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Smiles Are Innate, Not LearnedBlind individuals produce similar facial expressions as people with sight.Source: Livescience.com | 29 Dec 2009 | 6:34 pm 2008 a Devastating Year for Natural DisastersInsurance group ranks this year third for human and financial losses from natural disasters.Source: Livescience.com | 29 Dec 2009 | 6:18 pm Top 10 Most Literate U.S. CitiesBookworms and others in cities in the Midwest and West have beaten out Yankee types to reach the very top of a researcher’s list of the most literate American cities.Source: Livescience.com | 29 Dec 2009 | 4:18 pm New Hope for U.S. Science EducationMore than 200,000 new science teachers needed in next decade.Source: Livescience.com | 29 Dec 2009 | 3:50 pm Top 5 Incredible Science Discoveries of 2008Dinosaurs, the brain, gorillas, electrons and arctic ice make the list of this year's top 5 science stories.Source: Livescience.com | 29 Dec 2009 | 2:49 pm Exercise Improves Kids' AcademicsAerobic exercise improves a student's fitness level and test scores, too.Source: Livescience.com | 29 Dec 2009 | 2:06 pm Why Locusts Abandon A Solitary Life For The SwarmBy applying an old theory that has been used to explain water flow through soil and the spread of forest fires, researchers may have an answer to a perplexing ecological and evolutionary problem: why locusts switch from an innocuous, solitary lifestyle to form massive swarms that can devastate crops and strip fields bare.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am How Small Can Computers Get? Computing In A MoleculeOver the last 60 years, ever-smaller generations of transistors have driven exponential growth in computing power. Could molecules, each turned into miniscule computer components, trigger even greater growth in computing over the next 60?Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am Common Food Additive Found To Increase Risk And Speed Spread Of Lung CancerNew research in an animal model suggests that a diet high in inorganic phosphates, which are found in a variety of processed foods including meats, cheeses, beverages and bakery products, might speed growth of lung cancer tumors and may even contribute to the development of those tumors in individuals predisposed to the disease.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am Flowering Plants Speed Post-surgery RecoveryContact with nature has long been suspected to increase positive feelings, reduce stress, and provide distraction from the pain associated with recovery from surgery. Now, research has confirmed the beneficial effects of plants and flowers for patients recovering from abdominal surgery.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am Pre-existing Diabetes For Persons Diagnosed With Cancer Associated With Increased Risk Of DeathPatients with diabetes at the time of a cancer diagnosis have an increased risk of death compared to patients without diabetes, according to a meta-analysis of studies.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am Bizarre Reproductive Techniques Discovered For Deep-ocean SquidMales that produce sperm packages that can penetrate deep into the skin. Females with bellies full of stored sperm. Males that seriously injure the females during mating. This is just a selection of the bizarre reproductive techniques that marine biologist Henk-Jan Hoving has discovered with different species of deep-ocean squid.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am Brain Birth Defects Successfully Reversed Through Stem Cell TherapyScientists have succeeded in reversing brain birth defects in animal models, using stem cells to replace defective brain cells. The work involved using mouse embryonic neural stem cells, which migrate in the brain, search for the deficiency that caused the defect, and then differentiate into becoming the cells needed to repair the damage.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Dec 2008 | 7:00 pm Competition, Not Climate Change, Led To Neanderthal Extinction, Study ShowsNeanderthal extinction was principally a result of competition with Cro-Magnon populations, rather than the consequences of climate change, according to a new study.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Dec 2008 | 7:00 pm Military Uniforms Now Provide Reliable Protection From MosquitoesAssuring that uniforms issued to U.S. military personnel are properly treated to repel mosquitoes is now possible, thanks to a new testing method.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Dec 2008 | 7:00 pm Both Major Theories About Human Cellular Aging Supported By New ResearchAging yeast cells accumulate damage over time, but they do so by following a pattern laid down earlier in their life by diet as well as the genes that control metabolism and the dynamics of cell structures such as mitochondria, the power plants of cells.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Dec 2008 | 7:00 pm Exercise Improves Kids' Academics (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - The end of 2008 brings some discouraging news about our kids' brains and brawn. Recent results from an international math and science test show United States students are performing near the middle of the pack compared to other countries, while their levels of obesity continue to climb.