SAN FRANCISCO, California -- Saturday morning, my doorbell unexpectedly buzzed. Thinking my girlfriend had forgotten her keys, I skated down the stairs to find a man from Pacific Gas and Electric blinking at me through our gate. He was there to install a smart meter, the man explained.

Ah, yes. I knew PG&E had committed to installing 9.3 million smart meters and now, my time had come. Here would be my opportunity to track my energy usage, spreadsheet it, look for patterns, respond to spikes in demand on hot summer days... I'd heard so many good things about smart meters (indeed, written some) and what they'd do for me that I was in nerd heaven.

"Can I take a picture of it?" I asked, hopping away to grab my camera.

When I got back downstairs, the installer, Dave Fong, had arrayed the obviously branded new meter on my stairs. I snapped pics like a tourist of the future.

But then I began to pepper Dave with questions. His answers struck me as legit, honest, and quite depressing.

Though he installed the meter yesterday, it wouldn't do anything special for PG&E or me until the transmitters went in to create the network through which my meter would communicate with the world. And the transmitters wouldn't be in for a couple of years.

But, surely, after the transmitters went in, I'd be able to track every kilowatt hour of my energy usage? Nope, Dave said. Special web apps for understanding my power user profile like I'd seen from Tendril or Greenbox? Not that he's heard of. The best I was going to get was daily energy usage reports. That's low resolution data, like your Toyota Prius telling you your gas mileage over the course of a week. The feedback loop just wouldn't be strong enough to change wasteful behaviors.

In fact, the primary purpose for these smart meters, Dave told me, was to simplify billing issues for PG&E.

"Meter readers are under intense time pressure," Fong said. "They are literally running from meter to meter."

Taking too long earns meter readers demerits, and so do mistakes. If meter readers accidentally charge you for $350 of gas instead of $35, it causes major headaches. The new smart meters will eliminate the meter readers and the pesky problems humans introduce.

But will the new meters do anything to change the energy usage patterns that have Americans using five times more energy than the world average? Anecdotally, it sure doesn't sound like it.

Image: Alexis Madrigal/Wired.com. My new smart meter. Fong, whose shadow is visible on the right, once lost twenty bucks to a meter reader whe he bet him he couldn't read a meter from 20 paces. Indeed, the reader nailed it.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

The hunt for extraterrestrial life is getting a major boost from revolutionary new technology that will give some of the world's largest telescopes the capability to detect Earth-size planets outside of our solar system, a feat not equaled even by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The technique, called nulling interferometry, combines the light captured by several large telescopes to mimic a single giant telescope with enough power to detect a quarter on the moon from Earth.

"The goal is nothing less than finding the first ever Earth-like planet orbiting around a star," said planet hunter Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley. "We've never found one."

The smallest rocky planet detected to date has around four times the mass of Earth. This planet, as well as most of the 300 exoplanets discovered to date, have been detected by the "wobble" or shift in the light spectrum of the star caused by the slight gravitational tug of the orbiting planet. Another planet-hunting method, called gravitational microlensing, takes advantage of the way the gravity of an exoplanet's star bends and focuses the light from a more distant star like a lens. Small deviations in the light from the distant star indicate that a planet is orbiting the lensing star.

Nulling interferometry will surpass both of these strategies in the search for smaller, earth-like worlds that orbit their star at a distance — in the "habitable zone" — that could harbor life. The technique involves incredibly precise measurements of the position of a star, so that the minutest wobble caused by the gravity of an orbiting planet 100,000 times smaller can be detected.

"It will be able to determine if a star budges a little bit as an Earth-like planet orbits that star," said Marcy, who is an expert in using the wobble technique, which can't detect very small planets. "The real holy grail of planet-hunting is to find other earths and ascertain whether they are habitable."

Continue reading "Telescope Tech Will Speed Search for Extraterrestrial Life" »

LIVERMORE, California — Who says that there's nothing good about nuclear weapons research?

The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was built by the Department of Energy to gather data on the thermonuclear reactions that occur inside atomic weapons. And as an excellent side bonus, NIF (rhymes with stiff) could unlock the secret of harnessing fusion for unlimited, clean electricity.

To achieve these high-fallutin' goals, NIF contains 192 of the world's most powerful lasers, which wend their way through a series of amplifiers inside the three-football-fields-long laser bay. At the end of their journey, their energy is focused onto a tiny target about the size of the end of your pinkie.

