Oil is the name of game in Iraq _January 31 2016

In a surprise move, the United States has announced that it will deploy a new force of special operations troops to Iraq to combat the Islamic State (IS) terror group which has seized swathes of the country and neighbouring Syria.

US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter wrote in the US publication Politico last week that soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division would soon deploy to Iraq to join the fight against IS “with a clear campaign plan to deliver the barbaric organisation a lasting defeat.”

Though Carter did not give details about the deployment, he said the troop mission was to destroy the IS “parent tumour in Iraq and Syria by collapsing its two power centres in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria.”

“Our campaign is to deliver IS a lasting defeat,” Carter wrote.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said “the government of Iraq was of course briefed in advance of secretary Carter’s announcement” and the two sides would work out details about the new deployment.

Joseph F Dunford Jr, the US top military officer, also said discussions between Washington and Baghdad had begun on how American forces would “integrate” with Iraqi military units to take back Mosul.

The move is a sharp departure from US President Barack Obama’s previous strategy that the US would not deploy “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Syria and would continue instead its current air campaign and military assistance to the Iraqi government.

Baghdad has not yet made it clear if it had agreed to let the US troops into Iraq. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi has repeatedly said foreign ground combat troops are not needed in Iraq. Leaders of the country’s Shia groups have warned that they will consider such a presence a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.

If the statements by top American officials are any indication, the United States is now gearing up for war with IS, including in the battle for Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city which was captured by the terror group in spring 2014.

Analysts believe that the US-led coalition against IS needs to take back Mosul where Saddam's Hussein sons Uday and Qusay were captured and killed back in 2003, a sprawling city of more than two million people, and the US military shift signals Washington’s readiness to engage IS strongholds with ground combat operations.

Iran's Fast Attack Small Boats

Iran Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Navy said the speedboats manufactured in Iran can sail at a much higher speed than the US vessels.

"Our fast attack craft fleet is often twice as fast as their American rivals. The plan is to make them go even faster,” Navy Spokesperson told the state-run TV

Referring to the US official remarks that Washington is aware of the scope of IRGC's missile tunnels and vessels along the Iranian coasts, he said, "The Americans don’t know everything about us and the things they know is what we, ourselves, have shown and wanted them to know it."

"Their unknown is twice the realm of their known," he added.

In recent years, Iran has made great achievements in its defense sector and attained self-sufficiency in producing essential military equipment and systems.

Iranian officials have always stressed that the country's military and arms programs serve defensive purposes and should not be perceived as a threat to any other country.

Iran Navy announced back in May that plans to mass-produce missile launching speedboats with the speed of 80 knots per hour are on the menu.

"Based on the fifth five-year (development) plan, we should materialize our objective of mass-producing military speedboats with the speed of 80 knots per hour. This is a formidable speed in the world's navies," Iran Navy said.

"Therefore, we should try to mass-produce speedboats that can traverse at the speed of 80 knots (per hour) and are equipped with missiles with a range of 100km; the vessels no one can catch," the IRGC commander added.

Commander also said that the IRGC Navy is equipped with laboratories and pools in which the country's experts can design and test speedboats with the speed of 120 knots per hour.

Three Men You Miss in Mid East Peace Process

Philip Charles Habib (February 25, 1920 – May 25, 1992) was a Lebanese-American career diplomat, known for work in Vietnam, South Korea, and the Middle East. After his death, The New York Times described him as "the outstanding professional diplomat of his generation in the United States

Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke (April 24, 1941 – December 13, 2010) was an American diplomat, magazine editor, author, professor, Peace Corps official, and investment banker.


George John Mitchell, Jr. GBE (born August 20, 1933) is an American lawyer, businessman and politician. A Democrat, Mitchell served as a United States Senator from Maine from 1980 to 1995 and as Senate Majority Leader from 1989 to 1995.

I hope someday to live near ocean. What should I look for in buying property there?

Q. I hope someday to live near ocean. What should I look for in buying property there?

A. Firm ground. Coastal Maine would be ideal bet. The dense metamorphic rock of much of the Maine shore is stable (within the human time frame) and hard ideal footings for a house. Make sure the site is far enough inland to avoid high surf, storm surge and tides. If the winters in Maine do not appeal to you, coastal Florida might make a choice. If you insist on building on a barrier island, make sure your home is on the mainland side of the southern end. Parts of the Pacific coast are all right, but local variability on the active margin makes some knowledge of the geological history of the area would be very valuable. For example, some parts of the San Diego shoreline is eroding about (3) meters (10 feet) per year - hardly a solid investment.  