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Dec 2008 | 1:40 pm Green RoomOur writers respond to your commentsSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Dec 2008 | 1:08 pm Escaped beaver eating through Cornish trees after breakout from Devon sanctuaryMoves may be afoot to reintroduce beavers to the wild, but for one determined furry favourite change was clearly not coming swiftly enough. The male rodent dodged through an electric fence at a sanctuary in Devon together with two females and made his dash for freedom. His two companions were quickly recaptured but the male is relishing his liberty on the banks of a river 20 miles away in Cornwall. The chunky 40kg animal has burrowed into the bank and is munching his way through poplar and willow trees. Derek Gow, principal of the Upcott Grange centre at Lifton in Dartmoor, where the beaver used to live, will attempt to trap it in the next few weeks. Gow said today: "It's ideal beaver country he's found himself in, so he'll be doing perfectly fine." The centre is holding four families of beavers that will be deliberately released into the wild in Scotland in 2009 after six months of quarantine. Gow is also a leading campaigner for the reintroduction of beavers into England and Wales. But he says the escape of the three beavers was a complete accident. "We didn't want this to happen. It's just one of those things," he said. "It's a pain in the arse. The law says we have to get him back so that's what we're going to do." The three escapees were being held in a watery five-acre pen at Upcott Grange. During heavy rain in October it is thought the pen's water level rose and short-circuited the electric fence, allowing the beavers to creep through. The two females did not get too far, stopping in a small oxbow lake. But the male, a Eurasian beaver originally from Germany, river-hopped all the way to a secluded spot near the village of Gunnislake and has enjoyed two months of freedom. In the past few weeks it has become obvious to locals that something unusual had found its way to the river Tamar when trees began to tumble. Gow said the beaver would be bringing down trees to get to any shoots and remaining leaves. It would also gnaw away at bark. The beaver has not been positively identified but Gow is convinced it is his escapee. "It can't be much else," he said. To catch the beaver, Gow says he will need around six traps. He has one, "but we're having the others built now. It's not the sort of thing you can go and find on the shelves of Woolworths," he said. The beaver was hunted to extinction in Britain for fur, meat and body oils. In the next few weeks, Natural England is expected to support the reintroduction of beavers to the wild after a feasability study. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 30 Dec 2008 | 1:00 pm Spokane digs out from record-breaking snow (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Dec 2008 | 12:20 pm Leap second to make new year revels last a moment longerJames Randerson Science correspondent Drunken revellers will probably notice no difference during tomorrow's new year celebrations, but thanks to the Earth's erratic rotation they will have fractionally longer to enjoy the moment and perhaps linger over that celebratory midnight kiss. British physicists and official timekeepers around the world will insert an extra second or "leap second" into the new year countdown to bring the most accurate atomic clocks in line with the astronomical day. "The difference between atomic time and Earth time has now built up to the point where it needs to be corrected, so this New Year's Eve we will experience a rare 61-second minute at the very end of 2008 and revellers all over the UK will have an extra second to celebrate," said Peter Whibberley, a senior research scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington who is helping to coordinate the time update. Planning for the change, which occurs at different times of the day in other time zones, has been no trivial task. Around 25 radio time signals around the world will need to implement the leap second, plus navigation systems such as GPS and its Russian equivalent, Glonass. Internet time servers and speaking clock services will need to make the change on the stroke of midnight. Traditionally, BBC Radio 4's hourly six pips are extended to seven to denote the change. Atomic clocks rely on regular oscillations of caesium atoms to keep time and are extremely accurate. These clocks are the basis for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which in 1972 became the basis for global commerce. The snag is that the rotation of the Earth is not so reliable. It is gradually slowing down and factors such as disruptions in the Earth's core, extreme weather, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes can all influence the precise length of the astronomical day. From time to time, the rotation-based clock — UT1 time — and UTC need to be brought back into line. Deciding whether and when a leap second is needed falls to an international organisation called the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS). It collects and averages measurements of the Earth's rotation from around the world. Each January and July it issues a notice announcing whether a leap second is required in the next six months. The process is not without its problems. "A leap second does cause considerable problems for many systems that require it to be applied simultaneously in a large number of places," said Whibberley. "This is more of an issue in the far east, where the leap second occurs in the middle of the day, and when one is inserted at the end of June and hence often on a working day. The need for manual programming every time creates opportunities for error." One proposal to get around this was to allow UTC to wander away from the astronomical time UT1 and then in a few hundred years make a big jump — a "leap hour" — to bring the two back into sync. But this idea was a non-starter, said Whibberly. "I don't think anyone believed that a leap hour could actually be implemented." He said abandoning leap seconds for UTC and allowing individual nations to read just