When the facility is up to full-power, sometime next year, the physicists hope the lasers will fuse hydrogen atoms inside the target into helium, giving off more power than was pumped into them.

In this video, we tour the high-security facility and I talk with its director, Ed Moses, about this unique place and its role in the future of energy.

Every week, Wired Science will bring you videos on the latest in science, medicine, energy, and space. You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, too, so check us out there.

Image: Alexis Madrigal/Wired.com

See Also:

• The Complete Wired Science Video Podcast Collection
• Video: Large Hadron Collider Fires Up Partying Physicists
• Video: A Jetpack in Flight
• Top 10 Amazing Physics Videos
• Video: This Guy Can Make Almost Anything with DNA

$700 billion?

That's nothing compared with the $2 to $5 trillion per year ecological damage costs the world each year, according to the preliminary report from an European Union-sponsored group of economists.

The calculation attempts to value the services, such as absorbing carbon dioxide and nitrogen fixation, that natural systems like forests provide for humans.

"So whereas Wall Street by various calculations has to date lost, within the financial sector, $1-$1.5 trillion, the reality is that at today's rate we are losing natural capital at least between $2-$5 trillion every year," Pavan Sukhdev, a Deutsche Bank economist and the study's leader, told the BBC today.

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity report uses a similar methodology as the Stern Review, a landmark report by British economist Nicholas Stern, which argued that the cost of doing nothing about climate change outweighed the costs of even strict CO2 mitigation measures. A landmark Nature paper in 1997 estimated the value of the world's ecosystems at somewhere between $16-54 trillion dollars (pdf). This type of accounting, in both its general thrust and detail, has been criticized by some economists.

Pinning a number on the value of healthy air is no easy task. Unlike standard commodities, no one can buy or sell the air to determine a "fair market value" for it.

"These are predominantly public goods with no markets and no prices," Sukhdev's group's website notes.

But the idea that nature has some kind of quantifiable value appears to be gaining steam among the scientific community. Earlier this year, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ran a nine-article special feature on implementing development strategies based on the concept of valuing ecosystem services.

Via > The BBC

Image: flickr/Taran Rampersad

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With Wall Street's vaunted financial models looking shaky, could other models of complex systems -- say, the climate models that underpin our understanding of global warming — have similar faults?

In two words, say scientists and financial engineers: not really. It turns out that it's much harder to model human sentiment, the basis of value, than particle interaction.

"It's the physics. The issue is that economic models aren't based on any underlying physically observed facts. They're based on people's feelings," said Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "We're not having a climate crisis because there's a lack of confidence in water vapor."

Modeling systems has always been a part of science, but increasing computer power has brought ever-more complex systems within the grasp of would-be modelers. Over the past two decades, scores of physicists, mathematicians and other scientists have headed to Wall Street to apply their knowledge to the markets. The models these "quants" created underpin a lot of the current financial system, particularly how options and derivatives are priced. The complexity of these models has been partially blamed for the problems the world's credit markets now face.

Meanwhile, scientists trying to understand the impact of human carbon dioxide emissions have built increasingly sophisticated models of the atmospheric chemistry of the Earth, which have come under criticism as well.

Given that both are big complex, computer-driven efforts, it's natural to link the two, as in this New Scientist article defending the accuracy of climate models.

"The claim is sometimes made that if computer models were any good, people would be using them to predict the stock market. Well, they are!" writes the author.

But Emanuel Derman, a physicist turned financial engineer, who teaches at Columbia University, said that while the symbols and math used in finance are drawn from science, they don't mean the same things.

Continue reading "Climate Models Trump Financial Models — Phew!" »

An explosion equal to more than a kiloton of TNT rocked the sky over a remote part of northern Sudan late Monday night, ending a 20-hour scramble to track the first Earth impacting meteoroid to be discovered before impact.

Though the meteoroid was not expected to reach Earth's surface, the astronomers' goal was to refine the trajectory and predict where the automobile-sized rock was headed to test their ability to track potentially dangerous asteroids in the future.

There are three reported "sightings" of the resulting fireball so far: The first was from a weather satellite over Europe and Africa that imaged the fireball as a cluster of pixels; The second was a seismometer in Kenya that picked up the kiloton blast; And the third was a KLM pilot who saw the streak of light from 750 nautical miles away. On the map above, the plane is marked by the cross and the asteroid by the circle.