ACTIVE  MARGIN

 In plate tectonics, a convergent boundary also known as a destructive plate boundary (because of subduction), is an actively deforming region where two (or more) tectonic plates or fragments of lithosphere move toward one another and collide. ...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_margin

BARRIER ISLAND

a long narrow sandy island (wider than a reef) running parallel to the shore

wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

METAMORPHIC ROCK

Sedimentary rock (formed by debris) that has been compressed and heated

www.museumnetworkuk.org/materials/glossary.html

Gullah People

Bees

Bees : The world's oldest bee fossil was found in a piece of Burmese amber believed to be 100 million years old by Khin Tun on Friday, February 4, 2011 at 10:56am

Albert Einstein is reputed to have said; " If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left. No more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.

Bees are brilliant. Bees have a sophisticated navigation system that uses the sun and landmarks as points of reference. it allows them travel up to three miles (5 km) from the hive in search of food without losing their way back home.They are able to direct other bees to food supplies through a remarkable form of communication called the "waggle dance".

The world's oldest bee fossil was found in a piece of Burmese amber believed to be 100 million years old

This world's oldest (first) bee is much smaller than the western honeybee but it was covered with same pluffy hairs to help pick up pollen.However, unlike the modern honeybee, it is thought that this ancient relative was a solitary creature.

The western honeybee migrated north and west from Africa, reaching Europe by the end of Pleistocene era some 10,000 years ago, as the glaciers retreated and the last ice age draw to a close.

Containers of 3,000 years old honey have been found alongside the mummified remains of a pharoah designed to sweeten after life.

China with its venerable history of beekeeping. Honey leads the list of medicines described in the books of chinese medicine written 2,200 years ago.

Chinese classified honey by the terrain from it was gathered as ground honey, bamboo honey, wood honey and even stone honey.

Worldwide honey bee pollination worth more than an estimated 60 billion a year of which soem 15 billion is in US alone according to the study by Cornell University.

Pollination is big business 40 billion bees in total, making it the largest pollination in history.

Argentina is the world number one honey exporter.

There are more than 20,000 species, 17,000 identified. These include sweat bees, squash bees, capenter bees, andrenid bees, mason bees, leafcutter bees, cactus-loving bees, bumblebees (fluffy bees).















Note:

Amber= Fossilzed resin of ancient trees. Most of the world's amber is in the range of 30-90 million years old

Solitary= Existing, living alone or in pairs only

Pleistocene era= At the time glaciers retreated and the extinction of numerous land mammals, such as mammoths, mastodans and sabered-tooth tigers

Cryogenic Engineering

Cryogenic engineering is a sub stream of mechanical engineering dealing with cryogenics, and related very low temperature processes such as air liquefaction, cryogenic engines (for rocket propulsion), cryogenic surgery. Generally, temperatures below the boiling point of Nitrogen (77°K) comes under the purview of cryogenic engineering.

In physics, cryogenics is the study of the production of very low temperature (below −150 °C, −238 °F or 123 K) and the behaviour of materials at those temperatures. A person who studies elements under extremely cold temperature is called a cryogenicist. Rather than the relative temperature scales of Celsius and Fahrenheit, cryogenicists use the absolute temperature scales. These are Kelvin (SI units) or Rankine scale (English/US units).

Air liquefaction application is that  in manufacturing processes the liquid air product is fractionated into its constituent gases in liquid or gaseous form, as the oxygen is especially useful for use in fuel gas welding and cutting, and the argon is useful as an oxygen-excluding shielding gas in some forms of shielded metal arc welding, while Liquid nitrogen is useful in various low-temperature applications, being nonreactive at normal temperatures (unlike the oxygen) and boiling at 77 K (−196 °C; −321 °F).

A cryogenic rocket engine is a rocket engine that uses a cryogenic fuel (liquid hydrogen) or oxidizer (liquid oxygen), that is, its fuel or oxidizer (or both) are gases liquefied and stored at very low temperatures. Notably, these engines were one of the main factors of the ultimate success in reaching the Moon by the Saturn V rocket. Most rocket engines are internal combustion engines.