their time zone every few hundred years – once their time had wandered away from UTC sufficiently – was still a possibility that was being discussed by the International Telecommunications Union, a UN agency. There are strong arguments against it. "Abolishing further leap seconds would break the direct link between timekeeping and the sun, for the first time in human history. It would result in the UTC day slowly drifting relative to the position of the sun in the sky," Whibberly said. "The technical problems caused by leap seconds ... are relatively minor. They don't create a significant risk to life or have a substantial financial impact, and many of them could be resolved by improvements to software and hardware." He said the jury was still out on whether to maintain leap seconds in UTC or abandon them. "At present there is no consensus for either retaining the current form of UTC with leap seconds or redefining UTC to have no leap seconds after some agreed date. Given that the present system works more or less (depending on your point of view) without causing major disasters, there is still time for more debate before a decision is reached." Whibberley said anyone sober enough and with an accurate digital clock that picks up leap second information from a reliable signal would see 2008's final seconds as 57, 58, 59, 60, 00, 01, where 60 denotes the extra second. "In practice, though, many people will be watching the television or an analogue clock, and will not notice the leap second at all." The last time a leap second was added was in the dying moments of 2005. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 30 Dec 2008 | 12:05 pm Researchers unlock secrets of 1918 flu pandemicWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers have found out what made the 1918 flu pandemic so deadly -- a group of three genes that lets the virus invade the lungs and cause pneumonia.Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Dec 2008 | 11:33 am China finds "largest dinosaur fossil site" in worldBEIJING (Reuters) - Scientists in China say they have discovered the world's largest dinosaur fossil site in the eastern province of Shandong, state media reported on Tuesday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Dec 2008 | 10:54 am China finds "largest dinosaur fossil site" in world (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Dec 2008 | 10:54 am Private firms to haul ISS cargoUS space agency Nasa tries to create a competitive market for re-supply flights to the International Space Station.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Dec 2008 | 10:52 am Key gene linked to high blood pressure identifiedWASHINGTON (Reuters) - A gene that affects how the kidneys process salt may help determine a person's risk of high blood pressure, a discovery that could lead to better ways to treat the condition, researchers said on Monday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Dec 2008 | 7:39 am US-Japanese study finds genes for 1918 'Spanish flu' pandemic (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Dec 2008 | 2:26 am Scientists eye unusual swarm of Yellowstone quakes (AP)AP - Yellowstone National Park was jostled by a host of small earthquakes for a third straight day Monday, and scientists watched closely to see whether the more than 250 tremors were a sign of something bigger to come. Swarms of small earthquakes happen frequently in Yellowstone, but it's very unusual for so many earthquakes to happen over several days, said Robert Smith, a professor of geophysics at the University of Utah.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Dec 2008 | 2:17 am China pandas lose weight at Taiwan zoo (Reuters)Reuters - Two giant pandas, goodwill gifts from China to political rival Taiwan, are losing weight since their arrival on the island last week because of a different diet and lack of exercise, a zoo official said on Monday.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Dec 2008 | 1:04 am Privacy fears may slow big genome project to tackle killer diseasesFears that sensitive genetic and health data will not be kept securely may be slowing recruitment to a medical research project designed to help further understanding of how to tackle deadly medical conditions. Only one in 10 are signing up after receiving a letter inviting them to take part in the UK Biobank project. A report seen by the Guardian suggests that "security is likely to be a key decisive consideration for potential participants". The report, commissioned by the Biobank ethics and governance council, shows that members of the public fear information from their medical records, together with blood and urine samples they give, will be shared with private companies, and they are particularly opposed to the possibility that it may be passed to organisations overseas. Biobank aims to recruit 500,000 people aged 40-69 from all over the UK. Some 2.5m letters have been dispatched inviting people to participate in a project which "should give future generations a much better chance of living their lives free of diseases that disable and kill". The letters allot people an individual provisional appointment for assessment, which they are free to cancel. Critics say many people will feel obliged to attend the assessment centre because of the official appearance of the letter, which bears the Department of Health logo. Participants will be followed up for the rest of their lives to check their health and the development of any disease. The database of anonymised, detailed health information, and blood and urine samples which offer genetic material will be available to scientific researchers with a valid and approved research proposal. Professor Rory Collins, principal investigator and chief executive