The space rock graciously targeted a very rural part of the world, allowing its gigantic fireball to serve as a warning to keep an eye on the sky. It also proved to be a good dry run for scientists to see how quickly they could coordinate observations and calculate trajectories. The real question is, if it had been bigger (in which case we might have had a few days more warning), and headed towards a major city, what could we have done?

This is the very scenario Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart has been asking the world to address. The time to make an emergency plan is not after you know where it is going to hit. Then only the impacted country will be concerned about it, and there might not be much they can do on their own. However if we come up with a global plan ahead of time, it could end up coming to the aid of my country just as well as yours.

Asteroid Impact [Space Weather.com]

See Also:

• Meteor Predicted to Hit Earth's Atmosphere Tonight
• Nukes Are Not the Best Way to Stop an Asteroid
• Ex-Astronauts Loney Mission: Save Earth from Asteroid Strike

Image courtesy Jacob Kuiper and Meteosat 7

For the first time, it is possible to actually watch the initial 24 hours of the life of an embryo at the cellular level.

With a newly developed microscope that uses a sheet of light to scan a living organism from many different dimensions, scientists were able to track the complex cellular organization of a zebrafish embryo as it grows from a single cell to 20,000 cells.

"Imagine following all inhabitants of a town over the course of one day using a telescope in space," Philipp Keller of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, said in a press release.

"This comes close to tracking the 10 thousands of cells that make up a vertebrate embryo."

Zebrafish embryos grow much faster than human embryos, which have just eight cells after three days.

Previously, scientists had only been able to piece together the first hours of a couple invertebrate organisms with only a few hundred cells such as a nematode worm -- work that resulted in a Nobel Prize. But doing the same for a vertebrate animal was essentially impossible.

The montage (above) of three-dimensional images taken at 10-minute intervals shows cells dividing and moving around the embryo to form specialized tissues from two different angles. The new research was published today in Science.

"The digital embryo is like Google Earth for embryonic development," Jochen Wittbrodt of the University of Heidelberg said in a release. "It gives an overview of everything that happens in the first 24 hours and allows you to zoom in on all cellular and even subcellular details."

The new technique, called Digital Scanned Laser Light-Sheet Fluorescence Microscopy, could be used on other animals such as mice, chicken and frogs, which would could help researchers better understand evolution at the cellular scale.

Already, the research has shown that the initial stages of heart development do not happen as scientists thought.

Video: European Molecular Biology Laboratory

In the hot, dark water of a South African mine, scientists have found the world's loneliest species.

Everywhere else biologists have studied life on our planet, they've found communities of life, but today, biologists announced they have discovered an ecosystem that contains just a single species of bacteria.

In all other known ecosystems, the key functions of life -- harvesting energy and elements like carbon and nitrogen from the environment -- have been shared among different species. But in the water of the Mponeng gold mine, two miles under the earth's surface, Desulforudis audaxviator carries out all of those functions by itself. In short, it's the tidiest package of life found yet.

"It is possible to pack everything necessary for maintaining life into one genome," said Dylan Chivian of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

All known life forms need carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and an energy source to live. Plants need nitrogen, but can't just pull it from the atmosphere and start using it to make amino acids. Instead, they rely on archaea for that task. Interconnections like these form the basis of an ecosystem, often cheesily called the 'web of life'.

What makes D. audaxviator so special is that its genome, cobbled together from bacterial and archaeal genes, can carry out all life's functions by itself.

That could make the bug a prime candidate for any attempt to see if Earth's microbes could live in some other extreme environment within the solar system.

"Since it could live on its own on Earth, if it were given a matching habitat elsewhere, it could live," said Chivian.

Images: 1. Inside a tunnel in the Mponeng mine. Courtesy Anglo Gold. 2. D. audaxviator's genome annotated by Chivian. Courtesy Science.

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Remember the hole in the ozone layer?

On this day back in 2000, the ozone hole got so big that residents of the tip of South America were warned to stay out of the sun. Without the protection from harmful solar radiation that the ozone layer naturally provides, those venturing outside risked getting sunburned in mere minutes of sun exposure, even with temperatures hovering around 70 degrees.

The environmental cause célèbre of the the late 1980s has fallen out of the news over the last couple decades, but the thinning of the ozone layer over Antarctica hasn't abated yet.

