Stove
A stove is an enclosed space in which fuel is burned to heat either the space in which the stove is situated, or items placed on the heated stove. There are many types of stoves, such as the kitchen stove, used to cook food, the wood-burning stove or a coal stove, used for heating a dwelling. Due to concerns about air pollution, efforts have been made to improve the stove design over the years. Pellet stoves, for example, are a type of clean-burning stove, air-tight stoves are another type that burn the wood more and therefore reduce the amount of the resulted combustion by-products. Another possibility is the addition of a device to clean the exhaust gas. All wood stoves manufactured In the United States since 1992 are required to limit emission of particulates; the Old English word stofa meant any individual enclosed space, such as a room, "stove" is still used in that sense, as in "stoved in". Until well into the 19th century "stove" was used to mean a single heated room, so that Joseph Banks' assertion that he "placed his most precious plants in the stove" or René Descartes' observation that he got "his greatest philosophical inspiration while sitting inside a stove" are not as odd as they first seem.
In its earliest attestation, cooking was done by roasting meat and tubers in an open fire. Pottery and other cooking vessels may be placed directly on an open fire, but setting the vessel on a support, as simple as a base of three stones, resulted in a stove; the three-stone stove is still used around the world. In some areas it developed into a U-shaped dried mud or brick enclosure with the opening in the front for fuel and air, sometimes with a second smaller hole at the rear. A kitchen stove, cooker, or cookstove is a kitchen appliance designed for the purpose of cooking food. Kitchen stoves rely on the application of direct heat for the cooking process and may contain an oven underneath or to the side, used for baking. Traditionally these have been fueled by wood and one of the earliest recorded instances of a wood burning kitchen stove was the so-called stew stove. More modern versions such as the popular Rayburn range offer a choice between using gas; the most common stove for heating in the industrial world for a century and a half was the coal stove that burned coal.
Coal stoves came in different operating principles. Coal burns at a much higher temperature than wood, coal stoves must be constructed to resist the high heat levels. A coal stove can burn either wood or coal, but a wood stove might not burn coal unless a grate is supplied; the grate may be removable or an "extra". This is because coal stoves are fitted with a grate so allowing part of the combustion air to be admitted below the fire; the proportion of air admitted above/below. Brown coal and lignites evolve more combustible gases than say anthracite and so need more air above the fire; the ratio of air above/below the fire must be adjusted to enable complete combustion. Compared to simple open fires, enclosed stoves can control. In free air, solid fuels burn at a temperature of only about 240 °C, too low a temperature for perfect combustion reactions to occur, heat produced through convection is lost, smoke particles are evolved without being burned and the supply of combustion air cannot be controlled.
By enclosing the fire in a chamber and connecting it to a chimney, draft is generated pulling fresh air through the burning fuel. This causes the temperature of combustion to rise to a point where efficient combustion is achieved, the enclosure allows the ingress of air to be regulated and losses by convection are eliminated, it becomes possible, with ingenious design, to direct the flow of burned gasses inside the stove such that smoke particles are heated and destroyed. Enclosing a fire prevents air from being sucked from the room into the chimney; this can represent a significant loss of heat as an open fireplace can pull away many cubic metres of heated air per hour. Efficiency is regarded as the maximum heat output of a stove or fire, is referred to by manufacturers as the difference between heat to the room and heat lost up the chimney. An early improvement was the fire chamber: the fire was enclosed on three sides by masonry walls and covered by an iron plate. Only in 1735 did the first design that enclosed the fire appear: the Castrol stove of the French architect François de Cuvilliés was a masonry construction with several fireholes covered by perforated iron plates.