of UK Biobank, said he did not believe data security was a big issue. Some 7,000 people who had turned down the invitation were asked their reasons. Although only half replied, the main reason given was lack of time, followed by illness. Only a small minority cited worries about data security. "There are people who are concerned and don't take part but our data say that is a very small minority," he said. Professors of IT had contacted the project with concerns, he added, but when the security arrangements had been explained, had agreed to take part themselves. All data from the assessment centre is encrypted and personal identifiers are separated from the data and kept under secure key code anonymisation. Only a limited number of people at UK Biobank have access to the key codes. Nonetheless, the Biobank recruitment drive alarms privacy campaigners and MPs who see it as part of a move towards collecting and storing personal and genetic data on every citizen. Ian Gibson MP, former chair of the Commons science and technology committee, said: "With all the recent problems with IT and databases, I'm very suspicious that they are going to be just as bad in holding on to the information." Helen Wallace, of pressure group Genewatch, said drugs companies would wish to access the data: "This research project is part of a much bigger plan to implement a brave new world where everyone is classified by their genetic risk and given medication even if they are not ill." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 30 Dec 2008 | 12:08 am Hard to hear at holiday parties? Blame your brain (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Dec 2008 | 11:07 pm Fossilised skull suggests cheetahs evolved in Asia not AmericasThe fossilised skull of a big cat unearthed in north-west China has been identified as the most primitive cheetah ever found. The skull, which is between 2.16m and 2.55m years old, is superbly preserved and its location has cast doubt on ideas that cheetahs evolved in the Americas. One theory is that modern cheetahs shared a common ancestor with pumas in the Americas, but the fossil record of the puma goes back only around 400,000 years in the US. Because the current find is so much older, it is strong evidence for an evolutionary origin for cheetahs in Asia. Cheetahs are the fastest land animal, using short bursts of speed in excess of 70mph to capture prey. They are now found almost exclusively in Africa and are classified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List of endangered species as vulnerable to extinction. One sub-species called the Asiatic cheetah still exists in Iran. Numbering between 60 and 100 individuals and critically endangered, according to the Red List, it represents the remnants of a much larger population that was once widespread across Asia but was devastated by human-induced habitat destruction and hunting. The new find, from the Linxia basin in China's Gansu province, suggests that Asia was the evolutionary cradle for the fleet felines. The nearly complete skull is among the oldest cheetah fossils yet found. It is around the same age as a 2.5m year-old related species discovered in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1997. But according to its discoverers, Dr Per Christiansen at the Zoological Museum in Copenhagen, and Dr Ji Mazák of the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum in China, the new find – dubbed Acinonyx Kurteni – has a unique set of characteristics. "We present a new discovery from the late Pliocene of China of a new species of primitive cheetah, whose skull shows a unique combination of primitive and derived characters," they wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The big cat's evolutionary history is poorly understood because few fossils have been found. The skull is around the same size as living cheetahs, but it has a very wide braincase relative to the skull's length. It also has enlarged frontal sinuses and its teeth are "surprisingly primitive", according to the researchers. They suggest that other cheetah specimens that are known only from fossilised teeth may have been misidentified by other scientists. "The dentition is far more primitive than in all other cheetah-like cats, raising doubts on the identification of isolated dental finds of large cats from the Pliocene-Pleistocene of Eurasia and Africa, which are often attributed to leopards," they wrote. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 29 Dec 2008 | 10:00 pm From Salon to Salad: Human Hair Makes Good Plant Fertilizer
Human hair could be used instead of chemical fertilizers for some plants like lettuce, new research in a horticultural journal suggests. The hair, which is manufactured into cubes from barbershop and hair-salon waste, provides nitrogen for plants as it decomposes, just as natural-gas-derived sources like ammonia do. "Once the degradation and mineralization of hair waste starts, it can provide sufficient nutrients to container-grown plants and ensure similar yields to those obtained with the commonly used fertilizers in horticulture," said horticulturalist Vlatcho Zheljazkov of Mississippi State University. All plants need nitrogen to grow. These plants form the basis of the proteins which eventually make their way into our bodies either directly through the consumption either of the plants themselves or of animals raised on plants. Our bodies turn those proteins into all sorts of useful things — like muscles — and some less useful things, like hair. In fact, studies carried out in the 1960s found that human hair contains about 15 percent nitrogen [pdf]. Nitrogen is ridiculously abundant. It composes about 75 percent of
the atmosphere, but plants can't use it in its inert atmospheric form.
