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CU team to turn on “green” lights in Haiti
Jan 5th
CU ENGINEERING TEAM TO SUPPORT
GREEN ENERGY IN HAITI
A team of University of Colorado Boulder engineers will travel to Haiti this month to support the growth of green energy on the two-year anniversary of the country’s devastating earthquake.
Engineering professors Alan Mickelson and Mike Hannigan and graduate student Matt Hulse will be in Haiti Jan. 8-16 to collaborate with the Neges Foundation school at Leogane to create a vocational training program on the installation, operation and maintenance of renewable energy systems.
“I’m eager to learn about the people of Haiti and the services that they would like energy systems to provide,” said Hannigan, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “Historically, the development of energy systems has shaped nations and economies, so the timing is right to pass along what we have learned about those energy systems that are sustainable.”
The Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake that struck Haiti destroyed what little electricity infrastructure had existed in the country, plunging towns across the country into total darkness and forcing households to rely on high-cost diesel generators for power, according to news reports. As a result, families are unable to study or work at night, and the number of assaults, particularly against women and girls, has increased.
Studies point to Haiti’s great potential for renewable energy, including solar, hydro and wind power. “The present lack of a Haitian power grid cries out for a distributed solution — that is, one that grows from small, localized, renewable energy sources,” said Mickelson, associate professor of electrical, computer and energy engineering.
To address these issues, the Engineering for Developing Communities project will:
- Develop a curriculum for vocational training on the operation and maintenance of self-contained, adaptable power sources, and electrical operations and maintenance with a focus on green energy systems.
- Build local capacity to provide vocational training on renewable energy systems using a “train-the-trainers” approach.
- Identify a viable system to create sustainable access to renewable energy that will meet basic household energy needs.
- Develop a strategy for the sustainable scale-up and replication of energy and infrastructure vocational training to support reconstruction efforts, with a focus on private sector investment.
About $35,000 has been provided for the initiative by CU-Boulder’s Mortenson Center for Engineering in Developing Communities, the IEEE Foundation and the CU-Boulder Outreach Committee. The Mortenson Center is seeking additional funding to build upon the initiative and develop additional vocational training curriculum on sustainable and disaster-resistant design and construction.
The Mortenson Center was founded to promote integrated, participatory and sustainable solutions to the engineering challenges of the developing world, with a focus on clean drinking water, sanitation and hygiene; energy; sustainable and disaster-resistant building materials and shelter; and cook stoves and indoor air quality. For more information, go tohttp://ceae.colorado.edu/mc-edc.
Boulder citizens, youth give high marks to city in survey
Jan 5th
2011 Community Survey results available
Results of the 2011 Community Survey that was conducted this fall are now available online and will be presented to City Council at its regularly scheduled meeting at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2012. Copies of the report are also available in the Main Library, 1001 Arapahoe Ave.
In September and October, surveys were mailed to more than 3,000 households and more than 400 University of Colorado students living in on-campus dormitories. Surveys could also be completed online and were available in Spanish. A total of 971 surveys were returned, which resulted in a 33 percent response rate. That is considered a good rate of return.
The survey asked people about their priorities for the city, quality of life, and their overall satisfaction with government services. Survey responses indicated:
- Perceptions of the quality of life, quality of neighborhoods and the sense of community in Boulder remain high;
- Employment and business related ratings were also high, with 77 percent of respondents rating Boulder as “very good’ or “good” as a place to work, and 69 percent rating Boulder as “very good” or “good” as a place to do business; and,
- Respondents’ priorities for City Council included energy, housing and business development.
The survey results also provided information about public participation and how people would like to obtain information about meetings, issues and programs:
- Approximately 25 percent of respondents said that they had attended a public meeting about city matters in the last year, and about 25 percent had watched a City Council meeting on the city’s municipal Channel 8.
- The Camera (72%), direct mailings (65%), and the city’s website (55%) – www.bouldercolorado.gov – were the most common sources of public information from the city.
The 2011 survey included additional outreach to Spanish speakers through community organizations, and 43 completed surveys were received. Priorities and concerns for these respondents included safety, affordable shopping, housing, adult education opportunities and activities for youth.
