Large Quantity Of Stem Cells Produced From Small Number Of Blood Stem Cells

Scientists have succeeded in producing a large quantity of laboratory stem cells from a small number of blood stem cells obtained from bone marrow. The team has thus taken a giant step towards the development of a revolutionary treatment based on these stem cells.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm

Jet Lag Disturbs Sleep By Upsetting Internal Clocks In Two Neural Centers

New research shows the sleep disruption associated with jet lag and shift work occurs in two separate but linked groups of neurons below the hypothalamus at the base of the brain.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm

Severe Hypoglycemia Linked With Higher Risk Of Dementia For Older Adults With Diabetes

Having hypoglycemic (low blood sugar level) episodes that are severe enough to require hospitalization are associated with a greater risk of dementia for older adults with type 2 diabetes, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm

Computers 'Trained' To Analyze Fruit-fly Behavior

Scientists have trained computers to automatically analyze aggression and courtship in fruit flies, opening the way for researchers to perform large-scale, high-throughput screens for genes that control these innate behaviors. The program allows computers to examine half an hour of video footage of pairs of interacting flies in what is almost real time; characterizing the behavior of a new line of flies "by hand" might take a biologist more than 100 hours.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm

Hollow Mask Illusion Fails To Fool Schizophrenia Patients

Patients with schizophrenia are able to correctly see through an illusion known as the 'hollow mask' illusion, probably because their brain disconnects "what the eyes see" from what "the brain thinks it is seeing," according to researchers. The findings shed light on why cannabis users may also be less deceived by the illusion whilst on the drug.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm

Newly Discovered Iron-breathing Species Have Lived In Cold Isolation For Millions Of Years

A reservoir of briny liquid buried deep beneath an Antarctic glacier supports hardy microbes that have lived in isolation for millions of years, researchers report in the journal Science. The discovery of life is in a place where cold, darkness, and lack of oxygen would previously have led scientists to believe nothing could survive.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm

Uncovering Secrets Of Salmonella's Stealth Attack

A single crafty protein allows the deadly bacterium Salmonella enterica to both invade cells lining the intestine and hijack cellular functions to avoid destruction. This evolutionary slight-of-hand sheds new insights into the lethal tricks of Salmonella, which kills more than 2 million people a year.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 12:00 pm

NASA's Kepler Captures First Views Of Planet-Hunting Territory

NASA's Kepler mission has taken its first images of the star-rich sky where it will soon begin hunting for planets like Earth.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 12:00 pm

Clock So Precise It Loses Only One Second Every 300 Million Years: Advance Uses Colliding Fermions

Physicists have measured and controlled seemingly forbidden collisions between neutral strontium atoms -- a class of antisocial atoms known as fermions that are not supposed to collide when in identical energy states. The advance makes possible a significant boost in the accuracy of atomic clocks based on hundreds or thousands of neutral atoms.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 12:00 pm

High-dose Radiation Improves Lung Cancer Survival, Study Finds

Higher doses of radiation combined with chemotherapy improve survival in patients with stage III lung cancer, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 12:00 pm

A photographer's journey

National Geographic photographer Mattias Klum has travelled the world capturing some of its most fragile environments and threatened species

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 17 Apr 2009 | 9:00 am

Palin stands against abortion during Ind. speech (AP)

AP - Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, speaking at anti-abortion group's dinner, criticized President Barack Obama for supporting abortion rights and challenged the idea that unplanned pregnancies are a nuisance that can be solved by abortion.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 8:48 am

World's largest nuke plant to restart in Japan (AFP)

AFP - A strong earthquake shut down the world's largest nuclear power plant here almost two years ago.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 5:29 am

Drought in West Africa repeats and may get worse (AP)

AP - West Africa is already living on the edge, and new research indicates that even worse droughts are possible than the one that devastated the region in the late 20th century.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 3:35 am

MI5 set to recruit science chief

MI5 is to appoint a chief scientific adviser, whose brief will include work on combating the terror threat, BBC News has learned.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 17 Apr 2009 | 2:19 am

The new Q?