It is known as a stew stove. Near the end of the 18th century, the design was refined by hanging the pots in holes through the top iron plate, thus improving heat efficiency more. In 1743, Benjamin Franklin invented an all-metal fireplace with an attempt to improve the efficiency, it was still an open-faced fireplace, but improved on efficiency compared to old-fashioned fireplaces. Some stoves use a catalytic converter, which causes combustion of the gas and smoke particles not burned. Other models use a design that includes firebox insulation, a large baffle to produce a longer, hotter gas flow path. Modern enclosed stoves are built with a window to let out some light and to enable the user to view progress of the fire. While enclosed stoves are more efficient and controllable than open fires, there are exceptions; the type of water-heating "back boiler" open fires used in Ireland, for instance, can achieve more than 80% absolute efficiency. Masonry
Isla Gorge National Park
Isla Gorge is a national park in Queensland, Australia, 415 km northwest of Brisbane, gazetted in 1964. It contains a rest area with toilets and a camping area, situated along the Leichhardt Highway just south of Theodore; the national park is upon the traditional Aboriginal lands of the Kongabulla Clan of Iman country, the carpet snake people, Wulli Wulli country. The north-western section was expanded in 1990 to include the hand-laid rock road which once ran from Rockhampton to Roma as part of the wool run. Protected areas of Queensland
Four-wheel drive
Four-wheel drive called 4×4 or 4WD, refers to a two-axled vehicle drivetrain capable of providing torque to all of its wheels simultaneously. It may be full-time or on-demand, is linked via a transfer case providing an additional output drive-shaft and, in many instances, additional gear ranges. A four-wheeled vehicle with torque supplied to both axles is described as "all-wheel drive". However, "four-wheel drive" refers to a set of specific components and functions, intended off-road application, which complies with modern use of the terminology. 4WD systems were used in many different vehicle platforms. There is no universally accepted set of terminology to describe the various architectures and functions; the terms used by various manufacturers reflect marketing rather than engineering considerations or significant technical differences between systems. SAE International's standard J1952 recommends only the term All-Wheel-Drive with additional sub classifications which cover all types of AWD/4WD/4x4 systems found on production vehicles.
Four-by-four or 4x4 is used to refer to a class of vehicles in general. Syntactically, the first figure indicates the total number of wheels, the second indicates the number that are powered. So 4x2 means a four-wheel vehicle that transmits engine torque to only two axle-ends: the front two in front-wheel drive or the rear two in rear-wheel drive. A 6×4 vehicle has three axles, two of which provide torque to two axle ends each. If this vehicle were a truck with dual rear wheels on two rear axles, so having ten wheels, its configuration would still be formulated as 6x4. During World War II, the U. S. military would use spaces and a capital'X' – like "4 X 2" or "6 X 4". Four-wheel drive refers to vehicles with two axles providing torque to four axle ends. In the North American market the term refers to a system, optimized for off-road driving conditions; the term "4WD" is designated for vehicles equipped with a transfer case which switches between 2WD and 4WD operating modes, either manually or automatically.
All-wheel drive was synonymous with "four-wheel drive" on four-wheeled vehicles, six-wheel drive on 6×6s, so on, being used in that fashion at least as early as the 1920s. Today in North America the term is applied to both heavy vehicles as well as light passenger vehicles; when referring to heavy vehicles the term is applied to mean "permanent multiple-wheel drive" on 2×2, 4×4, 6×6 or 8×8 drive train systems that include a differential between the front and rear drive shafts. This is coupled with some sort of anti-slip technology hydraulic-based, that allows differentials to spin at different speeds but still be capable of transferring torque from a wheel with poor traction to one with better. Typical AWD systems are not intended for more extreme off-road use; when used to describe AWD systems in light passenger vehicles, it refers to a system that applies torque to all four wheels and/or is targeted at improving on-road traction and performance, rather than for off-road applications. Some all-wheel drive electric vehicles solve this challenge using one motor for each axle, thereby eliminating a mechanical differential between the front and rear axles.
An example of this is the dual motor variant of the Tesla Model S, which on a millisecond scale can control the torque distribution electronically between its two motors. Individual-wheel drive is used to describe electric vehicles with each wheel being driven by its own electric motor; this system has inherent characteristics that would be attributed to four-wheel drive systems like the distribution of the available torque to the wheels. However, because of the inherent characteristics of electric motors, torque can be negative, as seen in the Rimac Concept One and SLS AMG Electric; this can have drastic effects, as in better handling in tight corners. The term IWD can refer to a vehicle with any number of wheels. For example, the Mars rovers are 6-wheel IWD. Per the SAE International standard J1952, AWD is the preferred term for all the systems described above; the standard subdivides AWD systems into three categories. Part-Time AWD systems require driver intervention to couple and decouple the secondary axle from the driven axle and these systems do not have a center differential.