In fact, despite aggressive global public policy to limit the pollutants causing the hole — CFCs in hairspray, refrigerants, etc — atmospheric chemists predict the hole won't start measurably shrinking until 2024. That's because there's a lag between when we stop putting out pollutants and when they stop having an effect on the globe.

There's an obvious lesson here for global warming policy and atmospheric carbon dioxide: already, climate scientists say that humans' past CO2 production has basically locked in several degrees of global warming over the next several decades, no matter what policies we enact now.

Video: The NASA-created video shows the size of the hole: purple areas have the least ozone while green have the most.

See Also:

• Oct. 9, 2000: Ozone Hole Exposes Chilean City

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

So you know your genome. Now what are you going to do?

That’s the question a new study underway at the Scripps Translational Science Institute hopes to answer. Scripps will sign up 10,000 employees and their families for genomic tests from Navigenics, the personal genomics company, and track the lifestyle and health-related decisions they make over 20 years. Will knowing that they have a predisposition for, say, heart disease compel them to eat better or exercise more? Or will it burden them with fate? Such questions strike at the heart of the controversy over personal genomics, and Scripps’ will be the first extensive attempt to answer them.

The study, which Scripps investigator Eric Topol estimates will cost $20 million to get running over the next few years, will be funded by Microsoft (patients will use Microsoft’s Health Vault system to track their medical histories), Affymetrix (which will scan the 1.8 million markers for each patient), and Navigenics (which will interpret the scans and provide genetic counseling). Scripps will have all rights to publishing the study results and will make independent assessments of the results.

Topol says the Institute will be able to not only track the study prospectively, but will also be able to study possible genomic associations between the patients’ medical histories and their genomes. And while he acknowledges that there is some concern that genetic variations the scan will track, known as single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs, are an incomplete measure of our genome, “it’s all we have right now. This is as good as we have.”

Topol says that once the 10,000 subjects have been scanned, the study will make assessments after three months, and then annually, to determine whether knowing their potential risks for disease spurs any significant changes in behavior. This is the great unknown promise of personal genomics, but it’s largely untested whether the information does have any individual consequences. “Is this actionable information?” asks Topol. “Does it lead to good decisions, or to adverse things? The consensus is that this needs to be studied.”

Image: The Human Genome in book form. Credit: flickr/several_bees

Clean technology companies of all sorts are cheering the green pork that legislators added to the $700-billion Wall Street bailout bill that passed Congress last week.

Extensions to tax credits for wind and solar power producers finally got their long-awaited passage, but a slate of more obscure provisions could help drive new interest in a diverse array of green businesses, including geothermal, solar thermal, tidal, and wave power, plug-in hybrid cars, and energy efficiency aids.

"It's a pretty comprehensive bill, much more so than extending the [tax credit] for solar. While that's probably the premiere provision, there's a whole lot more in there," said Josh Green, general partner at MDV, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with large investments in green tech. "I'm not a huge fan of all the pork that was put into the bill, but if it's going to be in there, I'm glad there's all this energy stuff."

With both candidates pitching "green jobs" as central to their economic plans, providing incentives for American companies to develop cleaner and more efficient energy technologies has become a safe political issue. That allowed green tech industry backers to finally get the slate of tax breaks passed after years of failed attempts. Some industries made out particularly well: solar, tidal, and wave power got investment credits extending all the way to 2016.

Continue reading "Bailout Bill Is Rife With Tasty Green Pork" »

This bird's-eye view of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania was the first image ever seen by the GeoEye-1, the world's highest-resolution commercial satellite sponsored by Google, when it opened its camera door earlier this week.

The 4,300-pound satellite collected the image at noon EDT on Oct. 7 while moving from the north pole to the south pole in a 423-mile-high orbit at 17,000 miles per hour, or 4.5 miles per second. The spacecraft can take photos at a resolution of up to 41 cm -- close enough to zoom in on the home plate of a baseball diamond, according to Mark Brender, GeoEye's vice president of communications and marketing.

Even though the GeoEye-1 satellite sports a colorful Google sticker, its key customer is actually not Google but rather the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a U.S. government agency that analyzes imagery in support of national security. The NGA is paying for half of the development of the $502 million satellite and has committed to purchasing imagery from it. Google is GeoEye's second major partner.

