Yes. And then they wait four weeks to see if the taster starts growing excessive body hair, or udders, or makes a lot of "moo" sounds.

When a truck finishes pickup at dairy farms they perform tests to ensure there are no hormones (like BGH) or other drugs in the batch. If they do find something then they start testing the individual samples they collected from each farmer, and then the farmer responsible has to pay for the entire, tainted batch.

The article is describing economic impacts; you should compare countries by the size of their economies. If, on the other hand, this was an article about something like a tug of war then listing countries by their population would certainly make more sense.

>Roots on the other hand typically want to be close enough to the surface to get water and nutrients in soft soil rather than less rich soil and harder rock below.

The roots need oxygen and do not grow where they cannot breathe. Any water or nutrients they find is just a bonus.

With respect to apples the biggest influence would be the type of rootstock used. As another poster mentioned, commercial apple trees are propogated from small segments of branches (scions) from the desired cultivar which are then grafted onto the roots of another apple tree cultivar (the rootstock). The rootstock of the tree influences the mature size of the tree, and rootstocks selected for dwarfing characteristics generally produce a tree that fruits earlier than a full-size, "standard" tree.

In the plant kingdom in general plants usually don't flower until they start approaching their mature size. In that respect it makes sense that a dwarf tree will fruit earlier in its life than a taller tree.

The modern method of iron refining still uses a blast furnace. That amounts to filling a tall, cylindrical structure with layers of coal and iron, lighting it, and then blowing air into the bottom until molten iron starts leaking out. Of course it's a bit more elegant than that, but I don't think there's any large-scale production of iron anywhere in the world that simply cooks the iron in a crucible.

Primitive Technology has a good example of how it would be done in earlier times.

The article has a numbers problem. It's "$39" to capture a ton of CO2 in the solvent but they don't explain how they extract it. They describe converting it to methanol, but if you're creating an equivalent ton of methanol then that's worth about $7,500 given that 2 lbs (1 gallon) of methanol costs about $15. They also need to get a bunch of hydrogen atoms from somewhere for that conversion (CH3OH) which is not explained.

So we gotta ignore the methanol thing and assume they're just extracting pure CO2 from the solvent. But how? If they're pulling it out as a gas then they'd be better off just using a vacuum to suck on the power plant's exhaust. And if the CO2 is somehow being extracted as a liquid then that's an incredibly exothermic reaction and the article is really burying the lede. Either way, all we have left is a bunch of CO2 with no explanation as to what we're supposed to do with it.

If it's not under warranty you can get a replacement if you google "CD motor" or just tear apart an old CD player.

My intention was to say that it's a nonsensical way to explain how a giraffe copes with a long neck given the lungs really aren't that large compared to their mass.

The googles say that a male giraffe average is 2628 lbs. Given that's about 13x the size of a human I'd expect a similar lung capacity; 8x seems small.

Here's a Goodman brand heat pump spec sheet (see p21) with COP numbers vs. ambient air temperature. They're giving a COP of 1.2 to 1.5 (120% to 150%) at -10F. It's going to be pretty cold before you'll want to use any resistive heat. The more important factor is that it can't put out as much heat (MBh in the chart) so it might not keep up.

Edit: Looking at price of Propane, Natural Gas, and electricity (in Iowa prices) you need a COP of 1.9 or 2.2, respectively, for the heat pump to be more cost effective. So that translates to the heat pump being more cost effiective around 5F and above vs propane or 15F vs natural gas. Unfortunately it's -6F right now :)

In (e.g.) Qatar the citizen population is 300K and then the other 2M are foreign labor -- seven foreign workers for each citizen. It's pretty crazy.