It's not all ejector seats - MI5 seeks science chief
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 17 Apr 2009 | 2:00 am

Californians say "baby, baby, no more drilling" (Reuters)

Reuters - U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar confronted a host of sea creatures and polar bears on Thursday as costumed Californians told the new administration 'no' to offshore oil drilling.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 12:24 am

Planet-Hunting Spacecraft Beams Home First Images (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - The planet-seeking Kepler spacecraft has beamed home its first images of a patch of the sky where NASA hopes to find Earth-like planets circling distant, alien stars.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Apr 2009 | 12:18 am

Bacteria found thriving beneath Antarctic glacier (AP)

AP - Hidden in the bone-chilling dark beneath an Antarctic glacier, a colony of strange bacteria is thriving. Scientists investigating the flow of blood-red water from beneath the glacier discovered the bacteria, which have survived for millions of years, living on sulfur and iron compounds, they report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Apr 2009 | 11:05 pm

8-foot-tall Man Seeks Record

Zhao Liang of China is 8 feet tall.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Apr 2009 | 10:45 pm

Plan to boost electric car sales

Motorists will be offered subsidies of up to £5,000 to encourage them to buy electric and hybrid cars under government plans.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Apr 2009 | 10:27 pm

Readers Pick: Top 10 Alternative Energy Bets

We polled LiveScience readers, and here are the Top 10 choices.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Apr 2009 | 10:07 pm

Critics of offshore drilling pack Calif. hearing (AP)

AP - Environmentalists dressed as polar bears, sea turtles and jellyfish were among dozens of people who packed a public hearing Thursday to press Interior Secretary Ken Salazar not to open new areas of the West Coast to oil drilling.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Apr 2009 | 9:28 pm

Climate change could worsen African "megadroughts"

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The recent decades-long drought that killed 100,000 people in Africa's Sahel may be a small foretaste of monstrous "megadroughts" that could grip the region as global climate change worsens, scientists reported on Thursday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 16 Apr 2009 | 7:55 pm

Newfound Lichen Species Named for Obama (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - A newly discovered species of lichen - a plant-like growth that looks like moss or a dry leaf - has been named after President Obama.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Apr 2009 | 7:53 pm

Plastic Bags a Major Problem for Marine Wildlife

A third of dead turtles had plastic bags in them.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Apr 2009 | 7:49 pm

Newfound Lichen Species Named for Obama

Newly discovered lichen species named for Obama to honor support of science.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Apr 2009 | 7:43 pm

BLOG: Why Can Susan Boyle Sing So Well?

Why can some (like Susan Boyle) sing and others can't? Here's the science.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Apr 2009 | 7:42 pm

Scientist Liked 'Story' Problems in Math as Kid

John Gierke of Michigan Technological University leads an effort to develop remote sensing tools and resource protection in Central America.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Apr 2009 | 7:39 pm

Iranian scientists claim they have cloned a goat (AP)

AP - Iranian scientists have cloned a goat and plan future experiments they hope will lead to a treatment for stroke patients, the leader of the research said Wednesday. The female goat, named Hana, was born early Wednesday in the city of Isfahan in central Iran, said Dr. Mohammed Hossein Nasr e Isfahani, head of the Royan Research Institute.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Apr 2009 | 7:31 pm

Planet-hunting spacecraft's first images released (AP)

AP - NASA's new planet-hunting telescope has beamed back the first images of a patch of faraway sky in the Milky Way galaxy where it hopes to find Earth-like planets. NASA on Thursday released several images snapped by Kepler earlier this month, including a view of a distant part of our galaxy containing some 14 million stars. Scientists say more than 100,000 of those stars are potential candidates for research.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Apr 2009 | 7:29 pm

First Light: Kepler Opens Her Eyes

The Kepler Space telescope took its first images of the region of the galaxy where it will hunt for planets.

The full-field view (below) contains approximately 14 million stars, and astronomers have selected more than 100,000 of them as good candidates for orbiting rocky planets.

"We expect to find hundreds of planets circling those stars" William Borucki, head of the Kepler mission at NASA. "And for the first time, we can look for Earth-size planets in the habitable zones around other stars like the sun.”

