ADAMANT

MonaLisa Underdrive

Are you really sure you want to learn to drive a Pixy, Puyo Or Pivo2 ?  Forget real world announcements about fuel cell vehicles.Welcome to the alternate universe of fuel cell concept cars at the Tokyo motor show.

Suzuki’s Pixy + SSC is a car within a car; a three-wheeled single-seater pod-- the Pixy- that docks inside a  hexagonal Suzuki Sharing Coach--the SSC, for (relatively) higher speeds and ranges, powered by a fuel cell and solar cell array.

If you don't find  the battery powered Nissan Pivo2, with a cabin that spins round 360 degrees sufficiently cuddly , there's always the fuel cell powered Honda Puyo, a car covered in "strokeable soft silicone "intended to absorb collisions , and possibly invite the attention of love-lorn wombats.

My Name Is Ozymandias, King Of Mars

I met a traveler in the freezing sands :

Cloudy Crimson Crystal Ball

If  A Walk On The Flat Side ,  The Twilght's Cold Glare ,  or my August 2000 Forbes  article  Paint The Town White  intrigued you, stay tuned - Science reports :

Tinkering with the Climate to Get Hearing At Harvard Meeting

Eli Kintisch

Should scientists and engineers seriously consider large-scale alterations of the climate to stave off the worst effects of global warming? Several dozen top U.S. climate scientists will explore that controversial question next month in a 2-day invitation-only workshop at Harvard University designed to explore whether direct interventions might be needed to supplement efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Curbing greenhouse warming manually, so to speak, could offer a more immediate and possibly simpler solution to climate change than the massive overhaul of energy systems that would be needed to cut global greenhouse gas emissions. Ideas include removing CO₂ from the atmosphere by forcing air through absorbers or stimulating plankton growth, and shading the planet with aerosols. But many prominent climate scientists have been leery of even discussing such possibilities for fear that they could provide policymakers with an excuse not to cut carbon emissions, or that the technology comes with serious side effects. As a result, says Harvard geochemist Daniel Schrag, who is organizing the meeting, discussions have occurred mostly among advocates. "I wanted to get the mainstream climate community … to look closely at this thing," he says.

The 8 to 9 November meeting will include climate heavyweights such as James Hansen of NASA, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Mark Cane of Columbia University. Its focus will be on ways to lower the atmosphere's temperature, including releasing massive amounts of sulfates into the atmosphere to mimic the natural cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. Such an approach was publicized last year by Nobelist Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany (Science, 20 October 2006, p. 401).

 

Solar shield. The University of Arizona's Roger Angel has calculated that trillions of orbiting disks could refract sunlight and reverse catastrophic global warming. CREDIT: TOM CONNORS/ROGER ANGEL/JOHANAN CODONA, COPYRIGHT ARIZONA BOARD OF REGENTS

Scientists pondering geoengineering ideas argue that such cooling schemes could be hard to control and wouldn't address the acidification of the oceans caused by CO₂. Others worry that any discussion of the topic will undermine political momentum to cut greenhouse gas emissions. These include atmospheric scientist Elisabeth Moyer, who before leaving Harvard for the University of Chicago told Schrag that the conference should be held off campus or without publicity. "I had concerns about lending the conference the prestige of the Harvard name. … The conference can be viewed as an endorsement [of geoengineering]," she says. Even so, Moyer thinks that "it is critical to discuss the idea."

Hansen says better forest practices, advanced agriculture techniques, and geologic carbon sequestration could supplement the real emission cuts required to stave off dangerous climate change and avoid the need for geoengineering efforts. He hopes to spread that message at the meeting. "The potential for stabilizing climate is more than realized," he says. But he agrees with Schrag that geoengineering should still be explored, as future policymakers might seek to do it whether or not scientists understand it. "I don't think scientists should shy away" from the topic, he says.

The fact that the meeting is taking place at all marks a new phase of urgency among climate scientists, says modeler Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, California. In a 1998 paper, Caldeira called the aerosol approach "a promising strategy," although he argued that emissions cuts remain "the most prudent" course of action. "A decade later, a bunch of people are coming to the same point," says Caldeira.

 

 

                                                       

For Your Popeyes Only

There was an audible thunk as four sentries secured the cell-phone proof Faraday doors of the DAPRA briefing bubble.

The first Top Secret slide to light the un-photographable overhead screen bore the agency's logo, itself highly classified, of The Agronauts' mighty ship running down the foundering  cockleshell of the hapless JASON's.

  Below it was the meeting's topic:
War On Terror Budget Earmarks FY 2007

As the Director Of the Defense  Agricultural Price Reflation Agency  took the podium , he directed his best smile at the knot  of  Army  shoulder board stars in the sea of  Navy  blue,  Space Command aubergine and white lab coats that otherwise filled the room.

"Gentlemen, Lady, we face a daunting task, and have but little time. Yet we do have some earmarked funds and the highest authorization to spend them. Even by  the standards of our colleagues at the  Defense Advanced Pork Recycling Agency , four hundred and eighty two million dollars ain't hay, and to earn our keep and keep the troops alive all we have to do is figure out how it can send terror packing by advancing the development of four strategic materials. The first, of course is milk solids.

As you know, casein is pretty tough stuff, and after just 31years, our HCI brethren at the Proving Ground have steadily moved the Strategic Hard Cheese Initiative towards its goal of an IED-proof MRE based on domestic Iraqi feta.  That's point one."

He beamed at the spectacularly uniformed   Deputy Veterinary Surgeon General, and waved an eye searing green laser pointer around the bullet on the screen for emphasis:
•   $283 million for Milk Income Loss program

"I'll bet few of you academics knew that when you combine the mandarin characters for 'Oral Examination' and ' Danger' they mean "Citrus Canker", but having testified on the subject on the Hill, I can tell you that the Senate Select Agricultural Subsidy Subcommittee is floored by our ballistic Bio Mimesis  work on toughening orange peels into biodegradable tank armor that doesn't smell like Tang."
•          $100 million for Citrus Assistance
Now you Sandia pukes have been outstanding, mutating soy beans means higher biofuel octane for the M1A3/4MBT Main Bradley Tow system, and compressing macadamia nuts to thermonuclear densities raises hopes of the DOE Green Fusion plan beating the Iranians to pistachio ignition. But now it's time to turn to defeating heavy artillery --and taking a bite out of:
•        $74 million for Peanut Storage costs

Just figure out how to compress the damn things to the density of chunky depleted uranium, and by God, we'll spread the stuff inside every Bremer Wall in Mesopotamia. That'll be the end of truckbombs and warehousing over-runs for once and for all. And don't forget the Navy. You  sailors now  have Compartmentalized Vegetable Intelligence clearance, so I can tell you those MSM cartoons of Hummers using  MRE's as applique body armor were just planted cover. The most strategic materials are human, and a real black side breakout  has come from the funding  that gave us  this--"

  A side-armed  MP passed a hard case to the Director, and a second later, the  shadow of a can trembled on the screen beneath :
•        $25 million for Spinach Growers

"While you've been taking the media flack, our DAPRA plantation hands have been working away at the recombinant  DNA of this nasty vegetable. They have it expressing enough steroids to scare the golf shoes off the  quartermaster corps., and today I'd like you to meet the first Future Seal to benefit from this joint armed services -USDA effort. You'll have to forgive him for being out of uniform, but frankly we couldn't find a Mil Spec digital camo blouse he could get on. Come on up here son--"

The newly breveted Master Chief smiled shyly and shifted the unlit corncob pipe from between his somewhat asymmetrical, but manly jaws into the fist at the end of his forty four inch right forearm.

