Nicaragua Canal Faces Numerous Challenges To Get Off Ground

Fortune:

The expansion of the Panama Canal has overcome labor disputes, legal battles, and technical hurdles, and is now on the verge of completion. Infrastructure projects of such massive scale almost inevitably face big delays and cost overruns—but backers have a way of finding the money and resolve to finish what they’ve started.
That may not apply, though, to a project that aims to build a $50 billion, 172.7-mile canal across Nicaragua—almost four times longer than Panama’s. The passage is intended to compete for inter-ocean traffic by servicing ships too big to pass through even Panama’s expanded canal, and would be one of the largest infrastructure projects in human history.
Nicaragua and its people could certainly benefit from a working canal. Panama’s has driven double-digit growth in recent years, anchoring a transport sector that makes up a quarter of the country’s $42.65 billion GDP as of 2013, and helping push per-capita income above $11,000. Nicaragua, by contrast, is the poorest country in Central America, with GDP of just $11.26 billion in 2013, and per-capita income of just over $1,800.
But the project faces obstacles as big as its ambitions—many of them internal. Chinese billionaire Wang Jing, who heads the Hong Kong Nicaragua Development Group that’s leading the project, has personally funded much of the preliminary work—but in 2015, he lost more than 80% of his fortune in the Chinese stock market rout. Financial problems, along with ongoing environmental and engineering reviews, are causing rolling delays.
Nicaragua and its people could certainly benefit from a working canal. Panama’s has driven double-digit growth in recent years, anchoring a transport sector that makes up a quarter of the country’s $42.65 billion GDP as of 2013, and helping push per-capita income above $11,000. Nicaragua, by contrast, is the poorest country in Central America, with GDP of just $11.26 billion in 2013, and per-capita income of just over $1,800.
But the project faces obstacles as big as its ambitions—many of them internal. Chinese billionaire Wang Jing, who heads the Hong Kong Nicaragua Development Group that’s leading the project, has personally funded much of the preliminary work—but in 2015, he lost more than 80% of his fortune in the Chinese stock market rout. Financial problems, along with ongoing environmental and engineering reviews, are causing rolling delays.

This is never going to happen.  Whodathunkit?

Scott Kelly's Photo Album

The Atlantic features photos astronaut Scott Kelly posted to his Twitter account during his year-long stay on the International Space Station.  This is one of my favorites, not because of its beauty, but because of its unnatural ugliness:

Oil fields in West Texas. #

Another photo from the Space Station was my NASA Photo of the Day this week.

The Perfect 18

The Perfect 18 from The All-Nighter Room on Vimeo.

At Least the U.S. Doesn't Have the Most Dangerous Crumbling Infrastructure

BBC:

The US embassy in Baghdad has warned the risk of the Mosul Dam collapsing is "serious and unprecedented" and has urged people to be ready to evacuate.

Maintenance work was disrupted after the dam was briefly seized by militants from so-called Islamic State in 2014.
If the dam burst, floodwaters could kill 1.47 million Iraqis living along the River Tigris, the embassy said.
Iraq's prime minister has said precautions are being taken, but that such a scenario is "highly unlikely".
The dam, Iraq's largest has suffered from structural flaws since its completion in 1984, with the water constantly eating away at the soluble gypsum base on which it is built.
To counter the erosion, engineers need to drill holes in the gypsum and fill them with a cement grout mixture six days a week.
IS only controlled the dam for 11 days, but many of the people working at the dam did not return after it was recaptured and regular maintenance did not resume.
 The statement issued by the US embassy on Sunday it had "no specific information that indicates when a breach might occur" in the Mosul Dam.
"But out of an abundance of caution, we would like to underscore that prompt evacuation offers the most effective tool to save event of a breach," it added. "Proper preparation could save many lives."
Some models estimate that Mosul, which has been controlled by IS since June 2014, could be inundated by as much as 21m (70ft) of water within one to four hours of a catastrophic breach.
The embassy also published a factsheet that said approximately 500,000 to 1.47 million Iraqis living along the River Tigris in areas at highest risk probably would not survive unless the 482km (300-mile) long flood zone was evacuated.

That would be very, very bad.

Another Reason To Hate Texas

Texas Monthly:

Not only did they foist this asshole onto the national stage, they've funded his campaign and they are going to keep him in the race tonight.  I will remember that for a long time, and I am awesome at holding a grudge.

Update:

In the Army I had a friend from CO who always said while in the bathroom- "Here I sit, butt cheeks flexing, giving birth to another Texan."