Kepler is the first space telescope with this capability, thanks to its 95-megapixel camera, the largest ever sent to space. The telescope will spend the next 3.5 years taking a closer at the targeted stars, waiting for their light to dim periodically as orbiting planets pass in front of them.

For the next few weeks, NASA will calibrate Kepler's instruments, and then the hunt will be on.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 16 Apr 2009 | 7:16 pm

West Africa faces 'megadroughts'

Droughts lasting centuries occur regularly in West Africa, scientists find - and another one is coming, climate change or not.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Apr 2009 | 7:04 pm

Obama Receives First Presidential Lichen

Long after the triumphs and failures of his administration are forgotten, Barack Obama's legacy will survive — in lichen.

University of California, Riverside lichen curator Kerry Knudsen named the newly-discovered Caloplaca obamae after the President Obama. It's the first species named after him.

"I made the final collections of C. obamae during the suspenseful final weeks of President Obama's campaign for the United States presidency," said Knudsen in a press release accompanying the lichen's description in Opuscula Philolichenum. "This paper was written during the international jubilation over his election."

Knudsen made his discovery on California's Santa Rosa Island, where grazing by non-native cattle nearly drove the now-presidential lichen to extinction. Ranching is no longer practiced on the island, and it's expected that non-native deer and elk will eventually be removed, eliminating the last threats to C. obamae's future.

If having an ochre-colored, fungus-algae symbiont named after you seems a backhanded compliment, then spare a second thought for these unappreciated organisms. Lichen can absorb up to 35 times their body weight in water, survive for years in a drought, and flourish from Antarctica to the equator.

Previous presidentially inspired species include a trifecta of slime-mold beetles named Agathidium bushi, Agathidium cheneyi and Agathidium rumsfeldi.

See Also:

• Selling the Rights to Name New Species is Cheap
• Fan Boy Professor Names Newly Discovered Beetle: O. orbisonorum ...
• Obama Budget Strong in Science

Citation: "Caloplaca obamae, a new species from Santa Rosa Island, California." By Kerry Knudsen. Opuscula Philolichenum, Vol. 6, 2009.Image: University of California, Riverside

Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 16 Apr 2009 | 6:32 pm

Porpoise-Like Sub Explores Deep Sea

A remote-controlled submarine will monitor ocean conditions off Tasmania.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Apr 2009 | 6:30 pm

Mirror Neurons Fire Better at Close Range

A newly discovered type of brain cell may help us prep for social interactions.

The cells are a special type of "mirror neurons," which are thought to aid understanding of the actions and intentions of others. Mirror neurons fire both when you do something, like grab a bottle of wine, and when you watch another person do the same thing. Instead of carrying out a step-by-step reasoning process to figure out why a friend is grabbing a bottle of wine, we instantly understand what's going on inside his head because it's going on in our heads too.

Now, researchers have discovered some mirror neurons don't just care about what another individual is doing, they also care about how far away they're doing it, and, more importantly, whether there's potential for interaction.  

"This was very surprising for us," said Antonino Casile of the University of Tübingen in Germany, co-author of the research, published in Science Thursday. "The current view about mirror neurons is that they might underlie action understanding. But the distance at which an action is performed plays no role in understanding what the others are doing."

The findings suggest an expanded role for mirror neurons in social interaction. Not only do they facilitate quick comprehension, but they may also help us instantly decide whether to respond and interact. If our friend drops the bottle of wine, we're ready to swoop in before it crashes to the floor. When someone special puckers up, you don't have to think before leaning in for the kiss.

The researchers located mirror neurons in the brains of two monkeys, which fired when the monkeys grabbed a small metal object and when they watched the experimenter do the same. Unexpectedly many of these neurons actually had a preference for where the experimenter was grabbing the object — about a fourth of the cells fired more rapidly when the action took place within arm's reach of the monkey (its "peripersonal" space), while another fourth were more excited when the action was out reach (its "extrapersonal space"). Over a range of distances, the closer the motion was to the monkey, the faster its peripersonal mirror neurons fired; the extrapersonal mirror neurons had the opposite response.

Distance shouldn't make a difference for understanding or imitating a task, or for any of the commonly attributed functions of mirror neurons. However, distance plays a fundamental role in deciding how to respond to behaviors.