“ Aw, Sir, yer recombinant spinnick had  nuttin to do wit  it. I just am what I yam.  And that's all what  I yam.  Now what's all this about Al Kaders, the swabs?  I'll gives em yer money’s worth ! "

Gunpowdered Whigs

The first post Freedom Fries French President , M.Sarkozy enjoyed 15 minutes of Sixty Minutes fame yesterday, but this morning, a NYTimes oped asks if historians pondering the Neocon ascendancy: 

"may find the French Revolution useful in understanding his curious brand of 21st- century conservatism. Soon after the storming of the Bastille, pro-Revolutionary elements came together to form an association that would become known as the Jacobin Club, an umbrella group of politicians, journalists and citizens dedicated to advancing the principles of the Revolution."

Its French Canadian author leaves the NeoJacobin's role in the devolution of Republican science policy unexamined. Yet cautious palaeocons should recall that, condemned as member of the Ancienne Regime, modern chemistry's founder met an untimely end , guillotined by the Jacobin Terror.

Lavoisier's protege in the gunpowder business escaped the Terror by fleeing to America, to found a Delaware chemical dynasty, so it is no small irony that his present namesake should  elect the losing side in the science wars of today. Before Pete Du Pont fires off another WSJ fuelleton, or another half-cocked Global Warming Primer escapes quality control at his National Center for Policy Analysis, the Governor might take counsel of the scientifically astute  board of the firm that has so long  been instrumental in keeping our powder dry in all climes.

SLIMEWIRE

Bacteria , writes Phillip Ball in Nature, "can sprout webs of electrical wiring that transform the soil into a geological battery"

D. Ntarlagiannis et al  report in Geophys. Res. Lett. 34, L17305; 2007, that ome soil bacteria form networks of tiny wires linking individual bacterial cells into a web-like electrical circuit. The wires allow the bacteria to get rid of electrons generated during metabolism, transporting them to distant 'electron dumps'.

This leads Venter research Institute scientist Yuri Gorby to speculate soil may act as a circuit built by microbes to power their metabolic systems,. As the bacteria consume nutrients for energy, they spit out unwanted electrons into the circuit.

Last year, Gorby and his colleagues discovered that Shewanella oneidensis bacteria can grow 100 nanometer ( 1000 atom wide ) filaments  which conduct electricity (Y. A. Gorby et al . Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 103, 11358–11363; 2006). The researchers presented evidence that the microbes use these 'nanowires' to shunt electrons produced during metabolic reactions onto the surface of mineral grains in the soil, to be taken up by metal ions. Without an electron acceptor, the bacteria cannot function properly and die.

UNHAPPY FEET

Remind me never to go night diving in Antarctica,
or for that matter anywhere else
in the Big South.

Give Me A Break

John Stossel's attempt to  bluff on some bad bets in climate science has been  raised and called by Prometheus

A Whale Of A Pod

Though the origins of the Straussian mythos are shrouded in the mists of Lake Michigan, and perhaps best left there, The New Yorker affords  some insight into the education of John Podhoretz , the Editor newly tasked with making Commentary as unintentionally funny as The Weekly Standard --

Hello Neighbor

20 Years Ago, And Not Very Far Away,

Some light reflected off a planet, and into deep space to face eventual interception by a more or less intelligent life form on another world.  Ours.

If the newly discovered globe of Gliese 581C circled the sun instead of a Spectral Type M star  20 light years away in the constellation Libra , it would be toast. But Gliese 581 is only half as hot as the sun, 3,000 versus 6,000 Kelvins, so its  radiant energy peaks in the near infrared. This leaves the 12,000 mile diameter planet circling just six million miles distant from the diminutive red star basking in sunlight of  Earthly intensity, and endowing  its surface with temperatures that are nothing less than temperate,  some 30 to 100 Fahrenheit.

In short, the solar system has a habitable neighbor.

The discovery was made decades ago by Gliese 581C standards-- its year is only 13 earth days long.

That was this spring here in Cambridge, and fall to the European Southern Observatory team who added it to the stars first two planets using a telescope at La Silla Chile.

However you reckon the discovery's timing, they

"wouldn't be surprised if there is life on this planet,"

says Stephane Udry, a project  astronomer based at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland" according to Britain's Guardian.

Though it's not cold outside, whether there's no kind of atmosphere on the third rock from the distant red dwarf remains unknown. But location is everything --it's never too early for realtors to join the campaign to expedite space telescope development.

or for those confidently predicting a technological singularity leading to near-immortality to give themselves something to do in their extended prime of life . The sooner we dispatch a slow robotic  space probe in  Gleise 581's direction, accelerating all the way,  the earlier it might return news of a fit destination for future human exploration.

   

Global Warming : A Walk On The Flat Side

  Climate Policy In Dimension

A century ago, a Victorian parson wrote a book exploring  how hard two-dimensional creatures would find it to imagine our three dimensional world. We share their perplexity trying to  intuit how two dimensional phenomena can determine the behavior of complex three dimensional systems like the climate of the Earth. Yet we encounter the importance of two dimensional phenomena to climate all the time.  It's hard to weigh a shadow, yet you can feel the impact of one whenever you walk out of sunlight into shade.

The global warming debate ponders weighty matters, but such massive policy questions as taxing carbon by the ton  or burying megatons of CO2 exist in response to something utterly weightless- the radiant energy of the sun.  Global warming arises less from the weight of what humanity adds to the air as how much energy it traps between earth and sky.

Though The Greenhouse Effect is  popularized as a problem in three dimensions, like lighting or fighting a fire , global warming  has a profoundly two dimensional aspect. The Earth's albedo, it's basically  about photons bouncing off of some surfaces and being absorbed by others.

The Earth's albedo is only skin deep.

Light and  dark, black and  shiny, dim and glaring , are all words describing the surfaces of things, not their massive interiors--what things weigh has little to do with how sunlight or radiant warmth interacts with their surfaces, or their interfaces with  air or water. It is a capital error , economic and  dimensional, for analysts to overlook the fact that  two-dimensional solutions generally  entail  using-- or avoiding the use -- of  far less mass of fuel or material than climate control policies aimed exclusively at the mass of the atmosphere in three dimensions.