The definition notes. Full-Time AWD systems drive both rear axles at all times via a center differential; the torque split of that differential may be fixed or variable depending on the type of center differential. This system can be used on any surface at any speed; the definition does not address exclusion of a low range gear. On-Demand AWD systems drive the secondary axle via an active or passive coupling device or "by an independently powered drive system"; the standard notes that in some cases the secondary drive system may provide the primary vehicle propulsion. An example is a hybrid AWD vehicle where the primary axle is driven by an internal combustion engine and secondary axle is driven by an electric motor; when the internal combustion engine is shut off the secondary, electrically driven axle is the only driven axle. On-demand systems function with only one powered axle until torque is required by the second axle. At that point either a passive or active coupling sends torque to the secondary axle.
In addition to the above primary classifications the J1952 standard notes seconda
Capricorn Coast National Park
Capricorn Coast is a national park in the Shire of Livingstone, Australia. The park is 535 km northwest of Brisbane, it covers about 114 hectares, is divided into five sections: Vallis Park, Rosslyn Head, Double Head, Bluff Point, Pinnacle Point. The five sections were amalgamated into a single national park in 1994. Protected areas of Queensland
Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service
The Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service is a business division of the Department of Environment and Science within the Government of Queensland. The division’s primary concern is with the management and maintenance of protected areas within Queensland, to protect and manage Queensland’s parks and the Great Barrier Reef for current and future generations; the QPWS managed areas include more than 1000 national parks, state forests, marine parks and other protected areas, five world heritage areas. Queensland’s first national park, Witches Falls, was established on 28 March 1908, followed by Bunya Mountains National Park in July 1908, Lamington National Park in 1915. From modest early beginnings within the Forestry department, a dedicated national parks service was established in 1975—the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service. From that time, park rangers have proudly worn QPWS uniform badge featuring the symbol, which has become one of the most well-recognised symbols in Queensland; the Nature Conservation Act 1992, Marine Parks Act 2004 and Forestry Act 1959 provide guiding legislation for the service.
Leanne Enoch, Minister for Environment and Science is responsible for the department. The agency's head office is located at 400 George Street in the Brisbane central business district. Protected areas in Queensland are needed to provide wildlife habitat to maintain biodiversity and provide opportunities for outdoor nature-based activities. Managing national parks involves protecting a park's natural condition and processes, presenting the park's cultural and natural resources and its values. Managing multiple-use marine parks involves providing refuge areas for species and ecosystems while allowing for continuing recreational and commercial use of the majority of the marine environment. A Master Plan for Queensland's Park System outlines the directions for management of all protected areas in Queensland for the next 20 years. QPWS is responsible for day-to-day management of Queensland’s five World Heritage areas, which are within the protected area estate; these properties are outstanding examples of the world's natural or cultural heritage, provide valuable environmental and economic services for Queensland.
For each park, either a management statement or a management plan is prepared to identify the park's special values and determine ways to ensure those values are preserved, enhanced or maintained. The service employs park rangers who are responsible for constructing and maintaining infrastructure such as camping areas, picnic areas, walking tracks and lookouts providing advice to visitors, recording wildlife data, controlling feral plants and animals, assisting in the preparation of management plans and enforcing park rules. QPWS works with Aboriginal Traditional Owners and, in some places, volunteers, as well as other government departments and organisations to conserve, manage and present Queensland’s most precious natural and cultural places. Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland National Parks Association of Queensland Find a park or forest
Eyrean grasswren
The Eyrean grasswren is a small grasswren from the Passerine family Maluridae. This is a cryptically uncommon bird endemic to arid regions of Central Australia; the species was discovered by F. W. Andrews in 1874 around the Macumba River at Lake Eyre, named after the South Australian Surveyor General George Woodroffe Goyder. At 14-16.5 cm in length, Amytornis goyderi is the smallest grasswren. It has a finch-like bill. There are some minor differences between sexes, between populations across the distribution; the head is reddish with bold white streaks and upper body dull to bright rufous-brown, streaked with fine dark and white lines. The face is white except for the rufous forehead, white lores and a thin partial white eye-ring beneath the eye. Black and white ear coverts separate the dark head parts from throat; the tail is dark grey-brown with light brown fringes. Upperwings are dark grey-brown, but with prominent white shafts and narrow rufous-brown fringes to the secondary coverts and tertials.
