Sunlight Soaked Sea Sponges  

TreeHugger has a post on creating solar cells by biomimicing sea sponges. Technology Review had a good article on this called Silicon and Sun that I noted last year.

Last week, we wrote a post about biomimicry, which is the process of taking qualities from living organisms and using them in design. We thought we would bring you news of a good example, courtesy of the humble sea sponge, which could lead to a more efficient method of making solar cells.

Currently solar cells are made under high temperature and low pressure, which requires a large amount of power. However, certain sea sponges are capable of forming silicon structures without these energy-intensive conditions. By mimicking this process, and replacing the silicon with zinc oxide, scientists have succeeded in creating primitive, but cheap solar cells.

Reducing the energy required to make solar cells will lower production and sale costs, and make them a viable option for more applications. It could also bring us nearer to a possible tipping point for solar power, where increased adoption and economies of scale cause a break into the mainstream.

TreeHugger also had a post on biomimicry (one of my favourite technology trends) last week called "Mother Nature Knows Best".

Biomimicry is the term given to taking inspiration from nature and applying it to technology. Velcro is probably the most well known example of this; its hook and eye stickiness is inspired by the way that burrs stick to dog hair. Often, nature has a more elegant and effective solution for a problem than we do, and it makes sense to capitalize on millions of years of evolution and use that design. If mother nature can do it better, quicker and more efficient, then we should listen to her.

Janine Benyus, the author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, and Dayna Baumeister, are running a six day intensive course to train biologists interested in applying biomimicry to design. On the course you'll learn exactly what biomimicry is, what the major successes in the field have been and how to use your biological knowledge to help develop products inspired by nature.

The course runs from May 23-29, at the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Ranch in Dupuyer, Montana, and applications must be submitted by April 11. For more information have a look at the Biomimicry Institute's website.

Personally I'd love to attend, I completed a master’s degree in computer science by writing a program that used a model of evolution to solve a problem. Each possible solution was an animal, and solutions mated with each other to produce offspring with combined qualities. Occasionally some non-efficient solutions would be killed off, just as in natural selection, and occasionally a better solution would be born. Eventually what remained was a very efficient design for a circuit, which used less power than anything a human could have designed.

Perhaps if more circuits were designed in this way, then biomimicry would save a huge amount of power worldwide. Perhaps biomimicry could help to save real biology from our harmful impact on the planet.

Technology review has an article on BP's Bet on Butanol. At the end of the day this is a better biofuel than some, but it still suffers the same drawbacks they all do - competing with people for food and depleting the soil.

Forget ethanol: it's hard to transport and gives bad mileage per gallon. Another alcohol, butanol, is a much better renewable fuel, says the president of BP Biofuels.

Alternative fuels such as ethanol could help reduce carbon-dioxide emissions and decrease oil imports, but so far these biofuels only make up a small fraction of fuel use. One of the biggest challenges to ramping up ethanol use is distributing it. That's because ethanol can't be transported in the same pipelines used to distribute gasoline. What's more, ethanol delivers far less energy than gasoline does on a gallon-for-gallon basis.

Philip New, president of BP Biofuels, a recently created company within the giant British oil producer, thinks it has a solution: butanol. While butanol, like ethanol, can be made from corn starch or sugar beets, its properties are a lot more like gasoline than like ethanol. That means it can be shipped in existing gasoline pipelines. And it contains more energy than ethanol does, which will improve mileage per gallon.

Last month BP announced that it will be working with the University of California, Berkeley, on a $500 million, 10-year program, part of which will be devoted to research on improving biofuels such as butanol. And last year BP announced a partnership with DuPont to develop new technology for making butanol. DuPont will provide expertise in biotechnology. Technology Review spoke with New about the company's plans at a recent energy conference at MIT.

Technology Review: Why is BP interested in biofuels, which would seemingly be a direct competitor to your main business?