At present, Earth's population is such that there is a million tons of atmosphere per capita, yet your share of the earths surface area is encompassed by a 100 meter circle. So while your portion of the earth's greenhouse gases weighs a hefty  400 tons, ten tons of  paint would suffice  to cover your share of the Earth's surface. An even smaller mass might yield  an aerosol cloud  large enough to shade your share of it too.

Carbon dioxide weighs three times as much as the carbon that goes into it , so putting some or all of it back into the ground  from whence fossil fuels come is an even larger  enterprise  that  extracting them in the first place. Like it or not  carbon sequestration  means venturing into the realm of macroengineering  as well as macroeconomics.  And playing God is something  few people on Earth can afford to  do withouth consulting their bank accounts- no nation can afford to ignore an order of magnitude difference in the scale of potential solutions  to  problems  so universal as climate change ,soit behooves all of us to see to it that our politicians look up the phrase " dimensional anaysis' before they commit us to carbon trading schemes or CO2 sequestration.

Since few  politicians know what their pet  environmental solutions weigh, most are clueless as Flatlanders as to what they may end up  costing- some have even been known to confuse the area of sea ice  in two dimensions with the volume of ice caps in three.  gallon of flat white paint of excellent quality , costing  $20 at retail, can cover ~80 square meters. Were every American to commence painting their 3 hectare patch at the rate of one square meter per day , we'd run out of land to paint long before the end of the century. Though, like Flatland, this is not offered as a How To Guide, it does afford some idea of how such  things scale in human terms.

Few carbon taxation schemes are guaranteed  to run out of room for expansion after extracting only $2,000 from each intended victim.

 

Solid But Spooky Results

You don't see a new kindof phase transition every day. The first evidence for the one to the new state of matter termed a  supersolid emerged in 2004 when a wee can  filled with with liquid helium and squeezed solid at  25 atmospheres was  set  twisting back and forth on a very thin and springy shaft. Below  about 0.2 kelvin-- ,2 degree above absolute zero--the frequency of twisting shot up as though the can had lost mass. implying that some of the helium was not moving while the rest of it continued to twist back and forth-- through itself!

Some things are too simple to be readily understood, and in the very cold world of quantum solids , such things are the norm-if  superfluid liquid helium flows without any resistance Why Not Supersolids ?.

Some doubted this was the supersolidity that had been bravely  hypothesized in the 1960s (Science, 1 July 2005, p. 38) , but newly published work with a single crystal of the problematic stuff in a silicon  can has reduced the uncertainty due to grain boundaries in the earlier work

Run It Up The Flagpole And See If It Burns

Ten days after the announcement of the Nobel peace prize, network TV lit up like strobe with an avalanche of prime time advertisements on Green Themes. Not just Timberland's recycled shoes, but Honda's low-emission cars.  What advertising firms do on behalf of their clients  is their own business, but when they do it is a fit  object of public curiosity.

While the normative Nobels have an airtight  record of  keeping winners secret, the political milieu awarding the the Peace Prize leaks like the Senate Intelligence Committee-- at least one  US political journal ran a story announcing  Al's win the night before he got the call.

A dozen-odd  Laureates coincidentally gathered in Potsdam at a UNEP  "Global sustainability A Nobel cause'  conference  were shocked , shocked to learn of the award the following morning , former IPCC chairman Robert Watson so deeply  that it took him  several seconds to spontaneously  declaim:

" Al Gore is a tireless fighter for the cause of climate who thoroughly deserves the prize for bringing this serious issue...." and whole minutes for IPCC working group co-chair Susan Solomon of NOAA to add :

" I don't think he has tried to promote a political agenda."

Given the Advertising Council's self-advertising of its corporate consciousness raising  efforts on UNEP and the IPCC's behalf , how curious campaigns of a caliber taking months to shoot should be good to go, with pre-positioned network airtime buys in place, 48 hours after the Oslo announcement.

OPEN SESAME !

As if living in caves didn't present Islamotroglodytes like OBL with enough headaches, they are soon to be serenaded at their overhead doors with the Mother Of All Heavy Metal Band Props-

Ten tons or so of tungsten, depleted uranium, or tungsten carbide constitute the knocking end of this two part door opener of the rocket assisted,  6 m [20 feet] long Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The 15 ton weapon contains a  three ton explosive charge and is designed to penetrate up to 60 meters/200 feet of ordinary rock or concrete,and bury 8 meters/25 feet into reinforced concrete or even granite.

As if that's not enough, in less time than it takes to sing 'Rock of ages,cleft for me' along may come a scarcely smaller projectile, to 'ladder down' further into the ground through the rubble disrupted by the first. Northrop Grumman is working with Boeing, and they say " New more lethal defeat options for Hard and Deeply Buried Targets (HDBTs) like the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, that can overwhelm target uncertainties, are being developed ."

"The Direct Strike Hard Target Weapon... will make use of the JDAM interface under development for the B-52 & B-2 aircraft.The warhead will be a 20,000 lb. penetrator with dense metal ballast...an accelerometer ...allows control of the detonation point by layer counting, distance or time...The fuze can distinguish between earth, concrete, rock and air.

Performance predictions against targets were analyzed... experience has shown that 2,000 lb. penetrators carrying 500 lbs. of high explosive are relatively ineffective against tunnels, even when skipped directly into the tunnel entrance. Instead... the munition must be on the order of 20 to 30 klb. to couple a sufficient amount of energy to the tunnel. Optimized penetrators of this size ... may also be suitable for housing a clean, low-yield nuclear weapon..."

Sounds like Pinky Bhutto's chance to indulge the taste for underground testing Pakistan's military developed in her absence. Unless of course, Turkey calls dibs first on the prototypes of this NATO bolockbuster to deal with P P K die-hards holed up in what Baghdad's Deputy Prime Minister has called "the Tora Bora of Iraq."

PLAID ALERT

International Security

Has a sober examination of TSA's airport antics and DHS's 9/11 24/7 alerts:

Color Bind:
Lessons from the Failed Homeland Security Advisory System
Jacob N. Shapiro and Dara Kay Cohen

The United States’ color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS) has failed to motivate relevant actors to take costly protective measures in response to a terrorist alert, particularly after increases in the threat level appeared to be politically manipulated. The HSAS has neither shared relevant information regarding its alerts nor generated enough confidence in the government to convince the public to take necessary actions. An alternative trust-based alert system could succeed where HSAS has failed.

Click here to read the full text.

(Full disclosure: I am  a reviewer for this Harvard journal )

Prohibition Lite

This Caffeine Free Dehydrated Diet Crystal Coke's For You!