Luckily, some microbes that grow with legumes pull this N2 out of the
air and "fix it" into the reactive nitrogen that all living things use.
Until the development of the Haber-Bosch process for cooking natural
gas with more natural gas into nitrogen-rich ammonia, humans depended
entirely on these microbes for the production of nitrogen. We either
rotated other crops with legumes or used the nitrogen left over from
animal digestion as manure. The last 50 years, however, have seen enormous increases in the use of synthetic fertilizers using ammonia from the Haber-Bosch process. Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba, one of the world's foremost experts on energy, estimates that 40 percent of the human population owes its existence [pdf] to synthetic fertilizers. But all that nitrogen takes a lot of energy to produce. Smil has also estimated that the Haber-Bosch process uses about 1 percent of the world's total energy usage [xls], or about 150 gigawatts. That's about as much coal power as the UNited States plans to add between now and 2030, so low-energy alternatives to traditional chemical fertilizers could help reduce energy usage. The new study, published in HortTechnology, shows that both lettuce and wormwood, the psychoactive ingredient in absinthe, grow about as well with hair as a fertilizer as they do with chemical fertilizers. The plants seem to be able to use about 50 percent of the nitrogen contained in the hair. The only catch is that the hair takes a while to start decomposing and releasing nutrients into the soil, so it has to be paired with more fast-acting fertilizers. (And that some people might find decomposing hair fertilizing their salad greens a little gross.) Image: flickr/Composite (from left to right) Dane Larsen, Dane Larsen, RaeA See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost century of American clean tech; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 29 Dec 2008 | 8:50 pm If Climate Didn't Doom Neanderthals, Did Humans?
Soon after modern humans arrived in Western Europe, plenty of temperate, food-rich habitat existed for our evolutionary near-brothers — but their settlements dwindled, and modern human settlements spread. These patterns suggest that one of modern anthropological history's great mysteries had a harsh ending: a competition in which Neanderthals, for reasons still unknown, were doomed. "Neanderthals didn't end up being the champion lineage that emerged from the end of the Pleistocene," said study co-author A. Townsend Peterson, a Kansas University evolutionary biologist. "Wouldn't it be fascinating to understand that weird point in human history, when there were two lineages of Homo, in the same region?" One popular explanation holds that climate changes were inhospitable to Neanderthals unable to keep pace with fluctuations in food and weather. Indeed, the overlapping twilight of Neanderthals and dawn of modern humans in Western Europe, from roughly 45,000 to 35,000 years ago, was a time of intense climate disruption. Massive icebergs melting in the North Atlantic stalled major oceanic currents, producing rapid regional oscillations between balmy mildness and harsh cold. Even so, when Peterson's team plugged existing data on past weather patterns and topography into climate simulations that produced a locale-specific model of ecological conditions, they found that suitable habitat still existed for both Neanderthals and modern humans. But archaeological evidence of Neanderthal settlements shows their populations dwindled as their brethren became plentiful. "You can't wave your hands and say it was climate change," said Peterson, who demurred at describing actual conflict between the groups. "We're not demonstrating that there was some sort of interaction. We're simply demonstrating that the alternative explanation doesn't cut it," he said. But the team's paper, "Neanderthal Extinction by Competitive Exclusion," suggests competition, a hypothesis strengthened by the eventual diffusion of modern humans into the Neanderthals' last stronghold in what is now Spain. Neanderthals soon disappeared there as well. Study co-author William E. Banks, a University of Bordeaux archaeologist, made no bones about it. "Our modeling indicates that Neanderthals could have exploited a niche expressed across most of Europe," he said. "The fact that their final contraction to southern Spain coincides with the geographic expansion of the anatomically modern human niche is not coincidence." University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending, who reviewed the paper for its publication Monday in Public Library of Science ONE, called the findings "a real solid blow against the climate hypothesis," and lauded the researchers' careful analysis. "There's a flood of papers out there about how selenium deficiency or cannibalism or one thing or another led to the Neanderthal extinction, and most are nonsense," he said. "This was real solid science." But Harpending cautioned that other explanations, such as disease, are plausible, though no evidence for them exists, and perhaps never will. "There's no way of knowing," he said. Citation: Neanderthal Extinction by Competitive Exclusion. By
William E. Banks, Francesco d’Errico, A. Townsend Peterson, Masa