"Our brain divides space into at least two major sectors — one in which we can do things, in which we can act, and one in which we can't," explained Marco Iacoboni, who studies the human mirror neuron system at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Our cognition, even fairly complex stuff like empathy, seems grounded in our body."

The researchers also demonstrated that it's not mere distance that affects these neurons, but more specifically, whether there is indeed potential to act. They did the same tests with a clear barrier between the monkey and the experimenter's grabbing, eliminating the possibility of interaction. Even though the monkey never tried to grab the object during any of the experiments, the barrier stopped some peripersonal mirror neurons from firing, even when the grabbing was very close to the monkey. Meanwhile, the extrapersonal mirror neurons stepped in and started firing.

Casile speculates that these mirror neurons are analyzing actions both to understand what others are doing and to decide what one could do in order to interact with them, and that these analyses are happening simultaneously. "We might be deciding whether and how to interact with an action not after understanding it, but rather in parallel," he said.

"Mirror neurons may be very important for social relations," Iacoboni said. "These new findings truly speak to this idea. The neurons may be encoding actions in a way that's essential for cooperating with others, and very important for social interactions."

See Also:

• Are Mirror Neurons Just a Myth?
• Chimps: Not Human, But Are They People?
• Cooperation Beats Selfishness, at Least in Theory

Citation: "Mirror Neurons Differentially Encode the Peripersonal and Extrapersonal Space of Monkeys" by Vittorio Caggiano, Leonardo Fogassi, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Peter Thier, Antonino Casile. Science, Vol. 324, No. 5925. (DOI: 10.1126/science.1166818)

Image: stuartpilbrow/Flickr

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 16 Apr 2009 | 6:07 pm

Pandas opt for low-cal sweeteners

Red pandas have shown a preference for artificial sweeteners that has puzzled researchers.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Apr 2009 | 6:07 pm

1.5-million-year-old Antarctic Microbe Community Discovered

Colony of microbes discovered trapped in briny pool under Antarctic glacier.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

Ancient ecosystem found under glacier

The organisms, which were trapped two million years ago beneath half a kilometre of ice in Antarctica, evolved to live without light or oxygen

An ancient ecosystem that has thrived in isolation for millions of years has been discovered in a pool of dark, salty water beneath half a kilometre of ice in Antarctica.

Microorganisms in the pool evolved to live without light or oxygen after being covered by the Taylor glacier on the East Antarctic ice sheet up to two million years ago. Scientists estimate the pool's temperature to be around -10C, but the water does not freeze because it contains so much salt – around four times as much as seawater.

The discovery of simple organisms in the unmapped reservoir provides further evidence of the extreme conditions that life might be able to endure on other planets.

"This briny pond is a unique time capsule from a period in Earth's history," said Jill Mikucki, who led the research at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, US. "I don't know of any other environment quite like this on Earth."

Scientists made the discovery while analysing water samples from Blood Falls, a curious blood-red stain on the face of the Taylor glacier. Explorers in the early 20th century thought the stain was caused by red algae, but subsequent investigations have revealed that the colour comes from rust in the water.

While the glacier is made of frozen fresh water, water samples from Blood Falls are exceptionally salty and rich in iron and sulphur, but contain no oxygen. Water from the subterranean pool, which is thought to be around 5km wide, seems to be drawn up into the glacier before seeping from a tiny outlet in its face four kilometres away.

Because water flows only erratically out of the glacier, it took the researchers years to get enough samples to analyse. In the water eventually collected by the team, Kikucki found 17 different types of marine microbe, including a bacterium called Thiomicrospira arctica, though she suspects around 30 types might live in the pool. The study is reported in the journal Science.

"When I started running the chemical analysis on it, there was no oxygen. That was when this got really interesting. it was a real eureka moment," said Mikucki.

The scientists believe the pool's microbes eke out a living by "breathing" iron leached from the bedrock beneath the glacier, using sulphur as a catalyst. With no sunlight to power photosynthesis, the microbes are thought to feed on organic matter that was trapped in the pool with them.