Hard on the heels of studies indicating  tobacco use delays the onset of Alzheimer's Disease , comes a stunning demonstration in the New York Times that a deficiency of the miracle drug nicotine can manifest itself as Dementia  Praecox:

"A two-cigarette strategy would prohibit young smokers from buying addictive cigarettes. The tobacco industry is capable of producing cigarettes that are virtually free of nicotine, and regulators could develop clear standards for non-addictive cigarettes. (Disclosure: My law firm represents tobacco companies, but I have recused myself from that work.)

The age to purchase addictive cigarettes might be set at 21. Better yet, sales of addictive cigarettes could be restricted to individuals born 19 or more years before the two-cigarette strategy was put into effect. Under this approach, 18-year-olds who start smoking non-addictive cigarettes would be prohibited from switching to addictive cigarettes even after they turned 21.  a higher federal excise tax...would create a financial incentive for smokers of all ages, including scofflaw adolescents, to select non-addictive cigarettes."

...David G. Adams, a lawyer, was the director of the policy staff at the Food and Drug Administration from 1992 to 1994."

Mr.Adams prodigious legal talent is utterly wasted on the The New York Times Op-ed page

He should return to the Washington, where his proactive view of torture and bills of attainder can be put to current White House use . Since the wife of his previous chief executive purloined all the ash trays in the Oval Office,  his place on her transition team seems assured.

Crossing The Threshold

Divorce  and Prenuptual Agreement lawyers around the world are toasting the news that reports of a Japanese robot  that delivers professional quality massages have enabled a Dutch  graduate student to successfully defend his PhD  thesis, predicting  the consummation of  human-robot  marriages by the year 2050.

The Dark Side Of 9-11

50 years ago the Space Age began.

12 years after Sputnik I's alarming debut, I photographed the roaring launch of Apollo 11 for this  Conde' Nast cover.  I've been in volcanic eruptions before and since, but the 1969 event was like nothing so much as 9-11 run backwards.

Only louder.

The political dark side of NASA's thundering  technological  triumph has parallels in the aftermath of 9-11 as well . The focused idealism seen in the months following each event  gave way to both millenarian dreams and dystopic fantasies, and a plenum of unjustified claims.

In the moon launch's case, the success of outspending our Cold War adversary led to NASA's evolution into an obstacle to economic sanity in space , as its vastly expensive bureaucracy turned to defending its turf instead of expanding man's presence in  the solar system.

In the 1950s many science fiction writers predicted  men would walk on the moon, and though few were so bold as to assert it would happen within a decade, many  of the greatest  gathered at Cape Kennedy  to witness the realization of their dream. They did a lot of predicting, but none  imagined that after a half dozen lunar voyages in as many years , no one would set foot on the moon for another generation. It was a suggestion as  inconceivable as Columbus returning from the New World only to counsel  Queen Isabella to stop wasting  her time and treasure on  Atlantic caravels , and focus on employing more galley slaves.

That is essentially what we got five centuries later, as NASA's dysfunctional bureaucracy concentrated on the ill fated Space Shuttle even as an explosion of entrepreneurial creativity  in Silicon Valley showed that the Right Stuff had quit Cape Canaveral and gone west.

Within five years of  9-11, TSA had likewise discovered that the main mission of any organization that does not have to justify its mandate is to spend  as much as possible, but while NASA merely wasted the taxpayer's money, mindless spending by Homeland Security translates into the waste of the nation's time as well.  Treating passengers like Spam In A Can astronauts  prepared to suffer unending delays to get off the ground manifests bureaucratic sadism  more than safety concern.

NASA 's downward trajectory can teach us a lot about what else TSA should not be doing, but if history is any precedent, the last thing Homeland Security  will do is study those lessons of its own accord.

Sailing From Byzantium

One mild day in Greenland ,
a cruise ship puts His All Holiness Bartholomew I, ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople ashore to climb the hill behind the site of Bratthild,  a pagan Norse settlement founded by Erik The Red, and perform a Byzantine liturgy in the ruins of the first Catholic  church in the Western hemisphere.

His All Holiness' congregation responds antiphonally  with a Moravian protestant mission hymn sung in Inuit

Read the whole strange and elegaic thing here

Just The Facts , Ma'm

Climate Scientists Views On Climate Change

a survey          Hans von Storch and Dennis Bray

In 1996 and 2003 we surveyed the opinions on climate change held by climate scientists. The results of these surveys have been subject to many misuses and erroneous claims. Some have selected individual statements out of context (scroll down to number 5) to bolster their claims, while others have argued that the 2003 part of the survey would be strongly biased by skeptics misusing the online-sampling for multiple submissions... On the skeptical side, the survey has often been used to create the impression that most scientists were not in support of anthropogenic causes of ongoing climate change: Specifically, it was noted that “For example more climate scientists ‘strongly disagree’ than ‘strongly agree’ that climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.” This interpretation is certainly biased.

From Nature  Climate Feedback CLICK  FOR FULL TEXT

From Nature  Climate Feedback CLICK  FOR FULL TEXT

Collective Victory At Sea

Francis Fukuyama, back from Melanesia, where he took in some of the island scenes that helped make Victory At Sea  as visually memorable as its score , compares it with  Ken Burns attempt to render the Mother of All War Stories for PBS, and finds himself wondering if what we were may be as disquieting as that which we are becoming

MOORE'S THAW

Photovoltaics Beyond (But Including) Silicon

 

The  School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering of Sydney's University of New South Wales, argues in Materials Today that third-generation thin film photovoltaics can achieve higher efficiency  but  still use second-generation deposition technology.

To do this with only a small cost increase in cost per Watt, third-generation solar cells must be compatible with big substrates, and transcend the quantum efficiency limits of single materials. Using more than one-bandgap composite devices enables the addition of the  ~ 10% efficiencies  single materials  readily achieve in mass production, with results attractive enough to require rethinking of PV economics.

How To Lose A Science War

Nothing illustrates the  power of advertising, or the incompetence of the losing side in the climate wars better than this frankly brilliant--if dishonestly edited--video collage.

It remind us that what both sides are dishing out is not science, but merely what their sponsors' focus groups want. None of these sound bites appeared on PBS, and really sound science is anathema to Fox.  But Fox serves a broad demographic base , and what viewers  with three digit IQ's will take if given half a choice could differ from Yack T V's sorry excuse for ' science '  in revenue enhancing ways.

Rupert Murdoch can find out the difference any time he wants: .

To halt the present rout, the White House need only engage the gentleman on the right to deliver a two word public service message to many who star in this clip>>
...

As to how well climate neocontrarians have managed their media portfolio to date, National Review reports Al Gore now has an 85% chance of winning the  Presidency if he runs,  while the price of oil has risen to  $86

A Brief History Of Global warming bets

Is contained in this charming European Geophysical Union meeting paper:
Let The Market Decide

In case you are wondering, few vociferous skeptics, actually bet, and Pat Michael's 1998 offer in World Climate Report to wager on average global satellite temperatures going down by December 2007 has reportedly been withdrawn .