Cryogenic fuels are fuels that require storage at extremely low temperatures in order to maintain them in a liquid state. Cryogenic fuels most often constitute liquefied gases such as liquid hydrogen. Some rocket engines use regenerative cooling, that circulates their cryogenic fuel around their nozzles before the fuel is pumped into the combustion chamber and ignited. This arrangement was first suggested in 1940s. The Saturn V rocket that sent the first manned missions to the moon used this design element, which is still in use today. Quite often, liquid oxygen is mistakenly called cryogenic "fuel", though it is actually an oxidizer and not a fuel. Russian aircraft manufacturer Tupolev is currently researching a version of its popular Tu-154 design but with a cryogenic fuel system, designated the Tu-155. Using a fuel referred to as liquefied natural gas (LNG), its first flight was in 1989. India developed the technology in 2008 for use in their GSLV rockets.

During World War II, when powerful rocket engines were first considered by the German, American and Soviet engineers independently, all discovered that rocket engines need high mass flow rate of both oxidizer and fuel to generate a sufficient thrust. At that time oxygen and low molecular weight hydrocarbons were used as oxidizer and fuel pair. At room temperature and pressure, both are in gaseous state. Hypothetically, if propellants had been stored as pressurized gases, the size and mass of fuel tanks themselves would severely decrease rocket efficiency. Therefore, to get the required mass flow rate, the only option was to cool the propellants down to cryogenic temperatures (below −150 °C, −238 °F), converting them to liquid form. Hence, all cryogenic rocket engines are also, by definition, either liquid-propellant rocket engines or hybrid rocket engines.

Various cryogenic fuel-oxidizer combinations have been tried, but the combination of liquid hydrogen (LH2) fuel and the liquid oxygen (LOX) oxidizer is one of the most widely used. Both components are easily and cheaply available, and when burned have one of the highest entropy releases by combustion, producing specific impulse up to 450 s (effective exhaust velocity 4.4 km/s).

The major components of a cryogenic rocket engine are the combustion chamber (thrust chamber), pyrotechnic igniter, fuel injector, fuel cryopumps, oxidizer cryopumps, gas turbine, cryo valves, regulators, the fuel tanks, and rocket engine nozzle. In terms of feeding propellants to combustion chamber, cryogenic rocket engines (or, generally, all liquid-propellant engines) work in either an expander cycle, a gas-generator cycle, a staged combustion cycle, or the simplest pressure-fed cycle. The cryopumps are always turbopumps powered by a flow of fuel through gas turbines. Looking at this aspect, engines can be differentiated into a main flow or a bypass flow configuration. In the main flow design, all the pumped fuel is fed through the gas turbines, and in the end injected to the combustion chamber. In the bypass configuration, the fuel flow is split; the main part goes directly to the combustion chamber to generate thrust, while only a small amount of the fuel goes to the turbine

Currently, five countries have successfully developed and deployed cryogenic rocket engines:

• United States

SSME

J-2

RL-10

RS-68

RS-83

• Russia

RD-0120

RD-0146

• China

YF-50t

YF-73

YF-75

YF-77

• France

Vulcain

HM7-B

Vinci

• Japan

LE-7A

LE-5B

• India is still developing its cryogenic application for rocket launch as of January 31, 2011.

Cryosurgery first advantage is that when the neurosurgeon is can utilize low temperature during neurosurgery. The second is that the advancing front of reduced temperatures tends to cause the removal of blood and the construction of blood vessels in the affected area. This means that little or no bleeding results from cryosurgical procedure. The third is that the equipment employs z freezing apparatus (which is about the size of the large knitting needle) that can be placed in contact with the area to be destroyed with a minimum incision to expose the affected area. The equipment used in cryosurgery utilizes teh same operating priciples as teh controlled rate freezer. The flow of liquid nitrogen is controlled by and electrically operated valve.

Besides the preservation or destruction of life, low temperatures can be employed for teh formulation of drugs to release antibodies or other active agents from their cells.       

The industries that use cryogenic engineering are:

·         Food and beverages

·         Gas industries

·         Steel plants and allied industries

·         Engineering industries

·         Chemical industries

·         Hospital, pharmaceutical and fertilizer plants

·         Research institutes

Here are Samples of applications

CO₂ Tanks are used for Transport and Storage of Liquefied CO₂ to breweries, engineering industries, foundries, etc. and vaporises convert the liquid gas to gases form through pumps or auto pressure build up system.

The stored liquid nitrogen is used in hospitals for the preservation of clinical samples of tissue and cells at low temperatures and must be maintained at a temperature of -196˚C. (At room temperature, liquid nitrogen boils expanding like steam to fill a volume 2000 times its liquid state). And also liquid oxygen for patient use and the use of helium for MRI machines.