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DocWatch technological innovation Twitterit? News stories about "technological innovation," with punchlines: http://apocadocs.com/d.pl?technological+innovation Related Scary Tags: alternative energy  ~ efficiency increase  ~ sustainability  ~ renewable energy  ~ carbon emissions  ~ technical cleverness  ~ climate impacts  ~ smart policy  ~ carbon sequestration  ~ global warming  ~ contamination   Sat, Jul 11, 2015 from Grist: This cleantech expert lays down the facts on solar and natural gas ... A materials scientist and professor of engineering at MIT, Trancik would rather help humanity beat the clock by speeding up the development of clean energy technologies and sounding the alarm when a technology looks like it isn't going to scale effectively. In short, she's a cleantech efficiency expert. Whether it's solar cells, wind turbines, electric vehicles, natural gas biofuels, or that "miracle energy" your uncle emailed you about, Trancik wants to know: what materials does it require, how much do those materials cost, how much would we have to use the technology in order to meet emissions targets, how much would materials extraction and refinement have to go up accordingly, how much would that cost, and -- most importantly -- is this a smart or realistic path to go down? ... Using science to inform policy: so crazy that it might just work! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Dec 29, 2014 from Wisconsin State Journal: Technique for turning manure into drinkable water could help lakes Dane County is setting aside about $1.3 million for new technology officials say could turn lake-fouling dairy cow manure into crystal clear water. The process would be installed at a county-sponsored biodigester just outside of Middleton that this year began collecting natural gas from manure and other waste, and extracting about half of the phosphorus before the manure-waste mixture is spread on farm fields as fertilizer. ... Not quite straw-into-gold or water-into-wine but close! ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Jul 31, 2014 from E&E Publishing: Stanford researchers claim major breakthrough in lithium battery design A team of Stanford University researchers, including former Energy Secretary Steven Chu, believes it has achieved the "holy grail" of lithium battery design: an anode of pure lithium that could boost the range of an electric car to 300 miles. ... I'll be able to drive far away from sea level rise -- and fast! ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Apr 17, 2014 from Reuters: In green car race, Toyota adds muscle with fuel-cell launch ...Toyota Motor Corp will next year launch a hydrogen-powered car in the United States, Japan and Europe. For now, people at Toyota are calling it the 2015 FC car, for fuel-cell. Fuel-cell cars use a "stack" of cells that electro-chemically combine hydrogen with oxygen to generate electricity that helps propel the car. Their only emission, bar heat, is water vapor, they can run five times longer than battery electric cars, and it takes just minutes to fill the tank with hydrogen - far quicker than even the most rapid charger can recharge a battery electric car... Safety is also a concern. Hydrogen is a highly flammable element when not handled properly. ... Note to car-makers: Don't name it the Toyota Hindenburg. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Mar 24, 2014 from Associated Press: Could a toilet reinvention help save $260 billion worldwide? Who would have expected a toilet to one day filter water, charge a cellphone or create charcoal to combat climate change? These are lofty ambitions beyond what most of the world's 2.5 billion people with no access to modern sanitation would expect. Yet, scientists and toilet innovators around the world say these are exactly the sort of goals needed to improve global public health amid challenges such as poverty, water scarcity and urban growth... The World Bank estimates the annual global cost of poor sanitation at $260 billion, including loss of life, missed work, medical bills and other related factors. ... This new kind of toilet will be poopular. ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Jan 3, 2014 from North Carolina State, via EurekAlert: Researchers find simple, cheap way to increase solar cell efficiency Researchers from North Carolina State University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found an easy way to modify the molecular structure of a polymer commonly used in solar cells. Their modification can increase solar cell efficiency by more than 30 percent. Polymer-based solar cells have two domains, consisting of an electron acceptor and an electron donor material. Excitons are the energy particles created by solar cells when light is absorbed. In order to be harnessed effectively as an energy source, excitons must be able to travel quickly to the interface of the donor and acceptor domains and retain as much of the light's energy as possible.... PBT-OP was not only easier to make than other commonly used polymers, but a simple manipulation of its chemical structure gave it a lower HOMO level than had been seen in other polymers with the same molecular backbone. PBT-OP showed an open circuit voltage (the voltage available from a solar cell) value of 0.78 volts, a 36 percent increase over the ~ 0.6 volt average from similar polymers. ... I chalk it up to the smart branding of Exciton™! ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Dec 31, 2013 from USA Today: Plastic made from pollution hits U.S. market Two childhood friends spent a decade, beginning in college, figuring out how to cheaply make plastic from carbon that's been captured from the atmosphere... Today, the 31-year-old co-founders of California-based Newlight Technologies have two factories that take methane captured from dairy farms and use it to make AirCarbon -- plastic that will soon appear in the form of chairs, food containers and automotive parts. Coming next year: cellphone cases for Virgin Mobile. "You'll be able to hold carbon in your hand," Herrema says of the products, which an independent lab says remove more carbon from the atmosphere than their manufacturing emits. By replacing oil-based plastics, he says he wants to help reduce global warming: "We actually want to change the world."... ... Conceivably, my kitchen sink could be a carbon sink. ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Dec 26, 2013 from New York Times: Start-Up Uses Plant Seeds for a Biofuel In an unmarked greenhouse, leafy bushes carpet an acre of land here tucked into the suburban sprawl of Southern California. The seeds of the inedible, drought-resistant plants, called jatropha, produce a prize: high-quality oil that can be refined into low-carbon jet fuel or diesel fuel... The technology also could be used to domesticate wild fruits and vegetables, company scientists said. They said the technology has the potential to unleash a new green revolution for a world that will need to grow 70 percent more food by 2050, according to the United Nations, as agricultural productivity is slowing ... Fly the eco-friendly and hungry skies. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Nov 25, 2013 from Inderscience: Power Boosting Self-Cleaning Solar Panels High-power, self-cleaning solar panels might be coming soon to a roof near you. There are two obvious problems with photovoltaic cells, solar panels. First, they are very shiny and so a lot of the incident sunlight is simply reflected back into the sky rather than being converted into electricity. Secondly, they get dirty with dust and debris caught on the wind and residues left behind by rain and birds. Now, research published in the International Journal of Nanomanufacturing suggests that it might be possible to add a nanoscopic relief pattern to the surface of solar cells that makes them non-reflective significantly boosting efficiency and at the same time making them highly non-stick and self-cleaning. ... If they can also fry my bacon, too, I'm in! ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Nov 20, 2013 from Associated Press: Hyundai to sell hydrogen-powered SUV in 2014 For years, the joke in the auto industry was that a mass-produced car that runs on hydrogen was always a decade away. That will change next year when Hyundai starts selling a Tucson SUV powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. It will be the first mass-market vehicle of its type to be sold or leased in the U.S. ... All I can say is hyundrogenai. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Oct 7, 2013 from Minneapolis Star Tribune: Solar power for the do-it-yourselfer A Minnesota entrepreneur has brought the assemble-it-yourself concept to solar power. The SolarPod developed by Mouli Engineering of Eagan comes with four solar panels and related parts, including a rack, that its developer says are no more challenging to assemble than furniture from Ikea. "Two guys can put that thing together in an afternoon," said Nick Tamble of HGVids, who assembled one for a how-to video on a retail website. ... Two guys... and a case of beer. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Sep 30, 2013 from The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology: Novel Technology to Produce Gasoline by a Metabolically-Engineered Microorganism Scientists succeeded in producing 580 mg of gasoline per litre of cultured broth by converting in vivo generated fatty acid... The research team engineered the fatty acid metabolism to provide the fatty acid derivatives that are shorter than normal intracellular fatty acid metabolites, and introduced a novel synthetic pathway for the biosynthesis of short-chain alkanes. This allowed the development of platform E. coli strain capable of producing gasoline for the first time. Furthermore, this platform strain, if desired, can be modified to produce other products such as short-chain fatty esters and short-chain fatty alcohols. ... No shit! ApocaDoc permalink Wed, May 29, 2013 from PNAS, via RedOrbit: New CO2 Removal Technique Produces Green Fuel, Offsets Ocean Acidification A new technique to remove and store atmospheric carbon dioxide has been demonstrated by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The new technique also generates carbon-negative hydrogen and produces alkalinity, which can be used to offset ocean acidification. At laboratory scale, the team demonstrated a system that uses the acidity normally produced in saline water electrolysis to accelerate silicate mineral dissolution. The system simultaneously produces hydrogen fuel and other gases. The electrolyte solution that results shows a significant elevation in hydroxide concentration that in turn proved strongly absorptive and retentive of atmospheric CO2. The findings of this study were published in a recent issue of PNAS. The carbonate and bicarbonate produced in the process could be used to mitigate ongoing ocean acidification, the researchers suggest, much like how an Alka Seltzer neutralizes excess acid in the stomach. ... Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it might be if it scales up! ApocaDoc permalink Want more context? Try reading our book FREE online: Humoring the Horror of the Converging Emergencies! More fun than a barrel of jellyfish! Thu, Apr 25, 2013 from Stanford, via EurekAlert: New battery design could help solar and wind power the grid ... Currently the electrical grid cannot tolerate large and sudden power fluctuations caused by wide swings in sunlight and wind. As solar and wind's combined contributions to an electrical grid approach 20 percent, energy storage systems must be available to smooth out the peaks and valleys of this "intermittent" power - storing excess energy and discharging when input drops.... When discharging, the molecules, called lithium polysulfides, absorb lithium ions; when charging, they lose them back into the liquid. The entire molecular stream is dissolved in an organic solvent, which doesn't have the corrosion issues of water-based flow batteries.... "In initial lab tests, the new battery also retained excellent energy-storage performance through more than 2,000 charges and discharges, equivalent to more than 5.5 years of daily cycles," Cui said.... A utility version of the new battery would be scaled up to store many megawatt-hours of energy. ... Warning: Carbon industry crash ahead! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Apr 8, 2013 from American Chemical Society (ACS): Engineering Algae to Make the 'Wonder Material' Nanocellulose for Biofuels and More Genes from the family of bacteria that produce vinegar, Kombucha tea and nata de coco have become stars in a project -- which scientists today said has reached an advanced stage -- that would turn algae into solar-powered factories for producing the "wonder material" nanocellulose. Their report on advances in getting those genes to produce fully functional nanocellulose was part of the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society, being held here this week. ... Algae whiz! ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Mar 26, 2013 from University of Georgia: Discovery May Allow Scientists to Make Fuel from Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere ...researchers at the University of Georgia have found a way to transform the carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere into useful industrial products. Their discovery may soon lead to the creation of biofuels made directly from the carbon dioxide in the air that is responsible for trapping the sun's rays and raising global temperatures... The process is made possible by a unique microorganism called Pyrococcus furiosus, or "rushing fireball," which thrives by feeding on carbohydrates in the super-heated ocean waters near geothermal vents. By manipulating the organism's genetic material, Adams and his colleagues created a kind of P. furiosus that is capable of feeding at much lower temperatures on carbon dioxide. ... Rushing Fireball is the name of my punk band! ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Feb 5, 2013 from Cornell University : Klondike, Puppy Born from a Frozen Embryo, Fetches Good News for Endangered Animals Meet Klondike, the western hemisphere's first puppy born from a frozen embryo. He's a beagle-Labrador retriever mix, and although neither of those breeds are endangered, Klondike's very existence is exciting news for endangered canids, like the red wolf.... This frozen embryo technique is one of many reproductive technologies that can be used to conserve endangered species such as wild canids. ... Too bad they named him something edible. ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Jan 3, 2013 from NUVO: Hestia displays CO2 emissions at street level A team of researchers led by Kevin Gurney, a professor and researcher at Arizona State University, has recently developed a model that can predict carbon emissions on the street level. This model, named "Hestia" after the Greek goddess of the hearth, may prove essential in curbing and perhaps slowing the effects of global warming. One of the model's first publicized runs utilized Indianapolis, providing the city with tangible emissions data while positioning Indianapolis as a strong representative for carbon emissions modeling nationally. Currently, the model tracks carbon emissions, particularly carbon dioxide, the compound most responsible for global warming. ... I can predict your street level emissions! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Dec 3, 2012 from Battle Creek Enquirer: Catching waste energy with common materials Researchers at Michigan State University are working on a new low-cost approach to recapturing the heat energy that is lost in car exhaust and many other industrial processes, in search of a way to improve efficiency and decrease waste. The team is using a material based on very common naturally occurring minerals called tetrahedrites to make thermoelectric materials that have the ability to convert heat into electricity. ... Waste nothing! ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Nov 13, 2012 from American Technion Society : New Way to Split Water Molecules Into Hydrogen and Oxygen: Breakthrough for Solar Energy Conversion and Storage? Using the power of the sun and ultrathin films of iron oxide (commonly known as rust), Technion-Israel Institute of Technology researchers have found a novel way to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The breakthrough, published this week in Nature Materials, could lead to less expensive, more efficient ways to store solar energy in the form of hydrogen-based fuels. This could be a major step forward in the development of viable replacements for fossil fuels....these cells could store solar energy for on demand use, 24 hours per day. This is in strong contrast to conventional photovoltaic cells, which provide power only when the sun is shining (and not at night or when it is cloudy). ... I've heard it said rust never sleeps. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Sep 3, 2012 from New Scientist: Waste water harnessed to make electricity and plastics TREATING waste water is energy intensive. In the US, it sucks up the equivalent output of four of the country's biggest power plants every year. But it needn't be such a drain on resources - soon it might be able to earn its keep. A team led by Hong Liu from Oregon State University in Corvallis has plans for microbial fuel cells that will reclaim energy from waste water and produce around 2.87 watts per litre of waste water. That is almost double the amount of electrical power usual for such a cell. And its by-products could be harnessed to create cheap, biodegradable plastics. ... I suggest we stop calling it waste water. ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Aug 28, 2012 from New Scientist, via Paul Smedberg: Nanocrystalline Cellulose (NCC): Why wood pulp is world's new wonder material Nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC), which is produced by processing wood pulp, is being hailed as the latest wonder material. Japan-based Pioneer Electronics is applying it to the next generation of flexible electronic displays. IBM is using it to create components for computers. Even the US army is getting in on the act, using it to make lightweight body armour and ballistic glass.... So why all the fuss? Well, not only is NCC transparent but it is made from a tightly packed array of needle-like crystals which have a strength-to-weight ratio that is eight times better than stainless steel. Even better, it's incredibly cheap. "It is the natural, renewable version of a carbon nanotube at a fraction of the price," says Jeff Youngblood of Purdue University's NanoForestry Institute in West Lafayette, Indiana.... "Anyone who makes a car or a plastic bag will want to get in on this," he says. In addition, the human body can deal with cellulose safely, says Jones, so NCC is less dangerous to process than inorganic composites. "The worst thing that could happen is a paper cut," he says. ... Uh-oh. Paradigm shift ahead! ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Jul 27, 2012 from DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, via EurekAlert: Photovoltaics from any semiconductor A technology that would enable low-cost, high efficiency solar cells to be made from virtually any semiconductor material has been developed by researchers.... This technology opens the door to the use of plentiful, relatively inexpensive semiconductors, such as the promising metal oxides, sulfides and phosphides, that have been considered unsuitable for solar cells because it is so difficult to taylor their properties by chemical means.... "Our technology requires only electrode and gate deposition, without the need for high-temperature chemical doping, ion implantation, or other expensive or damaging processes," says lead author William Regan.... This makes it possible for electrical contact to and carrier modulation of the semiconductor to be performed simultaneously."... In one configuration, working with copper oxide, the Berkeley researchers shaped the electrode contact into narrow fingers; in another configuration, working with silicon, they made the top contact ultra-thin (single layer graphene) across the surface. With sufficiently narrow fingers, the gate field creates a low electrical resistance inversion layer between the fingers and a potential barrier beneath them. A uniformly thin top contact allows gate fields to penetrate and deplete/invert the underlying semiconductor. The results in both configurations are high quality p-n junctions. ... Ubiquitous p-n junctions give me the Palpably Next-era Jazz! ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Apr 25, 2012 from Michigan Technical University, via EurekAlert: Graphene boosts efficiency of next-gen solar cells The coolest new nanomaterial of the 21st century could boost the efficiency of the next generation of solar panels, a team of Michigan Technological University materials scientists has discovered. Graphene, a two-dimensional honeycomb of carbon atoms, is a rising star in the materials community for its radical properties.... In dye-sensitized solar cells, photons knock electrons from the dye into a thin layer of titanium dioxide, which relays them to the anode. Hu's group found that adding graphene to the titanium dioxide increased its conductivity, bringing 52.4 percent more current into the circuit.... The team also developed a comparably foolproof method for creating sheets of titanium dioxide embedded with graphene. It first made graphite oxide powder, then mixed it with titanium dioxide to form a paste, spread it on a substrate (such as glass) and then baked it a high temperatures. "It's low-cost and very easy to prepare," said Hu. ... What say we start ramping up solar, while we still have a civilization to do it? ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Mar 21, 2012 from USA Today: Column: High gas prices? Bring 'em on! Me, I'm not running for office. I blame feckless politicians from both parties for the lack of a sane energy policy over the past 40 years. And unlike Obama or his Republican challengers, I want higher gas prices. At least for a while. Long enough for us to get the market signals right and to continue to wean ourselves off our fossil fuel addiction. The way I see it, every time we've been confronted by an energy crisis, Americans have done the right thing. Faced with the cold hard economic facts of life when it comes to oil availability and price, we've figured out for ourselves how to be innovative, resilient and sensible. Having plentiful cheap resources can make us wasteful; scarcity and high prices can make us smart.... Change happens when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk of change. Right now, rising oil prices are driving up the cost of the status quo. That means it's time for all of us to embrace the risk of change. Once again. Because that's what we've done every time in the past when we've been challenged with higher prices and lower availability. It turns out, we're at our best, our most innovative and our most pragmatic when times get a little bit tougher. ... The cheapest energy of all is fun between people. ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Feb 23, 2012 from EnvironmentalResearchWeb: Drexel engineers develop cement with 97 percent smaller carbon dioxide and energy footprint Drexel University engineers have found a way to improve upon ordinary Portland cement (OPC), the glue that's bonded much of the world's construction since the late 1800s. In research recently published in Cement and Concrete Composites the group served up a recipe for cement that is more energy efficient and cost effective to produce than masonry's most prevalent bonding compound. Drexel's "green" variety is a form of alkali-activated cement that utilizes an industrial byproduct, called slag, and a common mineral, limestone, and does not require heating to produce. According to Dr. Michel W. Barsoum, A.W. Grosvenor professor in Drexel's Department of Materials Science and Engineering, this alternative production method and the ubiquity of the mix ingredients, lessens the cost of materials for Drexel's cement by about 40 percent versus Portland cement and reduces energy consumption and carbon dioxide production by 97 percent. ... Now that's a foundation to build upon! ApocaDoc permalink You're still reading! Good for you! You really should read our short, funny, frightening book FREE online (or buy a print copy): Humoring the Horror of the Converging Emergencies! We've been quipping this stuff for more than 30 months! Every day! Which might explain why we don't get invited to parties anymore. Mon, Feb 13, 2012 from New Scientist: Charging up an all-electric 320 km/h racing car HOW do you get more power out of an electric car than its main battery pack can deliver? Simple, turn the car's very bodywork into a battery, extract power from every bounce of its suspension system and, while you're at it, suck energy from the road surface too. Such are the measures being built into an electric racing car capable of reaching 320 kilometres (200 miles) per hour by a UK-based consortium. Their aim is to perfect a multitude of novel electric-vehicle (EV) technologies and ultimately to transfer them to road cars. ... Don't forget to use methane emissions from the driver, too! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Feb 13, 2012 from ABC Environment: Fake steak may feed the world It looks more like squid than steak and because it lacks the fat and protein found in real cattle, does not taste like traditional beef. So why would anyone eat meat grown in a lab? Cultured or in-vitro meat may still be years away from our supermarkets, but scientists in The Netherlands say they will be able to grow a hamburger by the end of this year. Professor Mark Post, who is refining the meat-making process at Maastricht University, says once perfected, the technology could slash the environmental footprint of growing food... Livestock for human consumption takes up 70 per cent of the world's arable land. They use eight per cent of global freshwater and produce 18 per cent of all global greenhouse gas emissions - some 3,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year (that's more than the entire world's transport sector). Deforestation to create farmland accounts for a third of those emissions. ... We can always pretend it's tasty. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Feb 6, 2012 from Stanford, via ScienceDaily: Engineers Weld Nanowires With Light In a paper just published in the journal Nature Materials, a team of engineers at Stanford has demonstrated a promising new nanowire welding technique that harnesses plasmonics to fuse the wires with a simple blast of light.... The beauty is that the hot spots exist only when the nanowires touch, not after they have fused. The welding stops itself. It's self-limiting," explained Mark Brongersma, an associate professor of materials science engineering at Stanford and an expert in plasmonics. Brongersma is one of the study's senior authors.... To demonstrate the possibilities, they applied their mesh on Saran wrap. They sprayed a solution containing silver nanowires in suspension on the plastic and dried it. After illumination, what was left was an ultrathin layer of welded nanowires. "Then we balled it up like a piece of paper. When we unfurled the wrap, it maintained its electrical properties," said co-author Yi Cui, an associate professor materials science and engineering. "And when you hold it up, it's virtually transparent."... "This opens some interesting, simple and large-area processing schemes for electronic devices -- solar, LEDs and touch-screen displays, especially." ... Please, please don't fund the touchscreen displays first. ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Jan 4, 2012 from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News via ScienceDaily: Keeping Our Beaches Safe from Fecal Contamination Fecal contamination of public beaches caused by sewage overflow is both dangerous for swimmers and costly for state and local economies. Current methods to detect Escherichia coli, a bacterium highly indicative of the presence of fecal matter in water, typically require 24-48 hours to produce a result. A new, accurate, and economical sensor-based device capable of measuring E. coli levels in water samples in less than 1-8 hours could serve as a valuable early warning tool and is described in an article in Environmental Engineering Science, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. ... Shit's up! ... I mean surf's up! ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Jan 3, 2012 from Berkeley Lab News Center: E. Coli Bacteria Engineered to Eat Switchgrass and Make Transportation Fuels A milestone has been reached on the road to developing advanced biofuels that can replace gasoline, diesel and jet fuels with a domestically-produced clean, green, renewable alternative. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have engineered the first strains of Escherichia coli bacteria that can digest switchgrass biomass and synthesize its sugars into all three of those transportation fuels. What's more, the microbes are able to do this without any help from enzyme additives. ... This sounds E. licious! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Dec 19, 2011 from University of Texas at Austin: Discovery of a 'Dark State' Could Mean a Brighter Future for Solar Energy The efficiency of conventional solar cells could be significantly increased, according to new research on the mechanisms of solar energy conversion led by chemist Xiaoyang Zhu at The University of Texas at Austin. Zhu and his team have discovered that it's possible to double the number of electrons harvested from one photon of sunlight using an organic plastic semiconductor material...Zhu and his team ... discovered that a photon produces a dark quantum "shadow state" from which two electrons can then be efficiently captured to generate more energy in the semiconductor pentacene. ... I will kid you not, an encouraging development, this is. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Dec 19, 2011 from Brown University via ScienceDaily: Novel Device Removes Heavy Metals from Water Engineers at Brown University have developed a system that cleanly and efficiently removes trace heavy metals from water. In experiments, the researchers showed the system reduced cadmium, copper, and nickel concentrations, returning contaminated water to near or below federally acceptable standards. The technique is scalable and has viable commercial applications, especially in the environmental remediation and metal recovery fields. ... Bet it can't remove smoke on the water. ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Nov 15, 2011 from BBC: Scientists boost battery strength with small holes Batteries for phones and laptops could soon recharge ten times faster and hold a charge ten times larger than current technology allows. Scientists at Northwestern University in the US have changed the materials in lithium-ion batteries to boost their abilities. One change involves poking millions of minuscule holes in the battery. Batteries built using the novel technique could be in the shops within five years, estimate the scientists. ... The holey grail! ApocaDoc permalink Sat, Oct 15, 2011 from CNN: Green sidewalk makes electricity -- one footstep at a time Paving slabs that convert energy from people's footsteps into electricity are set to help power Europe's largest urban mall, at the 2012 London Olympics site. The recycled rubber "PaveGen" paving slabs harvest kinetic energy from the impact of people stepping on them and instantly deliver tiny bursts of electricity to nearby appliances. The slabs can also store energy for up to three days in an on-board battery, according to its creator. In their first commercial application, 20 tiles will be scattered along the central crossing between London's Olympic stadium and the recently opened Westfield Stratford City mall -- which expects an estimated 30 million customers in its first year. ... Consumers ... giving back? Now that's an antidote for the apocalypse. ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Aug 10, 2011 from Fast Company: In Drought-Stricken Texas, They're Drinking Water Recycled From Urine Would you drink recycled urine? Residents of Big Spring, Texas may not have a choice--the local water district is breaking ground this year on a $13 million treatment plant that will direct 2 million gallons per day of thoroughly cleaned sewage back into the regular water system. It's a practical solution for a drought-stricken state that is hunting for water wherever it can. It's not as if wastewater recycling is a new idea. Texas has, in fact, used reclaimed water for over a century. But generally, the recycled water doesn't go to the tap; it's used in parks, golf courses, outdoor fountains, and more. The state has plenty of indirect sewage recycling plants--one of the newer plants filters wastewater through a wetland before sending it out to the facilities that want this so-called "raw water". In contrast, the Big Spring plant will use sewage that has already gone through a traditional wastewater treatment plant, clean it out further, and combine it in a pipeline with lake water before sending it out to be used by residents in their sinks, toilets, and showers. This is, according to KDAF-TV, the first plant of its kind in the state--and one of the only plants like it in the country. ... Big Spring has sprung a leak! ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Aug 2, 2011 from EnvironmentalResearchWeb: Carbon nanotube 'solar fuel' could store solar energy Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) have designed a new solar thermal fuel that could store up to 10,000 times more energy than previous systems. The fuel, which has been studied using computational chemistry but not yet fully tested in the lab, consists of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) modified with azobenzene. It is expected to provide the same energy storage per volume as lithium-ion batteries and can store solar energy almost indefinitely. It can also be recharged by simply exposing it to sunlight - no electricity required.... What is more, the volumetric energy density of this fuel is very low in contrast to that of azobenzene/CNT, which has a value that is 10,000 greater. "This value is comparable to that of lithium-ion batteries, and high enough for us to realistically envisage our solar thermal fuel in real-world applications," Kolpak told physicsworld.com. "The fuel also has many other advantages, such as being emission-free and easily rechargeable - you don't need to be near an electricity source to recharge."... The researchers admit that there are still many challenges to overcome before they can even consider commercializing such a technology. ... See? I told you that technology would solve the problem. Er, sometime in the future. ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Jun 29, 2011 from Oregon State University, via EurekAlert: Inkjet printing could change the face of solar energy industry Engineers at Oregon State University have discovered a way for the first time to create successful "CIGS" solar devices with inkjet printing, in work that reduces raw material waste by 90 percent and will significantly lower the cost of producing solar energy cells with some very promising compounds. High performing, rapidly produced, ultra-low cost, thin film solar electronics should be possible, scientists said.... Part of the advantage of this approach, Chang said, is a dramatic reduction in wasted material. Instead of depositing chemical compounds on a substrate with a more expensive vapor phase deposition - wasting most of the material in the process - inkjet technology could be used to create precise patterning with very low waste. "Some of the materials we want to work with for the most advanced solar cells, such as indium, are relatively expensive," Chang said. "If that's what you're using you can't really afford to waste it, and the inkjet approach almost eliminates the waste." ... Guess I'll stop investing in traditional solar, since a revolution is just around the corner. ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Jun 17, 2011 from iSupply: Historic $1-Per-Watt Solar Modules Just Months Away The photovoltaic (PV) industry appears set to achieve a major milestone with the selling prices of crystalline silicon (c-Si) modules projected to drop to $1 per watt by the first quarter of 2012, a significant benchmark level that could forestall a widely feared dip for solar installations next year and stimulate demand instead, according to new IHS iSuppli (NYSE: IHS) research.... "The recent price decline was quickened by top-tier module brands dropping prices to aggressively position themselves, in the face of fears that the industry could be headed toward a down market next year," said Henning Wicht, senior director and principal analyst, photovoltaics, at IHS. The drops in pricing were spurred by the recent price slide in cells and wafers, with wafers being quoted in the $2.30 per-piece range, down from $3.50 in March.... ... This makes 100 percent cents. ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Apr 15, 2011 from Biorefining: Dow, OPX Biotechnologies enter biobased acrylic acid agreement OPX Biotechnologies Inc. announced today that the two companies are collaborating to develop an industrial-scale process for the production of biobased acrylic acid ... using a fermentable sugar (such as corn and/or cane sugar) feedstock with equal performance qualities as petroleum-based acrylic acid, creating a direct replacement option for the market. If collaborative research is successful, the companies will discuss commercialization opportunities that could bring biobased acrylic acid to market in three to five years.... The global petroleum-based acrylic acid market is $8 billion and growing 3 to 4 percent per year. Acrylic acid is a key chemical building block used in a wide range of consumer goods including paints, adhesives, diapers and detergents. "Dow is interested in biobased products that are economically competitive to petrochemical-based products with equal or advantaged performance qualities," said Pat Gottschalk, business director and vice president, Dow Performance Monomers. ... DOW -- innovating with the Human Element™ (if it's economically competitive). ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Mar 21, 2011 from ScienceDaily: Batteries Charge Quickly and Retain Capacity, Thanks to New Structure Braun's group developed a three-dimensional nanostructure for battery cathodes that allows for dramatically faster charging and discharging without sacrificing energy storage capacity. The researchers' findings will be published in the March 20 advance online edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology. Aside from quick-charge consumer electronics, batteries that can store a lot of energy, release it fast and recharge quickly are desirable for electric vehicles, medical devices, lasers and military applications. "This system that we have gives you capacitor-like power with battery-like energy," said Braun, a professor of materials science and engineering. "Most capacitors store very little energy. They can release it very fast, but they can't hold much. Most batteries store a reasonably large amount of energy, but they can't provide or receive energy rapidly. This does both."... They have demonstrated battery electrodes that can charge or discharge in a few seconds, 10 to 100 times faster than equivalent bulk electrodes, yet can perform normally in existing devices.... "If you had five-minute charge capability, you would think of this the same way you do an internal combustion engine. You would just pull up to a charging station and fill up." All of the processes the group used are also used at large scales in industry so the technique could be scaled up for manufacturing. ... It's Three! Three! Three wins in one! ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Mar 16, 2011 from EnvironmentalResearchWeb: Isobutanol directly from cellulose Using consolidated bioprocessing, a team led by James Liao of the University of California at Los Angeles for the first time produced isobutanol directly from cellulose. The team's work, published online in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, represents across-the-board savings in processing costs and time, plus isobutanol is a higher grade of alcohol than ethanol. "Unlike ethanol, isobutanol can be blended at any ratio with gasoline and should eliminate the need for dedicated infrastructure in tanks or vehicles," said Liao.... "Plus, it may be possible to use isobutanol directly in current engines without modification."... While cellulosic biomass like corn stover and switchgrass is abundant and cheap, it is much more difficult to utilize than corn and sugar cane. This is due in large part because of recalcitrance, or a plant's natural defenses to being chemically dismantled.... The researchers noted that their strategy exploits the host's natural cellulolytic activity and the amino acid biosynthetic pathway and diverts its intermediates to produce higher alcohol than ethanol. ... These guys are really smart. How come they're not in banking, or something productive like that? ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Feb 1, 2011 from Reuters: U.S. scientists work to grow meat in lab In a small laboratory on an upper floor of the basic science building at the Medical University of South Carolina, Vladimir Mironov, M.D., Ph.D., has been working for a decade to grow meat. A developmental biologist and tissue engineer, Dr. Mironov, 56, is one of only a few scientists worldwide involved in bioengineering "cultured" meat. It's a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available for growing meat the old-fashioned way ... on the hoof.... The new National Institute of Food and Agriculture, part of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, won't fund it, the National Institutes of Health won't fund it, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration funded it only briefly, Mironov said. ... What do you wanna bet chickens, cows and pigs would be willing to help fund it? ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Jan 20, 2011 from California Institute of Technology via ScienceDaily: New Reactor Paves the Way for Efficiently Producing Fuel from Sunlight Using a common metal most famously found in self-cleaning ovens, Sossina Haile hopes to change our energy future. The metal is cerium oxide -- or ceria -- and it is the centerpiece of a promising new technology developed by Haile and her colleagues that concentrates solar energy and uses it to efficiently convert carbon dioxide and water into fuels...For all of this to work, the temperatures in the reactor have to be very high -- nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. At Caltech, Haile and her students achieved such temperatures using electrical furnaces. But for a real-world test, she says, "we needed to use photons, so we went to Switzerland." ... I sooo wish I was in college again... ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Jan 13, 2011 from Washington Post: New global network to precisely measure emissions A D.C. area company and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography will announce Wednesday that they are launching an ambitious project that aims to precisely gauge how human activity is affecting the climate. The $25 million, five-year commercial venture will include 50 sensors in the United States and another 50 around the world to measure atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Most governments and industries estimate their carbon footprint based on an inventory of the fossil fuels they burn, the trees they cut or the landfills they create; this technology will allow experts to quantify how much carbon dioxide and methane has entered the air. ... We better be able to see this in 3-D. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Jan 10, 2011 from UT Dallas, via ScienceDaily: Spinning the Unspinnable: Superconducting, Energy Storing and Catalytic Yarns Based on Ancient Types of Spirals Nanotechnologists at The University of Texas at Dallas have invented a broadly deployable technology for producing weavable, knittable, sewable, and knottable yarns containing up to 95 weight percent of otherwise unspinnable guest powders and nanofibers. A minute amount of host carbon nanotube web, which can be lighter than air and stronger pound-per-pound than steel, confines guest particulates in the corridors of highly conducting scrolls without interfering with guest functionality for such applications as energy storage, energy conversion, and energy harvesting.... Biscrolled yarns get their name from the way they are produced: a uniform layer of guest material is deposited on top of a web of carbon nanotubes, which is called the host. This bilayer guest/host stack is then twisted to form a biscrolled yarn.... The carbon nanotube webs that the inventors used for biscrolling are not ordinary carbon nanotube sheets -- they can be drawn at up to two yards/second from forests of carbon nanotubes.... Using as guest up to 95 weight percent LiFePO4, a remarkable material for lithium-ion batteries, high performance lithium ion battery electrodes were demonstrated by UT Dallas researchers, and shown to have the battery performance, flexibility and mechanical robustness needed for incorporation in energy storing and energy generating clothing. Biscrolling nitrogen-doped carbon nanotube guest provided highly catalytic fuel cell cathodes for chemical generation of electrical energy, which avoid the need for expensive platinum catalyst. By biscrolling a mixture of magnesium and boron powders and thermal treatment, superconducting MgB2 yarns were produced, which eliminated the thirty or more draw steps used for conventional production of superconducting wires. Using photocatalytic titanium dioxide guest, biscrolled yarns for self-cleaning fabrics were obtained. ... My recommendation for a colloquial name for any nanofibre-encased substance: "nanwich." ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Jan 3, 2011 from Virginia Tech via ScienceDaily: Enzyme Cocktail Could Eliminate a Step in Biofuel Process Tomorrow's fuel-cell vehicles may be powered by enzymes that consume cellulose from woodchips or grass and exhale hydrogen. Researchers at Virginia Tech, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the University of Georgia have produced hydrogen gas pure enough to power a fuel cell by mixing 14 enzymes, one coenzyme, cellulosic materials from nonfood sources, and water heated to about 90 degrees (32 C). The group announced three advances from their "one pot" process: 1) a novel combination of enzymes, 2) an increased hydrogen generation rate -- to as fast as natural hydrogen fermentation, and 3) a chemical energy output greater than the chemical energy stored in sugars -- the highest hydrogen yield reported from cellulosic materials. ... 4) The opportunity to use the words "cocktail" and "pot" in a biofuel story. ApocaDoc permalink Sat, Nov 20, 2010 from New Scientist: US reserves of rare earth elements assessed for first time The US has 13 million tonnes of rare earth elements but it would take years to extract them, suggests the first detailed report on the country's supply.... China controls 97 per cent of the world's supply and has been tightening its export quotas, sparking concerns that the rare earths could live up to their name. Now, the US Geological Survey has looked at all known national reserves of the elements as part of a larger assessment of the threat posed to defence by limited rare earth supplies. It found that the domestic pipeline is "rather thin". The US boasts the third largest reserves in the world after China and the Commonwealth of Independent States, made up of nations that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. But the only rare earths mine the US has ever operated, at Mountain Pass, California, is currently inactive. Mining may restart there within two years, but any other mines will be far behind. ... Maybe we should change the name to really expensive earths. ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Nov 19, 2010 from Christian Science Monitor, via Yahoo: Son of Stuxnet? Variants of the cyberweapon likely, senators told Stuxnet, the first known weaponized software designed to destroy a specific industrial process, could soon be modified to target an array of industrial systems in the US and abroad, cyber experts told US senators Wednesday. The Stuxnet malware, discovered this summer, was apparently designed to strike one target - Iran's nuclear-fuel centrifuge facilities, researchers now say. But Stuxnet's "digital warhead," they caution, could be copied and altered by others to wreak havoc on a much grander scale. Variants of Stuxnet could target a host of critical infrastructure, from the power grid and water supplies to transportation systems, four cybersecurity experts told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.... "from automobile assembly lines to mixing baby formula to processing chemicals," said Mr. McGurk.... "... Stuxnet is an important harbinger of things that may come if we do not use this opportunity to learn about this threat and apply it." ... What I want to know is why they can't just spray the computers with antibiotics. Wouldn't that kill the virus? ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Nov 2, 2010 from Wired.co.uk: First electric road car body produced with a 3D printer A prototype for an electric vehicle -- code named Urbee -- is the first to have its entire body built with a 3D printer. Stratasys and Winnipeg engineering group Kor Ecologic have partnered to create the electric/liquid fuel hybrid, which can deliver more than 200 miles per gallon on the motorway and 100 miles per gallon in the city. The two-passenger hybrid aims to be fuel efficient, easy to repair, safe to drive and inexpensive to own.... "Other hybrids on the road today were developed by applying 'green' standards to traditional vehicle formats," says Jim Kor, president and chief technology officer, Kor Ecologic. "Urbee was designed with environmentally sustainable principles dictating every step of its design." ... Is it possible to design as if future life mattered? ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Oct 29, 2010 from New Scientist: Will we cope if the rare earths live up to their name? For decades, the world has been busy incorporating the so-called rare earth elements into all manner of high-tech devices, including disc drives, wind turbines and hybrid cars. The messy business of mining the ore and extracting the elements was left to China, and few people in the west cared that the nation controlled 97 per cent of world supply. "Rare earth" is an alternative name for the lanthanides - elements 57 to 71 - plus yttrium and scandium, and despite the name most of them were not considered rare at all. The elements hit the headlines a few weeks ago, when China appeared to be blocking exports to Japan and the US. The Chinese government, which has also been tightening its export quotas, claims that it needs to clean up mining procedures and support its own growing demand for rare earths.... However, facilities to refine rare earths cannot be created overnight, and few US scientists know how to do it anyway. "Even if Molycorp can get material mined and concentrated right now... it would have to send that material to China to get it refined," says Gareth Hatch of Technology Metals Research, a consultancy firm in Carpentersville, Illinois. Recycling is another option, but impurities sneak in during the process, so recycled materials are not always as good as the freshly refined equivalent. The neodymium magnets used in hybrid cars, for example, work less well at high temperatures when recycled neodymium is used. ... This is a canary in a rare earth mine. ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Sep 29, 2010 from Stanford University via ScienceDaily: Solar Cells Thinner Than Wavelengths of Light Hold Huge Power Potential Ultra-thin solar cells can absorb sunlight more efficiently than the thicker, more expensive-to-make silicon cells used today, because light behaves differently at scales around a nanometer (a billionth of a meter), say Stanford engineers. They calculate that by properly configuring the thicknesses of several thin layers of films, an organic polymer thin film could absorb as much as 10 times more energy from sunlight than was thought possible. ... Less is always more. ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Sep 24, 2010 from North Carolina State University, via EurekAlert: Mimicking nature, water-based 'artificial leaf' produces electricity A team led by a North Carolina State University researcher has shown that water-gel-based solar devices - "artificial leaves" - can act like solar cells to produce electricity. The findings prove the concept for making solar cells that more closely mimic nature. They also have the potential to be less expensive and more environmentally friendly than the current standard-bearer: silicon-based solar cells. The bendable devices are composed of water-based gel infused with light-sensitive molecules - the researchers used plant chlorophyll in one of the experiments - coupled with electrodes coated by carbon materials, such as carbon nanotubes or graphite.... "We do not want to overpromise at this stage, as the devices are still of relatively low efficiency and there is a long way to go before this can become a practical technology," Velev says. "However, we believe that the concept of biologically inspired 'soft' devices for generating electricity may in the future provide an alternative for the present-day solid-state technologies." ... If we do this right, we can have R40 spray-on insulation that powers our homes! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Sep 13, 2010 from Carnegie Institution via ScienceDaily: Carbon Mapping Breakthrough By integrating satellite mapping, airborne-laser technology, and ground-based plot surveys, scientists from the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, with colleagues from the World Wildlife Fund and in coordination with the Peruvian Ministry of the Environment (MINAM), have revealed the first high-resolution maps of carbon locked up in tropical forest vegetation and emitted by land-use practices. These new maps pave the way for accurate monitoring of carbon storage and emissions for the proposed United Nations initiative on Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). ... How wonderful that we can actually watch the horror unfold! ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Aug 27, 2010 from ScienceDaily: Artificial Enzyme Removes Natural Poison For the first time ever, a completely artificial chemical enzyme has been successfully used to neutralise a toxin found naturally in fruits and vegetables. Chemzymes are designed molecules emulating the targeting and efficiency of naturally occurring enzymes and the recently graduated Dr. Bjerre is pleased about her results. "Showing that these molecules are capable of decomposing toxins ... proves the general point that it's possible to design artificial enzymes for this class of task," explains Bjerre.... But where natural enzymes are big and complex, the artificial ones have been pared down to the basics. One consequence of this simplicity is that designing chemzymes for targeted tasks ought to be easier. With fewer parts, there's less to go wrong when changing the structure of chemzymes.... Manmade enzymes take on heat and solvents without batting a molecular eyelid. One of the consequences of this is that chemzymes can be mass-produced using industrial chemical processes. This is a huge advantage when you need a lot of product in a hurry. ... Should I be thrilled, or terrified? ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Aug 26, 2010 from ScienceDaily: Electricity Collected from the Air Could Become the Newest Alternative Energy Source But new evidence suggested that water in the atmosphere really does pick up an electrical charge. Galembeck and colleagues confirmed that idea, using laboratory experiments that simulated water's contact with dust particles in the air. They used tiny particles of silica and aluminum phosphate, both common airborne substances, showing that silica became more negatively charged in the presence of high humidity and aluminum phosphate became more positively charged. High humidity means high levels of water vapor in the air ― the vapor that condenses and becomes visible as "fog" on windows of air-conditioned cars and buildings on steamy summer days. "This was clear evidence that water in the atmosphere can accumulate electrical charges and transfer them to other materials it comes into contact with," Galembeck explained. "We are calling this 'hygroelectricity,' meaning 'humidity electricity'."... These are fascinating ideas that new studies by ourselves and by other scientific teams suggest are now possible," Galembeck said. "We certainly have a long way to go. But the benefits in the long range of harnessing hygroelectricity could be substantial." ... Hygro big and strong, little science. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Aug 23, 2010 from MedicalNewsToday: PMO Compounds Show Promise Against Deadly Ebola, Marburg Viruses US scientists have discovered two compounds from a family known as antisense phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomers, or PMOs, can protect monkeys infected with Ebola and Marburg viruses from going on to develop lethal hemorrhagic fever, which has a 90 per cent fatality rate in humans; and they are now proceeding with clinical trials. The "proof of concept" study that led to these findings was a collaboration between the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) based at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and AVI BioPharma, a Washington-based biotechnology firm, and was published in the 22 August advanced online issue of Nature Medicine. There are currently no vaccines or effective treatments for the Ebola and Marburg filoviruses, which are commonly transmitted through blood and bodily fluids. However, infection can also occur via the aerosol route, which is why they are a cause of grave concern as potential weapons in biological warfare or terrorism. ... Blood won't gush from my pores, my mouth, my anus, my eyes? What a relief! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Aug 23, 2010 from ACS, via EurekAlert: Self-cleaning technology from Mars can keep terrestrial solar panels dust free Imagine keeping dust and grime off objects spread out over an area of 25 to 50 football fields. That's the problem facing companies that deploy large-scale solar power installations, and scientists today presented the development of one solution -- self-dusting solar panels ― based on technology developed for space missions to Mars. In a report at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), they described how a self-cleaning coating on the surface of solar cells could increase the efficiency of producing electricity from sunlight and reduce maintenance costs for large-scale solar installations.... The self-cleaning technology involves deposition of a transparent, electrically sensitive material deposited on glass or a transparent plastic sheet covering the panels. Sensors monitor dust levels on the surface of the panel and energize the material when dust concentration reaches a critical level. The electric charge sends a dust-repelling wave cascading over the surface of the material, lifting away the dust and transporting it off of the screen's edges. Mazumder said that within two minutes, the process removes about 90 percent of the dust deposited on a solar panel and requires only a small amount of the electricity generated by the panel for cleaning operations. ... That's even better than Space Food Stix! ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Aug 19, 2010 from BusinessGreen: Scientists brew up powerful whisky biofuel Biofuels made from whisky by-products could be available on Scottish roads within a few years after a team of researchers at Edinburgh Napier's Biofuel Research Centre this week filed for a patent for the new fuel. The team, which is now planning to form a spin-off company to commercialise the fuel, used pot ale waste liquid and spent grains known as draff from Diageo's Glenkinchie Distillery to develop a method of producing butanol. The researchers said the resulting biobutanol produces 30 per cent more output power than ethanol and can be used by conventional cars without any changes to the engine. They also predicted that the fuel will have minimal impact on the environment compared to first generation biofuels made from energy crops as it will draw on the 1,600 million litres of pot ale and 187,000 tonnes of draff produced by the Scottish malt whisky industry each year. ... Fill it up with single malt, please. ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Aug 17, 2010 from Yale360: Low-Cost Solar Array Developed for Residential Installation A Seattle-based company says that it has developed an inexpensive do-it-yourself solar power technology that will enable homeowners to install solar panels on their roofs and then connect them to their power supply by simply plugging a cord into a regular electrical outlet. The company, Clarian Power, is touting its Sunfish system -- with prices beginning at $799 -- as a major advance in reducing the high cost of installing home solar power systems, which typically start at $10,000. Clarian says its Sunfish system does not require a dedicated control panel and has built-in circuit protection, and thus does not require an electrician for installation. Users would mount up to five solar panels anywhere on the house, and plug the device into any outlet. The system is Wi-Fi enabled, enabling users to monitor the performance with online software such as the Google PowerMeter. The largest module will be able to generate 150 kilowatt hours per month, company officials say, so it would take five to six modules to produce the roughly 900 kilowatts used by an average American home. ... Stop right there! I just invested in a new coal-burning plant! ApocaDoc permalink Sat, Aug 14, 2010 from Reuters: FDA OKs new "morning-after" pill Health officials on Friday approved a new, longer-lasting "morning-after" pill to prevent pregnancy after unprotected sex. The prescription drug, called ella, is made by French company HRA Pharma and will be sold in the United States by Watson Pharmaceuticals. It is the first emergency contraceptive approved since a five-year battle under the Bush administration ended with limited over-the-counter sales and age checks by pharmacists for a rival pill. Ella has been shown to prevent pregnancy for up to five days after unprotected sex. ... Ella, our completely overwhelmed planet thanks you. ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Aug 12, 2010 from Marketplace: A green way to dispose human remains ...Cutting carbon emissions, greenhouse gasses, has become a goal that reaches into every corner of life. And now, it seems, death. Six states in this country have approved a new, low-carbon way to dispose of human remains. Resomation is being offered as an alternative to cremation -- reducing the body to a mixture of liquid and minerals...The process was developed by a Scottish firm. With zero carbon emissions and using seven times less energy than cremation, this... would make for the greenest of funerals...but many people recoil from it for other reasons. Resomation produces a kind of powder, which can be tastefully placed in an urn and given to the bereaved. But it also leaves a fluid -- and that, it has been suggested, might be washed down the drain. ... Being washed down the drain seems fitting somehow. ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Aug 11, 2010 from Chicago Tribune: Poised on History's Doorstep: Super Salmon or Frankenfish? ...With global population pressing against food supplies and vast areas of the ocean already swept clean of fish, tiny AquaBounty Technologies of Waltham, Mass., has developed a variety of salmon that reaches market weight in half the time of other salmon. What's more, AquaBounty not only promises to slash the ready-for-market time - and production costs -- on a hugely popular, nutritious fish that currently commands near-record prices, it plans to avoid the pollution, disease and other problems associated with today's salt-water fish farms by having its salmon raised inland. But there's a catch: AquaBounty's salmon is genetically engineered. Indeed, it aspires to be the nation's first genetically-modified food animal of any kind. That means the Food and Drug Administration must approve it. It also means the company and its salmon must withstand vociferous opposition from environmental and other advocacy groups, win over skeptical producers and -- possibly most difficult of all - overcome potential consumer resistance to genetic tinkering with food. ... Long as it tastes like chicken I'm good with it! ApocaDoc permalink Sat, Jul 24, 2010 from Science Daily: Graphene Organic Photovoltaics: Flexible Material Only a Few Atoms Thick May Offer Cheap Solar Power A University of Southern California team has produced flexible transparent carbon atom films that the researchers say have great potential for a new breed of solar cells. "Organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells have been proposed as a means to achieve low cost energy due to their ease of manufacture, light weight, and compatibility with flexible substrates," wrote Chongwu Zhou, a professor of electrical engineering in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, in a paper recently published in the journal ACS Nano.... But what graphene OPVs lack in efficiency, they can potentially more than make [up] for in lower price and, greater physical flexibility. Gomez De Arco thinks that it may eventually be possible to run printing presses laying extensive areas covered with inexpensive solar cells, much like newspaper presses print newspapers. "They could be hung as curtains in homes or even made into fabric and be worn as power generating clothing. I can imagine people powering their cellular phone or music/video device while jogging in the sun," he said. ... Another plot by those enviro-nazis. ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Jul 21, 2010 from Environmental Health News: New membrane makes fresh water from sea and sewage feasible Researchers at Yale University have developed a custom membrane that can clean and purify water from oceans, salty ground water or sewage water with far less energy input than currently is required to do a similar job. The membrane may be a big step forward in reaching the goal of reliable and affordable sources of fresh water. Finding sustainable sources of clean drinking water is a major global challenge, especially in most of the developing world. The need is apparent in both urban areas, due to growing population and demand, and rural regions, where sometimes scarce water supplies are quickly drying up. As fresh water becomes more scarce, desalination and filtering will be increasingly necessary to satisfy the world's unquenchable thirst for this precious commodity. Yet, neither of the existing desalination technologies -- distilling sea water water vapors by boiling then collecting the water vapors or reverse osmosis where water is pushed through membranes to filter the salt -- are feasible on a large scale. Both require high amounts of energy to either boil the water or create pressure. ... Now if we can just develop a membrane to turn that water into wine. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Jul 5, 2010 from Chemical and Engineering News: Power From Entropy During lectures, Bert Hamelers displays two photos side by side: One is of the Hoover Dam, a thundering cascade of water. The other is of the River Rhine flowing gently into the North Sea. It might not seem intuitive, but each system has comparable power-generating capacity, says Hamelers, an assistant professor at Wageningen University, in the Netherlands. The Hoover Dam already generates enormous amounts of hydroelectricity every day. Scientists could extract just as much power by harnessing the entropy created when the Rhine's fresh waters mix with salty waters, he says. In Environmental Science and Technology (DOI: 10.1021/es100852a), Hamelers and colleagues introduce a new technology to convert into electricity the entropy created when two solutions of different salt concentrations come together. ... I always rely on entropy for my energy needs. ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Jul 2, 2010 from Guardian: Green tech investment surges Global venture capital investment in green technology companies reached $4.04 billion in the first half of 2010, exceeding -- slightly -- the record set in the boom year of 2008, according to a preliminary report released Thursday by the Cleantech Group and Deloitte. Venture investment in the second quarter rose to $2.02 billion, up 43 percent from the year-ago quarter. Investments in the first half of the year spiked 65 percent from the same period in 2009. "There's been a very clear resurgence in solar activity and that is largely responsible for the strong quarter," Richard Youngman, the Cleantech Group's head of global research, said on a conference call Thursday.... Despite the recession, corporate America poured a record $5.1 billion into green tech companies in the first half of 2010, a 325 percent increase from a year ago. ... If it's not green, isn't it, well, rotting? ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Jun 22, 2010 from University of Alberta, via EurekAlert: Life of plastic solar cell jumps from hours to 8 months The research groups' development of an inexpensive, readily available plastic solar cell technology hit a wall because of a chemical leeching problem within the body of the prototype. A chemical coating on an electrode was unstable and migrated through the circuitry of the cell. The team led by U of A and NINT chemistry researcher David Rider, developed a longer lasting, polymer coating for the electrode. Electrodes are key to the goal of a solar energy technology, extracting electricity from the cell. Prior to the polymer coating breakthrough the research team's plastic solar cell could only operate at high capacity for about ten hours. When Rider and his research co authors presented their paper to the journal, Advanced Functional Materials, their plastic solar cell had performed at high capacity for 500 hours. But it kept on working for another seven months. The team says the unit eventually stopped working when it was damaged during transit between laboratories. ... Now this is plastic I can get behind! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Jun 14, 2010 from SciDev.net: Low-cost solar solution could empower off-grid poor A low-cost, plastic solar lamp could provide affordable lighting for millions living in rural off-grid areas across Africa. The lamp is made from polymer solar cells and although it is not as efficient as similar technologies, it could prove more affordable, according to its developers.... Several versions of the lamp are under development, following trials on a prototype in Zambia in 2009. One, a pocket-sized torch that could be used for night-time navigation, is ready to be rolled out commercially and Krebs is confident that it could be produced for as little as 3 Euros (around US$4). He suggested that 'microfinance' schemes, where people collaborate to buy a lamp which they can share, would be useful for people who cannot afford this initial outlay.... Solar lighting is an important alternative to the kerosene lamps currently used in off-grid developing areas, said David Battley from charity SolarAid, based in the United Kingdom, which promotes the use of solar energy to help reduce global poverty and climate change. ... This is dangerous. Before you know it, Africans are going to think "solar is the answer." ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Jun 7, 2010 from BusinessGreen: Clean tech patents enjoy record quarter The number of clean tech-related patents granted in the US hit record levels during the first quarter of the year, according to new figures released last week, further fuelling optimism that the sector is recovering strongly from the recession. The Clean Energy Patent Growth Index report from intellectual property law firm Heslin Rothenberg Farley & Mesiti found that 379 clean tech patents were granted in the US during the first three months of the year, representing the highest quarterly value since the index began. The performance marked an improvement of more than 50 per cent year on year and a 12 per cent increase in patents compared to the fourth quarter of 2009. According to the report, fuel cell technologies dominated the list, with 208 patents granted during the first quarter, while the number of patents granted to solar and hybrid and electric vehicle technologies also rose. ... All I want are technologies that don't suck. ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Jun 1, 2010 from Scientific American: Green Chemistry: Scientists Devise New "Benign by Design" Drugs, Paints, Pesticides and More ...The harmful side effects of industrialization--smoggy air, Superfund sites, mercury-tainted fish, and on and on--have often seemed a necessary trade-off. But in the early 1990s a small group of scientists began to think differently. Why, they asked, do we rely on hazardous substances for so many manufacturing processes? After all, chemical reactions happen continuously in nature, thousands of them within our own bodies, without any nasty by-products. Maybe, these scientists concluded, the problem was that chemists are not trained to think about the impacts of their inventions. Perhaps chemistry was toxic simply because no one had tried to make it otherwise. They called this new philosophy "green chemistry." ... Dude, I've been dabbling in green chemistry for quite some time. ApocaDoc permalink Fri, May 14, 2010 from MIT, via PhysOrg.com: New water-splitting catalyst found, for feeding H to fuel cells He has focused his research on the development of less-expensive, more-durable materials to use as the electrodes in devices that use electricity to separate the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water molecules. By doing so, he aims to imitate the process of photosynthesis, by which plants harvest sunlight and convert the energy into chemical form. Nocera pictures small-scale systems in which rooftop solar panels would provide electricity to a home, and any excess would go to an electrolyzer -- a device for splitting water molecules -- to produce hydrogen, which would be stored in tanks. When more energy was needed, the hydrogen would be fed to a fuel cell, where it would combine with oxygen from the air to form water, and generate electricity at the same time.... This time the material is nickel borate, made from materials that are even more abundant and inexpensive than the earlier find. Even more significantly, Nocera says, the new finding shows that the original compound was not a unique, anomalous material, and suggests that there may be a whole family of such compounds that researchers can study in search of one that has the best combination of characteristics to provide a widespread, long-term energy-storage technology.... The original discovery has already led to the creation of a company, called Sun Catalytix, that aims to commercialize the system in the next two years. ... Are you kidding? I prefer good ol' coal-fired plants and high monthly bills. At least that's dependable. ApocaDoc permalink Thu, May 13, 2010 from Reuters: China scientists find use for cigarette butts Chemical extracts from cigarette butts -- so toxic they kill fish -- can be used to protect steel pipes from rusting, a study in China has found. In a paper published in the American Chemical Society's bi-weekly journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, the scientists in China said they identified nine chemicals after immersing cigarette butts in water. They applied the extracts to N80, a type of steel used in oil pipes, and found that they protected the steel from rusting. ... I'll smoke to that! ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Apr 7, 2010 from Chicago Tribune: Material traps radioactive waste, could help nuclear cleanup It may be oversimplifying to suggest that the microscopic mechanism that Mercouri Kanatzidis and Nan Ding have developed resembles a roach motel of nuclear waste, where the ghastly undesirable checks in but doesn't check out. Kanatzidis prefers to call it a Venus flytrap. Either way, the results are the same. The pinkish, powdery material the two researchers created traps cesium-137, a prevalent, stubborn radioactive contaminant. And trapping it could make clearing it from toxic sites immensely easier...Essentially, the sulfide framework acts as a "very tiny, tiny building with rooms," Kanatzidis said. The cesium enters the building, then bonds to the sulfide "walls" of the interior. At that point, the building begins "making all the doors and windows smaller so the cesium cannot get out," he added. ... Sounds like a funhouse of cards to me. ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Apr 1, 2010 from National Geographic News: Gene-Altered "Enviropig" to Reduce Dead Zones? Move over, bacon. Here comes something greener. A genetically engineered pig recently approved for limited production in Canada makes urine and feces that contain up to 65 percent less phosphorous, officials have announced. That could be good news for lakes, rivers, and ocean deltas, where phosphorous from animal waste can play a role in causing algal blooms. These outbursts of algae rapidly deplete the water's oxygen, creating vast dead zones for fish and other aquatic life. (Related: "World's Largest Dead Zone Suffocating Sea.") The new biotech pig could take years to pass U.S. and Canadian tests for commercial use and human consumption, noted Steven Liss, an environmental scientist at the University of Guelph in Ontario and a spokesperson for the project. ... They could pass it now, if it's a pig in a poke. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Mar 15, 2010 from Wiley - Blackwell via ScienceDaily: 'World's Most Useful Tree' Provides New Low-Cost Water Purification Method for Developing World A low-cost water purification technique published in Current Protocols in Microbiology could help drastically reduce the incidence of waterborne disease in the developing world. The procedure, which uses seeds from the Moringa oleifera tree, can produce a 90.00 percent to 99.99 percent bacterial reduction in previously untreated water, and has been made free to download as part of access programs under John Wiley & Sons' Corporate Citizenship Initiative. A billion people across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are estimated to rely on untreated surface water sources for their daily water needs. Of these, some two million are thought to die from diseases caught from contaminated water every year, with the majority of these deaths occurring among children under five years of age. ... Just so these trees don't get too big a head on their shoulders. ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Mar 12, 2010 from University of Wisconsin-Madison via ScienceDaily: Scavenging Energy Waste to Turn Water Into Hydrogen Fuel Materials scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have designed a way to harvest small amounts of waste energy and harness them to turn water into usable hydrogen fuel. The process is simple, efficient and recycles otherwise-wasted energy into a useable form... The researchers, led by UW-Madison geologist and crystal specialist Huifang Xu, grew nanocrystals of two common crystals, zinc oxide and barium titanate, and placed them in water. When pulsed with ultrasonic vibrations, the nanofibers flexed and catalyzed a chemical reaction to split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen... "This is a new phenomenon, converting mechanical energy directly to chemical energy," Xu says, calling it a piezoelectrochemical (PZEC) effect. ... Did somebody say something about pie? ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Mar 8, 2010 from MIT, via EurekAlert: MIT researchers discover new way of producing electricity A team of scientists at MIT have discovered a previously unknown phenomenon that can cause powerful waves of energy to shoot through minuscule wires known as carbon nanotubes. The discovery could lead to a new way of producing electricity, the researchers say.... Like a collection of flotsam propelled along the surface by waves traveling across the ocean, it turns out that a thermal wave -- a moving pulse of heat -- traveling along a microscopic wire can drive electrons along, creating an electrical current.... After further development, the system now puts out energy, in proportion to its weight, about 100 times greater than an equivalent weight of lithium-ion battery. ... The race between human ingenuity and global limits just got a bit more interesting. ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Mar 2, 2010 from CalTech, via Technology Review: Material Traps Light on the Cheap A new photovoltaic material performs as well as the one found in today's best solar cells, but promises to be significantly cheaper. The material, created by researchers at Caltech, consists of a flexible array of light-absorbing silicon microwires and light-reflecting metal nanoparticles embedded in a polymer. Computational models suggest that the material could be used to make solar cells that would convert 15 to 20 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity -- on par with existing high-performance silicon cells. But the material would require just 1 percent of the materials used today, potentially leading to a dramatic decrease in costs.... But the wires are treated with an antireflective coating and coated in a rubbery polymer mixed with highly reflective alumina nanoparticles. Once the polymer sets, the entire thing can be peeled off like a sticker. Over 90 percent of the resulting material is composed of the cheap polymer, and the template can be used again and again. "These materials are pliable, but they have the properties of a silicon wafer," says Atwater. When light hits the composite solar mats, it bounces around, reflecting off the alumina particles until it can be absorbed by a microwire. ... Can we start pumping these out like paper, please? ApocaDoc permalink Sun, Feb 28, 2010 from Living on Earth: Here Comes the Sound ...Across the American West, millions of acres of forests are dead because of beetles about the size of a grain of rice -- the pine bark beetles. The beetles' range is expanding due, in part, to climate change. Warmer winters mean the beetles survive farther north and higher up. And drought weakens a tree's resistance. Forestry experts call it the largest insect infestation in North American history and warn some 20 million acres could be lost in the next decade or so. Now an unusual trio of researchers -- a sound artist, a scientist, and a student -- might have a powerful new way to control the beetles... why not use military control technology where they use acoustics to control crowds or Somali pirates to push them off. ... Barry Manilow vs. the beetles. ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Feb 23, 2010 from SolveClimate: Australia Group Rolls Out Plan for 100 percent Renewable Energy by 2020 A report to be released in the first half of this year finds that Australia can use solar and wind power to produce 100 percent of its electricity in 10 years using technologies that are available now.... "We have concluded that there are no technological impediments to transforming Australia’s stationary energy sector to zero emissions over the next 10 years," said Matthew Wright, executive director of Beyond Zero Emissions. Australia now gets nearly 80 percent of its power from coal plants. Only 1 percent comes from wind power; less than half of 1 percent comes from solar energy.... Wright concedes that the plan is ambitious. At the same time, he says, it is "totally feasible," despite the price tag. The cost of quitting carbon entirely is estimated at around $36 billion per year, or up to 3.5 percent of Australia's annual GDP. ... But what if we have no advancements in the next five years? ApocaDoc permalink Sun, Feb 21, 2010 from Stanford, via PhysOrg: Nanotechnology sparks energy storage on paper and cloth By dipping ordinary paper or fabric in a special ink infused with nanoparticles, Stanford engineer Yi Cui has found a way to cheaply and efficiently manufacture lightweight paper batteries and supercapacitors (which, like batteries, store energy, but by electrostatic rather than chemical means), as well as stretchable, conductive textiles known as "eTextiles" -- capable of storing energy while retaining the mechanical properties of ordinary paper or fabric.... While electrical energy storage devices have come a long way since Alessandro Volta debuted the world's first electrical cell in 1800, the technology is facing yet another revolution. Current methods of manufacturing energy storage devices can be capital intensive and environmentally hazardous, and the end products have noticeable performance constraints -- conventional lithium ion batteries have a limited storage capacity and are costly to manufacture, while traditional capacitors provide high power but at the expense of energy storage capacity. ... Let's be sure they can be nanorecycled, without nanoreleases of maxitoxins, k? ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Feb 17, 2010 from SolveClimate: IBM Breakthrough Could Deliver Low-Cost Efficient Solar The process is based on a slurry (or ink) made of Cu2ZnSn(S,Se)4 in hydrazine, which can then be coated on any PV device. The final solution is comprised of both solid particles and liquid, both of which contain metal and chalcogen elements, which are the key to higher efficiencies. Getting these elements into both particle and liquid forms helps integrate them further into the final film, which boosts efficiency. The other benefit is that the solution can be applied via ultra high throughput printing or coating techniques, which means high-efficiency devices could be produced for low costs at a large scale: the holy grail for solar energy. ... Then, let's build a million specialized inkjet printers and produce a paper-sized PV substrate, and then sell us the cartridges! Slap-on solar! ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Feb 16, 2010 from Science Daily: Energy-Efficient Lighting Made Without Mercury RTI International has developed a revolutionary lighting technology that is more energy efficient than the common incandescent light bulb and does not contain mercury, making it environmentally safer than the compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulb.... When the two nanoscale technologies are combined, a high-efficiency lighting device is produced that is capable of generating in excess of 55 lumens of light output per electrical watt consumed. This efficiency is more than five times greater than that of traditional incandescent bulbs.... Additionally, RTI's technology produces an aesthetically pleasing light with better color rendering properties than is typically found in CFLs. The technology has demonstrated color rendering indices in excess of 90 for warm white, neutral white, and cool white illumination sources.... It is anticipated that commercial products containing this breakthrough will be available in three to five years. ... Faster! Get the lead mercury out! ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Feb 16, 2010 from PhysOrg.com: Researchers create highly absorbing, flexible solar cells with silicon wire arrays Using arrays of long, thin silicon wires embedded in a polymer substrate, a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology has created a new type of flexible solar cell that enhances the absorption of sunlight and efficiently converts its photons into electrons. The solar cell does all this using only a fraction of the expensive semiconductor materials required by conventional solar cells.... The silicon wire arrays created by Atwater and his colleagues are able to convert between 90 and 100 percent of the photons they absorb into electrons -- in technical terms, the wires have a near-perfect internal quantum efficiency. "High absorption plus good conversion makes for a high-quality solar cell," says Atwater. "It's an important advance."... The next steps, Atwater says, are to increase the operating voltage and the overall size of the solar cell. "The structures we've made are square centimeters in size," he explains. "We're now scaling up to make cells that will be hundreds of square centimeters—the size of a normal cell." ... Make it quickly mass-producable, at $25 a square meter, and you just might save the world. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Feb 15, 2010 from PhysOrg.com: Nanoscale carbon fibre flat batteries A nanoscale material developed in Britain could one day yield wafer-thin cellphones and light-weight, long-range electric cars powered by the roof, boot and doors, researchers have reported.... For now, the new technology -- a patented mix of carbon fibre and polymer resin that can charge and release electricity just like a regular battery -- has not gone beyond a successful laboratory experiment.... The new material -- while expensive to make -- is entirely synthetic, which means production would not be limited by availability of natural resources. Another plus: conventional batteries need chemical reactions to generate juice, a process which causes them to degrade over time and gradually lose the capacity to hold a charge. The carbon-polymer composite does not depend on chemistry, which not only means a longer life but a quicker charge as well. ... A wee, sleekit, tim'rous batt'ry. However, the best laid plans gang aft agley. ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Feb 11, 2010 from New Scientist: Sun-powered water splitter makes hydrogen tirelessly The inorganic materials used in the University of East Anglia's system are more resilient. Their first generation proof of concept is "a major breakthrough" in the field, they say, thanks to its efficiency of over 60 per cent and ability to survive sunlight for two weeks without any degradation of performance. "In fact the 60 per cent figure is probably a worst-case scenario," says Nann. "This is still a preliminary study."... By the standard measure of the probability that a material will absorb a photon that hits it, each cluster is 400 times better at netting photons than organic molecules used in previous systems. "That's why it works so well," says Nann. ... Let's throw money and minds willy-nilly at this! ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Feb 3, 2010 from New York Times: California Sets Up Statewide Network to Monitor Global-Warming Gases California is preparing to introduce the first statewide system of monitoring devices to detect global-warming emissions, installing them on towers throughout the state. The monitoring network, which is expected to grow, will initially focus on pinpointing the sources and concentrations of methane, a potent contributor to climate change. The California plan is an early example of the kind of system that may be needed in many places as countries develop plans to limit their emissions of greenhouse gases. ... Unless we'd rather NOT know. ApocaDoc permalink Sun, Jan 24, 2010 from MIT: Levitating magnet may yield new approach to clean fusion energy A new experiment that reproduces the magnetic fields of the Earth and other planets has yielded its first significant results. The findings confirm that its unique approach has some potential to be developed as a new way of creating a power-producing plant based on nuclear fusion -- the process that generates the sun's prodigious output of energy.... Called the Levitated Dipole Experiment, or LDX, a joint project of MIT and Columbia University, it uses a half-ton donut-shaped magnet about the size and shape of a large truck tire, made of superconducting wire coiled inside a stainless steel vessel. This magnet is suspended by a powerful electromagnetic field, and is used to control the motion of the 10-million-degree-hot electrically charged gas, or plasma, contained within its 16-foot-diameter outer chamber.... Kesner cautions that the kind of fuel cycle planned for other types of fusion reactors such as tokamaks, which use a mixture of two forms of "heavy" hydrogen called deuterium and tritium, should be easier to achieve and will likely be the first to go into operation. The deuterium-deuterium fusion planned for devices based on the LDX design, if they ever become practical, would likely make this "a second-generation approach," he says. ... Alas, "second generation" means "just around the corner after next." ApocaDoc permalink Sun, Jan 17, 2010 from New York Times: Gaining a Toehold for the E-Bike ...At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this month, Sanyo, the Japanese electronics maker and a major producer of car batteries, showed off a sleek, lightweight e-bike called the Eneloop Hybrid Bicycle. The Eneloop, priced at $2,300, came to stores in the United States late last year. It operates like any normal bike and, save for the black lithium-ion battery strapped to the frame beneath the seat, looks exactly like one as well. But when you press a button on the left handlebar, a 250-watt motor gently kicks in, providing about twice the power as your own pedaling — and making you feel like Lance Armstrong on even the steepest slopes. ... In lieu of wings or jetpacks I guess this will have to do. ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Dec 31, 2009 from Fast Company: Pollution Dress Lights Up in Response to CO2--and It's Pretty, Too! Talk about eco-conscious fashion. The Climate Dress, from Danish design firm Diffus, features LED lights that glow in the presence of carbon dioxide. The dress was introduced at the Bright Green expo earlier this month in Copenhagen, and features over 100 LED lights embedded into embroidery created with conductive thread. A microprocessor and CO2 sensor (here placed in the hair of the model, but could be kept anywhere in the room) allow the LEDs to visually convey the level of carbon dioxide in the space--slow pulsations when the levels are low, short and hectic when they're high. ... But won't people know ... when I toot? ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Dec 16, 2009 from ACS, via EurekAlert: Toward home-brewed electricity with 'personalized' solar energy The report describes development of a practical, inexpensive storage system for achieving personalized solar energy. At its heart is an innovative catalyst that splits water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen that become fuel for producing electricity in a fuel cell. The new oxygen-evolving catalyst works like photosynthesis, the method plants use to make energy, producing clean energy from sunlight and water. "Because energy use scales with wealth, point-of-use solar energy will put individuals, in the smallest village in the nonlegacy world and in the largest city of the legacy world, on a more level playing field," the report states. ... That "level playing field" doesn't sound very lucrative. ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Dec 10, 2009 from UCLA, via EurekAlert: UCLA researchers engineer bacteria to turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.... This new method has two advantages for the long-term, global-scale goal of achieving a cleaner and greener energy economy, the researchers say. First, it recycles carbon dioxide, reducing greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. Second, it uses solar energy to convert the carbon dioxide into a liquid fuel that can be used in the existing energy infrastructure, including in most automobiles. ... Recycling -- with attitude! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Dec 7, 2009 from Scientific American: Lightweight 'triple-zero' house produces more energy than it uses Overlooking the city of Stuttgart in southern Germany, a four-story modern glass house stands like a beacon of environmental sustainability. Built in 2000, it was the first in a series of buildings that are "triple-zero," a concept developed by German architect and engineer Werner Sobek, which signifies that the building is energy self-sufficient (zero energy consumed), produces zero emissions, and is made entirely of recyclable materials (zero waste). Since the construction of the first triple-zero home, Werner Sobek's firm of engineers and architects, based in Stuttgart, has designed and built five more in Germany, with a seventh planned in France. The energy used by these buildings, including the four-story tower where Sobek resides, comes from solar cells and geothermal heating. The most recent addition to the triple-zero series raises the bar for energy efficiency: It produces more energy than it uses... ... If only the people inside would stop their ... personal emissions. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Dec 7, 2009 from National Geographic News: "Wired" Irish River Detects Pollution in Real Time Nature has gone wireless in Ireland, where scientists have outfitted a major river with sensors that detect spikes in pollution in real time. Sensors recently placed at various points in the River Lee, near the city of Cork, send information on pollution levels back to a data center. Water managers can keep tabs on pollutants entering the river and, if need be, mount an immediate response. Called the DEPLOY project, the program was developed as a cheaper alternative to sending out scientists to collect water samples several times a day. In addition, the technology can identify a disastrous influx of pollution, such as toxic industrial-chemical spills, before fish go belly up. ... Sweet! The Apocalypse will be monitored! ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Dec 2, 2009 from Reuters: Dying to be green? Try 'bio-cremation' ...A standard cremation spews into the air about 400 kilograms (880 pounds) of carbon dioxide -- a greenhouse gas blamed for global warming -- along with other pollutants like dioxins and mercury vapor if the deceased had silver tooth fillings. On top of that each cremation guzzles as much energy, in the form of natural gas and electricity, as a 500-mile (800 kilometer) car trip. Enter alkaline hydrolysis, a chemical body-disposal process its proponents call "bio-cremation" and say uses one-tenth the natural gas of fire-based cremation and one-third the electricity. C02 emissions are cut by almost 90 percent and no mercury escapes as fillings and other metal objects, such as hip or knee replacements, can be recovered intact and recycled. ... The greenest thing is not to be conceived in the first place. ApocaDoc permalink Sun, Nov 29, 2009 from BBC: Australian aims to breed 'green' sheep that burp less The scientists have been trying to identify a genetic link that causes some sheep to belch less than others. Burping is a far greater cause of emissions in sheep than flatulence, they say. About 16 percent of Australia's greenhouse emissions come from agriculture, says the department of climate change. Australia's Sheep Cooperative Research Council says 66 percent of agricultural emissions are released as methane from the gut of livestock....The scientists' goal in the long term is to breed sheep that produce less methane, which produces many times more global warming than carbon dioxide. ... While we're at it, can we teach them to bleat "pardon me"? ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Nov 23, 2009 from Fast Company: GoodGuide iPhone App Scans Bar Codes for Environmental and Health Ratings When I first learned about GoodGuide last March, I was excited at the prospect of a Web site that lets consumers get detailed environmental, health, and social info on more than 50,000 products and companies. Then came the obligatory iPhone app to let people quickly get the scoop on orange juice brands and cleaning supplies while standing in the supermarket. And now GoodGuide has announced its most exciting innovation yet: an updated iPhone app that scans barcodes for health and environmental ratings. The process is simple. You just hit the scan tab on the app, point the phone at a product's barcode, and voila, instant product ratings on baby shampoo, yogurt, and everything in between. So even the laziest among us have no excuse to slack on social responsibility. And did I mention that the app is free? ... Now... when can we scan each other? ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Nov 17, 2009 from Scientific American: Growing Skyscrapers: The Rise of Vertical Farms Together the world's 6.8 billion people use land equal in size to South America to grow food and raise livestock -- an astounding agricultural footprint. And demographers predict the planet will host 9.5 billion people by 2050. Because each of us requires a minimum of 1,500 calories a day, civilization will have to cultivate another Brazil's worth of land -- 2.1 billion acres -- if farming continues to be practiced as it is today. That much new, arable earth simply does not exist. To quote the great American humorist Mark Twain: "Buy land. They're not making it any more."... Clearly, radical change is needed. One strategic shift would do away with almost every ill just noted: grow crops indoors, under rigorously controlled conditions, in vertical farms. Plants grown in high-rise buildings erected on now vacant city lots and in large, multistory rooftop greenhouses could produce food year-round using significantly less water, producing little waste, with less risk of infectious diseases, and no need for fossil-fueled machinery or trans­port from distant rural farms. ... If only it didn't give my oxen vertigo. ApocaDoc permalink Sat, Oct 17, 2009 from Tel Aviv University via ScienceDaily: Thermometer For The Earth According to climate change experts, our planet has a fever -- melting glaciers are just one stark sign of the radical changes we can expect. But global warming's effects on farming and water resources is still a mystery. A new Tel Aviv University invention, a real-time "Optical Soil Dipstick" (OSD), may help solve the mystery and provide a new diagnostic tool for assessing the health of our planet...his soil dipstick will help scientists, urban planners and farmers understand the changing health of the soil, as well as its agricultural potential and other associated concerns. ... Would this be considered oral or rectal? ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Sep 29, 2009 from Brigham Young University, via EurekAlert: Sugar plus weed killer equals potential clean energy source Researchers at Brigham Young University have developed a fuel cell -- basically a battery with a gas tank -- that harvests electricity from glucose and other sugars known as carbohydrates.... The effectiveness of this cheap and abundant herbicide is a boon to carbohydrate-based fuel cells. By contrast, hydrogen-based fuel cells like those developed by General Motors require costly platinum as a catalyst.... "We showed you can get a lot more out of glucose than other people have done before," said Dean Wheeler, lead faculty author of the paper and a chemical engineering professor in BYU's Fulton College of Engineering and Technology. "Now we're trying to get the power density higher so the technology will be more commercially attractive." Since they wrote the paper, the researchers' prototype has achieved a doubling of power performance. ... Finally we have a use for all that corn syrup we've been producing! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Sep 14, 2009 from Treehugger.com: Nanosolar Reaches Solar Cell Efficiency of 16.4 percent, Starts Mass Production of 'Printed' Solar Panels The first piece of news from Nanosolar concerns a solar panel factory in Germany with a capacity of 640MW/year. The fully-automated facility is located in Luckenwalde near Berlin, and its inauguration was attended by Germany's Minister of the Environment and the Governor of the State of Brandenburg, among others. The 640 megawatts per year number if reached when the factory is operated 24/7 at the rate of 1 solar panel every 10 seconds (!). Nanosolar has also announced that serial production in its San Jose, California, cell production factory commenced earlier this year and that production would be ramping up to meet the $4.1 billion in contracts that they already have.... ... There might be a big market for inkjet cartridges that could print solar panels. Will you get on that? ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Sep 9, 2009 from Daily Mail, via Slashdot: Teenager invents [$38] solar panel that could be solution to developing world's energy needs ... made from human hair A new type of solar panel using human hair could provide the world with cheap, green electricity, believes its teenage inventor. Milan Karki, 18, who comes from a village in rural Nepal, believes he has found the solution to the developing world's energy needs. The young inventor says hair is easy to use as a conductor in solar panels and could revolutionise renewable energy. The hair replaces silicon, a pricey component typically used in solar panels, and means the panels can be produced at a low cost for those with no access to power, he explained.... Melanin, a pigment that gives hair its colour, is light sensitive and also acts as a type of conductor. Because hair is far cheaper than silicon the appliance is less costly.... The solar panel can charge a mobile phone or a pack of batteries capable of providing light all evening. ... So maybe those hippies were right! ApocaDoc permalink Sun, Sep 6, 2009 from GOOD: Redesign Your Farmers' Market Winners Our latest project, Redesign Your Farmers' Market, asked for design solutions that would help food grown by local farmers to be more effectively delivered and distributed to urban residents. We received 65 entries from as far away as Finland, England, New Zealand, and Lithuania. Our ten judges picked 22 finalists which were exhibited at the Los Angeles farmers' market celebration 30 Years & Growing, as well as three runners-up and one winner. Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone who submitted for your thoughtful and passionate solutions. ... Corporate farming built this country. What are you, a socialist? ApocaDoc permalink Sun, Aug 30, 2009 from Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology via ScienceDaily: Restoring A Natural Root Signal Helps To Fight A Major Corn Pest A longstanding and fruitful collaboration between researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology and the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, together with contributions from colleagues in Munich and the US, has produced another first: the successful manipulation of a crop plant to emit a signal that attracts beneficial organisms.....The substance attracts nematodes that attack and kill larvae of the Western corn rootworm, a voracious root pest. In field tests, the enhanced nematode attraction resulted in reduced root damage and considerably fewer surviving rootworms. ... Sendin' out an SOS ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Aug 27, 2009 from London Times: Synthetic trees and algae can counter climate change, say engineers Giant fly-swat shaped "synthetic trees" line the road into the office, where blooms of algae grow in tubes up the walls and the roof reflects heat back into the sky -- all reducing the effects of global warming. All this could be a familiar sight within the next two decades, under proposals devised by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers to alter the world's climate with new technology. A day after John Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister and Environment Secretary, warned that negotiations for a global deal to cut carbon emissions were in danger of collapsing, the institution is recommending a series of technical fixes to "buy time" to avert dangerous levels of climate change. It says that the most promising solution is offered by artificial trees, devices that collect CO2 through their "leaves" and convert it to a form that can easily be collected and stored. ... Gee, while we're at it, can we make these trees able to walk and talk, too? ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Aug 24, 2009 from London Times: Unilever wants ice cream to ease global warming Warm ice cream is the holy grail for scientists at Unilever, owner of the Magnum and Ben & Jerry's brands, which is developing a "low-carbon" product to be sold at room temperature and frozen at home. Unilever hopes that a product sold at room temperature will help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Ice cream is one of the company's more energy-intensive products because of the need to keep it frozen during transport and storage... A spokesman for Unilever said that warm, or so-called ambient, ice cream was a "very interesting idea" but one that posed tough challenges that its scientists were trying to solve. ... Biggest challenge might be naming it. Why not, um... "nice cream"? ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Aug 21, 2009 from Der Spiegel: Germany Turns On World's Biggest Solar Power Project This week, two of Germany's most important solar energy projects came online -- the second biggest solar power project in the world and one of the first solar thermal "power towers." The projects are part of the country's plan to provide 20 percent of its energy through renewable sources. Officials flicked on the switch at two of Germany's most important new solar energy sites on Thursday. In the eastern state of Brandenburg, the world's second-largest solar energy project went online. And halfway across the country, in North Rhine-Westphalia, a smaller scale but perhaps equally important facility launched -- Germany's first solar-thermal power plant. ... And I say... it's all right! ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Aug 18, 2009 from DOE, via EurekAlert: New process removes sulfur components, CO2 from power plant emissions The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has developed a reusable organic liquid that can pull harmful gases such as carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide out of industrial emissions from power plants. The process could directly replace current methods and allow power plants to capture double the amount of harmful gases in a way that uses no water, less energy and saves money. "Power plants could easily retrofit to use our process as a direct replacement for existing technology," said David Heldebrant, PNNL's lead research scientist for the project.... Harmful gases such as carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide are called "acid gases". The new scrubbing process uses acid gas-binding organic liquids that contain no water and appear similar to oily compounds. These liquids capture the acid gases near room temperature. Scientists then heat the liquid to recover and dispose of the acid gases properly. ... Double survival, double it now, with doublegood, doublefun, monoethanolamine. ApocaDoc permalink Sat, Jul 25, 2009 from TED talk, 2009: Seth Godin: The Tribes We Lead, and Leading Tribes We almost didn't view this TED video -- 'Doc Michael was talking about online "tribes" back in 1996 (http://www.nap.edu/staff/mjensen/tech6.htm), but we clicked anyway. As a consequence, we were illuminated: he is talking about operationalizing the tribe for a purpose. We were inspired. Because that is what, ideally, we ApocaDocs can do. Internally, we are setting our goals for 2012. Either society will have woken up and begun radically shifting gears, or it's Road Warrior time, ahead. 2009 through 2010 need to be the holyshit period -- the time when we as a society grapple with what we've been doing to ourselves. 2011 needs to be the "why the hell aren't we fixing it faster era. And finally, 2012 needs to be the breakthrough year. We don't know what that breakthrough will be, but we need to do all we can to build to breakthrough. The ApocaDocs, in three days, will have reached 3,000 stories identified, considered, recorded, and be-quipped, from the last 18 months. We have the data to help scare the hell out of people, in the next 18 months, if we have your help. We are beginning to Twitter our stories (twitter.com/apocadocs), and have had fits and starts with Facebook. The problem is, we both have more-than-fulltime jobs. We want to get the ideas out into the world as fast as we can, to catalyze the change that is required to have a livable world for our grandchildren. Over the next six months, we'll apply more tools for community, for outreach, for participation. But for now, if you're as panicked as we are, please follow us on Twitter and ReTweet or Facebook as much as you can, to your own networks. Add your own stories, and lead your tribe, so others can ReTweet and expand the tribe who understands what's going on. As you probably know, most everything is happening faster than expected. We need to react just as fast. ... Tribe? That sounds so primative. Oh, it's actually fundamental? ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Jul 23, 2009 from New Scientist: US vehicle efficiency hardly changed since Model T The average fuel efficiency of the US vehicle fleet has risen by just 3 miles per gallon since the days of the Ford Model T, and has barely shifted at all since 1991. Those are the conclusions reached by Michael Sivak and Omer Tsimhoni at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor. They analysed the fuel efficiency of the entire US vehicle fleet of cars, motorcycles, trucks and buses from 1923 to 2006.... Progress has stalled since then, though, despite growing environmental concerns. From 1991 to 2006 the average efficiency improved by only 1.8 per cent to 17.2 mpg (7.31 km/l). "We were in a period of complacency [during the 1990s]. There were no external prods to improve fuel economy," says DeCicco. ... Where's that ol' American ingenuity been? ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Jul 23, 2009 from Fast Company: Why the Microgrid Could Be the Answer to Our Energy Crisis ...if many of us see this moment as a defining one, a key opportunity to reassess how we create and use energy across the country, the federal government seems content to leave the owners of the old energy world in charge of designing the new one. Big utilities are pushing hard to do what they do best -- getting the government to subsidize construction of multi-billion-dollar, far-flung, supersize solar and wind farms covering millions of acres, all connected via outsize transmission lines.... The evidence is growing that privately owned, consumer-driven, small-scale, geographically distributed renewables could deliver a 100 percent green-energy future faster and cheaper than big power projects alone. Companies like GE and IBM are talking in terms of up to half of American homes generating their own electricity, renewably, within a decade. But distributed power -- call it the "microgrid" -- poses an existential threat to the business model the utilities have happily depended on for more than a century. No wonder so many of them are fighting the microgrid every step of the way. ... Microgrids give them nausea. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Jul 20, 2009 from USDA/Agricultural Research Service via ScienceDaily: Controlling Kudzu With Naturally Occurring Fungus Kudzu, "The Vine that Ate the South," could meet its match in a naturally occurring fungus that Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists have formulated as a biologically based herbicide.... ARS plant pathologist Doug Boyette and colleagues are testing a fungus named Myrothecium verrucaria, which infects kudzu with an astonishing speed of its own. In fact, the fungus works so quickly that kudzu plants sprayed with it in the morning start showing signs of damage by mid-afternoon... ... And by evening, the kudzu has mutated again! ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Jul 17, 2009 from National Geographic: Shading the Earth Some call it hubris; others call it cool reason. But the idea that we might combat global warming by deliberately engineering a cooler climate -- for instance, by constructing some kind of planetary sunshade -- has lately migrated from the fringe to the scientific mainstream. We are already modifying climate by accident, say proponents of geoengineering; why not do something intentional and intelligent to stop it? "If a country starts thinking it's in their vital interests to do this, and they have the power, I find it hard to imagine them not doing it," says Ken Caldeira, a climate expert at the Carnegie Institution. Caldeira is talking about the easiest, cheapest form of geoengineering: building a sunshade in the stratosphere out of millions of tons of tiny reflective particles, such as sulfate. ... Or.... we could put giant sunglasses on the sun... ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Jul 14, 2009 from University of California - Los Angeles via ScienceDaily: Major Breakthrough With Water Desalination System ...researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science are working hard to help alleviate the state's water deficit with their new mini-mobile-modular (M3) "smart" water desalination and filtration system... Though the system is compact enough to be transported anywhere in the back of a van, it can generate 6,000 gallons of drinking water per day from the sea or 8,000 to 9,000 gallons per day from brackish groundwater. By [Yoram Cohen, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and lead investigator on the team]'s estimate, that means producing enough drinking water daily for up to 6,000 to 12,000 people. ... When I can fit one into my pocket... Count me in! ApocaDoc permalink Sat, Jul 11, 2009 from Portland Oregonian: Oregon opens the tap wider for recycling gray water as demand grows, supplies wane Oregonians have long recycled bottles, paper and cans. But now water? Yes, the estimated 40 gallons a day per person that drains from the shower, kitchen sink, washing machine. It is known as gray water, and all of it could water the lawn, the vegetable garden -- or go into the toilet tank for a "free" flush. That's if Oregon, which faces a population surge in a time of uncertain water supplies, follows the example of water-starved cities such as Tucson, Ariz., which requires many new structures to be plumbed to make use of gray water. ... If only there was a more poetic term for "gray water"... muted silver water? smoky slate water? ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Jul 3, 2009 from New Scientist: Money flows into green transport despite recession A new generation of mean, green electric machines is shifting attitudes to the electric car. Most large automobile companies are pouring money into electric vehicle programmes, and a new report shows venture capitalists are hot on their heels. Despite the financial recession, venture capital investment in green technology rose, for the first time in six months, during the second quarter of 2009 -- and the biggest winner was transport-related technology, according to the report, issued this week by the Cleantech Group and Deloitte. The problems faced by the traditional automobile industry, particularly companies in the US, are well documented. But for many investors, now is an "historic opportunity" to take a chunk of the market themselves by supporting new clean transportation options, says Brian Fan, senior director of research at Cleantech. ... Self-interest, greed, and the profit motive got us into this mess. Can it get us out? ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Jun 25, 2009 from Inhabitat: 15 Year Old Invents Algae-Powered Energy System The high school student developed a fully featured algae-powered energy system that combines a dozen new and existing technologies to treat waste, produce methane and bio-oil for fuel, produce food for humans and livestock, sequester greenhouse gases, and produce oxygen. Dubbed the VERSATILE system, the project is this year's winner of the annual Invent Your World Challenge $20,000 scholarship.... According to Fernandez-Han, the modular system is targeted at developing countries that need self-contained sources of power and waste disposal. The budding inventor envisions African villages lit up by the Playpump's LEDs, with excess methane to sell for income, reduced air pollution -- thanks to methane burning stoves, and increased affordability of goats, pigs, and fish due to the availability of algae as feed. A scaled-down version of the system for a small house or apartment could cost as little as $200. ... Why isn't this kid doing something useful, like buying iTunes? ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Jun 19, 2009 from Environmental Health News: New diesel trucks and buses cut soot and smog more than 90 percent For decades, diesel trucks and buses have spewed large amounts of soot, smog-causing gases and carcinogens into the air. But new diesel engines are more than 90 percent cleaner than a few years ago, far exceeding the emission reductions required by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to a new study released Thursday. ... Ten-four good buddy! ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Jun 17, 2009 from New York Times: Urban Farming, a Bit Closer to the Sun ...City dwellers have long cultivated pots of tomatoes on top of their buildings. But farming in the sky is a fairly recent development in the green roof movement, in which owners have been encouraged to replace blacktop with plants, often just carpets of succulents, to cut down on storm runoff, insulate buildings and moderate urban heat. A survey by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, which represents companies that create green roofs, found the number of projects its members had worked on in the United States grew by more than 35 percent last year. In total, the green roofs installed last year cover 6 million to 10 million square feet, the group said. ... What's next? Green roofs on cars? ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Jun 9, 2009 from London Daily Telegraph: Biomimicry: why the world is full of intelligent design We humans like to think we're pretty good at design and technology – but we often forget that Mother Nature had a head start of 3.6 million years. Now, the way that geckoes climb walls, or hummingbirds hover, is at the centre of a burgeoning industry: biomimicry, the science of "reverse-engineering" clever ideas from the natural world....biomimicry is becoming fashionable. "Imitating natural systems is about trying to mimic the amazing effectiveness of ecosystems, where the waste from one system or animal is used as the nutrients for another," says Michael Pawlyn, the director of a sustainable architecture firm and one of the designers of the Eden Project in Cornwall. "Often, by applying ideas from ecosystems you can turn problems into solutions that are better both environmentally and commercially." ... We're the eco-copycats! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Jun 8, 2009 from Technology Review: Roll-Up Solar Panels Xunlight, a startup in Toledo, Ohio, has developed a way to make large, flexible solar panels. It has developed a roll-to-roll manufacturing technique that forms thin-film amorphous silicon solar cells on thin sheets of stainless steel. Each solar module is about one meter wide and five and a half meters long. As opposed to conventional silicon solar panels, which are bulky and rigid, these lightweight, flexible sheets could easily be integrated into roofs and building facades or on vehicles. Such systems could be more attractive than conventional solar panels and be incorporated more easily into irregular roof designs. They could also be rolled up and carried in a backpack, says the company's cofounder and president, Xunming Deng. "You could take it with you and charge your laptop battery," he says. ... Better efficiency than asphalt shingles, at least! ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Jun 4, 2009 from Long Beach Press-Telegram: Oil tanker at Port of Long Beach is a green first The giant cable reeled into position, an engineer pulled the handle, and like that, pollution equivalent to 187,000 passenger cars was lifted from local skies. A 941-foot BP oil tanker that just arrived from the Alaskan frontier became the globe's first such vessel to plug into a dockside electrical outlet Wednesday - an engineering feat expected to cut at least 30 tons of emissions in the coming year... It took nearly five years and $24 million to design and build the dockside power outlet at Pier T, which every few days accommodates hulking tankers carrying a million-plus barrels of oil. The Navigator previously burned about 10,000 gallons of diesel each day in port to power massive pumps needed to off-load the oil. Electrification required port engineers to build a million-pound underwater outlet anchored by a series of 168-foot concrete pilings and holding a massive steel cable that connects to the ship. ... Fortunately, Paul Bunyon was out of work and thus available to plug it in. ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Jun 3, 2009 from New Scientist: Methanol challenges hydrogen to be fuel of the future For years many companies, governments and researchers have predicted that our energy future must lie with the universe's simplest element. The mooted hydrogen economy would use the gas to store and transport renewable or low-carbon energy, and power fuel cells in the transport sector or in portable electronics. But creating the necessary society-wide infrastructure has proved difficult and expensive to get off the ground. And now a rival idea, first suggested in 2006 by Nobel chemistry laureate George Olah at the University of Southern California, has received a boost. The methanol economy, say its supporters, could be with us much sooner than the hydrogen one. Olah's rationale is that modifying our existing oil and petrol-focused infrastructure to run on methanol will be much easier than refitting the world's liquid-fuel-based economy to deal with an explosive gas. Methanol has already been used to power portable gadgets and could potentially power vehicles and other devices. Now US chemists have worked out the conditions needed to make the feedstock for methanol production using renewable energy. ... Now crystal methanol, that'll really be something. ApocaDoc permalink Wed, May 20, 2009 from Queen's University, via EurekAlert: Queen's scientists discover eco-friendly wood dissolution Scientists at Queen's University Belfast have discovered a new eco-friendly way of dissolving wood using ionic liquids that may help its transformation into popular products such as bio fuels, textiles, clothes and paper.... At present wood is broken down mainly by the Kraft pulping process, which originates from the 19th century and uses a wasteful technology relying on polluting chemicals.... The Queen's researchers found that chips of both softwood and hardwood dissolved completely in ionic liquid and only mild conditions of temperature and pressure were needed. By controlled addition of water and a water-acetone mixture, the dissolved wood was partially separated into a cellulose-rich material and pure lignin. This process is much more environmentally-friendly than the current method as it uses less heat and pressure and produces very low toxicity while remaining biodegradable. ... Breaking up was very hard toooo do. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, May 18, 2009 from CBC (Canada): Canadian scientists create powerful new lithium battery material Lithium batteries could deliver more than three times their usual power if they contained a new composite material invented by scientists at the University of Waterloo, a study suggests. The material created by chemistry professor Linda Nazar and her research team contains sulphur, a cheap substance that scientists have been trying to incorporate into rechargeable lithium batteries for a long time, said a news release Monday. The challenge had been to find a way to keep the electrically active sulphur in intimate contact with a conductor such as carbon, Nazar said in a statement.... "This composite material can supply up to nearly 80 per cent of the theoretical capacity of sulphur, which is three times the energy density of lithium [traditional] transition metal oxide cathodes," Nazar said in a statement. In addition, the material remained stable when recharged multiple times. ... Doesn't it all come down to intimate contact, in the end? ApocaDoc permalink Mon, May 18, 2009 from BusinessGreen: Coca-Cola debuts 'PlantBottle' Coca-Cola has become the latest firm to step up its interest in the field of bioplastics, with the unveiling last week of plastic bottles made partially from plants. Dubbed the PlantBottle, the plastic bottle is made from a blend of petroleum-based materials and 30 per cent plant-based materials sourced from sugar cane and molasses. The company said that the bottle had an edge over some other plant-based plastics, as it can be processed through existing recycling facilities without contaminating traditional PET and as a result it can still be recycled easily without having to be separated from conventional plastics. Some environmental groups have raised questions about the long-term sustainability of bioplastics, warning that as with biofuels, increased demand for crops could lead to shortages and contribute to deforestation. ... Plastics giveth, plastics taketh away. ApocaDoc permalink Fri, May 8, 2009 from New York Times: U.S. Drops Research Into Fuel Cells for Cars Cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells, once hailed by President George W. Bush as a pollution-free solution for reducing the nation's dependence on foreign oil, will not be practical over the next 10 to 20 years, the energy secretary said Thursday, and the government will cut off funds for the vehicles' development.... The Energy Department will continue to pay for research into stationary fuel cells, which Dr. Chu said could be used like batteries on the power grid and do not require compact storage of hydrogen. The Obama administration will also establish eight "energy innovation hubs," small centers for basic research that Dr. Chu referred to as "Bell Lablettes." These will be financed for five years at a time to lure more scientists into the energy area. "We're very devoted to delivering solutions -- not just science papers, but solutions -- but it will require some basic science," Dr. Chu, who won a Nobel Prize for his work in physics, said at a news conference. ... Again with the pragmatics. Where has the ideology gone? ApocaDoc permalink Thu, May 7, 2009 from BusinessGreen: Ford to convert SUV plant to produce its first electric car In a highly symbolic move, auto giant Ford announced yesterday that it is to invest $550,000,000 ... in converting a Michigan plant currently used to manufacture SUVs into a factory specialising in small, fuel-efficient cars that will also produce its first electric vehicle. The company said that the plant would be refitted to manufacture a new version of its small Ford Focus from next year, and would then begin producing a battery-electric version of the Focus -- Ford's first all-electric passenger car -- in 2011. The Michigan plant was one of the world's most profitable car factories during the late 90s when sales of large SUVs such as Ford's Lincoln Navigator boomed. However, it has suffered in recent years as the market for larger vehicles has collapsed. ... But without a monster SUV, how can I prove my dominant-primate status? ApocaDoc permalink Thu, May 7, 2009 from UCLA, via EurekAlert: UCLA physicists create world's smallest incandescent lamp The incandescent lamp utilizes a filament made from a single carbon nanotube that is only 100 atoms wide. To the unaided eye, the filament is completely invisible when the lamp is off, but it appears as tiny point of light when the lamp is turned on. Even with the best optical microscope, it is only just possible to resolve the nanotube's non-zero length. To image the filament's true structure the team uses an electron microscope capable of atomic resolution. With less than 20 million atoms, the nanotube filament is both large enough to apply the statistical assumptions of thermodynamics and small enough to be considered as a molecular — that is, quantum mechanical — system. "Because both the topic (black-body radiation) and the size scale (nano) are on the boundary between the two theories, we think this is a very promising system to explore," Regan said. "The carbon nanotube that is used as the lamp filament is ideal for their purposes because of its smallness and extraordinary temperature stability." ... Shouldn't we be replacing these incandescent lights with really tiny CFLs? ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Apr 28, 2009 from Yale Environment 360: A Potential Breakthrough In Harnessing the Sun's Energy n the high desert of southern Spain, not far from Granada, the Mediterranean sun bounces off large arrays of precisely curved mirrors that cover an area as large as 70 soccer fields. These parabolic troughs follow the arc of the sun as it moves across the sky, concentrating the sun's rays onto pipes filled with a synthetic oil that can be heated to 750 degrees Fahrenheit. That super-heated oil is used to boil water to power steam turbines, or to pump excess heat into vats of salts, turning them a molten, lava-like consistency. The salts are just fertilizers -- a mix of sodium and potassium nitrate -- but they represent a significant advance in the decades-old technology of solar thermal power production, which has traditionally used mirrors to heat water or oil to generate electricity-producing steam. Now, engineers can use the molten salts to store the heat from solar radiation many hours after the sun goes down and then release it at will to drive turbines. That means solar thermal power can be used to generate electricity nearly round-the-clock. ... Little darling... I say it's all right! ApocaDoc permalink Sat, Apr 25, 2009 from Chester Chronicle: Chester scientist believes the power of poo will save the planet A SCIENTIST is hoping to save the planet with poo. Research scientist Ruyi Hu, 24, from Chester, is at the cutting edge of experimental technologies with the potential to cut thousands of tons of carbon emissions and save millions of pounds. His work on Inverted Phase Fermentation might be a conversation killer at dinner parties but could enable the billions of litres of waste water generated in the North West every year to be treated in a much more environmentally friendly way. ... I always thought it would be tigger who saved the planet. ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Apr 17, 2009 from Naples Daily News: Babcock Ranch to be United States' first solar powered city LEE COUNTY -- Planned mega-development Babcock Ranch will be the world's first entirely solar-powered city, developer Syd Kitson and an official from Florida Power & Light announced Thursday morning during a Washington D.C. press conference. The ambitious Charlotte County development will draw all of its electricity from a 75-megawatt photovoltaic solar power plant to be built by FPL. Construction on the facility could start by the end of this year.... The facility will be carbon-free, use no water and produce no waste. It will avoid the 61,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions a fossil fuel plant of equal size would release each year...Plans for Babcock Ranch include 19,500 homes in neighborhoods situated around a city center... Population at build-out is expected to reach 45,000. ... Sounds freakin' utopian! ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Apr 9, 2009 from London Guardian: Obama climate adviser open to geo-engineering to tackle global warming The global warming situation has become so dire that Barack Obama's chief scientific adviser has raised with the president the possibility of massive-scale technological fixes to alter the climate known as 'geo-engineering'. John Holdren, who is a member of the president's cabinet, said today the drastic measures should not be "off the table" in discussions on how best to tackle climate change.... The suite of mega-technological fixes includes everything from placing mirrors in space that reflect sunlight from the Earth, to fertilising the oceans with iron to encourage the growth of algae that can soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide. Another option is to seed clouds which bounce the sun's rays back into space so they do not warm the Earth's surface. Such global-scale technological solutions to climate change may seem fantastical, but increasing numbers of scientists argue that the technologies should at least be investigated. ... Let's not rule out asking the Justice League to help. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Apr 6, 2009 from New Scientist: Bug eats electricity, farts biogas ...An intriguing new idea involves "feeding" surplus power to the microorganisms instead, which combine it with carbon dioxide to create methane. That could then be stored and burned when needed. The method is sustainable too, as the carbon is taken from the atmosphere, not released from long-term storage in oil or coal... The new method relies on a microorganism studied by Bruce Logan's team at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. When living on the cathode of an electrolytic cell, the organism can take in electrons and use their energy to convert carbon dioxide into methane... If the CO2 used to make the methane was captured from the flue pipes of power stations or even -- using more complex methods -- from the open air, the methane would become a carbon-neutral fuel. ... These microorganisms are called "barking spiders." ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Apr 3, 2009 from Reuters UK: Slum cooker protects environment, helps poor Kenya's huge and squalid slums don't have much of anything, except mountains of trash that fill rivers and muddy streets, breeding disease. Now Kenyan designers have built a cooker that uses the trash as fuel to feed the poor, provide hot water and destroy toxic waste, as well as curbing the destruction of woodlands. ... If it can also take my dog for a walk I'm gettin' one! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Mar 30, 2009 from US News and World Report: 6 Scientists on the Cutting Edge of Energy and Environmental Research Donald J. Hammerstrom envisions a day when every electrical appliance is wise to what's happening on the far side of the wall socket. The inexpensive device he and his Pacific Northwest National Laboratory colleagues in Richland, Wash., have developed, dubbed the Grid Friendly Appliance Controller, is designed to reduce reliance on backup generators and prevent power outages that can occur when the electrical grid suffers momentary capacity problems. The controller, which he says could be built into a water heater, clothes dryer, or other energy-hungry appliance for $5 or less, recognizes when telltale fluctuations in the current flowing through the socket indicate that the grid is straining to meet demand. The controller's response: briefly scale back the appliance's electricity use. That move, if multiplied by many appliances in thousands of homes and buildings, would be enough to relieve the strain on the grid, potentially averting a blackout. The grid would also need less 24-7 standby capacity (read, wastefully idling generators) to buffer the occasional unexpected fluctuation in electrical supply or demand. ... It better not know everything going on, on the far side of that wall socket! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Mar 30, 2009 from Forbes: Hottest Electric Cars Soon To Hit The Roads America's roads could get a whole lot quieter in the not-too-distant future. Thanks to unprecedented tax incentives included in Obama's $787 billion stimulus package, plug-in electric vehicles are getting closer to the road than you might expect. Tax credits ranging from $2,500 to $7,500 for buyers of electric cars, the largest of which start in 2010, mean the race is on for automakers to produce moderately priced plug-ins for eager, eco-conscious consumers. "There is a lot of interest currently with the Obama administration making it very attractive for electric vehicle manufacturers to come into the U.S. to produce vehicles," says Brendan Prebo, a spokesman for Th!nk, a Norway-based maker of electric cars. "And that's very much what we'd like to do." ... Plus, we can pray gas prices go up, too! ApocaDoc permalink Sun, Mar 29, 2009 from New York Times: Freeman Dyson: We Can Fix It, It's Not A Big Deal. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus.... Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that "the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn't scare me at all"... A particularly distressed member of that public was Dyson's own wife, Imme, who, after seeing the film in a local theater with Dyson when it was released in 2006, looked at her husband out on the sidewalk and, with visions of drowning polar bears still in her eyes, reproached him: "Everything you told me is wrong!" she cried. "The polar bears will be fine," he assured her.... Far from expecting any drastic harmful consequences from these increased temperatures, he says the carbon may well be salubrious -- a sign that "the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse," because carbon acts as an ideal fertilizer promoting forest growth and crop yields. "Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now," he contends, "and substantially richer in carbon dioxide." Dyson calls ocean acidification, which many scientists say is destroying the saltwater food chain, a genuine but probably exaggerated problem. Sea levels, he says, are rising steadily, but why this is and what dangers it might portend "cannot be predicted until we know much more about its causes." ... James Lovelock vs. Freeman Dyson: The Cage Match! ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Mar 27, 2009 from MIT, via EurekAlert: 'Alarming' use of energy in modern manufacturing methods Modern manufacturing methods are spectacularly inefficient in their use of energy and materials, according to a detailed MIT analysis of the energy use of 20 major manufacturing processes. Overall, new manufacturing systems are anywhere from 1,000 to one million times bigger consumers of energy, per pound of output, than more traditional industries. In short, pound for pound, making microchips uses up orders of magnitude more energy than making manhole covers.... Solar panels are a good example. Their production, which uses the same manufacturing processes as microchips but on a large scale, is escalating dramatically. The inherent inefficiency of current solar panel manufacturing methods could drastically reduce the technology's lifecycle energy balance -- that is, the ratio of the energy the panel would produce over its useful lifetime to the energy required to manufacture it.... One message from the study is that "claims that these technologies are going to save us in some way need closer scrutiny. There's a significant energy cost involved here," he says. ... Let's make stuff now, while energy's cheap! I'm sure that "climate stuff" will work itself out. ApocaDoc permalink Sat, Mar 14, 2009 from London Guardian: 'Biochar' goes industrial with giant microwaves to lock carbon in charcoal Giant microwave ovens that can "cook" wood into charcoal could become our best tool in the fight against global warming, according to a leading British climate scientist. Chris Turney, a professor of geography at the University of Exeter, said that by burying the charcoal produced from microwaved wood, the carbon dioxide absorbed by a tree as it grows can remain safely locked away for thousands of years. The technique could take out billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. Fast-growing trees such as pine could be "farmed" to act specifically as carbon traps — microwaved, buried and replaced with a fresh crop to do the same thing again. Turney has built a 5m-long prototype of his microwave, which produces a tonne of CO2 for $65. He plans to launch his company, Carbonscape, in the UK this month to build the next generation of the machine, which he hopes will process more wood and cut costs further. ... If the pines are okay with this... I'm all for it! ApocaDoc permalink Sat, Mar 14, 2009 from Living on Earth: CO2-Eating Rocks GELLERMAN: Carbon dioxide has the planet between a rock and a hard place - we get needed energy from fossil fuels, yet burning them produces a greenhouse gas that's causing climate change. But perhaps the answer lies in the problem: put the gas between a rock and a hard place. Not just any rock - but a type called ultramafic. Juerg Matter has investigated this ultra-interesting rock. He's an Associate Research Scientist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.... MATTER: Yeah, ultramafic rocks are mantle rocks which are usually 25 to 30 miles below surface, and they are rich in magnesium silicate minerals. And actually these magnesium silicate minerals can be used for carbon sequestration. The magnesium is used to carbonate the CO2 into magnesium carbonate minerals.... It changes, you know, the carbon dioxide, which is a gas, into a mineral, which is stable and environmentally benign. ... Rocks like this ROCK!!! ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Mar 12, 2009 from New Scientist: 'Nanoball' batteries could recharge car in minutes Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have revealed an experimental battery that charges about 100 times as fast as normal lithium ion batteries. Their battery contains a cathode made up of tiny balls of lithium iron phosphate, each just 50 nanometres across. The balls quickly release lithium ions as the battery charges, which travel across an electrolyte towards the anode. As the battery discharges, the lithium ions move back across the cell to be re-absorbed by the nanoballs.... Bigger batteries for plug-in hybrid electric cars could charge in just 5 minutes -- compared with about 8 hours for existing batteries -- though this would require a very high-powered charger. ... Big cojones from some nanoballs! ApocaDoc permalink Sun, Mar 8, 2009 from BusinessGreen: Energy secretary promises "transformational" green research US energy secretary, Steven Chu, yesterday called on a Senate committee to authorise far greater levels of government support for energy research, arguing that the onus is on the federal government to help incubate cutting edge low carbon technologies before they become commercially viable. Chu was testifying at a hearing held by the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources to review the future direction of energy research and development. He argued there was an urgent need for greater funding, and a renewed focus on how to spend that money more wisely.... Chu also called for greater government support for cutting edge " transformational" energy research, arguing there was a need for "game changing, rather than incremental" science.... These include the creation of fuel from non-food crops and bio-waste, automotive batteries with greater longevity, reducing the cost of photovoltaic by 80 per cent, and computer design tools to increase energy efficiency in buildings. Finally, the Government could help to develop energy storage technology that could turn renewable power sources into base load generators, he said. ... If we change the game, how will we know who wins? ApocaDoc permalink Sat, Feb 28, 2009 from BusinessGreen: Aquamarine Power touts 'biggest deal in the history of marine energy' Fresh from securing "the biggest deal in the history of marine energy" with Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), wave and tidal power specialist Aquamarine Power is in talks to agree similar supply deals with utilities in Ireland and Portugal. Earlier this week, the company signed a major alliance with SSE's renewables division Airtricity that could see the developer of tidal and wave energy systems provide the company with up to one gigawatt of marine energy by 2020. Under the terms of the deal, the two companies will launch a 50:50 joint venture that will work to gain consent for wave and tidal energy sites in the UK and Ireland. ... Can a rising tide lift all floats? ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Feb 24, 2009 from McGill University, via EurekAlert: Peptides-on-demand: McGill researcher's radical new green chemistry makes the impossible possible Fast and simple 'enabling technology' being offered to the world on open basis... McGill University chemistry professor Chao-Jun (C.J.) Li is known as one of the world leading pioneers in green chemistry, an entirely new approach to the science which eschews the use of toxic, petrochemical-based solvents in favour of basic substances like water and new ways of making molecules. The environmental benefits of the green approach are obvious and significant, but following the road less travelled is also paying off in purely scientific terms. With these alternative methods, Li and his colleagues have discovered an entirely new way of synthesizing peptides using simple reagents, a process that would be impossible in classical chemistry.... "This is really an enabling new technology," he added, "and since McGill has decided not to patent it, we're making our method available to everyone. We are paying the journal's open access fee, so anyone in the world can access the paper." ... A new kind of science... making the impossible possible... available to everyone... where's the money in that? ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Feb 23, 2009 from New York Times: Antibodies Offer a New Path for Fighting Flu In a discovery that could radically change how the world fights influenza, researchers have engineered antibodies that protect against many strains of the virus, including even the 1918 Spanish flu and the H5N1 bird flu. The discovery, experts said, could lead to the development of a flu vaccine that would not have to be changed yearly. And the antibodies already developed can be injected as a treatment, going after the virus in ways that drugs like Tamiflu do not. Clinical trials to prove that the antibodies are safe in humans could begin within three years, a researcher estimated.... "It's not yet at the point of practicality, but the concept is really quite interesting." The work is so promising that Dr. Fauci's institute will offer the researchers grants and access to its ferrets, which can catch human flu. ... Finally: finding flu fix from Fauci's ferrets. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Feb 16, 2009 from New York Times: Bringing Wind Turbines to Ordinary Rooftops WIND turbines typically spin from tall towers on hills and plains. But in these green times, some companies hope smaller turbines will soon rise above a more domestic spot: homes and garages. The rooftop turbines send the electricity they generate straight on to the home's circuit box. Then owners in a suitably wind-swept location can watch the needle on their electricity meter turn backward instead of forward, reducing their utility bills while using a renewable resource. ... Let's get this down to the price of a used car, can we? ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Feb 12, 2009 from New York Times: Big Science Role Is Seen in Global Warming Cure WASHINGTON -- Steven Chu, the new secretary of energy, said Wednesday that solving the world�s energy and environment problems would require Nobel-level breakthroughs in three areas: electric batteries, solar power and the development of new crops that can be turned into fuel....Dr. Chu said a "revolution" in science and technology would be required if the world is to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and curb the emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. Solar technology, he said, will have to get five times better than it is today, and scientists will need to find new types of plants that require little energy to grow and that can be converted to clean and cheap alternatives to fossil fuels. ... Big science... hallelujah! ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Feb 11, 2009 from Reuters: Can algae save the world - again? Can algae save the world again? The microscopic green plants cleaned up the earth's atmosphere millions of years ago and scientists hope they can do it now by helping remove greenhouse gases and create new oil reserves. In the distant past, algae helped turn the earth's then inhospitable atmosphere into one that could support modern life through photosynthesis, which plants use to turn carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugars and oxygen. Some of the algae sank to sea or lake beds and slowly became oil. "All we're doing is turning the clock back," says Steve Skill, a biochemist at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory. "Nature has done this many millions of years ago in producing the crude oil we're burning today. So as far as nature is concerned this is nothing new," he said. The race is now on to find economic ways to turn algae, one of the planet's oldest life forms, into vegetable oil that can be made into biodiesel, jet fuel, other fuels and plastic products. ... ...(sigh) yeah they can do it... but they won't be happy about it! ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Feb 6, 2009 from New Scientist: Why sustainable power is unsustainable Renewable energy needs to become a lot more renewable -- a theme that emerged at the Financial Times Energy Conference in London this week. Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter, and more unpredictable, the most advanced "renewable" technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources, attendees heard. ... You mean we may have to confront Peak Renewables? ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Jan 21, 2009 from Bloomberg News: Japan to Launch Satellite to Measure Global Warming The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency plans to launch a satellite in two days to measure greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere as nations seek better data on the evolution of global warming. The Greenhouse-Gases Observing Satellite, or Gosat, will be lofted from the Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan shortly after noon local time on Jan. 22, the agency said today in a statement on its Web site... The Japanese project will measure the density of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere at 56,000 points around the globe, Yukiko Kaji, spokeswoman for the agency, said by telephone from Tokyo. Development costs for the satellite, dubbed “Ibuki,” the Japanese word for “breath,” totaled 18.3 billion yen ($202 million), she said. ... Ibuki ... Japanese word for "you can emit, but you cannot hide"! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Jan 19, 2009 from Fast Company: Water Desalination: The Answer to the World's Thirst? A quick spin through recent headlines reveals just how badly -- and how soon -- we're going to need new supplies of freshwater: Over the past 18 months in the United States alone, the governor of Georgia declared a state of emergency due to water shortages; salmonella contaminated municipal water in Colorado; and eight states ratified the Great Lakes Basin Compact, an agreement designed to ensure that Great Lakes water, nearly 20 percent of the world's freshwater, won't be shipped beyond those basins -- not even to nearby Minneapolis or Pittsburgh. Worldwide, the picture is far bleaker. Global water consumption has roughly doubled since World War II, and yet, according to the United Nations, 1.1 billion people still have no access to a clean, reliable supply. Eighty percent of disease and deaths in developing countries -- more than 2.2 million people a year, including 3,900 children each day -- are caused by diseases associated with unsanitary water. The cost of waterborne diseases and associated lost productivity drains 2 percent of developing countries' GDP each year.... Saltwater already comprises 97.5 percent of the water resources on the planet, and 60 percent of the world's population lives within 65 miles of a seacoast. Why not desalinate seawater and slake the thirst of nations? ... Well we sure better think of something! ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Jan 13, 2009 from SciDev.net: Solar house promises greener heating for Tibetans Chinese engineers have designed a solar house for Tibetans that aims to reduce their dependency on cattle dung for warmth. A typical Tibetan family living in a remote mountainous village burns 300 sacks of dung -- around 2,000 kilograms -- each year, half of which it must purchase. But burning dung is inefficient and, in winter, temperatures plunge indoors.... Zeng Yan, chief architect of the Institute of Solar Building Technology, part of CNECHS, said that the experimental house, to be built in May, is supported by three core techniques: insulation, energy collection and energy storage. The 100 square-metre house has an embedded greenhouse that collects the sun's energy, which can be transferred to the surrounding bedrooms and living room by opening connecting windows and doors.... But Xie Yuan, head of the Department of Science and Technology of Qinghai Province said that the houses might be unaffordable for local Tibetans. The annual personal income in a typical village is less than 1,700 Chinese yuan (around US$249), but the new house costs nearly 40,000 yuan (around US$5,850). ... I suspect this is a price point that would allow overnight shipping to the US. ApocaDoc permalink Sun, Jan 11, 2009 from Guardian (UK): 20 big green ideas as Emma Howard Boyd, head of socially responsible investing at Jupiter Asset Management – sponsors of the Big Idea award, makes clear: "The urgency of what is required to combat issues such as climate change has not diminished as a result of the current financial crisis. We need big ideas -- and it is at times like these, when there is widespread disruption, that we see innovation and new thinking." Big ideas need not necessarily be a whistle-and-bells hi-tech response. At least one of our Big 20 can be described as an "ancient technique" on loan from the Aztecs. The modern genius lies in its rediscovery and deployment because, while it would be foolish to believe blindly in a silver bullet for all environmental problems, now is absolutely the time for faith in contemporary ingenuity. ... This story makes me feel like, y'know, Yes We Can. ApocaDoc permalink Sat, Jan 10, 2009 from Environmental News Network: California Scientists Create E.Coli-based Fuel That's Much More Efficient Than Ethanol U.S. scientists say they can turn E.coli, a strain of bacteria present in the human digestive tract, into a fuel that is twice or three times more efficient than ethanol. The scientists, attached to theUniversity of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) managed to create a strain for the first time that generates alcohol with five carbon atoms per molecule instead of the regular two or three. That's important because the larger, longer chain molecules contain more energy, something of a "holy grail" for the fuel industry.... E.coli, which is mostly found in dangerous quantities on polluted beaches, can be altered so that each cell can generate "long-chain alcohol". The bacteria that result from this process excrete a type of fuel that can be used in the airline industry. Gas and other petroleum products also stand to benefit from the excretion process. ... Sometimes scientists seem like the modern Knights Templar... ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Jan 7, 2009 from New Scientist: Rise of the garage genome hackers The competition is part of a do-it-yourself movement that hopes to spark a revolution in biotechnology. It is based on the emerging field of synthetic biology, which uses genes and other cell components as the building blocks for new organisms or devices. The movement is trying to open up this field to anyone with a passion for tweaking DNA in their spare time -- from biologists to software engineers to people who just like it as a hobby. The hope is that encouraging a wider mix of people to take part could lead to advances that would not happen otherwise, just as tinkering by the Homebrew Computer Club hackers of the 1970s spawned the first personal computers. "Biology is becoming less of a science and more of a technology," says Mackenzie Cowell, co-founder of the group DIYbio, which aims to be an "Institution for the Amateur", providing scientists with resources akin to those found in academia or industry. "There will be more opportunity for people who didn't spend up to seven years getting a PhD in the field," he says. ... Oh boy! Soon we'll all be able to engineer Roundup-ready crops! And, as a bonus, a more slow-cycling Ebola virus! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Jan 5, 2009 from via ScienceDaily: Biofuel Development Shifting From Soil To Sea, Specifically To Marine Algae ...Today, the most fervent attention in biofuel development has shifted from soil to the sea, and specifically to marine algae. Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, along with researchers at UCSD’s Division of Biological Sciences, are part of an emerging algal biofuel consortium that includes academic collaborators, CleanTECH San Diego, regional industry representatives, and public and private partners. Scripps scientists see algae as a “green bullet,” science and society’s best hope for a clean bioenergy source that will help loosen broad dependence on fossil fuel, counteract climate warming, and power the vehicles of the future. ... I've got an even better idea: Let's grow crops on top of that giant floating island of plastic! ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Jan 2, 2009 from London Independent: Climate scientists: it's time for 'Plan B' An emergency "Plan B" using the latest technology is needed to save the world from dangerous climate change, according to a poll of leading scientists carried out by The Independent. The collective international failure to curb the growing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has meant that an alternative to merely curbing emissions may become necessary. The plan would involve highly controversial proposals to lower global temperatures artificially through daringly ambitious schemes that either reduce sunlight levels by man-made means or take CO2 out of the air. This "geoengineering" approach – including schemes such as fertilising the oceans with iron to stimulate algal blooms – would have been dismissed as a distraction a few years ago but is now being seen by the majority of scientists we surveyed as a viable emergency backup plan that could save the planet from the worst effects of climate change, at least until deep cuts are made in CO2 emissions. What has worried many of the experts, who include recognised authorities from the world's leading universities and research institutes, as well as a Nobel Laureate, is the failure to curb global greenhouse gas emissions through international agreements, namely the Kyoto Treaty, and recent studies indicating that the Earth's natural carbon "sinks" are becoming less efficient at absorbing man-made CO2 from the atmosphere. ... What the hell. Let's skip B and go right to Plan C! ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Jan 1, 2009 from Guardian (UK): 95 months and counting From today, based on the best estimates available, we have eight years to head-off potentially uncontrollable climatic upheaval. What can happen in eight years? Quite a lot, actually. A world war can begin, and end. Two, in fact.... [H]istory tells us great things are possible. We are still in control. We just need to build, rapidly, new energy and transport systems and change our behaviour. Only, we seem to have forgotten what we are capable of. Victorian engineers would have been aghast at our timidity. Within our 8 year time frame, for example, between 1845 and 1852 there were 4,400 miles of railway track laid in Britain. ... Bad enough if the last two generations are labelled "world killers" -- but "timid losers"? That would be too much. ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Dec 30, 2008 from Discovery News: Sprayed Aerosols Could Ease Climate Woes It won't solve global warming, but a group of scientists are calling for a focused research program to investigate ways to seed the atmosphere with chemicals that would let the heat out -- literally... David Keith, with the University of Calgary's Energy and Environmental Systems Group ... and colleagues want to investigate putting aerosols, such as sulfur, into the atmosphere to chemically unlock the greenhouse effect and allow more of the sun's reflected heat to radiate back into space. "This brings up the question of who would make that decision," said Alan Robock of Rutgers University. And what temperature the world should be. "A ski slope operator and someone running a shipping company in the Arctic might have different opinions about what's the ideal temperature for the planet," NASA's administrator Michael Griffin told Discovery News in an interview last year. ... Where's the anti-christ when you need him -- or her. ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Dec 30, 2008 from Popular Science: This Machine Might* Save the World * that's a big, fat "might" ... The source of endless energy for all humankind resides just off Government Street in Burnaby, British Columbia, up the little spit of blacktop on Bonneville Place and across the parking lot from Shade-O-Matic blind manufacturers and wholesalers. The future is there, in that mostly empty office with the vomit-green walls -- and inside the brain of Michel Laberge, 47, bearded and French-Canadian... What Laberge has set out to build in this office park, using $2 million in private funding and a skeletal workforce, is a nuclear-fusion power plant... If (and this is a truly serious if) Laberge and his team succeed, the rewards could be astounding: nearly limitless, inexpensive energy, with no chemical combustion by-products, a minimal amount of extremely short-lived radioactive waste, and no risk of a catastrophic, Chernobyl-level meltdown. ... Sounds like this is the guy to put the "nu" and "fu" back into nuclear fusion! ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Dec 29, 2008 from Washington Post: Inventors Find Inspiration in Natural Phenomena For some, whale watching is a tourist activity. For Gunter Pauli, it is a source of technological inspiration. "I see a whale, I see a six-to-12-volt electric generator that is able to pump 1,000 liters per pulse through more than 108 miles of veins and arteries," he said. The intricate wiring of the whale's heart is being studied as a model for a device called a nanoscale atrioventricular bridge, which will undergo animal testing next year and could replace pacemakers for the millions of people whose diseased hearts need help to beat steadily. Pauli -- who directs the Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI) Foundation in Geneva -- is an unabashed promoter of biomimicry, the science of making technological and commercial advances by copying natural processes. At a time when many are looking for a way to protect Earth's biodiversity and reduce the ecological impact of industrial products and processes, a growing number of business leaders and environmental activists alike are looking to biomimicry as a way to achieve both ends. ... And biota won't sue you for intellectual property theft! ApocaDoc permalink Sun, Dec 21, 2008 from Time Magazine: Making Hospitals Greener -- and Patients Healthier A doctor's principle code is, "First, do no harm." The irony is that your doctor's office or hospital may be making you sicker. Indeed, many hospitals are built with materials, like particleboard, PVC flooring and even conventional paint, that can leach poisonous substances. What's more, the chemicals used to clean hospitals -- chlorine, laundry detergents and softeners, ammonia -- contain toxic ingredients and can cause respiratory disease. In fact, studies suggest that nurses, who spend long hours at the hospital, have among the highest rates of environmentally induced asthma of any profession....Enter "green medicine" -- the effort to detoxify the healing environment and enhance patients' and employees' health, while reducing costs all around. ... Making the Hippocratic Oath less hypocritical. ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Dec 11, 2008 from Newsweek: Out of Thin Air Remember those sweltering summer days when the air was so muggy you could practically drink it? A new home appliance is promising to make that possible by converting outdoor air into nearly 13 quarts of fresh water every day. Originally envisioned as an antidote to the shortage of clean drinking water in the world, the WaterMill has the look of a futuristic air conditioner and the ability to condense, filter and sterilize water for about 3 cents per quart. At $1,299, the 45-pound device doesn't come cheap, and it is neither the first nor the biggest machine to enter the fast-growing field of atmospheric water generators. But by targeting individual households with a self-cleaning, environmentally friendly alternative to bottled water, Kelowna, British Columbia-based Element Four is hoping its WaterMill will become the new must-have appliance of 2009. ... In the future... we'll all be fish! ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Dec 5, 2008 from Christian Science Monitor: Rice-powered stove ignites new hope for poor farmers Alexis Belonio’s obsession with rice husks began in 2003, when rising fuel prices and heavy dependence on foreign oil slammed his native Philippines with an energy crunch. "I saw rice mills throw husks into the rivers," says the agricultural engineer. "I started thinking about using them as fuel." Mr. Belonio was already an accomplished inventor, having designed over 30 devices ranging from paddy dryers to water pumps for poor Filipino farmers. So his thinking led him to the cooking stove, an item fraught with expense and danger in the developing world. More than a third of the world’s population can’t afford propane or other petroleum-based cooking fuels, relying instead on biomass such as wood or charcoal. Most biomass is burned in inefficient stoves that emit soot, smoke, and toxic fumes. Belonio envisioned a safer, cleaner, and less-expensive way to cook. Working largely in isolation and with little funding, he turned rice husks – an inedible byproduct of milling rice for food – into a bright blue flame. ... New toy this Christmas: The Easy Bake Oven, fueled by rice husks! ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Dec 4, 2008 from Associated Press: Solar car completes 1st ever round-the-world trip POZNAN, Poland (AP) — The first solar-powered car to travel around the world ended its journey at the U.N. climate talks Thursday, arriving with the message that clean technologies are available now to stop global warming. The small two-seater, hauling a trailer of solar cells and carrying chief U.N. climate official Yvo de Boer, glided up to a building in Poznan, Poland, where delegates from some 190 nations are working toward a new treaty to control climate change. "This is the first time in history that a solar-powered car has traveled all the way around the world without using a single drop of petrol," said Louis Palmer, the 36-year-old Swiss schoolteacher and adventurer who made the trip. "These new technologies are ready," he said. "It's ecological, it's economical, it is absolutely reliable. We can stop global warning." ... But does it have cool cupholders? ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Dec 3, 2008 from Washington Post (US): EPA to Curb Medical Emissions The Environmental Protection Agency moved yesterday to curb pollution released by medical waste incinerators, ending an 11-year battle over how to best regulate the emissions. Environmentalists hailed the move as an important precedent for controlling toxic releases into the air, saying EPA based its calculations on the availability of technologies to significantly clean up incinerator pollution. The facilities can install fabric filters to trap toxic particles or scrubbers to capture gaseous releases. "This is the first time I've ever seen them do an air toxic rule right," said Jim Pew, a lawyer at Earthjustice... ... The EPA ... actually protecting the environment? Maybe they're trying to reduce global warming by freezing over hell. ApocaDoc permalink Sat, Nov 29, 2008 from Chicago Tribune: Scientists say they've found bacteria that will fight invasive mussels Researchers seeking to slow the spread of invasive zebra and quagga mussels in American lakes and rivers have found a bacterium that appears to be fatal to the problematic species without affecting native mussels or freshwater fish. The bacterium, Pseudomonas fluorescens, offers some hope for controlling the troublesome bivalves that are wreaking ecological and economic havoc in North American waters from the Colorado River to Vermont, and especially in the Great Lakes. But more testing remains to be done, and the bacteria could be used effectively only on a limited scale, said Daniel Molloy, the New York State Museum researcher who discovered the possible new use for P. fluorescens. ... From the Great Lakes ... to the Ate-Up Lakes. ApocaDoc permalink Sat, Nov 22, 2008 from University of Alberta via ScienceDaily: Research Finds Way To Double Rice Crops In Drought-stricken Areas University of Alberta research has yielded a way to double the output of rice crops in some of the world's poorest, most distressed areas. Jerome Bernier, a PhD student in the U of A Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science, has found a group of genes in rice that enables a yield of up to 100 per cent more in severe drought conditions. The discovery marks the first time this group of genes in rice has been identified, and could potentially bring relief to farmers in countries like India and Thailand, where rice crops are regularly faced with drought. Rice is the number one crop consumed by humans annually. ... Let's call it TwiceRice! ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Nov 18, 2008 from Washington Post: Japan's Trash Technology Helps Deodorize Dumps in Tokyo TOKYO -- It doesn't smell like a dump. If it did, there are a quarter-million neighbors to complain about Tokyo's Toshima Incineration Plant, which devours 300 tons of garbage a day, turning it into electricity, hot water and a kind of recyclable sand. ... Remarkably, this does not create a big stink, literally or politically. ... Why don't we put all our trash on barges and send it to Japan! ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Nov 6, 2008 from The Earth Institute at Columbia University via ScienceDaily: Rocks Could Be Harnessed To Sponge Vast Amounts Of Carbon Dioxide From Air Scientists say that a type of rock found at or near the surface in the Mideast nation of Oman and other areas around the world could be harnessed to soak up huge quantities of globe-warming carbon dioxide. Their studies show that the rock, known as peridotite, reacts naturally at surprisingly high rates with CO2 to form solid minerals -- and that the process could be speeded a million times or more with simple drilling and injection methods. ... Now I'm lamenting I threw my pet rock away! ApocaDoc permalink Fri, Oct 17, 2008 from Science Daily (US): Microbes Useful For For Environmental Cleanup And Oil Recovery BioTiger™ resulted from over eight years of extensive work that began at a century-old Polish waste lagoon. "DOE had originally funded us to work with our Polish counterparts to develop a microbe-based method for cleaning up oil-contaminated soils," explains Dr. Robin Brigmon, SRNL Fellow Engineer. From that lagoon, they identified microbes that could break down the oil to carbon dioxide and other non-hazardous products. "The project was a great success," Dr. Brigmon says. "The lagoon now has been cleaned up, and deer now can be seen grazing on it." ... Not sure that CO2 is exactly "non-hazardous," but this is still a good trend line. ApocaDoc permalink Mon, Oct 13, 2008 from Innovations Report: Copper catalyst recycles carbon dioxide RIKEN chemists have developed a catalyst that should allow carbon dioxide to be used as a versatile synthetic chemical.... Zhaomin Hou... along with colleagues Takeshi Ohishi and Masayoshi Nishiura, has now developed a copper catalyst that helps the boron compounds to react with carbon dioxide without destroying sensitive chemical groups.... "One of our goals is to find a catalyst that can transform CO2 in exhaust gasses of automobile vehicles or chemical plants into useful materials." ... Think of CO2 as a renewable resource. ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Oct 7, 2008 from Scientific American: Cylindrical Solar Cells Give a Whole New Meaning to Sunroof There are approximately 30 billion square feet (2.8 billion square meters) of expansive, flat roofs in the U.S., an area large enough to collect the sunlight needed to power 16 million American homes, or replace 38 conventional coal-fired power plants. By covering these roofs with large, flat arrays of cylindrical thin-film solar cells (think massive installations of fluorescent tubes, only absorbing light rather than emitting it), Fremont, Calif.–based Solyndra, Inc., hopes to harness that energy....the newly shaped cells have the potential of harnessing solar power at around the same price as electricity from coal-fired power plants, currently the cheapest generation option at around six cents per kilowatt hour. ... Only the NMR (Not on My Roof) people will take issue with this. ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Aug 21, 2008 from American Chemical Society, via EurekAlert: A new biopesticide for the organic food boom With the boom in consumption of organic foods creating a pressing need for natural insecticides and herbicides that can be used on crops certified as "organic," biopesticide pioneer Pam G. Marrone, Ph.D., is reporting development of a new "green" pesticide obtained from an extract of the giant knotweed.... "The product is safe to humans, animals, and the environment," says Marrone... The new biopesticide has active compounds that alert plant defenses to combat a range of diseases, including powdery mildew, gray mold and bacterial blight that affect fruits, vegetables, and ornamentals. ... Before we get too excited, let's be sure it doesn't, say, build up in honeybees, or ants, or worms, or affect water species via runoff.... I'm just sayin'. ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Aug 19, 2008 from American Chemical Society, via ScienceDaily: Green catalysts provide promise for cleaning toxins and pollutants Tetra-Amido Macrocyclic Ligands (TAMLs) are environmentally friendly catalysts with a host of applications for reducing and cleaning up pollutants, and a prime example of "green chemistry".... The oxidation catalysts are the first highly effective mimics of peroxidase enzymes. When partnered with hydrogen peroxide, they are able to convert harmful pollutants into less toxic substances. ... Can we locate catalysts for converting toxic attitudes? ApocaDoc permalink Sun, Jul 6, 2008 from Robert Silverberg, in Asimovs Science Fiction: Peak Metals: Gallium, Indium, Zinc, Copper The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany' s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet's stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.... Dr. Reller says that by 2017 or so there'll be [no gallium] left to use. Indium, another endangered element -- number 49 in the periodic table -- is similar to gallium in many ways, has many of the same uses ... and is being consumed much faster than we are finding it. Dr. Reller gives it about another decade. ... Surely we'll simply invent a way to make fundamental elements. right? ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Jun 17, 2008 from University of New Hampshire: Researchers Test Sediment-Scrubbing Technology In Cocheco River Rather than dredging up the problem, or burying it under several feet of sand, they've created a patch -- black geotextile mats designed to cap and stabilize pollution in place.... The reactive "filling" of this quilt contains three different substances that bind and stabilize different pollutants. One such substance -- a UNH-patented technology based on a natural form of phosphorus -- treats toxic heavy metals associated with industrial pollution such as lead, copper, zinc and cadmium. ... A patch in time may save mine. ApocaDoc permalink Sat, May 31, 2008 from MIT newsoffice: MIT develops a 'paper towel' for oil spills The scientists say they have created a membrane that can absorb up to 20 times its weight in oil, and can be recycled many times for future use. The oil itself can also be recovered. Some 200,000 tons of oil have already been spilled at sea since the start of the decade. "What we found is that we can make 'paper' from an interwoven mesh of nanowires that is able to selectively absorb hydrophobic liquids--oil-like liquids--from water," said Francesco Stellacci, an associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and leader of the work. ... If only the Exxon Valdez had had a few rolls of those towels in their cupboard. ApocaDoc permalink Wed, May 21, 2008 from American Chemical Society via ScienceDaily: Simple, Low-cost Carbon Filter Removes 90 Percent Of Carbon Dioxide From Smokestack Gases "Researchers in Wyoming report development of a low-cost carbon filter that can remove 90 percent of carbon dioxide gas from the smokestacks of electric power plants that burn coal and other fossil fuels. The study describes a new carbon dioxide-capture process, called a Carbon Filter Process, designed to meet the need. It uses a simple, low-cost filter filled with porous carbonaceous sorbent that works at low pressures." ... Dude, this news is sooooo carbonaceous! ApocaDoc permalink Thu, May 8, 2008 from ClimateChangeCorp: Ten eco-innovators to watch All of these innovative companies have something in common. They took an essential industry, such as clothing, housing, or energy, turned it upside down and gave it a shake. They shook out wasted energy, extra costs and excess materials, and in many cases they created something that stands to revolutionise the industry. ... Maybe if enough industries are revolutionized, society will be revolutionized. Wait, that's kinda Marxist, isn't it? ApocaDoc permalink Thu, Apr 24, 2008 from Newcastle University, via Eurekalert: Technological breakthrough in the fight to cut greenhouse gases The Newcastle team has succeeded in developing an exceptionally active catalyst, derived from aluminium, which can drive the reaction necessary to turn waste carbon dioxide into cyclic carbonates at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, vastly reducing the energy input required.... 'If our catalyst could be employed at the source of high-concentration CO2 production, for example in the exhaust stream of a fossil-fuel power station, we could take out the carbon dioxide, turn it into a commercially-valuable product and at the same time eliminate the need to store waste CO2', he said. ... A big "if," of course, but come on -- let's get catalyzing! ApocaDoc permalink Wed, Apr 9, 2008 from Purdue University: Interactive Map of Greenhouse Gases and Emissions "A new, high-resolution, interactive map of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels has found that the emissions aren't all where we thought. "For example, we've been attributing too many emissions to the northeastern United States, and it's looking like the southeastern U.S. is a much larger source than we had estimated previously," says Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric science at Purdue University and leader of the project...."Ten years ago there might have been resistance to the notion of examining who is responsible for the CO2 emissions in such a visually detailed way," Gurney says. "However, what Vulcan makes utterly clear is that CO2 emissions cannot be exclusively affixed to SUV drivers, manufacturers or large power producers; everybody is responsible...." ... You mean... I can't just blame everybody else? ApocaDoc permalink Tue, Feb 19, 2008 from Science: New Materials Can Selectively Capture Carbon Dioxide, Chemists Report "UCLA chemists report a major advance in reducing heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions in the Feb. 15 issue of the journal Science. The scientists have demonstrated that they can successfully isolate and capture carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, rising sea levels and the increased acidity of oceans. Their findings could lead to power plants efficiently capturing carbon dioxide without using toxic materials." ... This could be very important -- though there's no description of how much energy it takes to produce the "zeolitic imidazolate frameworks, or ZIFs," nor what we'd do with megatons of ZIFs that had absorbed all the CO2 they could absorb, nor what other unintended consequences... but here's hoping! ApocaDoc permalink Copyright 2009 The Apocadocs.com