Philip New: It is possible--if the world now is really serious about climate change, and if people continue to be concerned about energy security--that given the breakthroughs in technology that now seem plausible, biofuels could represent a significant amount of the transport fuel mix in the future.

I think you have a choice. Either you can try to deny it and resist it and hold it back, or you can embrace it and welcome it and make it a part of your business. And clearly BP has chosen to do the latter.

TR: BP is focusing on a relatively obscure fuel: butanol. Why focus on butanol rather than on ethanol?

PN: Ethanol is a good start. But ethanol was not designed to be a fuel. No one sat down and said, "Let's create a biomolecule that will operate in engines." What happened was, people said ethanol can work in engines. As a lot of people are becoming aware, it's good, but it has some drawbacks. Butanol is, we think, an innovation that overcomes many of the drawbacks.

You shouldn't view butanol as being a competitor to ethanol. An ethanol plant can evolve into a butanol plant. And you can mix ethanol and butanol together, and it can actually help you use more ethanol.

TR: So how is butanol better?

PN: The key way is higher energy density. Whereas ethanol is around about two-thirds the energy density [of gasoline], with butanol we're in the high eighties [in terms of percent].

It's less volatile [than ethanol]. It isn't as corrosive, so we don't have issues with it at higher concentrations beginning to eat at aluminum or polymer components in fuel systems and dispensing systems. And it's not as hydroscopic--it doesn't pick up water, which is what ethanol can do if you put it in relatively low concentrations. So we can put it through pipelines.

I'm not sure if I should put this in the tinfoil section or not, but cold fusion is making a reappearance courtesy of US Navy researchers. As its from "Chemistry World" rather than just free energy sites I'll file this under experimental science for now.

Most chemists would rather forget all about cold fusion. After the barrage of criticism dismissing Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann's sensational 1989 claims that nuclei could be forced to fuse and release excess energy at room temperature, only a small core of researchers has kept the idea from fading away entirely. ...

'I feel there is a strong rebirth of interest in cold fusion,' said Miley. He and other cold fusion supporters are taking their ACS presence as one more indication of the subject's growing respectability. Organiser Jan Marwan said he was very surprised at how easy it was to gain acceptance for the symposium. But Gopal Coimbatore, program chair of the ACS's division of environmental chemistry, felt that unless a forum was provided, the subject might never get discussed; and 'with the world facing an energy crisis, it is worth exploring all possibilities'.

The chances of cold fusion meeting that crisis may seem remote, but enthusiasts point to recent research from the US navy's Space and naval warfare systems center (Spawar) in San Diego, California. Here, Stanislaw Szpak and Pamela Mosier-Boss have claimed a ream of evidence for nuclear reactions occurring in a system similar to the 1989 reports.

Pons and Fleischmann suggested that electrolysis could pack deuterium nuclei into a palladium lattice so tightly that they were fusing together; Szpak and Boss now claim to have speeded up this process by co-depositing palladium and deuterium onto a thin wire subjected to an electric field. They have used plastic films - so-called CR-39 detectors - to track charged particles emerging from their reactions, publishing most recently in Naturwissenschaften. And, unlike the original 1989 experiments, the researchers claim their results are easily reproducible, with other groups reportedly detecting products of nuclear reactions such as alpha particles and gamma rays.

Acceptance by the scientific community is still the main target for cold fusion advocates - hence the importance of replication, appearing at major conferences, and publishing in peer reviewed journals. In this at least, success seems imminent: Miley says his cold fusion paper is the first to be accepted to the Journal of Fusion Energy, which normally covers 'hot' thermonuclear fusion or sonofusion (which uses pulses of sound to rapidly compress bubbles in liquids). Meanwhile, Scott Chubb, who chaired a cold fusion session at an APS meeting in March, feels that Physical Review Letters, one of the top physics journals, may finally start accepting papers in the field. Avowed critics of cold fusion don't see anything to shout about, though. Frank Close, of the University of Oxford, UK, says he sees no renewed interest, 'just the usual suspects recycling'. Indeed, Fleischmann's ACS report is a re-presentation of research from the 1990s, showing that his calorimetry measurements were accurate. Bob Park, at the University of Maryland, US, agrees, but concedes that 'there are some curious reports - not cold fusion, but people may be seeing some unexpected low-energy nuclear reactions'.