The underbody is white with buff-brown wash on the flanks through to the legs and underside of tail. The bill is light grey to blue-grey with a darker grey culmen, the iris is dark to olive-brown; the legs and feet are purplish to dark grey. Identical to males but the flanks are a brighter rufous-brown, not as distinctly pale compared to the upperparts; the legs may be a paler grey with stronger purplish tinge. Females are smaller overall and have a finer bill. Nestlings are naked with dark grey down on wings; the bare skin is pink with dark blue-grey skin around the eyes. Newly fledged birds have yellow gape-flanges. Partial moult begins soon after fledging, producing similar patterns to adult male but upperparts are much duller and browner, with less distinct streaking and facial patterns, they are fluffier which can give a mottled appearance around the ear coverts. The eye is olive and the bill is light grey, lacking the dark culmen and brown tip seen in the adult male. In young birds the skull is not pneumatised.
The Eyrean grasswren was described by John Gould in 1875, who named it Amytis goyderi. Gould assumed. During the 20th century, various authors placed it in clades derived from either A. textilis or A. striatus, considering it related to either A. modestus or A. striatus. With the development of molecular studies, it was found that A. goyderi belongs in a clade with A. ballarae and A. purnelli which appears to have evolved from a common ancestor with A. textilis. There are two possible explanations for grasswren diversity in Central Australia: Either they originated there, or they colonised it; the close relationships between A. goyderi and other central taxa indicate that they arose there in the last 100000 years as glaciation events influenced the vegetation structures in Central Australia. A. goyderi is one of few avian species to evolve in a minor ecological refuge. A. goyderi has a patchy, restricted distribution, found only in dune fields of the Simpson and Strzelecki deserts of Central Australia.
These deserts are located in the Birdsville Structural Basin, an enormous drainage basin centring on Lake Eyre. Most populations are found in South Australia from north of Cameron Corner to Witjira National Park, it is that populations are plastic, being most abundant when canegrass is plentiful and withdrawing to refuges during drought. The Eyrean grasswren habitat consists of sandhill canegrass tussocks on large, loosely sanded dune crests and slopes. Typical landscapes consist of tussocks ranging from 1-4m high and 2-3m in diameter, spaced well apart and with bare ground between them; the birds stray from dune slopes. No extensive surveys of Eyrean grasswren behaviour have been undertaken, but it is thought to be sedentary, they are found in singles and pairs, or small groups of up to ten. It is cryptic, remaining hidden within Z. paradoxa tussocks, is difficult to flush. Flight is rare, but when flushed the birds bound with wings half spread between tussock clumps or fly short distances of up to 10m with the tail trailing.
They use a distinctive "half running, half flying" movement low to the ground and flying for short distances of 40–220 cm. Movements are quick and furtive with the tail held cocked, they sometimes perch low on canegrass or other shrubs. Prey consists of about equal amounts of invertebrates. Specimen stomach contents include seeds from grasses Z. paradoxa and Aristida holathera, as well as remnants of numerous invertebrate species. Individuals move with small hops while foraging between clumps of spinifex and within clumps of dune pea, it will sometimes skip shuffle the feet to uncover food items in the sand. Little is known about the mating habits of A. goyderi. No information exists on incubation durations. Nests containing nestlings and eggs have been located from July to September and dependent fledglings from May to September. Clutches are 2-3 broadly oval eggs with slight variations in shape, it is assumed to breed throughout the range. Females are responsible for nest construction, which takes about
Dune
In physical geography, a dune is a hill of loose sand built by aeolian processes or the flow of water. Dunes occur in different sizes, formed by interaction with the flow of air or water. Most kinds of dunes are longer on the stoss side, where the sand is pushed up the dune, have a shorter "slip face" in the lee side; the valley or trough between dunes is called a slack. A "dune field" or erg is an area covered by extensive dunes. Dunes occur along some coasts; some coastal areas have one or more sets of dunes running parallel to the shoreline directly inland from the beach. In most cases, the dunes are important in protecting the land against potential ravages by storm waves from the sea. Although the most distributed dunes are those associated with coastal regions, the largest complexes of dunes are found inland in dry regions and associated with ancient lake or sea beds. Dunes can form under the action of water flow, on sand or gravel beds of rivers and the sea-bed; the modern word "dune" came into English from French c.
