Archive for the 'Science' Category

‘Hot rock’ source of energy

Thursday, June 28th, 2007
Tentative steps are being taken to explore the potential ‘hot rock’ technology has to solve the need for a sustainable energy alternative source in Tenerife. In the drive for reduced emissions and cleaner sources of energy, 'hot rock' or, more precisely, geothermal technology has been largely ignored. Yet its potential to provide mankind with an environmentally-friendly and economically-viable energy available on a worldwide scale is immense. Geothermal technology involves the mechanically simple process of injecting water into a borehole several kilometres deep, where the temperature can be over 250C. The superheated water is then retrieved through one or more other boreholes. Keeping it under pressure prevents it from becoming steam so that any material dissolved in the water can be filtered and returned to the ground. At the surface the water is passed through a heat exchanger to extract most of the heat, which is then used to drive a turbine to ...

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Posted by Ken

Comments: Leave a Comment » Categories: All about Tenerife, Environment, Science

Dragon tree reputed to be a thousand years old

Monday, April 2nd, 2007
dragon tree tenerife The Dragon Tree, or Drago, is one of the iconic symbols of Tenerife. It is very slow growing, but when it attains maturity it usually has a thick trunk which is crowned by a thick umbrella-shaped canopy of dagger-like leaves. It gets its popular name from the secretion of a reddish resin, know as dragon’s blood, which appears when either the bark or leaves are cut. It is thought that the original inhabitants of the island, the Guanches, used the blood-red sap from the tree in medicines and as an embalming fluid. Because it grows so slowly, generally taking ten years to reach a height of one metre, many of the taller specimens are believed to be hundreds of years old. The oldest, in the town of Icod de los Vinos (pictured above) in the north of the ...

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Posted by Ken

Comments: Leave a Comment » Categories: All about Tenerife, Flowers & Plants, Guanches, Icod de los Vinos, Nature, Photo-Blog, Science, Tourism

Tenerife plans to plant a million new trees

Monday, March 26th, 2007
The north of Tenerife is renowned for its magnificent forests that start at altitudes of around 400 metres and climb to a level of 2,000 metres at the foot of the equally magnificent Mount Teide, at 12,194ft, the highest point on Spanish territory. Mindful, however, that there aren’t nearly as many trees on the island as there used to be, the island authorities have announced a programme of reforestation that will see over a million trees planted in the coming months to cover an area of over 60 hectares, roughly the area that 150 football pitches would occupy. The trees will be of two ancient species common throughout the Canarian archipelago, the Canarian pine and laurisilva. The forests are important to the ecosystem of Tenerife, helping to prevent soil erosion and drawing moisture from the clouds to replenishing the island’s network of water underground water reserves.

Posted by Ken

Comments: Leave a Comment » Categories: All about Tenerife, Environment, Flowers & Plants, Nature, Science

Spooky science leaps the gap in Tenerife

Monday, March 12th, 2007
‘Beam me up Scotty’ is a phrase familiar to fans of the sci-fi television series Star Trek, in which the crew of the Star Ship Enterprise are teleported around the cosmos during their many adventures. Though teleportation of large objects or people remains nothing more than a fantasy, scientists are making great strides in quantum teleportation, or entanglement as they prefer to call it. The field of quantum mechanics is on the very outer limits of our current understanding of the laws of physics, but nonetheless major advances are being made on a regular basis. American scientists working on the Canary islands of Tenerife and La Palma have recently made a huge leap forward in the transmission of entangled photon, sending them a distance of 89 miles between the two islands. Their achievement is ten times the distance entangled photons – a photon is an individual particle of light – ...

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Posted by Ken

Comments: 1 Comment so far » Categories: All about Tenerife, Science