STCWA points to a report from Nigeria about the diabolical state of the country's energy infrastructure

Nigeria is rich in oil but short of energy, and at night the lights are out and darkness reigns for most of the 140 million inhabitants. Hundreds of small and medium-scale businesses are being strangled by an almost total lack of power in a country which is the sixth-biggest exporter of oil in the world.
President Olusegun Obasanjo, on assuming office in May 1999, promised to put an end to the perennial energy crisis. His probable successor, Umaru Yar'Adua, says the same, but louder, insisting that if elected in April, he would declare a national "energy state of emergency."

For several weeks now, from Kano in the north to Port Harcourt in the south, power supplies have deteriorated so much that Nigerians count the minutes of electricity provided by the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) rather than refer to power cuts. PHCN, which is the successor to the defunct National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) and is being prepared for privatisation, is widely referred to by frustrated Nigerians as either "Problem Has Changed Name", "Poverty Holding Company of Nigeria" or "Please Hold Candle Now".

The last evident effort by PHCN to respond was by installing pre-paid meters in some parts of Lagos. But power is so short, they cannot be read. The national president of small and medium scale enterprises (SME), Ike Abugu, sounded a note of alarm recently when he said: "The situation is critical, the SMEs are the worst victims. Beside the change of name, nothing has changed. Or if there is one, it is in a wrong direction," he said.

The official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) has reported that despite investment of millions of dollars by the federal government in the energy sector in recent years, the nation has to manage on output of 1,000 megawatts of electricity. "South Africa supplies 45,000 megawatts for a population of 40 millions", Abugu said.

Yar'Adua, the presidential candidate for the governing party in the April poll, has promised production of at least 30,000 megawatts of electricity by 2011. Energy minister Edmund Daukoru has announced 5,500 megawatts for May 29, the date a new president will assume office. "Ridiculous", objected the independent newspaper The Guardian, asking how this could be achieved in two months even though it had not been possible in eight years. Ironically, Nigeria sells power to its neighbours: Benin, Ghana, Niger and Togo. For Abugu, "this attitude of 'big brother' defies comprehension."

Although the government is often quick to blame vandals who damage oil and gas pipelines, others point to mismanagement and endemic corruption in the power sector. "Where have all the billions gone?" asked an editorialist in the Sunday Guardian, who said that in six years, the PHCN had received 244 billion naira (about two billion dollars) to tackle the power problem.

Early this year, Nigerians suffered from a serious shortage of fuel which lasted for several weeks .

TreeHugger points to a post from Paul Kedrosky at Infectious Greed on the rising price of fertiliser - following in the wake of natural gas prices - the Nitrogen Fertilizer Perfect Storm.

Everything I know about economics (which isn't much) I have learned from Paul Kedrosky, who notes that nitrogen fertilizer prices have gone through the roof. Corn needs fertilizer and we have noticed that there is a lot of corn being planted these days. Paul says "Why are nitrogen fertilizers costs up so much? Demand is part of the equation, but there is a supply issue as well. Keep in mind that the price of nitrogen is tied directly to the price of natural gas, with 1 ton of fertilizer requiring about 33,500 cubic feet of natural gas. The upshot is that with rapidly increasing demand, plus increased components prices, we have a pricing perfect storm for nitrogen fertilizers."

Why does nitrogen fertilizer need so much natural gas? Paul recommends this link, discussing the Claude-Haber process. Fritz Haber is a fascinating character; read more about the new biography of him at Amazon.

The BBC has an article on the limits of the Green Revolution (the agriculture one, not Alex Steffen's version).