Despite their lengthy spell in isolation, Mikucki was able to culture the bacteria and extract DNA from them. Tests showed they were remarkably similar to modern marine microbes, suggesting the population living beneath the glacier was once part of a larger population living millions of years ago in the surrounding area or in an open fjord.

Studying the microbes might help to explain how life survived a period of our planet's history known as "Snowball Earth", when ice sheets encroaching from both poles met at the equator, encasing the world in ice.

"It's a bit like finding a forest that nobody has seen for 1.5 million years," said Ann Pearson, a co-author of the report at Harvard Univeristy in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Intriguingly, the species living there are similar to contemporary organisms, and yet quite different – a result, no doubt, of having lived in such an inhospitable environment for so long."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 16 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

Ancient Ecosystem Found in Ice Pocket

A population of microbes has been thriving in a reservoir of briny liquid under an Antarctic glacier.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

Goat Cloned by Iranian Scientists

The world's first cloned goat could help scientists find treatments for stroke.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Apr 2009 | 5:20 pm

Jet Lag Caused By Out-of-synch Brain

Jet lag caused by brain cells falling out of synch with change in light-dark cycle.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Apr 2009 | 4:03 pm

Engineers set to convert carbon dioxide into solid rock

Icelandic experts hope to dispose of 30,000 tonnes of the greenhouse gas each year

Engineers in Iceland are set to convert carbon dioxide to solid rock as a way to tackle global warming.

The experts want to exploit the country's volcanic origins to dispose of up to 30,000 tonnes of the greenhouse gas each year. They expect the gas to react with layers of volcanic rocks deep beneath the surface to form minerals that will lock the carbon pollution away for millions of years.

"This is a well-known natural process," said Holmfridur Sigurdardottir, project manager. "We are just trying to imitate what nature is doing."

The project will take CO2 produced by an Icelandic geothermal energy plant and dissolve it in water under high pressures. It will then pump the solution into layers of basalt about 400-700m underground, and watch what happens.

Laboratory experiments suggest the dissolved CO2 will react with calcium in the basalt to form solid calcium carbonate. Sigurdardottir said: "In the lab it takes a few days to a few weeks. We want to see what happens in the field and whether we can do it on the scale required."

The project, called Carb-fix, is a form of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Such schemes usually aim to pump the CO2 into deep saltwater reservoirs, where the high pressure is expected to keep the gas dissolved and trapped underground. Mineral storage offers a safer bet, Carb-fix says, because there is less chance of leakage.

Domenik Wolff-Boenisch from the University of Iceland, who works on the project, will tell the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna next week that "storage of carbon dioxide as solid carbonate in basaltic rocks may provide an ideal solution".

The project is scheduled to begin pumping down the dissolved CO2 in August, Sigurdardottir said. It will take about a year before the team knows whether the gas is converting to minerals as expected.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 16 Apr 2009 | 3:44 pm

"Take AIM at Climate Change" - Music Video

AIM = Adapt Innovate Mitigate. What happens at Earth's poles will rock your world. From POLAR-PALOOZA, a multimedia initiative with NSF & NASA support. [See the science behind the lyrics]
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Apr 2009 | 3:20 pm

Patent for meatier pigs gets European trotters in a mix

German pig farmers urge the EU to revoke the patent for a genetic method used to breed meatier pigs.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Apr 2009 | 2:58 pm

Video Takes You on 3-D Virtual Trip Into Growing Tumor

Take a virtual trip inside the human body at a cellular level to see how blood vessels grow to feed tumors. Stopping this growth is one of the primary lines of attack scientists take in trying to defeat diseases, cancer in particular.

Wired.com got an exclusive early look at Amgen's new website, launched Wednesday, which aims to explain blood-vessel growth, or angiogenesis, and how it relates to cancer. The video above is just the first of 15 produced by Amgen that explore various aspects of angiogenesis and potential ways to control it in beautiful, lifelike videos.