Better Than The Original

Susan Faludi's  The Terror Dream has inspired an an astonishingly vigorous piece of writing on John Leonard's part in the New York Times Book Review. Morphing  Harper's Index to into a book review is   mighty hard work, but the only question this tour de force leves in my mind  is whether any book could sustain for half as many pages the sheer incandescence of his first 800  words.

Nixes Mate

Last year, the Hubble Space Telescope nearly fried its eye gathering enough off axis photons to reveal Pluto's two new and unsuspected moons, Nix and Hydra.Now  ten images gathered by the adaptive optics of the giant ground-based Keck telescope in Hawaii have been integrated into a clearer view

As to  Hydra, Nix's companion in the Plutonian  suburbs, I hope they leave it off the star charts, lest dyslexic New England astrogators confound it  with  the eponymous rock in Boston Harbor, formerly the site of a gibbet for showing off freshly hanged pirates, quakers and such.

Death And Taxes In Vwuip

David Muffett OBE was riding down villains in Nigeria even before they discovered internet fraud. Sadly, he has declined his last dinner invitation. Long before I visited Biafra, the imposing Administrator of Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service looked into the Kano Native Authority with such vigor that Emir Sir Muhammadu Sanussi, abdicated, and "Aka yi masa mafed"--' they did him a Muffett' became a Hausa byword for  "Justice caught up with him."

The Falstaffean magistrate dined out on a Mandevillean tale of collaring the Tigwe of Vwuip , a sahel highlands chieftain with decidedly novel views on the relationship of death and taxes. Muffett, though a great respecter of local customs, did so because the Tigwe, impressed by a district tax collector's miraculous ability to squeeze shillings from indigent indigenes, ate him in an effort to assimilate his fiscal acumen

The problem was less the loss of the tax collector than UN officials about to arrive. Muffett maintained he " wasn't about to have one of them eaten. I considered that it would be a highly retrogressive step."  So he locked up the Tigwe "until the delegation had departed beyond the reach of his culinary aspirations."

In 1958, at the  Nigerian constitutional conference in London, he seconded his friend al-Hadji Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, whose murder in 1966 unleashed the anti-Ibo atrocities that lead to Biafran secession. It was in Owerri in 1968 that I first heard  of Muffett's efforts to end the civil war. He also preceded me as an Associate of Harvard's Center for International Affairs, lecturing on the evils of Apartheid and working on his account of post-colonial Nigeria's dictatorial woes Let Truth Be Told. Full of years and honors, he passed away in England on 30 September.

THE GOLDEN CHAD

Ceci n'est pas un Prix, c'est un morceaux non decoupe' doree

Though struck from an equally hefty slug of solid gold, the Nobel Peace Prize has little in common with the science and literature awards. While handed out by Sweden's King, it is awarded by Norway's parliament, the Storting.  Whoever wins a seat can nominate whom they please for the award, but its disconnect from  the more soberly considered science and arts Nobels hardly tarnishes its luster.  As you watch Hollywood's savvy Greens transform the awards ceremony into  media event on a par with the Oscars or American Idol recall that past gongs have gone to designers of the Iron Curtain and the lobotomy. This is not the Florida election -- no court figures in the race for this golden chad

The method of electing the winner ensures a political outcome. Other Nobel prizes ar assigned by committees of experts in the orbit of the Swedish Academy of Science, but the peace Prize winner is determined by a committee reflecting the current strength of Norwegian political parties. The parliamentary committee of five  to whom Democrat Gore owes his prize includes three drawn from the Socialist Left, Labour, and Progressive parties forming Norway's ruling coalition, and one Conservative, a former Minister of Trade. Were the anti-immigrant Progressives in power, Gore might have found himself short listed with Pat Buchanan, for as Francis Sejersted, past chairman of the committee points out:  “Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act.”

And all politics is local. None of the other worthy Peace Prize nominees one might list, from Burmese monks to the embattled opponents of tyranny in Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe, can increase the value of Norway's oil and gas reserves. Giving a prize that amplifies the credibility of the world's foremost advocate of carbon taxes most assuredly can.

Investing $750,000 in Al's power to pontificate on behalf of his ( and Lehman Bros.) carbon trading business should pay Norway  and OPEC handsomely. If  Al's crusade to double coal's cost by taxation hikes  lower carbon  North Sea oil and gas prices proportionately, Oslo stands to gain a cool trillion Kroner on its multi-billion barrel  state owned reserves. Not a bad return on a 206 gram disc of gold and some chump change from a Swedish foundation.

So my congratulations to Mr. Gore, and kudos to the Oslo committee, whom I hereby place in nomination for the Nobel Prize in Economics, for awarding the Peace Prize to Al.

It is a gift in the best Viking fiscal tradition .Expropriating a neighbor's purse often avoids the recrimination that attends rapine, pillage,looting and burning. Especially the last --nowadays, a Viking's loot might not cover his carbon offsets.

Warning : Tangled Web

...   .Use Gentle Spin Cycle

In a lawsuit instigated by the anti-Tory  New Party calling for classroom  ban on Al Gore's opus, a Scottish judge ruled that the DVD's of An Inconvenient Truth flung like freebie Frisbies into the post box of every teacher in Britain may  be shown pupils in class , but ought to be presented as an example of political advocacy rather than science .

On Planet Gore CEI's Iain Murray gets his sporran in a knot attempting to present this Scots verdict as the dispatch of global warming to the guillotine after High Court condemnation, but The Guardian's David Adam's take maintains M'lud heartily endorsed the IPCC report in the process of warning against Al's hyperbole.  Adam's seems ahead on direct quotations , but Murray gets some points for creative ellipsis.  You better read both for yourself, as the judge sounds too bloody judicious to  ever make the grade on Fox or NPR.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

• The IPCC cheering section of RealClimate is understandably  chuffed about their team's Nobel Peace Prize, but just as Al is a bit conflicted about sharing his honor with Linus Pauling, who also won the gong on the left, this website comment suggests RC may feel oddly about it being shared with the star of An Inconvenient Truth:

  Fair is fair. Shouldn’t Al Gore send a thank you note to all the right-wing nutjobs who have abandoned the scientific high ground and left him standing there alone. I mean after all, without climate change (which to be fair, he was among the first to embrace), he would just be another washed up politician. Now he has an Academy Award, a Nobel Peace Prize and bookies have cut the odds on his becoming President from 10:1 to 8:1. He couldn’t have done it without the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, Senator James Inhoff,[sic] Rush Limbaugh, The Cato Institute, Exx-Mob etc. Come on guys step up and take a bow! Comment by Ray Ladbury — 12 October 2007 @ 7:59 AM

  An award for scientific polemicists who aim for the stars but shoot themselves in the foot is long overdue. With biofuel mania fermenting inside the Beltway, perhaps it should do honor to Paul Barbe Alfred Nobel's Business partner and French Minister of Agriculture, who having oversold his own ability to manipulate financial markets, committed suicide in 1890. Dynamite's inventor left him this cautionary epitaph: Avec d'excellentes capacités dans le travail mais dont la conscience était plus elastique que le caoutchouc.

