Fill ‘er Up!
Jun 9 at 5:05pm by Aileen
…with Bug Juice, please.
When I started college in the late 1960s in Oklahoma, I could buy gas for my Volkswagon Bug for 19.9ยข a gallon. That’s 5 gallons for a dollar, enough to drive home to visit the folks, drive around town to see friends, and get back to college without having to stop at a gas station. This past weekend I drove our little pickup to Gatlinburg, Tennessee to see an old Navy buddy, a round trip equivalent to that past Oklahoma weekend trek. Gas for the journey cost us right around $50. A dollar’s worth won’t get me to the grocery store and back any more, and it doesn’t look like the price is ever going to come down.
The going price per barrel of petroleum is pushing $150 hard and will probably go over $200 before the end of the year. Diesel fuel is a dollar more expensive than gasoline, and the price of everything grown on a farm and transported by ship, train or truck must go up accordingly.
The good news - or, at least the hopeful news is that progress is being made in deciding what replacement fuels we should be developing. Most people are skeptical of corn-based ethanol and the diversion of food crops as well as crop land to biofuels. And while new techniques can make biofuels from native vegetation like switchgrass or even algae, the fact is that plants aren’t very efficient at converting solar energy into the biomass required.
Biotech researchers are now turning to engineered microorganisms as both helpers in turning biomass into fuels and as fuel themselves - photosynthetic bacteria that can capture sunlight energy 100 times more efficiently than plants - that can be grown in massive amounts without competing for cropland.
It does appear that the time has finally come when human civilization must change its ways, the only questions being how much it’s going to hurt regular people and which nations and/or multinational corporations will corner the markets. Perhaps biotechnology can be put to good use creating new fuel sources instead of turning staple foods into pesticides. That would be a positive change of focus, help get the tarnish of public resistance off the biotech bus, and maybe even save the planet.
But you and I will probably be paying at least $5 a gallon to fill our tanks, no matter what kind of fuels are developed. Just something we’ll have to get used to.
Links:
New Source for Biofuels Discovered
Harnessing Microbes to Meet Future Energy Needs
Are microbes the answer to the energy crisis?
The ‘08 Farm Bill and Improving America’s Diet
Jun 2 at 4:04pm by Aileen
The 2007 Farm Bill - now the 2008 Farm Bill, was passed by both chambers of Congress, vetoed by President Bush, then the veto was overridden by both houses and is now the ‘Law of the Land’. Politically, the bill isn’t perfect, there is still too much pork and payments to rich agribusiness concerns for their poor farming practices, and not enough clarifying guidelines for biofuels production and organic farming.
But it’s a lot better than no bill at all, which would have kept the last support bill in place for the foreseeable future. The new bill has incentives to clean up residue discharges in important watersheds, and supports for best practices in crop rotations, cover crops and low-chemical input farming. It’s still strong on commodity production (corn, wheat, rice), but does put some real support into farmer’s market promotions and expansion of organic markets. It does somewhat limit subsidies to near-millionaire commodity farmers, requires more fresh fruit and vegetables to be available in schools, increases food stamp benefits as tied to the price of food, allots priority funding to research into the bee die-off situation, and supports rural enterprise and microenterprise investments.
Research into the “typical American diet” and its relationship to serious health issues and obesity informs us that Americans eat way too much junk and not nearly enough healthy food. Which, in a country that rations health care by income level and allows insurance companies to exclude people who actually need health care, would seem to be an important issue to address with education and real food availability in public institutions such as schools.
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Global Warming, Biodiversity and Biofuels
Oct 12 at 5:05pm by Aileen
The dramatic breakup of the northern ice sheet has tended to confirm global warming, and there are other indications that things are worse than we thought. Turns out that North America’s Northernmost Lake is showing signs of climate change too.
An international research team reports that a core sample of lake bed sediment indicates a drastic change in algae and diatom concentrations in the lake over the last 200 years, but not in the 8,000 years prior - when the lake was permanently frozen. This tends to support the hypothesis that human industrialization has contributed to the warming.
Even if we stopped releasing greenhouse gases today we’d still have to deal with the effects of climate change, and this has been a concern for important ecosystems’ stability. Good news is that researchers have discovered Forests of Endangered Tropical Kelp surviving just fine in the deep waters off the Galapagos Islands.
Little Hoods, Little Goods, Little Doo-Dads from the Woods…
Sep 7 at 3:03pm by Aileen
(With apologies to Zappa/Beefheart and Poofter’s Froth Wyoming)
In the science news this week reports run the gambit of science and technology, including biofuels, nanotechnology, genes and genomes, evolution, and bizarre animal behavior.
Nanotechnology
Single-Atom Data Storage, Single-Molecule Switching
In the quest for ever smaller, ever more useful computers and other devices, IBM reported this week that its researchers have made significant progress in understanding the magnetic properties of atoms, which opens the door to computational and data storage devices that will have practical applications even beyond current AI dreams of quantum computers.
The researchers unveiled the first single-molecule switch, which operates flawlessly and does not disrupt the molecule’s outer frame. They used IBM’s scanning tunneling microscope [STM] to manipulate single iron atoms, arranging them with precision on a prepared copper surface. Two papers on the subject have been published in the Sept. 5 issue of the journal Science.
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