"This is the opposite of a spy satellite," Brender said in a phone interview. "Spies don't put info on the internet and sell imagery. We're an Earth-imaging satellite, and we can sell our imagery to customers around the world who have a need to map and measure and monitor things on the ground."

Since around the late 70s, the military has used high-resolution spy satellites capable of reading newspaper headlines in Red Square. But only in recent years the technology became available to the public and businesses while concurrently making dramatic strides in coverage and resolution. For example, when Google Earth launched in 2004, its imagery was low-res and spotty. But by March 2006, a third of the world population could get a bird's-eye view of their own homes in high resolution.

There's one catch for Google: While the GeoEye-1 will provide imagery to the NGA at the maximum resolution of 43 cm, Google will only receive images at a 50-cm resolution because of a government restriction, Brender explained. However, Google's partnership with GeoEye is exclusive, meaning the search-engine giant will be the only online mapping site using the satellite's photos.

"We're commercializing a technology that was once only in the hands of the governments," Brender said. "Just like the internet, just like GPS, just like telecom -- all invented by the government. And now we are on the front end of the spear that is commercializing this technology."

Considered the world's most-accurate commercial imaging satellite, the GeoEye-1 had been undergoing calibration and inspection since it was launched on Sept. 6 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

A second satellite, GeoEye-2, slated to launch in 2011 or 2012, will have a resolution of 25 cm, company representatives promised. However, Google's satellite imagery will not likely get more detailed because of the 50-cm regulation.

See also:

• Google Launches Super-Spycam Into Space; Logo Goes Along for a Ride

Photo: GeoEye

Adler Planetarium in Chicago took a hit during last night's presidential debate when Sen. John McCain derided a $3-million earmark that Sen. Barack Obama had requested last year to replace the facility's 40-year-old projector.

McCain repeatedly called the requested equipment an "overhead projector" which brings to mind the simple light projector your junior-high geometry teacher used to display transparencies. But the Zeiss planetarium projector Adler has its eye on is no simple teaching aid.

The 78-year-old planetarium's current system weighs more than a ton, is around ten feet long and is capable of projecting over 4,500 stars on a 360 degree planetarium dome. Adler installed its first Zeiss projector in 1930 when the museum opened as the only planetarium in the western hemisphere. It upgraded a newer model in 1969, when humans first landed on the moon.

It's not surprising that nearly 40 years later it might be time for another upgrade. Once at the cutting edge of planetarium technology, Adler has fallen behind the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, which already have the latest Zeiss projector.

Still, Adler is one of the premier science education facilities in the country. It helped turn a generation onto space, and today it hosts over 400,000 school children and visitors every year. Of the many earmarks clearly listed on Senator Obama's website in the name of transparency, I find it interesting that McCain's people picked a science center as the best example they could find of egregious spending.

Besides, as space politics blogger Jeff Foust points out, the point is moot as far as the planetarium is concerned because the spending wasn't passed.

Despite the context, maybe being mentioned in a presidential debate isn't all bad. It put the Adler planetarium on the map for many people who had never heard of it, which could result in a higher turnout for NASA's Future Forum there on Oct. 10.

Photo: Courtesy Fritz Geller-Grimm

"Hey, this is a really great idea," snarked a commenter in our vote-off between the official and Wired Science winners of the Nobel Prize in physics. "Nobel laureates should be chosen by the casual readers of popular and esoteric technology magazines."

But what do you know: University of California, San Diego biochemist Roger Tsien, a pioneer in real-time cellular observation and the overwhelming favorite in our Nobel chemistry vote, has won.

Tsien, along with co-recipients Osamu Shimomura of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and Columbia University's Martin Chalfie, works with green fluorescence protein, or GFP. In nature, it makes crystal jellyfish glow. In a laboratory, spliced into a genome, it lights up whenever a target gene is activated.

This allows researchers to observe cellular function at a level that was previously impossible. (Think of it as the difference between having the pieces of a mechanical clock and seeing the clock run.) It's a rare paper on gene or cell function that doesn't involve GFP -- if not directly, then in the research that led to it.

Congratulations to Tsien, Shimomura and Chalfie, and to the invisible army of colleagues, assistants, lab technicians and everyone else who helped make their work possible.

