’t any safe guards on quality, no product information in terms of the strength of any particular batch, and most importantly of all, money spent on cannabis is going to support organised crime!
On the other hand if it were legalised these issues could all be eliminated; users could be sure they knew what they were getting, and wouldn’t be funding criminals, but on the contrary could be providing revenue for govt.

At a time when we’re being told that, due to the banking bail out, our country is going to be in debt for decades to come you’d think that the govt might be open to new means of raising revenue. The Home Office estimates that in 2006 the UK drug trade was worth between £3.5 and £5.8 billion, not enough to solve the country’s money woes, but getting a slice of any figure which is measured in the billions isn’t to be sniffed at!

Really it seems like a no brainer to me. Now that “the genie’s out of the bottle” it’s never going away, people are going to take these drugs, they’ll find a way to get them because someone else can make money from supplying them. When even the experts are saying that dope is less harmful than substances which society already makes freely available, why can’t the govt just get over the outdated dogma that “drugs are bad m’kay” and do the thing which would benefit everbody except the organised criminals?

This piece in the New Scientist lays out the wider picture, in terms of the govt’s rocky relationship with it’s own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. There’s also a petition running on the No. 10 site here, if you want to join the call to re-instate Dr Nutt.

The study in question was carried out by British and Australian academics & investigated the likely effects of global warming on flowers, and other plant species. My first reaction was actually pedantic rage brought on by NASA’s use of the phrase “Global Warming“. All too often this term is used incorrectly as a synonym for climate change, and it’s one of my pet hates, since the label “global warming” implies that climate change will lead to warmer weather globally; whereas the reality of climate change is that some places will get hotter while others get colder, or that specific locations will become hotter in the summers but get colder winters than they’ve previously experienced.

In short, climate change comes down to much more than the idea that everythings going to get warmer, & I believe imprecise use of the term “global warming”, when one is talking about climate change as a whole, only adds confusion to a debate which is already bogged down in misunderstanding, statistical chicanery, &, at times, downright dishonesty.
For a start it implies that everywhere is going to get warmer, which makes some people wonder “What’s the problem, hotter summers would be nice!”, but it also gives especially ignorant anthropogenic climate change sceptics an excuse to crow on about how “global warming” is a myth, whenever it snows badly, or there’s a cold snap. Of course, what the poor fools are missing is that climate change could very well lead to much hotter, wetter summers for us in the UK, but leave us (in worse case scenarios) with winters they’d be more familar with in Moscow; London’s only a few degrees of latitude south of Moscow, and if the Gulf Stream &/or Jet stream were to pack up it’s likely that the UK would become a good deal colder!

In anycase misuse of “global warming” to mean “climate change” it’s one of my pet hates, and it especially grates when a source which should know better does it, hence my initial reaction to the piece. However, on reading through it I discovered that I had perhaps been too hasty, as the piece in question appears to be looking at a “global warming” scenario, rather than climate change as a whole; Of course how much validity there is in a study which is predicting an overall warming pattern, rather than considering the possibility that weather will become more extreme, and erractic, all round is another question entirely, and one which I’ll maybe rant about another day.

Think of the flowers! won't somebody please think of the flowers?

“So what’s the problem?” you may be asking; how do flowers appearing earlier in the year have a negative impact on anyone, except for possibly shops which sell flowers losing sales around Valentine’s day. The answer is that, most likely, there wouldn’t be any direct negative effects for humans, but when one thinks about the numbers of other species, particularly insects, whose life cycles rely in some way on flowers, and other species who, in turn, rely on those species, it’s clear that ecologically this could be a pretty big deal.
A great deal of effort is spent on highlighting how climate change might end up directly effecting humans, and while that is definitely a worthy goal, I think that too often it’s wider ecological effects are only vaguely touched upon. The stark truth is that, despite all of our scientific advances, humanity’s welfare is still, very much, tied to the ecosphere which we inhabit, and if other species which play important roles in the ecosystem start to fail then the overall impact of climate change could be far greater than many realise.