— John Cole (@Johngcole) March 2, 2016

Latest Dairy Fad Boosts Guernsey Breed

Bloomberg:

In dairy circles, Guernsey cows have long been overshadowed by their heftier, black-and-white cousins.
The reddish-colored breed originally from Guernsey, in the British Channel Islands, has been decimated in recent decades, purged from farms to make room for higher milk-yielding Holsteins, according to South Australian dairy farmer Lyndon Cleggett. His family began breeding pedigree Guernseys in 1964 and is one of about 100 members of the Guernsey Cattle Society of Australia.
Now, Guernsey cattle are enjoying a mini revival, thanks to the popularity of their milk. Golden-colored, it typically lacks a type of protein prevalent in regular milk that some researchers have connected to a raft of chronic illnesses. While scientific proof of the link remains contested, Guernsey cattle breeders in Australia are seeing unexpected interest from dairy farmers as far away as Japan and Thailand.
“I can’t keep up,” said Cleggett, who runs the “Brookleigh” herd of about 330 milkers at Glencoe, about 430 kilometers (267 miles) southeast of Adelaide. “We’ve got back up to the Holstein prices, whereas years ago we were always well under.”
Eight-month-old Guernsey heifers now fetch about A$1,400 ($998), from as little as A$700 a decade ago, while membership of the Guernsey society has stabilized after sliding for years, he said.
Guernseys first became popular on English dairy farms in the late 18th century, according to the World Guernsey Cattle Federation, which counts about 40,000 cows among the breed’s global ranks. That pales in comparison to the 1 million-plus Holsteins in Australia alone.
The renewed interest in Guernsey cows stems from the breed’s renowned docile nature as well as the purported merits of its milk. About 90 percent of Australian Guernseys carry a gene causing them to produce milk containing only the A2 type of beta-casein protein, said Cleggett, a former president of the Australian Guernsey society. Guernseys possess the highest percentage of A2 among traditional dairy cattle breeds, the American Guernsey Association says on its website.
In contrast, Holsteins, which originated from the Netherlands and northern Germany, typically produce a combination of A2 and A1 milk proteins, which scientists such as Keith Woodford, an agri-food professor at New Zealand’s Lincoln University, say may contribute to conditions from heart disease and diabetes to digestive discomfort.

Until today, I'd never heard of the A2 and A1 milk proteins, but Bloomberg has a second story on it here.  It's hard to keep up with food trends.

Running Out of Oil Storage Places

Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. is so awash in crude oil that traders are experimenting with new places to store it: empty railcars.
Thousands of railcars ordered up to transport oil are now sitting idle because current ultralow crude prices have made shipping by train unprofitable. Meanwhile, traditional storage tanks are running out of room as U.S. oil inventories swell to their highest level since the 1930s.
Some industry participants are calling the new practice “rolling storage”—a landlocked spin on the “floating storage” producers use to hold crude on giant oil tankers when inventories run high.
The combination of cheap oil and surplus railcars has created a budding new side business for traders. J.P. Fjeld-Hansen, a managing director for trading company Musket Corp., tested using railcars for storage last year and found he could profit by putting the oil aside while locking in a higher price to deliver it in a later month.
The company built a rail terminal in Windsor, Colo., in 2012 to load oil shipments during a boom in U.S. oil production. Now, Mr. Fjeld-Hansen says, “The focus has shifted from a loading terminal to an oil-storage and railcar-storage business.”
Energy Midstream, a trading company based in The Woodlands, Texas, stored an ultralight oil known as condensate on Ohio railcars last month for about 15 days before shipping it to a buyer in Canada.
Dennis Hoskins, a managing partner at Energy Midstream, says there are so many unused tank cars that he is constantly hearing from railcar owners hoping to put them to use. “We get offers everyday for railcars,” he said.

It looks like it might be a while before oil prices rise.  That doesn't do any favors for the price of ethanol, and thus corn.  That condensate is replaced by ethanol due to the RFS.

Explaining Leap Day

NASA Photo of the Day

February 24:

USA's Northeast Megalopolis from Space
Image Credit: NASA, International Space Station Explanation: Can you identify a familiar area in the northeast USA just from nighttime lights? It might be possible because many major cities are visible, including (right to left) New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond and Norfolk -- Boston of the USA's Northeast megalopolis is not pictured. The featured image was taken in 2012 from the International Space Station. In the foreground are two Russian cargo ships with prominent solar panels. This Northeast megalopolis of the USA contains almost 20 percent of the people of the USA but only about 2 percent of the land area. Also known also as the Northeast Corridor and part of the Eastern Seaboard, about 10 percent of the world's largest companies are headquartered here. The near continuity of the lights seem to add credence to the 1960s-era prediction that the entire stretch is evolving into one continuous city.

The Most Powerful Space Telescope Ever

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