And in an editorializing aside: Osamu Shimomura, who is responsible for identifying and isolating GFP, did so during his work on crystal jellyfish. His website notes that Shimomura "has never been interested in applications" -- he just wanted to figure out how they glowed.

And that's why basic research, so often criticized for being pointless and esoteric, is so important.

Image: Leiden University

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NASA is getting ready to launch a first-of-its-kind satellite that can measure the sources and sinks for carbon dioxide around the planet, in January 2009.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory is an incredible new tool in the global effort to understand climate change that will fill in the gaps left by ground measuring stations in parts of North America, Europe and Asia. The new satellite mission dovetails with a newly-announced plan by Virgin Galactic and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to measure carbon dioxide concentrations in the upper stratosphere, mesosphere and lower thermosphere with Virgin's high altitude carrier aircraft, White Knight Two, and its spacefaring companion, SpaceShipTwo.

The Economist just published a great article on the two new systems that explains how together they might finally offer us the high resolution map of carbon sources and sinks that scientists need to more accurately understand how, where and why carbon dioxide is entering and exiting the atmosphere.

The NASA satellite will measure sunlight reflecting off the planet and calculate what gases are present in a 6-mile-wide column of gas to an accuracy of one part per million. Inserted into a polar orbit, the satellite will fly over the polar cap every 16 days, like a string being wrapped around the planet in 6-mile swaths.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory is called the "front of the A-train" because it is joining a group of Earth observing satellites that are already flying close together in the same orbit, minutes behind each other. Their shared track means that their measurements can be more easily correlated. The other satellites, which are measuring water, clouds, aerosols and other characteristics of our planet, are "sun-synchronous" and fly over each part of the earth at the same hour. The "A" in A-train is for afternoon because the satellite out in front of the series crosses the equator on every orbit at 1:30 p.m. local time.

NOAA's CO2 measurements via Virgin Galactic's vehicles will help provide calibration and "air-truthing" of the satellite measurements. By flying high, over 50,000 feet with the White Knight Two and perhaps over 370,000 feet with the spaceship, NOAA will be able to take measurements of the entire column of atmospheric gas that can be well-matched against satellite data. The vehicles will also yield more data at high and intermediate altitudes, always useful for the NOAA scientists trying to build global models of carbon emissions and transport. As George T. Whitesides of Virgin Galactic told Wired.com, "When it comes to climate change research, the more data the better."

Indeed, this is still only the opening phase in the challenge to track and study CO2 on our planet. The climate change community first recommended satellite CO2 measurements back in 1990's, and now is finally getting the first global on-orbit systems. Now the challenge is to make sure that when its nominal mission completes in two years time, the next generation of carbon dioxide monitoring missions is ready to go.

A is for earth: the world will soon know more about about carbon dioxide [The Economist]
NOAA and Virgin Galactic to explore collaboration for study of climate change [Virgin Galactic]

Graphic: NASA
Full disclosure: George T. Whitesides is my husband.

Biofuels have contributed far less to rising food prices than previously estimated, a new United Nations report's data suggests.

The State of Food and Agriculture 2008 projects that biofuels production only adds 15 percent to world food prices, and that despite rising ethanol capacity, overall food prices are headed down. The slowing world economy combined with increased agricultural production, are cutting the prices of staples like wheat, sugar and vegetable oil.

"Food prices have dropped significantly and will continue to drop," said Per Pinstrup-Andersen, a food economist at Cornell University, who was not an author of the U.N. report. "The reason for that is that farmers respond to these higher prices and you'll get more food produced than ever before."

After a period of optimism earlier this decade that biofuels could help the world wean itself off crude oil, scientific and public sentiment have turned against the current generation of fuels made from crops. First, the carbon dioxide reduction benefits of corn-based ethanol were questioned and then, with food prices on the rise, food security advocates began to ratchet up the heat. Late last year, one U.N. official called converting food crop land to biofuel farming use a "crime against humanity." Earlier this summer, the Guardian reported that a World Bank researcher had found that biofuels had been responsible for 75 percent of the rise in food prices and "caused [the] food crisis." Even the new report

But all the rhetoric didn't square with the relative amount of food being diverted to fuel production. Close to 2,500 million metric tons of grain and oilseeds are produced each year. U.S. ethanol production, which has received a big chunk of the blame, uses about 79 million metric tons of corn, according to a USDA report.

