Science Forums 2

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by Star30

ONE HUGE THING. As was suggested be sure to check with your health care provider before altering your diet. This especially with potassium or salt substitutes which often (not all) are of a potassium derivative. Anyone on Potassium sparing diuretics does not want to add potassium to the diet. Hyperkalemia can lead to death.

This guy -Cuatro Cienegas-thinks potassium may have caused the Cambian Extinction Event.
Interesting argument
Phosphate Does A Body Good

This scarcity of phosphorus makes Cuatro Cienegas a good analogue for the Precambrian Earth.
The rock record shows that phosphorus, once scarce, became abundant around the same time as the Cambrian explosion.
Could phosphorus be the key to unlocking the mystery behind the Ediacaran extinction and the sudden emergence of animal life on Earth?
. . .
Then he discovered studies of other animals which also showed that too much phosphate has a negative effect on their growth. This led Elser and his colleagues to suggest that animals exist on a phosphate "knife edge" where too little phosphate in the food supply provides poor nutrition, but too much is harmful.

"Phosphate is central in cellular metabolism in all kinds of ways - ATP turnover, nucleic acid synthesis, and other pathways," says Elser. "Cells maintain the phosphate concentrations in the cytoplasm extremely tightly; it's very strongly regulated.
But if you have too much phosphate, then those equilibrium phosphate concentrations in metabolism get out of balance, and reactions in the cell are impaired."

Elser wonders if the Ediacaran biota, first stimulated by initial increases in the phosphorus supply in the biosphere 600 million years ago, may have been poisoned by further influxes of phosphate recorded in the early Cambrian rock record.
The Cambrian animals that followed needed to find a way to accommodate the increased phosphate.

Elser suggests the solution, for at least some of the animals, was the ability to produce the mineral apatite.
This calcium-phosphate mineral was deposited as hard body parts, and apatite is still the main component of our bones today.

"Your bones have more phosphorus by mass in them than calcium," says Elser. "Everyone knows you've got to drink milk to get calcium, but everyone forgets about the phosphorus part of the mineral.
Our argument is that the first function of apatite formation in animals was not for structural support the way it is used now. Instead, it was originally a detoxification mechanism as a way of preventing excess dietary phosphate from affecting physiology."

The emergence of hard parts in animals by phosphate deposition could account for the "explosion" of fossils in the Cambrian rock record, since hard parts are better preserved over long time scales than soft body parts.

Elser also says that the increased phosphate - after eons where there was very little phosphate available in the environment -- may have allowed multi-cellular life forms to proliferate.

Salt water as a fuel??
nah!
http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/908501...-2BCDEF0926BC/
http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_articl...?storyid=68227
Donklephant » Blog Archive » Turning Salt Water Into Fuel?
blog.myspace.com/thehardbody
Directory:John Kanzius Produces Hydrogen from Salt Water Using Radio Waves - PESWiki
WorldNetDaily: Can water fuel world?
Directory:John Kanzius Produces Hydrogen from Salt Water Using Radio Waves - PESWiki

Salt to Store energy?

The DESERTEC concept

For a summary, click DESERTEC in brief.

Every year, each square kilometre of hot desert receives solar energy equivalent to 1.5 million barrels of oil. Multiplying by the area of deserts world-wide, this is several hundred times the entire current energy consumption of the world.

The key technology for tapping in to this energy is 'concentrating solar power' (CSP), which means using mirrors to concentrate sunlight to create heat. The heat may be used to drive a Stirling engine and dynamo to generate electricity or it may be used to raise steam to drive turbines and generators in the conventional way. CSP is very different from the better-known photovoltaics (PV, sometimes called 'solar panels') and should not be confused with it. However, slightly confusingly, some CSP plants use mirrors to concentrate sunlight and then use PV panels to convert the concentrated sunlight to electricity.
Less than 1% of the world's hot deserts, if covered with concentrating solar power plants, could produce as much electricity as the world currently uses.

Solar heat that has been captured by a CSP plant can be stored in melted salts (eg nitrates of sodium or potassium) or other medium so that electricity generation may continue at night or on cloudy days. Also, gas may be used as a stop-gap source of heat when there is no sun. More about these aspects of CSP may be found on the web page about generating electricity without the sun.

TREC-UK