Smoking Bans Reduce Risk of Heart Attacks by Lowering Exposure to Secondhand Smoke

People who live in communities that ban smoking in public places--such as bars, restaurants, and government buildings--have fewer heart attacks, according to two new research studies recently reported by the National Institutes of Health.
In the communities researchers studied, the rate of heart attacks fell dramatically within one year after the smoking ban was put in place (17 percent in one study and 25 percent in the other), and dropped about 36 percent after three years, leading one researcher to estimate that a nationwide ban on smoking in public places in the United States would result in more than 154,000 fewer heart attacks annually.

Sulfur Scrubbing Gets A Boost As China Cracks Down On Pollution

Last year's Olympics in Beijing brought China to the verge of global embarrassment over its pollution problem. Only shutting down some of its factories temporarily stopped the city from choking the tourists and athletes.
But beyond such quick fixes, there are signs that China is getting more serious about its long-term environmental problems. In June 2008, the government tightened its gas emission standards.
One of its rules related to sintering, a process that makes solid alloys out of metal powder using high heat. The process emits sulfur dioxide when powered by coal, so the new rules mandate desulfurization equipment on all coal-fired sinters.
Builds Better Mousetrap
Enter Rino International (NasdaqGM:RINO - News) of Dalian, China. More than three-quarters of its sales come from flue gas desulfurization systems, or FGD, designed for that very niche. It costs about a third of what the competition costs without sacrificing quality, says Chief Financial Officer Jenny Liu.
"Our technology can remove 92% to 93% of sulfur," she said. "The current technology can only remove 88%."
So far, the company has installed 29 systems in the sintering facilities of China's major steel producers, more than half of all such installations in China. Its most recent deployment, which started Sept. 8, is a $14 million deal with Hunan Lianyuan Iron and Steel Co. The technology is a new ammonia-based FGD system called DXT, which resolves an earlier issue over what to do with the waste products the process creates, Liu says. DXT's waste comes in the form of ammonia sulfate, which can be used as fertilizer.
There should be more business in the pipeline, according to analyst Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Only about 10% of the 500 or so sinters in China have had FGD gear installed. And unlike some sectors of the Chinese market, the steel industry seems to be expected to comply.
"In many cases where polluters have not adhered to the new laws, arrests have been made," Dayal wrote in his Sept. 3 initiation report. "In regards to Rino's position in this context, a majority of its customers are state-owned steel entities that cannot avoid meeting these mandates."
The FGD business has driven explosive growth. In 2005, Rino pulled just $3.6 million in sales, but last year it reached $139 million. In the second quarter of this year, profit jumped 86% from last year to 39 cents a share. Sales rose 18% to $40.7 million.
Though FGD sales climbed a brisk 20% in the quarter, it wasn't the fastest-growing segment. That honor went to wastewater treatment, whose sales vaulted 53.4% to $6 million. Strange as it sounds, the customer base for this is the same as for FGD gear. Iron-making blast furnaces and steel-making converters both consume and expel large amounts of water, contributing to industrial pollution.
Rino's Lamella wastewater treatment system cost $4 million to install and draws a 40% gross margin for the company. But it is a somewhat more mature market than FGD. Dayal says 68% of blast furnaces and 54% of converters already have treatment systems, some of them installed by the steel producers without recourse to third-party vendors.
Wastewater treatment is Rino's original product line, launched when its first facility started production in 2003. Since then, the firm has been developing new equipment jointly with the research departments of several Chinese universities.
Apart from the FGD line, this system has produced an anti-oxidation technology to combat pollution from production of hot-rolled steel. That drew $1.1 million in sales in the second quarter. Last year, the R&D department also created dust-catching and sludge-treatment technology, but this has yet to produce revenue.
Meanwhile, demand for the existing products has been so brisk that Rino is outsourcing some of its work. This has put pressure on margins, since the firm generally benefits from controlling the supply chain. Liu says the company is "in the closing stage" of a deal to buy another piece of land in Dalian where it will build a factory.
Becoming Visible
The growth has helped raise Rino's U.S. profile. It first started trading on the Nasdaq in 2007 after a complicated reverse merger, but it was trading only around 3,000 shares a day and rarely topped $10 in price. In July, however, it was upgraded to the Nasdaq Global Market, and hired U.S.-educated Liu as CFO. The price and volume both shot up, and it now trades about 600,000 shares a day at over 20.
So far Dayal is the only analyst to launch coverage, but his outlook is promising. The main thing to keep an eye on, in his view, is the restructuring of China's steel industry. It got hit by the global recession like everybody else, causing an ongoing consolidation of production into a few companies. This could potentially limit demand for Rino's products.
But that still leaves room for growth. Dayal expects earnings to jump 122% this year to $1.91 a share, climbing 11% next year to $2.09.