Continue reading "Don't Blame Biofuels for Food Crisis" »

In a sad coda for a magnificent species, the last known female Yangtze giant soft-shell turtle has failed to mate with one of three remaining males.

The New York Times reports on the breeding attempt today, under the headline "Future of Giant Turtle Still Uncertain."

But make no mistake: had the turtles bred, it would still require Panglossian optimism to think of the species' future in anything but the bleakest terms. When a population is reduced to single digits, the gene pool is so diminished that the possibility of their recovery in the wild is practically nil.

The would-be breeders of the Yangtze giant soft-shell turtle are doing the right thing. With the species driven to likely extinction by humans, we owed them this effort. But we also owed to the turtle -- and still owe every other threatened and endangered species -- a level of care and protection that gives them a chance to survive in something more than long-term, species-level life support.

In related news, scientists recently reported that one in four mammal species are threatened with extinction.

Image: Turtle Survival Alliance

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Leading the candidates for the next Nobel Prize in chemistry are three scientists whose basic work makes as much sense to me as a Latin Bible.

There, I've admitted it: my deepest, darkest secret as a science writer. Chemistry and me are like oil and water -- and don't expect me to explain why oil and water don't mix.

When interviewing chemists, I joke about the (cough) strategems I used to barely pass high school chemistry, and warn that explaining their work will require a level of patience normally accorded to adults who have trouble tying their shoes. They chuckle. It's the last laugh either of us have for the next hour.

Fortunately, Nobel Prizes tend to go to scientists whose work is important enough to be explicable in general, mass-market terms: the underlying ions and chargers and what-all reactions can be conveniently glossed over (in much the same way, perhaps, as the apparent order of matter hides its broken symmetries.)

Continue reading "Vote for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry" »

The Nobel Prize committee went off the board yesterday, awarding -- despite Wired Science readers' clear preference for graphene's discoverers -- the prize in physics to three theoretical physicists whose work has illuminated the nature of matter.

Yochiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa -- of, respectively, the Enrico Fermi Laboratory, the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization and Kyoto University -- study what are known as broken symmetries: the ways in which, at the level of quarks, the standard laws of physics necessarily break down.

Nobody's actually seen this, but physicists say it must be true, as broken symmetries unify three of the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity being the pesky outlier) and appear to explain why the universe was not annihilated shortly after the Big Bang by the mutual antagonism of matter and antimatter.

Continue reading "Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded: Fair or Foul?" »

FREMONT, California -- Solar cells have been converting sunlight into electricity for years, but scientists have been much less successful at turning that technology into money.

Now, in a staid Bay Area office park, a converted hard-drive factory with a shiny new façade has begun churning out unconventional solar tubes that could change the economics of solar power.

The highly-automated factory belongs to Solyndra, a three-year-old company that has received $600 million in venture capital and $1.2 billion in orders for its new modules, which look like curtain rods. Those big investors are betting the company's unique product will soon blanket commercial buildings across the world.

Instead of the standard panels mounted on racks that have dominated solar for the last 20 years, Solyndra's cylindrical solar modules collect sunlight more efficiently across a broader range of angles and catch light reflected off the roof itself. The solar cells also contain no silicon, which has been a costly component of most solar systems.

Targeted at a highly specific market — office and big-box rooftops — and with signed contracts in hand, the company, along with a small cadre of other well-funded solar startups, are racing to turn their scientific and engineering marvels into profitable businesses.

The scramble, the money, and the size of the prize — a big slice of the trillions of dollars made in energy — remind the company's founder, Chris Gronet, of his earlier experience in the industry that became the basis for the information revolution.

"We think the solar industry or market look very similar to the way semiconductor manufacturing was 20 years ago," Gronet, Solyndra's CEO, told Wired.com. "We say, 'Wow this is familiar. We've been through this before.'"

All types of solar power have experienced growth in the wake of increasing awareness of the risks of climate change and the rising costs of fossil fuels. A report released last week by Lux Research, a solar-focused analysis firm, predicts that the total solar market will grow from $33.4 billion in 2008 to $100.4 billion in 2013. While traditional silicon-based solar cells continue to underpin most solar systems, there is a broad expectation among industry analysts and insiders that these new thin-film solar cells, such as Solyndra is making, will experience rapid growth. While thin-film cells aren't as efficient at using the sun's energy as their silicon competitors, they cost less to produce.

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