Kageyama, Adriana Sima and Maria-Fernanda Sanchez-Goni. Public Library of Science ONE, Dec. 29, 2008. See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 29 Dec 2008 | 8:09 pm Quake experiment tests shake-proof metalWASHINGTON (Reuters) - A 10-second experiment using an "elastic" alloy made of nickel and titanium may point to a way help save bridges in earthquakes.Source: Reuters: Science News | 29 Dec 2008 | 8:08 pm The Top 10 Green-Tech Breakthroughs of 2008Green technology was hot in 2008. Barack Obama won the presidential election promising green jobs to Rust Belt workers. Investors poured $5 billion into the sector just through the first nine months of the year. And even Texas oilmen like T. Boone Pickens started pushing alternative energy as a replacement for fossil fuels like petroleum, coal and natural gas. But there's trouble on the horizon. The economy is hovering somewhere between catatonic and hebephrenic, and funding for the big plans that green tech companies laid in 2008 might be a lot harder to come by in 2009. Recessions haven't always been the best times for environmentally friendly technologies as consumers and corporations cut discretionary spending on ethical premiums. Still, green technology and its attendant infrastructure are probably the best bet to drag the American economy out of the doldrums. So, with the optimism endemic to the Silicon Valley region, we present you with the Top 10 Green Tech Breakthroughs of 2008, alternatively titled, The Great Green Hope.
10. THE ISLAND OF THE SOLAR With money flowing like milk and honey in the land of solar technology, all sorts of schemers and dreamers came streaming into the area. One Swiss researcher, Thomas Hinderling, wants to build solar islands several miles across that he claims can produce hundreds of megawatts of relatively inexpensive power. Though most clean tech advocates question the workability of the scheme, earlier this year, Hinderling's company Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique received $5 million from the Ras al Khaimah emirate of the United Arab Emirates to start construction on a prototype facility, shown above, in that country. (Image: Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique)
9. NEW MATERIALS CAGE CARBON Carbon capture and sequestration has a seductively simple appeal: We generate carbon dioxide emissions by burning geology — coal and oil — so to fix the problem, we should simply capture it and inject it back into the ground. It turns out, however, that it's not quite so simple. Aside from finding the right kind of empty spaces in the earth's crust and the risks that the CO2 might leak, the biggest problem with the scheme is finding a material that could selectively snatch the molecule out of the hot mess of gases going up the flues of fossil fuel plants. That's where two classes of special cage-like molecules come into play, ZIFs and amines. This year, Omar Yaghi, a chemist at UCLA, announced a slough of new CO2-capturing ZIFs and Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech, reported that he'd made a new amine that seems particularly well-suited to working under real-world condition. Both materials could eventually make capturing CO2 easier -- and therefore, more cost effective. Perhaps better still, Yaghi's lab's technique also defined a new process for quickly creating new ZIFs with the properties that scientists — and coal-plant operators — want. Some of their crystals are shown in the image above. (Image: Omar Yaghi and Rahul Banerjee/UCLA) 8. GREEN TECH LEGISLATION GETS REAL On the federal and state levels, several historic actions put the teeth into green tech bills passed over the last few years. A review committee of the EPA effectively froze coal plant construction, a boon to alternative energy (though earlier this month the EPA ignored the committee's ruling and it is unclear how the issue will be settled). In California, the state unveiled and approved its plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, which could be a model for a nationwide system. Combined with the green-energy tax credits in the $700-billion bailout bill, the government did more for green tech in 2008 than in whole decades in the past. 7. THE CATALYST THAT COULD ENABLE SOLAR Combined with cheap photovoltaic solar panels (like Nanosolar's), the system could lead to inexpensive, simple systems that use water to store the energy from sunlight. In the process, the scientists may have cleared the major roadblock on the long road to fossil fuel independence: Reducing the on-again, off-again nature of many renewable power sources. "You've made your house into a fuel station," Daniel Nocera, a chemistry professor at MIT told Wired.com. "I've gotten rid of all the goddamn grids." The catalyst enables the electrolysis system to function efficiently at room temperature and at ordinary pressure. Like a reverse fuel cell, it splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. By recombining the molecules with a standard fuel cell, the O2 and H2 could then be used to generate energy on demand. 6. PICKENS PLAN PUSHES POWER PLAYS INTO AMERICAN MAINSTREAM Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens might be a lot of things, but environmentalist he is not. That's why his support for a nationwide network of wind farms generated so much excitement. While his solution for transportation, natural gas vehicles, may not pan out, his Pickens Plan is the most visible alternative energy plan out there and it began to channel support from outside coastal cities for finding new sources of energy. Of course, no one said Pickens is stupid. If his plan was adopted and major investments in transmission infrastructure were made, his wind energy investments would stand to benefit.