  In 1949, Dr. Moniz won
  a Nobel for consciousness
  changing too.

   

Modern Art : The First 11,000 Years

From Jadet Moghara.       .  To.                . Piet Mondrian

Several thousand years older than agriculture, this painting on a plaster covered wall  French .   ..archaeologists  .discovered  while ......excavating a neolithic village in Syria may  equally disconcert postmodernists and conservatives, but those who think aesthetic sensibility, like the faculty of language, is hardwired into the human brain can only smile.

The walls of Jadet Moghara (or Djade al-Mughara, depending on your taste in other people's  transformational grammar) may be an eon older than Mondrian's Composition A,  but the Caves of Lascaux were already older still when the residents of suburban Aleppo took up interior decor.

But Can It Play Volleyball?

A Virtual Lifeguard To Watch Your Bay
Though it more resembles a horseshoe crab on steroids than Pamela Anderson, Sentry may become a welcome sight to surfers.The waterjet propelled unmanned reconn craft from MOD spin-off Qinetiq can get to where you wipe out at 50 knots, with length --3.5m, and beam--1.25m, enough to  haul   back to the beach without anybody else getting wet. A joystick console allows full control of the vehicle over a 16 nautical mile range.

The basic payload includes microwave datalink communications and camera. Options include stabilized real-time day / night high resolution cameras, a full lighting rig , a loud-hailer system and a smoke marker launcher. Add a homing system and a wristband transponder , and  It could revolutionize the  Arabian Sea beach scene, affording damsels in gnarly distress an alternative to drowning if a lady lifeguard or male relative cannot be found to  rescue them -the gadget debuted in Dubai.

Not Ready For Primate Time

.

.

Now that Leipzig's Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology  has determined that "unlike humans, chimpanzees conform to traditional economic models,"  perhaps they'll fund a study of why otherwise rational primates think the climate of the future will ape the predictions of models that depend on traditional emissions forecasts as well?

Newton's Law

Global solutions begin in Massachusetts, where Tip O'Neil first declared that all politics is local, including how to deal with CO2. While mayors elsewhere share the Constitutions dim view of treating with  foreign princes and potentates, ours regard the Kyoto treaty as a town ordinance: "Both Worcester and Newton are committed...a 75-85 percent reduction in greenhouse gases is necessary...Massachusetts must act now!"

Atmospheric activism is old in New England. In the17th century , Newton's  Pilgrim Fathers scorned Salem's failure to get carbon offsets for witch burning, and the Puritan Synod of 1679's wimp-out on the death penalty for smoking after fornication. But since then CO2 has burgeoned, and to achieve a 75% reduction, each latter day  Newtonian must take 300 tons of CO2 out of circulation -- wherever will they put it all?

Some may valiantly attempt to internalize the problem, by inhaling CO2 recreationally, or using it to freeze jack O'lanterns, and inflate bicycle tires, soccer balls, and whoopee cushions. Storing it as a liquid won't do, for building  steel tanks entails CO2-intensive coal mining and smelting, and leakage could turn Newton Reservoir into a fizzing slough of Vichy water. Clearly, a more solid solution is needed.

Suitable For Ages 0 To 1

Wired Science 's feature on the demise of chemical availability has Sci Am grumbling about sexism in the  days of Ask Mr Wizard , when boys got  chemistry sets but girls were expected to make do with junior lab technician kits. Perhaps they should be riled instead at the nanny state for the growing infantilization of science education.

While liability lawyers have been driving the number of chemicals in chemistry sets down to literally zero, lest  kids burn , maim, derange or kill themselves, the number of chemicals in household drug cabinets has burgeoned , as has the availability of such hazardous substances as elemental phosphorus and iodine to do it yourself pharmacists.

Will some one please dig up mortality stats comparing elevensomething amateur scientists and the  meth lab operators that provide work for underemployed SWAT teams?  it is hard to believe that  theJunior Lab Technician death toll to date exceeds the number of fingers on a nitrogen tri-iodide enthusiast.

When only criminals have chemistry sets, kids will have only the most widely available non-household chemicals and solvents at their disposal . This means a lot of explosive propellants and detonating compounds, for tens of millions of households have ample ammunition in their gun closets, nitromethane and ether in their garages,and acetone and peroxides on their powder room cosmetic shelves.

Why worry about sexism when the calculus of terror depends on the gap between peroxide sales and the  number of blonde bombshells, and the  mmonium nitrate in a nation's garden sheds  can end up raising hell instead of roses and zucchini?

THE GLITTERING PRIZES

The Nobel Committee announced today that the Prize in physiology goes to Mario R. Capecchi, Oliver Smithies and Sir Martin J. Evans--who developed a way to "knock-out" specific genes in mice, allowing researchers to figure out what each gene does in mammalian bodies.

As the Nobel citation notes:Such gene "knockout" experiments have elucidated the roles of numerous genes in embryonic development, adult physiology, aging and disease. To date, more than 10,000 mouse genes (approximately half of the genes in the mammalian genome) have been knocked out. Gene targeting has already produced more than 500 different mouse models of human disorders, including cardiovascular and neuro-degenerative diseases, diabetes and cancer 

Several IgNobels merit honorable mention as well:

Chemistry
Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan
For developing a way to extract vanilla essence from cow dung

Linguistics
Juant Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Barcelona University,
Demonstrating that rats confuse Japanese spoken backwards with Dutch spoken  backwards

Medicine
Brian Witcombe of Gloucester and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee,
Discovering that sword swallowing hurts 

Peace
The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio,
Developing chemical weapons to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other

Aviation
Patricia V Agostino, Santiago A Plano and Diego A Golombek of Argentina,
Discovering that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters

White Christmas In Islamabad

Outside of Lahore, where Kipling cut his teeth as a cub reporter a century ago, a palace built by a local political dynasty in the 1990's has become the center of operations for Tablihi Jamaat. The  eighty year old  Deobandi sect owes its present popularity to recruiting Junaid Jamshed , the lead singer in Vital Signs,who now sings only devotional songs, and converting several stars of the national cricket team. Its influence in Pakistan's British Diaspora is such that it seeks to build the world's largest mosque adjacent to  London's new Olympics site.So what is Musharraf doing about it as an electoral crisis looms?

Having appointed his intelligence chief as interim President, he's telling people to go to the movies and see Khuda Kay Liye

Bush 2.0 : The Life Of The Party

Who says American  political life is as artificial as it can get?

Adamant noted The advent of Synthetic Life on Earth  last June, when the replication of a bacterial chromosome using man-made amino acids was reported to the Zurich Synthetic Biology conference.