1790, which in turn came from Middle Dutch dūne. Dunes are made of sand-sized particles, may consist of quartz, calcium carbonate, gypsum, or other materials; the upwind/upstream/upcurrent side of the dune is called the stoss side. Sand is pushed or bounces up the stoss side, slides down the lee side. A side of a dune that the sand has slid down is called a slip face; the Bagnold formula gives the speed. Five basic dune types are recognized: crescentic, star and parabolic. Dune areas may occur in three forms: simple and complex. Barchan dunes are crescent-shaped mounds which are wider than they are long; the lee-side slipfaces are on the concave sides of the dunes. These dunes form under winds that blow from one direction, they form separate crescents. When the sand supply is greater, they may merge into barchanoid ridges, transverse dunes; some types of crescentic dunes move more over desert surfaces than any other type of dune. A group of dunes moved more than 100 metres per year between 1954 and 1959 in China's Ningxia Province, similar speeds have been recorded in the Western Desert of Egypt.
The largest crescentic dunes on Earth, with mean crest-to-crest widths of more than three kilometres, are in China's Taklamakan Desert. See lunettes and parabolic dues, for dunes similar to crescent-shaped ones. Abundant barchan dunes may merge into barchanoid ridges, which grade into linear transverse dunes, so called because they lie transverse, or across, the wind direction, with the wind blowing perpendicular to the ridge crest. Seif dunes are linear dunes with two slip faces; the two slip faces make them sharp-crested. They are called seif dunes after the Arabic word for "sword", they may be more than 160 kilometres long, thus visible in satellite images. Seif dunes are associated with bidirectional winds; the long axes and ridges of these dunes extend along the resultant direction of sand movement. Some linear dunes merge to form Y-shaped compound dunes. Formation is debated. Bagnold, in The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes, suggested that some seif dunes form when a barchan dune moves into a bidirectional wind regime, one arm or wing of the crescent elongates.
Others suggest. In the sheltered troughs between developed seif dunes, barchans may be formed, because the wind is constrained to be unidirectional by the dunes. Seif dunes are common in the Sahara, they range up to 300 km in length. In the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula, a vast erg, called the Rub' al Khali or Empty Quarter, contains seif dunes that stretch for 200 km and reach heights of over 300 m. Linear loess hills known; these hills appear to have been formed during the last ice age under permafrost conditions dominated by sparse tundra vegetation. Radially symmetrical, star dunes are pyramidal sand mounds with slipfaces on three or more arms that radiate from the high center of the mound, they tend to accumulate in areas with multidirectional wind regimes. Star dunes grow upward rather than laterally, they dominate the Grand Erg Oriental of the Sahara. In other deserts, they occur around the margins of the sand seas near topographic barriers. In the southeast Badain Jaran Desert of China, the star dunes are up to 500 metres tall and may be the tallest dunes on Earth.
Oval or circular mounds that lack a slipface. Dome dunes occur at the far upwind margins of sand seas. Fixed crescentic dunes that form on the leeward margins of playas and river valleys in arid and semiarid regions in response to the direction of prevailing winds, are known as lunettes, source-bordering dunes and clay dunes, they may be composed of clay, sand, or gypsum, eroded from the basin floor or shore, transported up the concave side of the dune, deposited on the convex side. Examples in Australia are up to 6.5 km long, 1 km wide, up to 50 metres high. They occur in southern and West Africa, in parts of the western United States Texas. U-shaped mounds of sand with convex noses trailed by elongated arms are parabolic dunes; these dunes are formed from blowout dunes where the erosion
