Comments

I totally agree with Ian1108. I can't imagine why anyone would find anything about this article offensive. Nobody declared anything, except to say that it's too soon to say anything declarative. Speaking of grand-standing, using these comments to express such misplaced hostility that has little to do with the article. The article said nothing negative or disrespectful about the armed forces in anyway, unless you're seriously offended by the use of the old name for Miranmar. Helodecicco, it sounds to me like you have some obvious personal grievances against John Pike that cannot realistically be attributed to this article. Maybe you could give some examples if you believe him to be a less than reliable source. I thought it was a good article based on the very limited information available.

All science is a wast of money. Until you discover, whether by intent or accident, rubber, or antibiotics, or vaccines, or asprin, or the internal combustion engine... Usually scientists try to learn as much as they can about something new, and accidentally discover things that benefit humanity. And Diggs was obviously not being serious, because the amount of propellent (methane, in this case) needed to propel a cow at any velocity would be quite a bit more than 70 gallons. You might get a nice fireball, but that's it. Esbiem, of course the gas is compressible, but I did those calculations for room temp at atmospheric pressure at sea level. Though I treated it as an ideal gas, the results should be really close. If we know the atmospheric pressure, and the temperature, and the volume, we can easily find the number of molecules of the methane present. And what does carbon offsets (fraudulent they may be, and I'm inclined to agree with you there) have to do with methane producing cows? Also, this would be super easy to set up, because tapping a cow's first stomach to release excess gas is commonplace, and you wouldn't need to liquefy it to do work, just compress it a bit, so because you're not transporting it anywhere, you could use it as is, without even needing to purify it, to generate electricity, right there on the farm. Though you would indeed have to worry about cows rubbing their feet on the carpet and zapping each other into hamburger helper.

Oakspar has the right idea of collecting the methane at the same time you milk the cow. All you'd need to do is unplug the tube to the cow's stomach, and attach another tube connected to a cheap pump to pump out the methane from the inflatable bag. So if the energy density of methane is (according to Wikipedia) 891 kilojoules per mole, and there are about 10.8 moles of methane in 70 gallons, then we can get 9655 kilojoules of energy per cow, per day, from methane. So if we figure the average home in the U.S. uses about 100,000kJ of electricity per day, then we can figure the methane from 10 cows would produce about enough methane to power a home. If you just think about the vast number of cows in the midwest, that's a lot of electricity that can be generated.

70 gallons of methane per cow, per day? And they want to reduce this? Are you kidding? Put inflatable methane collection bags on all the cows in, say, Wisconsin, and you will have a huge amount of methane that can be used to generate a vast amount of power.

I am really surprised that this article did not mention the serious change in standards for the classification of "autism", and the huge increase in testing for it. Two of the primary research articles that reported on this increase both say that there can be no confidence in any reportable statistical significance (nobody knows if the increase in numbers means anything) because of these very reasons. And as far as the Amish go, they tend to be very reluctant to let outsiders examine anything about them, especially their children. It's no surprise, then, that there are fewer reported cases of autism in Amish children. It might be true that exposure to environmental toxins can increase the chances of a kid being autistic (I wouldn't be shocked at all), but there needs to be way more research done before any conclusions can be made. Josh Schipper NCSU Biochemistry