5. SOLAR THERMAL PLANTS RETURN TO THE DESERTS When most people think of harnessing the sun's power, they imagine a solar photovoltatic panel, which directly converts light from the sun into electricity. But an older technology emerged as a leading city-scale power technology in 2008: solar thermal. Companies like Ausra, BrightSource, eSolar, Solel, and a host of others are using sunlight-reflecting mirrors to turn liquids into steam, which can drive a turbine in the same way that coal-fired power plants make electricity. Two companies, BrightSource and Ausra, debuted their pilot plants. They mark the first serious solar thermal experimentation in the United States since the 1980s. BrightSource's Israeli demo plant is shown above. (Image: BrightSource)
4. OBAMA PICKS A GREEN TECH EXPERT TO HEAD DOE President-elect Barack Obama ran on the promise of green jobs and an economic stimulus package that would provide support for scientific innovation. Then, Obama picked Steven Chu, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, to head the Department of Energy. Chu had been focused on turning Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory into an alternative-energy powerhouse. The green tech community rejoiced that one of their own would be in the White House. That's because green tech is going to need some help. With the world economy falling into recession, the price of oil has dropped, even though there are serious concerns about the long-term oil supply. When energy prices drop, clean tech investments don't seem quite as attractive, and the renascent industry could be in trouble. It's happened before, after all. Back in the '70s, geopolitical events sent the price of oil soaring, which, as it tends to, created a boom in green tech. But the early 1980s saw the worst recession since the Depression. Sound familiar? In the poor economic climate, focus and funds were shifted away from green tech. The last nail in the coffin was the election of Ronald Reagan, who immediately pulled off the solar panels Jimmy Carter had placed on the White House. The green tech industry collapsed. History has given U.S. alternative energy research a second chance and environmental advocates hope that a different president will lead to a very different result. (Image: DOE) 3. SOLAR CELL PRODUCTION GETS BIG, GIGA(WATT)BIG Every clean tech advocate's dream is a power-generating technology that could compete head-to-head with coal, the cheapest fossil fuel, on price alone. Nanosolar, one of a new generation of companies building solar panels out of cheap plastics, could be the first company to get there. Early this year, the company officially opened its one-gigawatt production facility, which is many times the size of most previous solar facilities. Nanosolar, in other words, has found a process that can scale: it works as well in production as it does in the lab. That's the main reason that the company has picked up half-a-billion dollars in funding from investors like MDV's Erik Straser. "[It's the] first time in industry a single tool with a 1GW throughput," Straser wrote in an e-mail. "It's a key part of how the company is achieving grid parity with coal."