Food output across the world increased considerably in the last four decades of the 20th Century, largely as a result of the intensive farming techniques introduced by the Green Revolution. The new techniques involved distributing hybrid grain seeds - mainly wheat, rice and corn. The hybrids grow with a shorter stalk. This maximises the process of photosynthesis, which nourishes the grain because less energy goes into the stem. The hybrid seeds were combined with the intensive use of fertilisers and irrigation.

After successfully being introduced in India, the Green Revolution was rolled out in other parts of Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. It was so successful in terms of production increases that it defied the gloomy Malthusian predictions of the 1960s, which said hundreds of millions would starve as population outstripped farm output.

The Revolution was a technological success. "Before the 1960s, the population of India was multiplying like rats in a barn," said Jagjit Singh Hara, "but we didn't have the grain to feed them. After the Green Revolution, we doubled our yield and now we have proved that India can feed the world".

But the process has limits and they may have been reached. Population, on the other hand, has continued to rise in poor parts of the world. The graph, compiled for the BBC by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, shows that while yield per hectare has increased, the amount of land used for the major staple grains has remained fairly constant; this is because the amount of good farmland is finite. ...

Given the shortage of land suitable for growing more food, the obvious answer would be a new Green Revolution, or another hike in yields. But this may not be possible. "The difficulty is that we are now pressing against the photosynthetic limits of plants," says the influential environmentalist Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in the United States. ...

There are other limits to the Green Revolution. Some of the poorer villagers I spoke to in rural Punjab said they had fallen into debt as they were unable to keep up with the rising cost of the inputs - fertilisers, irrigation pumps and regular fresh supplies of seed - which intensive agriculture requires.

WorldChanging has a post on an exhibition called "The Edible City".

What is Edible City about? It's about the fact that very few city dwellers or suburbanites would be able to locate the factory where the milk from the cow ends up in a carton. And who knows the whereabouts of the abattoir where the cow ends its days? Where are our vegetables auctioned, washed, sliced and packaged?

Practically everything to do with the production and processing of food takes place out of our sight. The whole chain of action preceding the supermarket or the dinner table is often thousands of kilometers in length: haricots verts from Kenya, wine from Chili and lamb from New Zealand. Dutch pigs are processed into Parma ham in Italy and then sold back the country as an Italian product. I recently read of a company's plans to ship prawns from Scotland, where they are caught, on a 12,000-mile, nine-week round trip to Thailand, where they would be hand-peeled by workers earning 25p an hour. They would then be shipped back to British supermarket and sold as premium “Scottish Island” scampi. Our daily food supply too has become a globalized affair.

In the distant past, the city functioned more or less as a self-sustaining system. All that now remains is consumption.

But a counter movement is emerging. Its adherents aim to bring production, distribution, consumption and, often, recycling closer together, and thus contribute to a more sustainable world.

The Edible City exhibition mixes admirably pragmatic proposals as well as utopian schemes that each, in its very original way, has the potential to enable city-dwellers to meet their own food requirements. The design of the exhibition itself is as engaging and pleasant as its content: much of the show is itself edible. You find models, videos, images, descriptions of projects among young salads and other plants. The whole space makes you feel like you're in some kind of greenhouse. ...

WorldChanging also has a post on a hydropower project in the East River in New York.

The term hydropower tends to evoke images of large hydroelectric dams, born from some massive public works project during a bygone era, right? The truth is that hydropower can also refer to something much smaller and more eco-friendly --and New York City is currently host to two of them. Didn't know that? Well, that's because they are under the East River, near Roosevelt Island.

It seems that back in December 2006, an innovative energy company known as Verdant Power planted two state-of-the art turbines in the East River. They spin with the ebb and flow of the river's tides, turning the water's boundless energy into electricity (as long as dead bodies don't get stuck in the blades). Eventually, Verdant hopes to generate as much as 10 megawatts in the East River, and 500 megawatts statewide, with the help of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and New York University.