After a Devastating Fire, an Intense Study of Its Effects

The Station fire, which in over a month has burned away nearly a quarter of this vast, mountainous backdrop to the Los Angeles skyline, is finally just about out, sending all but a handful of firefighters home. Now, the scientists swoop in

Adam Backlin and Liz Gallegos, federal biologists, stood thigh-deep in a stream last week, sweeping a large net over and over like frustrated anglers to collect Santa Ana speckled dace fish as part of research on the damaging effects of fire on fragile wildlife.
Earlier, another biologist, Diana Papoulias, hauled out centrifuges, dry ice, syringes and other equipment to perform autopsies on fish, delving deeper into the role that heat, fire retardant and debris in the water may have played in their demise.
And Todd M. Hoefen, a geophysicist, scooped up white and black ash as part of research to analyze “the impact of it, what blows out of these fires and what are people breathing.”
Fire, typically touched off by lightning strikes, has always been part of the life cycle of the wilderness here and elsewhere, to a large degree crucial to regenerating it. Most wildlife and landscape eventually come back.
But with the increasing frequency and size of fires — 7 of the state’s 10 largest wildfires have occurred in the last six years, and most were caused by people — scientists are intensifying study of the environmental aftermath of the changing burn pattern.
“Fire dynamics have changed a lot, and urbanization has fragmented the landscape,” said Robert N. Fisher, a biologist with the United States Geological Survey, which has coordinated a team to take a closer look at this fire and other recent ones. “We have to figure out a way to give animals a way to persist in a way they did before in a landscape that is burning too fast and too much.”
This week, Mr. Fisher coordinated an unusual evacuation of sorts. A multiagency team of state and federal forest and wildlife representatives removed a colony of mountain yellow-legged tadpoles, endangered in Southern California, from a tributary of the San Gabriel River before rock and debris unleashed by fall and winter rains imperil their creekside habitat.
The tadpoles were taken to the Fresno Chaffee Zoo, where they will be raised, with the young spawned there eventually returned to the wild.
But such maneuvers represent the extreme. Much of the scientists’ work is intended to provide a better understanding of the ecological aftermath of fires, particularly those in areas where development meets wilderness and threatened and endangered species are present.
Scott L. Stephens, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and president of the Association for Fire Ecology, said the Station fire work coincided with a burst of fire science research in recent years designed to answer questions not only about what happens during and after fires but also about the effect climate change and drought may be having on forests and scrubland in high-burn areas.
Underlying much of the interest, Dr. Stephens said, are questions like these: “Are there things we can do to mitigate fire? Are there things managers can do to reduce their impact?”
The Station fire, which was named for its start on Aug. 26 near a ranger station, has destroyed several dozen homes and caused the deaths of two Los Angeles County firefighters. It ranks as the largest fire in the modern history of Los Angeles County. It has burned more than 160,000 acres, or 250 square miles, an area nearly the size of Chicago, and has cut off access to one of Los Angeles’s most popular wilderness getaways, about 20 miles north of downtown.
But the fire may be best remembered for the towering, thundercloud-like plume that loomed for days over the city.
Just what happened to all that ash and how thousands of gallons of fire retardant sprayed on the forest is affecting its creatures is now the focus of much investigation.
Much of the work requires painstaking field research in the deepest reaches of craggy forest.
On a recent afternoon, in the moonscape of the “burn scar,” Mr. Backlin and Ms. Gallegos bounced in a truck along trails and hopped out at the edge of a creek for an afternoon of “fishing.”
With a Forest Service fire truck parked nearby and water-dropping helicopters dashing overhead to hit the last smoldering hot spots, the two cast a literal wide net in an effort to collect small, finger-length speckled daces.
“We’re on fire now,” Mr. Backlin exulted, after several previous efforts turned up nothing but trout and water bugs.
“When the winter rains come, we won’t have any idea what these fish were like if they are washed away,” he said, tossing a few more into a collection bucket.
Later, the two biologists sat in the dirt and measured the specimens, euthanized them and placed them in jars to take back to the laboratory for autopsies.
DNA samples were taken, their internal organs analyzed and other tests performed to assess their overall health and the presence of toxins