2. PROJECT BETTER PLACE FINDS HOMES Doing just that is the centerpiece of Some of these systems, however, are actually throwbacks to earlier eras. As Peter Shulman, a historian of technology at Case Western Reserve University, likes to remind his students: in the early 20th century, before the Model T, one-third of all cars were electric. (Image: Joe Puglies/WIRED) 1. CALERA'S GREEN CEMENT DEMO PLANT OPENS Cement? With all the whiz bang technologies in green technology, cement seems like an odd pick for our top clean technology of the year. But here's the reason: making cement — and many other materials — takes a lot of heat and that heat comes from fossil fuels. Calera's technology, like that of many green chemistry companies, works more like Jell-O setting. By employing catalysis instead of heat, it reduces the energy cost per ton of cement. And in this process, CO2 is an input, not an output. So, instead of producing a ton of carbon dioxide per ton of cement made — as is the case with old-school Portland cement — half a ton of carbon dioxide can be sequestered. With more than 2.3 billion tons of cement produced each year, reversing the carbon-balance of the world's cement would be a solution that's the scale of the world's climate change problem. In August, the company opened its first demonstration site next to Dynegy's Moss Landing power plant in California, pictured here. See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 29 Dec 2008 | 7:29 pm BLOG: For SpaceX, More Launches, Less MoneyIrene Klotz chats with Elon Musk, founder of the startup company SpaceX.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 29 Dec 2008 | 7:09 pm 2008: Year of the Natural Disaster?Natural disasters killed more than 220,000 people in 2008, among the worst years ever.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 29 Dec 2008 | 7:09 pm 'Huge year for natural disasters'Losses from natural disasters rose by 50% in 2008, underlining need for action on climate change, re-insurers Munich Re say.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 29 Dec 2008 | 6:30 pm Japanese Whalers Disrupted by ActivistsSea Shepherd activists prevent Japanese whalers from harpooning whales.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 29 Dec 2008 | 5:48 pm Sprayed Aerosols Could Ease Climate WoesSeeding the atmosphere with aerosols could help release heat into space.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 29 Dec 2008 | 5:06 pm Over the MoonThe magic of the Moon is once again captivating nationsSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 29 Dec 2008 | 4:24 pm Artistic clues to coastal changeTwo-hundred-year-old paintings can help modern engineers deal with coastal erosion, a study shows.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 29 Dec 2008 | 4:08 pm How Visiting Your Family Warps Your BrainNew research helps explain why we're so hard on our family members during the holidays.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 29 Dec 2008 | 4:00 pm Did Drought Help End Roman Rule?Clues preserved in an ancient cave link the fall of the Roman Empire with drought.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 29 Dec 2008 | 2:33 pm Breeding programme boosts numbers of endangered crayfish speciesA breeding programme has boosted the numbers of an endangered species of British crayfish. The white-clawed crayfish is threatened by a deadly "crayfish plague" and competition from a brash American cousin that was introduced to the country in the late 1970s. The conservation project, launched in 2003 in the Yorkshire Dales, has produced 300 juveniles this year – making it the UK's most successful breeding programme for the native species. The white-clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes) was once common in upland rivers and streams, favouring hard-water areas in particular. But its numbers have been devastated by a virulent plague caused by a fungus that was almost certainly brought to this country by the North American signal crayfish – a species that has been farmed in the UK for the seafood trade since the late 1970s. Now the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List of endangered species rates the native white-clawed crayfish as vulnerable to extinction – just two categories away from being critically endangered. The threat from the larger and more aggressive North American signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus) is particularly acute because, apart from spreading disease, it is able to breed faster and preys on the smaller native species. Crayfish plague has taken hold quickly because it can be spread by water, fish or equipment that has been in contact with the signal crayfish. In Northern Ireland, where there are no crayfish farms, the crayfish plague is unknown. The Yorkshire project, run by Natural England and the Environment Agency, began by attempting to ringfence populations of the British crayfish. It has now moved on to developing techniques for captive breeding and rearing that allow more than 60% of offspring to survive – many more than would reach breeding age in the wild. "We are at a critical stage in protecting our remaining native crayfish populations and our work in the Yorkshire Dales is at the forefront of conserving this endangered species. It has required a lot of hard work but the results demonstrate just how successful we have been in rearing native white-clawed crayfish. We now need to build on this success," said Neil Handy, fisheries officer with the Environment Agency, who is responsible for managing the facility. "The news that white-clawed crayfish are breeding in increasing numbers in the Yorkshire Dales is extremely encouraging and shows that targeted conservation work can make a real impact. The species has been all but wiped out following the introduction of its American cousin, but the success of this project gives grounds for hoping that extinction is by no means inevitable," said Dr Helen Phillips, the chief executive of Natural England. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 29 Dec 2008 | 2:17 pm Astronomers Aim to Grasp Mysterious Dark Matter (SPACE.com)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Dec 2008 | 2:07 pm
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