There are some concerns in the eco-community that the turbines could hurt aquatic life or disturb fish breeding grounds. But for the time being it's pretty clear that this new form of clean energy is a lot better for the East River than the usual stuff that flows off the streets of the city on a daily basis.

While ten megawatts is a small amount of energy in the scheme of things, it's a start. We probably won't be cozying up to a movie like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with the help of these little East River turbines any day soon, but hey -- we can dream!

MetaEfficient has a post on the Danish island of Samso, which gets 100% of its power from renewable sources.

The goal of the Danish island of Samso, home to about 4000 people, is to power their island with completely green power. They heat their homes with grass burned in a central heating system. Their electric come from the wind, and they power their vehicles on biofuel which they also grow. Since 1998, Samso began converting its energy into renewable energy, and has been so successful that 100% of its electricity comes from wind power and 75% of its heat comes from solar power and biomass energy.

With the completion of an offshore wind farm comprised of 10 beautiful turbines, Samso has become carbon neutral. The energy produced by these wind turbines compensates for the island’s transportation emissions, including the ferries, and all other non-renewable energy sources. In fact, sometimes Samso’s wind turbines produce so much energy that the island sells it back to the mainland!

It all started in 1997 when Denmark held a national competition. The selected winner would be home to a one-of-a-kind experiment: The winner would be expected to convert all its energy supply to 100% renewable energy within 10 years. Samso was given the nod. Because it is an island that has no conventional energy resources of its own, Samso was an ideal choice for such a controlled experiment.

MetaEfficient also has a post on Al Gore's "Electranet" branded smart grid concept.

With his new-found movie star clout, former Vice President Al Gore has begun an aggressive environmental crusade for ground-breaking technology and policy changes to the nation's electricity grid. Using the momentum of his Oscar-winning documentary on global warming, Gore is advocating a decentralized "smart grid" that would allow anyone to set up their own generator and buy or sell surplus electricity without caps. Such an "Electranet" would eliminate the need for new-generation plants, spark widespread use of renewable energy and, ultimately, beat back global warming.

"In the same way the Internet took off and stimulated the information revolution, we could see a revolution all across this country with small-scale generation of electricity everywhere," Gore told a House committee on climate change last week.

Futuristic as it may sound, experts say that despite resistance from utilities and sluggish state bureaucracies, newly designed distribution grids could be just a decade away.

Another island that is looking to be 100% renewably powered is Spain's Hierro island (in the Canaries).

Spain has declared that El Hierro, one of the smallest of Spain's Canary Islands, will soon be completely carbon neutral. The island, with a population of around 10,000, will be powered by a combination of wind and hydroelectric power.

Most of the islands power will be taken from it's 10 megawatt hydroelectric infrastructure. Interestingly, excess wind power will actually be used to pump water uphill into one of two reservoirs. The potential energy of that water will then become a kind of gigantic battery for times when the wind isn't so strong. This unique system basically allows for wind power to become a steady, instead of intermittent, source of power.

The wind turbines will also power a desalination plant for the islands population. Of course, just in case, a diesel generator will be maintained just in case the carbon-neutral system fails. No word on exactly when the system will be up and running, but the windfarm and pumping stations are already being built.

Confessions seem to be the topic du jour lately, with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession to the sinkings of the Maine and Lusitania, the attack on Pearl Harbour, sparking the Vietnam war and sundry other offences being followed recently by David Hicks' confession to be a terrorist.

In somewhat Kafkaesque fashion, Hicks is being threatened with further punishment if his confession isn't genuine. The Rodent and co are denying that the sudden resolution is part of an effort to bury the issue before the federal election. Apparently Hicks will be under a gag order until after the election as well.

DAVID HICKS is likely to confess his allegiance to al-Qaeda at his next US military commission hearing in Guantanamo Bay. The admission he trained with al-Qaeda is required so that a military judge can satisfy himself that Hicks's guilty plea is genuine. Hicks will have to detail what he did in Afghanistan in 2001, before he was captured and handed over to American forces.