Now a Venter Institute team led by Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith is about to announce the design and construction of a new species  with a synthetic chromosome built from scratch, ready to  install into empty cells to kick-start the first artificial life form on Earth.

"The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California," says The Guardian, reporting "they have painstakingly stitched together a chromosome that is 381 genes long and contains 580,000 base pairs of genetic code." The DNA sequence, based on the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium has been pared down to the bare essentials,  trademarked with fluoromeres , and rechristened Mycoplasma laboratorium.

But disconcerting as Beltway metaphysicians may find this rather predictable prospect, it should not distract us from more pressing biotech needs :

The Nation Needs Another President Bush

.

.Clone Vannevar
.....For 2008

The Committee To Re-Elect The MIT President

Donate now, before Harvard  recombines the DNA of the first fifty democrats in the Cambridge phone book.

Since Venter patented the synthetic gene sequence in question las year, it's only a matter of time before patented candidates appear--why not now ? Consider the  preceding a Record of Invention for 'A means for securing multiple presidential terms by recombination and expression of Candidate Genes.'

As a paleocon I naturally disapprove of Neocons bent on cloning Wilson, Woodrow 1.0,  but if Harvard has President Mather's DNA in its archives, I grant them free license to amplify Increase at will.

Hearts And Mines

In an actual display of military intelligence unmatched since the OSS sent Carleton Coon to the Atlas Mountains in 1942, the US Army is deploying honest-to-gosh anthropologists to places like Afghanistan's Shebak valley in Paktia province to explain to tacticians how and why locals are responding to both Allied and Taliban efforts to enlist them. On the other side of the Hindu Kush, OBL can't be happy about this development.

Wontons Of Mass Distraction

Fears of chemical attack by Islamic militants led  to evacuation of parts of  London yesterday.

Police closed off three roads and evacuated Soho homes as a mysterious cloud of acrid smoke hovered over the district for three hours and the Hazardous Area Response Team Unit swept the deserted streets seeking its source.

After test kits showed no sign of polonium. plutonium, VX  Sarin,or mustard gas , HART firefighters wearing specialist breathing apparatus broke down the door of a building suspected to contain the terrorist device and confronting staff and management of the Thai Cottage restaurant, identified the terrifying chemical agent as capaiscin. They emerged carrying a huge cooking pot containing about 9lb of smouldering dried  chillies.

Chef Chalemchai Tangjariyapoon said he was preparing Nam Prik Pao, a red-hot Thai dip for fried prawn crackers:

" With extra-hot chillies that are deliberately burnt... I can understand why people who weren't Thai would not know what it was. But it doesn't smell like chemicals.    I am a bit confused. "

What Color Is Your Stratosphere?

Altering the reflectivity of parts of the Earth is a thermodynamically obvious alternative to curbing greenhouse gases -a topic touched on in my August 2000 Forbes essay, ' Paint The Town White.'
However, there is a lot more to the subject than whitewashing the greenhouse effect.

The new issue of
The Wilson Quarterly reviews the possibilities discussed at a recent conference  in considerable historical depth

Is The Patient Still Dead ?

"Towards the end of the 1970s, I was told by one of our most competent defence secretaries that he did not regard it as his responsibility to ensure that a weapons programme submitted by the Department of Defense for the president's budget was sound and worthwhile. He saw it as the job of the White House Office of Management and Budget to sort that out, with the help of the PSAC. To me this was evidence that increased scientific and technological expertise in government departments increased rather than reduced the need for scientific competence in the White House.

Since Nixon abolished the PSAC, no president has seen fit to create an advisory committee of a similar level of commitment or energy — despite the establishment of a President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology by George Bush Snr in 1990. In 1972, Congress had founded the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA),...The unique feature of the OTA was an advisory committee for each study that included passionate proponents and opponents of the programme in question, whose points of view were evaluated, if not endorsed.

The United States has drawn particular strength from granting independent technical consultants access to government at many levels. Such individuals add knowledge, if not always wisdom. Today, that access is increasingly subject to political and ideological tests...
In a further blow, the OTA was abolished in 1995...Some likened this act to Congress shooting themselves in the brain."  --Richard Garwin

Science & politics :How the mighty have fallen                    Nature 449, 543 (4 October 2007)  

Raiders Of The Faux Ark

Last season , TV viewers saw an assortment of  SWAT team members, ghost busters, self-styled prophets and  parapsychology adepts, none of them archeologists, presented as the discoverers of The Lost Tomb of Jesus, a compact version of  His sarcophagus, The Ark of the Covenant and The Garden of Eden. Not a year goes by without zealous amateurs and rapacious con men raising millions for one more go at putting Noah's Ark on prime time.

For all the grandiose claims these programs make, it is vain to go in search of  evidence for these 'discoveries' in the dry and dusty  literature of archaeology. Belief in them is sustained not by the contents of museum basements, or potsherds in plain sight in the Holy Land, but by vanity presses, PR handouts and self-serving websites on that new arbiter of truth and received wisdom, the Internet.

Yet Biblical archeology is not the foremost locus of media fraud, dubious science, and crackpot theorizing. There is a larger field  in play - just look out the window. Climate science has become the foremost plaything of the Broadband  Gods.

.......As Televised, Climate Science And  Biblical Archaeology
....................Have  Entirely Too Much In Common

The reason is simple - the stakes are very high. There is no money in archaeology , but climate policy has trillion dollar potential - taking CO2 out of the air could evolve into a physically and financially bigger business than digging up fossil fuels. Little wonder that just as frankincense scented Biblical discoveries like the Jesus and James ossuary invite accusations of forgery, rising levels of CO2 lead Senators to pitch cries of 'hoax' at scientists bearing less than joyful  tidings to the oil patch.

Greens too are blackening science's reputation. They evangelize worthy foundations, raising untold amounts of money from gullible trustees eager to  listen to tales of how they can save the world , whether spun by guileful professionals ,  sincere amateurs or rapacious con men out to make a fast buck waylaying  good Samaritans on the soft energy path-- it is not always easy to tell them all apart.

Real biblical archaeologist can use the tools of modern science, from isotopes  to precise excavation, to beat off their tendentious opponents , but predicting the fate of the Earth's climate has an odor of metaphysics about it.  Projecting the technological future is a lot  harder than stratifying the Biblical past, and without knowing the economic future,  science cannot rigorously predict what the technical economy will do to climate and weather. So it is cautionary to compare the abuse of archaeology in the media with the claims made there by  pundits representing both sides in the Climate Wars.

In a thoughtful piece entitled ' Raiders Of The Faux Ark,' archaeology department chairman Eric  H. Cline says something both Liberal foundation executives and  Conservatives with a religious bent should heed , for it bears acutely on what their ideological brethren are doing in the climate debate :

" the amateurs are taking in the public's money to support ventures that offer little chance of furthering the cause of knowledge. With their grand claims, and all the ensuing attention, they divert the public's attention from the scientific study of the Holy Land - and bring confusion, and even discredit, to biblical archeology.