With Forest Service officials already warning that heavy rains could produce severe mudslides because so much vegetation holding the soil in place has burned away, scientists worry about the consequences, particularly to aquatic creatures

Another group of scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Arizona State University and the California Institute of Technology plan to take detailed, high-resolution aerial photographs of the burn in the coming days as part of research on erosion and the movement of sediment in the mountains.
“Fire changes a lot of dynamics and releases a lot of sediment,” said Todd Farr, a geologist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose offices in La Cañada Flintridge abut the forest.
But even without the rain, the fires created a threat.
Already, scientists have found that ash particles in the streams can shred the fish’s gills and drive up the water’s alkalinity, possibly affecting reproduction and setting the stage for die-offs.
A research ecologist, Edward E. Little, said soil and water samples reddened by retardant were being analyzed to determine toxicity to fish and amphibians, among the creatures most susceptible to environmental changes.
Similar work has been done after fires in Colorado and Idaho, Dr. Little said, but “the interesting thing about the Station fire is it is such a different kind of fire than we have visited, in terms of devastation of vegetation in the area.”
Mr. Hoefen, who also helped analyze ash from the World Trade Center collapse, said ash samples had shown elevated levels of minerals that could be the result of what the burned plants had absorbed from the soil or air pollution. They mirror findings from devastating fires in San Diego in 2007, he said, though additional research is needed to pinpoint how harmful the ash could be to human health and the environment.
With rains expected to wash much of the ash into the watershed, Mr. Hoefen said, the quality of rivers, streams and reservoirs could be affected.
“Hopefully, our science will start to show people that it is not just fire, but there could be problems for the frogs, fish and the runoff,” Mr. Hoefen said. “Wind and rain blowing the ash into streams and ponds could have an effect after the fire.”

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Greenhouse on the road to be energy producer

The greenhouse sector currently has extremely high energy overheads, so finding ways of reducing energy consumption is of great economic and climatic interest. In the longer term the aim is for greenhouses to actually produce energy themselves.
“By altering the climate control system at Hjortebjerg Nursery to a dynamic climate in which optimum use is made of natural light, we can reduce the whole nursery’s energy consumption by around 20 percent. In specific terms, the concept is to accept slightly higher temperature and humidity variations, so the idea is relatively easy to implement once you have developed the model,” explains Project Manager Anker Kuehn of AgroTech, which is involved in developing the new greenhouse concept.
The next step in the project has already been taken, with energy depots established underground in which surplus energy from the summer can be stored and reused during the cold months.
A greenhouse functions like an efficient solar collector, and on an annual basis receives twice as much solar energy as is used for a whole year’s heating. On an annual basis the energy consumption for heating the glasshouse area is an average of approx. 400 kWh per m², while annual insulation is approx. 1020 kWh pr m².
“For eight months of the year the energy input is higher than energy consumption. By collecting and storing the summer’s surplus heat and using it in the heating season, the greenhouse can become self-sufficient on energy – and even supply the nursery’s six other greenhouses. For a large part of the year heating requirements are limited to night-time,” explains Anker Kuehn.

Denmark shares its wind power secrets

The Danish Crown Prince Frederik recently pushed the button that made the wind turbines spin at Horns Rev 2 – the worlds largest offshore wind farm. The 91 wind turbines are the recent symbol that wind is one of Denmark’s most abundant natural energy sources, today accounting for one-fifth of the electricity supplied through Danish outlets.
And there is more to come. A wind power share of around 50 per cent in around 10 to 15 years is not a distant dream in Denmark. That is part of the Danish vision to combat climate change.
In just under 30 years, Denmark has become world champ when it comes to harnessing the otherwise tough-to-control wind energy in the power system. And the experiences is shared in a new film called wind power – how to combat climate change produced by the Danish Wind Industry Association, Energinet.dk, the Danish Transmission System Operator and Climate Consortium Denmark.
The key to success is a well-equipped toolbox. A number of tools provide the recipe for integrating considerable amounts of wind energy into the power system, thus ensuring that wind energy is always used where most needed. The list of tools avail­able today is long and will be growing longer.
“What particularly makes the Danish history of energy successful and interesting in an international context is that we have developed an electrical system that can integrate renewable energy in a large scale in corporation with district heating systems and decentralized cogeneration. Renewable energy will in increasing amounts be included in our future energy supply. This requires innovation and change in relations to both the electric-, heat- and transportation system today. This is what we with the short film about wind power want to shed light on,” says Hans Mogensen vice president of communications at Energinet.dk, that is the Danish Transmission System operator.