The Great Plains: America’s Carbon Vault

As a nation we are starting a race against climate change, a competitor who has had a very long head start and only plans on picking up the pace. The Clean Power Plan has laid a blueprint to lower carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning power plants nationwide, a crucial step in recovering from decades of pollution. Meeting these goals will take years and greenhouse gasses will continue to accumulate throughout the process. Efforts beyond the scope of this plan must also be made in order to prevent emissions from sources not specifically addressed, namely sources of carbon that cannot be controlled at a single point. A largely unaddressed source of carbon emissions comes from the tillage of native grasslands which act as a great vault of carbon stored within the central United States. The Great Plains once hosted native prairie grasses which covered roughly one third of the country. Since agriculture took hold in the area most of the original grasses have been cut and the soil has been plowed. The act of plowing these ancient prairie soils releases an immense amount of carbon which is stored in the soil. Between 2009 and 2015 fifty-three million acres of grassland were converted to cropland each year, an annual loss rate of 2%. In this amount of time an estimated 3.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide which had previously been stored in the soil was released. Each year the conversion rate increases, scraping away at what little grassland is left. The remaining grasslands of the Great Plains still act as a vault for carbon but are overlooked by most conservation efforts. The Great Plains have been described as “one of the least protected places on earth” by the World Wildlife Fund, with an estimated 1-4% of original grasslands remaining. Monumental amounts of effort go into protecting more visually striking environments such as rain forests while one of equal importance is being eliminated right in the heart of America. The prairie is a misunderstood ecosystem, and as a result its benefits are often ignored. These highly productive domains provide unbelievable biodiversity, environmental benefits, and wildlife habitat. The grasses which populate these areas quickly process carbon from the atmosphere and have deep penetrating roots, often 8-15 feet in length. These roots bury carbon deep underground where it can be stored for decades; 22.5 tons of carbon per acre can be stored in the roots alone, and 1.7 tons per acre can be moved to the soil every year. This storage is accumulative over time and moves carbon from the atmosphere to the ground continuously creating massive carbon deposits over the course of centuries. Prairies have the ability to store as much carbon below the ground as forests can store above the ground. When carbon is stored below ground it will remain locked there and be unable to enter the atmosphere. Wetlands are also commonly found within prairies and are capable of storing as much as 68.6 kilograms of carbon per cubic meter while also providing benefits such as flood protection, water purification, and groundwater recharge. The conversion of prairie to farmland can be attributed to federal incentives which provide premium subsidies to crop growers. These incentives lead ranchers to abandon the practice in favor of agriculture, tilling the land which once locked away vast stores of carbon. When done responsibly raising-grass fed cows allows for the conservation of a healthy grassland ecosystem while still maintaining an economic business. Without creating incentives to assure the survival of ranching native grasslands will continue to decline. Protecting the remaining native grasses of the Great Plains is a sensible and benign way to secure a massive vault of carbon that will otherwise be released, counteracting the efforts of the Clean Power Plan. Solely focusing on reducing emissions from power plants will not be enough

Some Physical Properties of Coke: The Significance of (a) the Volatile Matter Content and of (b) the Particle Size of the Coal

It was shown that, at the average rate of heating obtaining in a coke oven and even at much faster rates, the majority of Scottish coking coals showed no tendency to intumesce. According to the findings of Audibert and Delmas these coals should therefore give abradable cokes but this was not found to be the case. These Scottish coking coals are therefore very different in type to those of many other coalfields. Rose (Fuel, 1926,5,562) has observed that there is some relation between the total volatile matter content and the nature of the coke obtained from a coking coal. Coals having high volatile matter contents gave highly fissured cokes while coals having low volatile matter contents gave blocky cokes with comparatively few fissures. Since it is during the period subsequent to the plastic range that the fissuring of the coke takes place, the degree of fissuring should be related to the percentage of volatile matter evolved during this period, and it was thought that by comparing the volatile matter contents of the coals after heating to the temperature at the end of the plastic range and the nature of the cokes obtained, a more accurate correlation would be obtained. The plastic ranges of a series of coals taken from the chief coalfields of Britain were determined by a modification of Foxwell's method. The volatile matter contents of these coals at the temperatures corresponding to the end of their plastic ranges were also determined. Since the shatter index of a coke has been found to give a valuable indication of its quality, the shatter indices of the coke made from these coals were accordingly obtained. These determinations have shown that there is a decided relationship between the volatile matter contents of the coals at the end of their plastic ranges and the shatter indices of the corresponding cokes. From indications of the various results obtained it was thought probable that if the percentage of volatile matter retained by a coal at the end of the plastic range could be diminished, a less fissured coke would be produced. Accordingly several Scottish coking coals were blended with non-coking materials having low volatile matter contents and in every blending test in which an appreciable reduction of the volatile matter content of the mixture at the temperature of the end of the plastic range was obtained, there was also a definite increase in the size and the resistance to shatter of the coke obtained from the blend, provided that the limits of size and percentage addition were not exceeded. The tests carried out demonstrated that the reduction of the large fissures present in a coke by blending the coal with non-coking materials having low volatile matter contents was not wholly due to the actual reduction of the volatile matter content at the end of the plastic range, but was partly due to a more even distribution of the shrinkage cracks occuring in the coke. Binary blends of coking coals were also examined. The Northern Coke Research Committee obtained some remarkable results from a series of experiments in which pairs of coking coals were blended. They found that small additions of an inferior coking coal to a good coking coal and small additions of a good coking coal to an inferior coking coal produce more than proportionate effects on the shatter index of the coke; a 20% addition seemed to be a critical quantity in both types of result. In many experiments an optimum blend composition has been discovered, such a blend sometimes giving a coke of higher shatter index than that obtained from either of the parent coals. Several of these blends were examined during the present investigation and it was found that there was a close relationship between the volatile matter contents of the blends at the end of their plastic ranges and the shatter indices of the corresponding cokes