Unfortunately, when fantastic claims are made, they largely go unchallenged by academics. There have been some obvious exceptions.... But much more common is a vast and echoing silence reminiscent of the early days of the debate over "intelligent design," when biologists were reluctant to respond to the neocreationist challenge. Archeologists, too, are often reluctant to be seen as challenging deeply held religious beliefs. And so the professionals are allowing a PR disaster to slowly unfold: yielding a field of tremendous importance to pseudoscientists, amateur enthusiasts, and irresponsible documentary filmmakers."

The Great Global Warming Hoax comes from the man who gave the world The Naked Pilgrim, and while Roland Emmerich is famed for The Day After Tomorrow, his first global deep freeze flick was The Noah's Ark Principle.

At a time when the world is increasingly divided by religion, both domestically and internationally, and when many people are biblically illiterate, legitimate inquiries ...have never been more important... We have an obligation to challenge the lies and the hype, to share the real data, so that the public discussion can be an informed one.

It is time we take back our field."

His essay deserves to be read not just by Former Next Presidents and politicians of both parties,  but  media executives who, the sight of God not being before their eyes, eschew fact checking in times when disinformation and Apocalyptic cant compete with ideology and bald denial in inviting policy disasters of Biblical proportions.

All The Sun That's Fit To Print

Greens are overjoyed to see Hemlock Semiconductor gearing up a 17,000 tonne polysilicon plant to furnish two gigawatts of solar cells a year, but some materials scientists have  doubts about the billion dollar investment: the DOE estimates PhotoVoltaic capacity will barely reach 10 billion kilowatt hours by 2030.

This is only .2% of projected energy use, far below projections for other renewable energy sources notes Materials Today ,which opines "The PV industry must sidestep the need for high capital expenditure by tapping into unused capacity."

Silicon computer chip foundries  have no surplus capacity. They are running flat out, so John de Mello and Omar Cheema of Imperial College London suggest the future of cheap solar may lie in Rupert Murdoch's back yard. Tabloid printing presses can bang out organic solar cells when the news is slow:

'organic semiconductors... share many of the chemical and rheological properties of conventional inks...Their low materials cost, ease of processing, and minimal component counts promise  significant savings ."

Printed solar cells lag behind crystalline semiconductors in efficiency and lifetime-- the best they can presently do is 6% energy conversion for about one year, though advanced  n-type PODOT derivatives  or boromers may  soon do better . Yet though silicon cells are not much better, they attract massive investment, and the prospect of founding a fabulously Fab-less new electronic power sector may intrigue printers union pension funds:

"OPV is still an early stage, high-risk technology, but its successful adaptation to print manufacturing would be genuinely revolutionary, enabling solar electricity to be deployed on a scale and at a rate that is unimaginable with Silicon."

6%  is no solution to the world's energy woes, but newsprint solar already beats photosynthesis when it comes to quantum efficiency.

Power is never too cheap to meter, but if next generation laptops start printing out power supplies when taken to the beach, scrap solar cells may one day supplant newspapers as the foremost medium for wrapping fish.

Full Speed Astern

Australian spelunker and policy guru  Hal Colebach is incensed at Conservative Party Leader David Cameron contributing  "to a large carbon-offset company, Climate Care...supplying treadle pumps -- treadmill-type devices-- to Third World villages rather than have them use diesel pumps" to undo the CO2 of the turbojet engines that lofted him to lecture India's tories. This suggests a post-Concorde transport fashion trend , as energy efficiency and appropriate technology are paramount in curbing CO2.

While paddlewheel pumps are ideal for irrigating rice paddies, human treadmill performance falls off direly at turbojet speeds. Thus to minimize CO2 emissions in connection with environmental diplomacy , the international climate change conference and Eco-Rock concert jet setters should switch to human powered paddle boats, preferably made by converting Irawaddy Flotilla steamers, as nobody is going to Burma anytime soon.

Propelled at a sensible 1 1/2 knots by the efforts of several hundred Third World pedestrians glad of such gainful employment , this Great Green Fleet could transport Mr. Gore's cohort from Hollywood to Stockholm or Cannes in six months flat, and whisk the entire International Panel On Climate Change from its venues to its  labs and back in under 1000, for the first time allowing all participants ample deck chair time to read the last edition of their vital work.

Most importantly, it will allow readers writers and editors of journals as diverse as The Nation and The Weekly Standard who now assemble offshore for a hopelessly brief cruise-ship  week each year to at last apply themselves to the formulation of policy in world-changing depth.  Think how the political environment might be transformed were they to remain outside the 12-mile limit for a minimum of 52 weeks a year?

Move over, Churchill, young Cameron may be on to something.

Nanogyros

For The Spin Doctor Who has Everything

Mechanical gyroscopes commonly consist of a rotating axis and  a disk, with  a static structure caging the ends of the axis. Now  molecular nanogyros have been made that duplicate the gyroscope's connectivity, symmetry and internal rotation.  Subjecting an organometallic complexes to alkene metathesis created the three-spoked cage molecule shown here.

It can be made with rotor groups such as Fe(CO)3, which  feature a three-fold symmetry axis, but reasonable yields can also be obtained with metal ligands such as  PtCl2, Rh(CO)Cl to produce a square-planar geometry , or  Re(CO)3X  to produce a  gyro with a spinning octahedron.

Experiments are underway directed at getting them all to spin in the same direction when crystallized. Success would mean new and possibly major headaches for Fedex, as sending packages of the spun-up compounds around sharp corners may require deliverymen to lean at odd angles. For the dizzying details, ask John A. Gladysz  of the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Institut für Organische Chemie. lead author of the ACS meeting presentation:
Alkene metathesis in metal coordination spheres:
The quest for molecular gyroscopes                       gladysz@chemie.uni-erlangen.de

Shriven Me Timbers

Confess Your Earthly Eco-Sins In A Recycled Confessional
The Greenpeace festival in Glastonbury, famed resting place of Arthur, first biodegradable King of the Britons,  hosted a major liturgical innovation as  Dom Anthony Sutch ,Benedictine monk, offered those tired of buying Carbon Indulgences a place to confess their Eco-sins.

"The Eco-fessional , made from recycled materials, such as doors and other found objects" featured the Benedictine monk bedecked in vestments "made from recycled curtains...

The ecofessional is described as  a "non-judgmental environmental advice installation 'aimed at getting people to sign a pledge promising to reduce energy consumption and engage in socially sustainable practices, like ethical banking...The Earthly Sins website... includes a Temple of Sustainability...whether you are a devout Catholic, a staunch atheist, or something in between...there is a way for everyone to find environmental salvation." Screaming Lord Sutch has not commented on his namesake's epiphany.