A slightly revised survey was also distributed to Boulder youth to help the city determine their concerns and needs. A total of 234 returned surveys indicated that youth priorities include homelessness, improving activities for young people, jobs, discrimination, bike safety and facilities, and the environment.
Survey results will be used to inform the budget process, plan for future projects, develop community outreach and various other ways to help make Boulder a better place to live and work. A complete list of results, responses and methodologies is available at www.BoulderColorado.gov > Hot Topics > 2011 Community Survey Results.
The survey was conducted by Boulder-based National Research Center Inc. Results were weighted and the margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points from the information that would have been obtained if all Boulder adults were surveyed.
CU Boulder study: fossils show evolution of bug hearing
Jan 3rd
50-MILLION-YEAR-OLD CRICKET AND KATYDID FOSSILS
FROM COLORADO HINT AT ORIGIN OF INSECT HEARING
FROM COLORADO HINT AT ORIGIN OF INSECT HEARING
How did insects get their hearing? A new study of 50-million-year-old cricket and katydid fossils sporting some of the best preserved fossil insect ears described to date are helping to trace the evolution of the insect ear, says a new study involving the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
According to University of Colorado Museum of Natural History paleontologist Dena Smith and University of Illinois Professor Roy Plotnick, who collaborated on the new study at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, or NESCent, in Durham, N.C., insects hear with help from some very unusual ears.
Grasshoppers have ears on their abdomens. Lacewings have ears on their wings. The ears of the tachinid fly are tucked under the chin. “Insects have ears on pretty much every part of their body except on their head proper,” Plotnick said.
Insects have evolved ears at least 17 times in different lineages, said Smith, also an assistant professor in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department. Smith and Plotnick are trying to figure out when different insects got their ears, and whether predators may have played a role.
Modern insects use their ears to tune in to each other’s chirps, trills and peeps. Think of the chorus of crickets, or the love songs of cicadas. But many species can also pick up sounds beyond the range of human hearing, such as the high-pitched sonar of night-hunting bats, according to Smith and Plotnick.
Crickets, moths and other flying insects have ultrasound-sensitive hearing and can hear bats coming, diving or swerving in midflight to avoid being eaten. Insects that evolved such supersensitive hearing would have had a crucial survival advantage, the researchers said.
“The big evolutionary trigger for the appearance of hearing in many insects is thought to be the appearance of bats,” Plotnick said. “Prior to the evolution of bats we would expect to find ears in relatively few insects, but after that we should see ears in more insect groups,” he explained.
Did insect ears get an upgrade when bats came to be? Before this study the fossil evidence for insect hearing was too poorly preserved or scantily described to know for sure, according to the researchers.
To find out, Plotnick and Smith turned to remarkably well-preserved fossils from a series of lake deposits in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado known as the Green River Formation, where some of the earliest bats are found.
Roughly 50 million years ago, fine-grained sediment covered and buried the animals that lived there and managed to preserve them in exquisite detail. “You can see every tiny feature down to the veins in their wings and the hairs on their legs,” said Smith, who has been studying Green River fossils for more than 15 years.
For this study, the researchers examined fossils from a Green River site in Colorado, focusing on crickets and katydids, which have ears on their front legs, just below their knees.
The team scoured more than 500 museum drawers of Green River fossils for crickets and katydids with intact front legs, looking for evidence of ears. “You can just make them out with the naked eye,” Plotnick said. “They look like the eye of a needle.”
In crickets and katydids living today, the ear is a tiny oval cavity with a thin membrane stretched over it that vibrates in response to sound, much like our own eardrum.
The fossil ears measured half a millimeter in length, and were virtually identical in size, shape and position to their modern counterparts. The findings suggest that this group of insects evolved their supersensitive ultrasonic hearing long before bat predators came to be, the researchers say. “Their bat-detecting abilities may have simply become apparent later,” Smith said. “The next step is to look for ears in other insect groups.”
The study appears in this month’s issue of the Journal of Paleontology. NESCent is a nonprofit science center dedicated to cross-disciplinary research in evolution and is jointly operated by Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, with funding from the National Science Foundation.
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