For good measure
Cutting carbon dioxide emissions to curb climate change and reach net-zero is possible but not easy, Alexandra Witze reported in “The road to net-zero” (SN: 1/28/23, p. 22).
A report by Princeton University’s Net-Zero America project, released in 2021, estimates that wind and solar power production needs to roughly quadruple by 2030 to achieve the United States’ goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, Witze reported. In the most ambitious scenario, “wind turbines would cover an area the size of Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma combined,” she wrote.
Reader Mary Sweeney noted that, while technically correct, the statement quoted above could be misleading. “What the Princeton report actually states is that the visual footprint of the turbines would be equivalent to the combined areas of the states listed above. In other words, that figure for land use was reached by considering the very large area from which the very tall turbines would be visible,” Sweeney wrote. The actual land use would be only a tiny fraction of the visual footprint.
Disappearing act
A glass frog hides nearly all of its red blood cells in the liver while it sleeps, upping the animal’s transparency, Susan Milius reported in “Glass frogs make their blood vanish” (SN: 1/28/23, p. 6).
Reader Len Yaeger wondered what criteria the researchers used to determine transparency in the frogs.
Biologists think about transparency a bit differently from physicists, says Jesse Delia of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. “If the individual tissues are transmitting over 90 percent of light, they’re — as far as biology goes — relatively perfectly transparent,” he says. Glass frogs’ green dorsal skin “gives them sort of a diffuse transmittance, like the filtered light if you were to look up at the tree canopy on a sunny day.”
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