Angiogenesis is critical for tumors to grow beyond a few millimeters, and for cancer to metastasize to other parts of the body. Cancer cells use the blood vessels as conduits to other areas of the body, where a single cell can set up camp and begin forming a new tumor. Stop angiogenesis, and you stop cancer.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 16 Apr 2009 | 2:37 pm

Vast Black Coral Forest Found

The largest forest of black coral is found near the home of mystical sea monsters.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Apr 2009 | 2:13 pm

Baby Pythons Escape on Passenger Plane

Four baby pythons slithered from their box during a passenger flight over Australia.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Apr 2009 | 2:13 pm

Some Men Prefer Fat Women

A recent study finds that not only do some men prefer overweight women, but that they also find a wide range of body sizes attractive.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Apr 2009 | 1:53 pm

The Chemistry of Life: The Human Body

The body is full of elements. But just which are essential and which are not is still not completely sorted out.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Apr 2009 | 1:37 pm

Artificial Trees Could Cool Climate

Tree-like towers could help scrub CO2 from Earth's atmosphere.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Apr 2009 | 1:30 pm

US power company to tap solar energy in space

Orbiting solar farms will be commercially viable within next seven years, says group

A leading American power company is hoping to turn science fiction into reality by supporting a project to set up solar panels in outer space and beam the electricity generated back to Earth.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which serves San Francisco and northern California, has agreed to buy electricity from a startup company claiming to have found a way to unlock the potential power supply in space.

The firm, Solaren Corp, says it will launch solar panels into orbit and then convert the power generated into radio-frequency transmissions, which will be beamed back down into a depot in Fresno, California. The energy would then be converted into electricity and fed into the regular power grid, PG&E said.

Although spacecraft and satellites routinely use solar panels, the project marks the first serious attempt to take advantage of the powerful and near-constant supply of sunshine in space.

Nasa and the Pentagon have been studying the idea of orbiting solar farms since the 1960s, and a number of private researchers have been looking at ways to tap into space-based solar energy.

But Solaren Corp, founded by a former spacecraft engineer, says it has developed a technology that would make it commercially viable within the next seven years to transmit electricity generated in space to a terrestrial power grid.

PG&E announced this week that it had agreed to buy 200 megawatts of electricity from Solaren starting in 2016. The deal has yet to be approved by California state government regulators and PG&E has not put any money into Solaren, but the promise alone has turned the notion of space based solar power from fantasy to reality.

"There is a very serious possibility they can make this work," said PG&E's spokesman Jonathan Marshall.

Unlike on earth, with its cycle of nights and days and where there can be clouds, sunshine in space is practically constant – aside from a few days around the spring and autumn equinoxes. That means the space-based solar panels could potentially produce a steady supply of electricity.

The sunlight hitting solar panels 200 miles in space would be 10 times as powerful as the light filtering down to Earth through the atmosphere. The satellite would then convert the energy into radio waves and beam them down to a receiving station on Earth. Spirnak did not give details of how this would work but said the technology was based on that now used by communications satellites, describing it as "very mature". He added that power losses via the radio-wave route are lower than transmission cables used on Earth. Another advantage of the plan is that it does not require large amounts of real estate. Ground-based solar installations require huge tracts of land.

Solaren has released relatively few details about the project. But Solaren's CEO, Gary Spirnak, said the company, a group of about 10 former satellite and aerospace engineers, was confident in the technology and timing behind the venture.

He argued that the science behind the orbiting solar farms was little different to that of communications satellites. "This is the exact same thing that satellites do every day. The basic technology is there," said Spirnak. "The bottom line is that this is not really a technology issue."

Daniel Kammen, a professor in energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley, agreed: the most daunting challenge to Spirnak is cost.

"The ground rules are looking kind of promising. Whether we can do it at scale, whether we can do it affordably, whether it is too much of a technological leap or not, those are all factors," Kammen said. "It is doable. Whether it is doable at a reasonable cost, we just don't know."

Spirnak argues that a confluence of recent events now make the project more commercially viable. The cost of rocket launches – though still prohibitive – has been dropping because of the commercialisation of space, making it cheaper to send up and service solar panels.

Spirnak will face a difficult task raising funds for his project though, especially in this time of global economic recession. He said he was seeking in the low billions of dollars in investment – much higher than the usual $100m (£67m) to $200m costs for projects in renewable energy.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 16 Apr 2009 | 1:26 pm

Earth Watch

Why those electric cars don't only come in green
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Apr 2009 | 12:25 pm