Marshall University Music Department Presents a Faculty Recital, William Davidson, Piano

https://mds.marshall.edu/music_perf/1077/thumbnail.jp

Marshall University Music Department Presents the Marshall Faculty Woodwind Quintet

https://mds.marshall.edu/music_perf/1090/thumbnail.jp

Archive 2.0: Imagining the Michigan State University Israelite Samaritan Scroll Collection

This project will work with Michigan State University units and the A.B. Samaritan Institute in Holon, Israel to create using the latest in Web 2.0 technologies an accessible, useable and living archive for the Israelite Samaritan community in Holon and Nabulus as well as biblical scholars. To facilitate this work we will digitize over the next several years three 15th century Israelite Samaritan Pentateuch scrolls, and provide a unique suite of tools to help facilitate collaboration: social networking, tagging, social bookmarking, zoomify view, and multilingual support. The aim is to bring together two distinct groups of users - textual scholars and members of the Israelite Samaritan community - both of whom have a significant stake in the cultural and scholarly value of the Samaritan Archive, via an online environment in which they can view and interpret the Samaritan texts, interact with members of their respective communities, and interact with one another

Sanitation and sewage disposal for country homes

"September, 1910.""The demand for modernly equipped farm homes at a moderate cost is becoming an urgent one. Farmers throughout Missouri are striving to keep abreast of the times in modern methods of agriculture. Likewise they are seeking the latest and best practices in every line of activity pertaining to the industry of farming. They are demanding that their homes be equipped with the same modern conveniences that the people of the city enjoy, and it is the call from them for information on modern farm sanitation that has led to the publication of this bulletin. The greater part of the bulletin is devoted to the subject of modern sewage disposal plants for isolated houses. A portion has been given to the discussion of sewage disposal methods now employed on the farm, and still another portion to country plumbing. It is the purpose of this bulletin to present several specific designs and to call attention to the necessity of home sanitation in a general way."--Introductio

The Buoyant Behavior of Viral and Bacterial DNA in Alkaline CsCl

In equilibrium density gradient centrifugation, the banding polymer species is electrically neutral. The banding species for a negative polyelectrolyte with a polyanion P_(n)^(-z)n (where n is the degree of polymerization, and z the titration charge per monomer unit) in a CsCl salt gradient is CS_(zn)P_n. If the ion P_(n)^(-z)n is itself a weak acid, it may be titrated to the state P_(n)^(-(Zn+y)) by CsOH; the banding species is then Cs_(zn+y)P_n. Because of the large mass and high effective "density" of a Cs^+ ion, it is to be expected that the buoyant density in a CsCl gradient of a polymer acid will be increased by such a partial alkaline titration with CsOH. This expectation has been confirmed for polyglutamic acid (where z = 0 at low pH). The guanine and thymine monomer units of DNA are weak acids. The present communication is concerned with the increase in buoyant density of DNA in alkaline CsCl solutions. It is well known that the guanine and thymine protons are more readily titrated in denatured DNA than in native DNA. We find that the buoyant density of denatured DNA and of single strand ϕX-174 DNA gradually increases as the pH of the solution is increased beyond pH 9.8. The density of native DNA is not affected until a critical pH > 11 is reached, where the DNA abruptly denatures and increases in density. Similar increases in buoyant density have been observed independently by Baldwin and Shooter in their studies of 5BU[overbar]-substituted DNA's in alkaline solutions

Marshall University Music Department Presents William R. Davidson, Piano

https://mds.marshall.edu/music_perf/1177/thumbnail.jp

Sam Houston and the Indians : a rhetorical study of the man and the myth

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Kansas, Speech and Drama, 1971

International Tourism and Culture Change in the Western Caribbean: Temporary and Non-Acculturative Systems

The few studies on international tourism and culture change have emphasized the direct effects of tourism on the host society. Recent research on western Caribbean islands indicates that under the stimulation of economic developments arising from tourism, in-migration from adjacent mainlands has effectively stifled, at least temporarily, the onslaught of acculturation by North Americans. On Cozumel Island, Mexico, Mayan-speakers from the Yucatán Peninsula have fortified Cozumeleño culture; in the Bay Islands, Honduras, Spanish-speaking mainlanders are the primary change agents