SOLAR POWER TOWERS ARE 'VAPORIZING' BIRDS

BUT THEY AREN'T THE DEADLIEST ENERGY SOURCE FOR OUR FEATHERED FRIENDS

Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project

Wikimedia Commons

This photo was taken on December 31, 2014.

The Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project in Nevada is set to come online in March. Once completed, it will use thousands of mirrors to focus sunlight on a tower, melting millions of pounds of salt contained inside. The molten salt will heat water into steam, which then turns turbines and generates electricity without any carbon byproducts. There’s just one little problem: During a test run on January 14, the intense heat from the mirrors reportedly incinerated and/or vaporized more than 100 birds.

Rewire reports that during the test, operators fired up a third of the 110-megawatt facility’s mirrors, concentrating sunlight on a spot 1,200 feet off the ground. Over a six-hour period, biologists counted 130 "streamers," or trails of smoke and water left behind as birds ignited and plummeted to their deaths. Rewire’s anonymous source said that at least one of the birds "turned white hot and vaporized completely."

Another solar power plant, Ivanpah, reportedly scorches one bird every two minutes. Both companies are trying to devise measures to keep birds out of the concentrated solar energy.

It’s certainly a gruesome way to die. But solar power plants may not be that much worse for birds than other sources of electricity. This graph from a U.S. News & World Report in 2014 shows that overall, fossil fuels cause a lot more feathered fatalities.

Bird Deaths By Power Source

U.S. News & World Report

However, the chart is not a perfect data source. The estimates weren’t taken in any standardized way, and some of the studies were outdated. It’s also not an apples-to-apples comparison, since fossil fuels supply way more power to U.S. homes than renewable sources. So we combined the chart with data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration to calculate how many birds each type of power kills for every 1,000 megawatt-hours of power that’s generated. It's just a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but here’s what we found:

PopSci Does Math

Popular Science

Coal still stands out as the big bad bird killer, but solar and wind power aren’t so angelic either. If you accept the higher estimate for solar power, the impact on our feathered friends is higher than for oil and natural gas. Does that mean we should stick to fossil fuels? Of course not. (A world scorched by climate change is good for nobody.) But it does underline the fact that clean energy needs to clean up its act.

The Best Valentines Day Flower

New "Porta Potty" Flower Discovered
Phallic-shaped species smells like rotting meat and feces.




The newly discovered plant species Amorphophallus perrieri grows to about five feet tall.
Photograph courtesy Cameron McIntire, University of Utah



Botanist Greg Wahlert and the new species. Photograph courtesy Lee Siegel, University of Utah
Rachel Kaufman
for National Geographic News
Published February 8, 2012

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. And a new species of Amorphophallus—the genus that includes the "corpse flower"—still smells like rotting meat and feces.

Discovered on an island off the coast of Madagascar, the newfound plant grows up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) high and blooms once a year with a "really foul" stench, according to discoverer Greg Wahlert, a postdoctoral researcher in botany at the University of Utah.

Lynn Bohs, a biology professor in the same lab as Wahlert, described the smell in a statement as a combination of "rotting roadkill" and a "Porta Potty."

The new flower adds to the roughly 170 species in the Amorphophallus genus, which means "misshapen penis" in Greek after the phallic shape of the plants' flowers.

Finding Flower a Stroke of Luck

Wahlert discovered the new species—named A. perrieri—in full bloom while collecting violets in two remote islands northwest of Madagascar in 2006 and 2007.

Suspecting the plant might be a new species, he brought back samples and began cultivating them. After consulting with an Amorphophallus expert in the Netherlands, he confirmed that A. perrieri was a previously undescribed species.

Because A. perrieri is dormant for much of the year, Wahlert's discovery is a case of good timing.

For months out of the year, there's little rain in that part of Madagascar, so the plants remain dormant underground.

"These things are growing out of the most miserable soil," said Wahlert, who is working on a scientific paper about the species.


The specimen he is cultivating in the university's greenhouse shot up its flower in just two weeks. If Wahlert had been visiting the islands at a different time, "I could have very easily missed it."

Stinky Flowers "Fascinating"

All Amorphophallus species emit smells to attract flies and other insects.

Though a few emit more pleasant aromas, such as chocolate or spices, most smell terrible to human noses, Wahlert said.

"You can imagine in Africa, where big game will die and rot in the sun ... that's what they smell like," Wahlert said.

Despite the stench, he added, "I'm glad I got a stinky one. It's fascinating to me.

World's Tiniest Chameleons Found in Madagascar

Smallest Lizard A juvenile Brookesia micra is barely bigger than a match head.

This little chameleon is one of four miniature lizards identified in Madagascar, adding to our growing list of amazingly teeny animals. The one on the match in this picture is a juvenile, but even the adults max out at 30 millimeters. They're the smallest lizards in the world, and some of the smallest vertebrates found to date.

The Lilliputian lizard is near the lower limits of size in vertebrate animals. Learning about how these creatures live can put some constraints on animal morphology — if your species has eyes, a backbone and a brain, there’s likely a limit to how little you can get. A different group of field biologists just announced the world’s smallest frog, and they claim it is the smallest vertebrate in the world, knocking a tiny Indonesian fish off the pedestal of puniness.

The chameleons are related to other Madagascan lizards, but DNA analysis showed they have enough genetic differences to count as distinct species, according to the researchers who found them, led by Frank Glaw of the Zoological State Collection of Munich. The animals live in leafy undergrowth in Madagascan forests.

Tiny and camouflaged — how did they find these guys? Most of the lizards were collected at night, when they typically climb up into the underbrush to roost. The field biologists used torches and headlamps to spot the sleeping lizards, according to their paper.