The judge has the power to reject Hicks's admission of guilt and call for a trial. He can also quash the plea bargain between prosecutors and Hicks that led to his dramatic declaration of guilt to a charge of material support for a terrorist group on Monday.

The Herald revealed yesterday that the proposed sentence will involve a short stint in an Australian prison, enough to keep Hicks behind bars during the federal election campaign. As things stand, Hicks, who has been in Guantanamo Bay for more than five years, will serve less than one year in an Adelaide jail before being released.

However, in justifying his guilty plea, Hicks may have to contradict what his father, Terry, has been saying: that he is pleading guilty in order to get out of the US military prison, and that the process is so stacked against him that he has no choice. "I think most of you would be pleading guilty to something to get out of the place," Terry Hicks said yesterday after returning to Adelaide from Cuba.

Hicks is expected to spruce up his appearance for the hearing tonight, Sydney time. His lawyer, Major Michael Mori, assured the military judge that he would not attend future hearings in his prison garb, as he did on Monday. The judge demanded Hicks wear a suit or "casual business" attire.

While our conservative friends are all convinced the Mohammed and Hicks confessions are genuine, apparently the televised "confession" of the British sailors captured by Iran is a complete fraud - extracted under duress.

Britain today rejected a demand by Iran's foreign minister that it admit its 15 sailors and marines entered Iranian waters in order to resolve a standoff over their capture. Since the crew's detention last week, Britain has insisted they were in Iraqi waters.

A Foreign Office official in London said no admission would be forthcoming because "the detention is completely wrong, illegal and unacceptable and we've set out the reasons why." The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, pointed to the satellite positioning coordinates released by the Defence Ministry yesterday to show the British sailors were in Iraqi waters when the Iranian navy seized them.

The demand by Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki for the British admission came on a day of escalating tensions, highlighted by an Iranian video of the detained Britons that showed the only woman captive saying her group had "trespassed" in Iranian waters. Britain angrily denounced yesterday's video as unacceptable and froze most dealings with the Mideast nation.

Monty Python's Terry Jones is outraged at the Iranian treatment of their captives, noting they've been deprived of modern day courtesies expected by prisoners such as hoods, electric shocks and nude pyramids.

I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? That's what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it's hard to breathe. Then it's perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can't be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn't be able to talk at all. Of course they'd probably find it even harder to breathe - especially with a bag over their head - but at least they wouldn't be humiliated.

And what's all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It's time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That's one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.

The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn't rush into charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it's just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives before the cameras!

What's more, it is clear that the Iranians are not giving their British prisoners any decent physical exercise. The US military make sure that their Iraqi captives enjoy PT. This takes the form of exciting "stress positions", which the captives are expected to hold for hours on end so as to improve their stomach and calf muscles. A common exercise is where they are made to stand on the balls of their feet and then squat so that their thighs are parallel to the ground. This creates intense pain and, finally, muscle failure. It's all good healthy fun and has the bonus that the captives will confess to anything to get out of it.

And this brings me to my final point. It is clear from her TV appearance that servicewoman Turney has been put under pressure. The newspapers have persuaded behavioural psychologists to examine the footage and they all conclude that she is "unhappy and stressed".

What is so appalling is the underhand way in which the Iranians have got her "unhappy and stressed". She shows no signs of electrocution or burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress, such as by forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed, as they were in Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the civilised world so that everyone can see exactly what has been going on.

As Stephen Glover pointed out in the Daily Mail, perhaps it would not be right to bomb Iran in retaliation for the humiliation of our servicemen, but clearly the Iranian people must be made to suffer - whether by beefing up sanctions, as the Mail suggests, or simply by getting President Bush to hurry up and invade, as he intends to anyway, and bring democracy and western values to the country, as he has in Iraq.