London Review of Books: John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books reviews a series a books on global warming and ends his review with the following paragraphs:
The remarkable thing is that most of the things we need to do to prevent climate change are clear in their outline, even though one can argue over details. We need to insulate our houses, on a massive scale; find an effective form of taxing the output of carbon (rather than just giving tradeable credits to the largest polluters, which is what the EU did – a policy that amounted to a 30 billion euro grant to the continent’s biggest polluters); spend a fortune on both building and researching renewable energy and DC power; spend another fortune on nuclear power; double or treble our spending on public transport; do everything possible to curb the growth of air travel; and investigate what we need to do to defend ourselves if the sea rises, or if food imports collapse. If we do that we may find that we develop the technologies that China and India will need. If we can show that it is possible to cut carbon output dramatically without trashing our economy – well, that might be the single most important thing we could do, far outweighing the actual impact of our emission reductions.
We know all this, but whether any of it will actually happen is a different question. It is easy for politicians to stick wind turbines on their houses and ride bicycles, but effective action on climate change is about to require doing things that are not popular. In his eponymous report, Nicholas Stern has argued that it would cost about 1 per cent of global GDP now to prevent a loss of 5 per cent of global GDP in the future. The calculation is tweaked to make the cost now sound manageably small – but it is not yet clear whether Western electorates are willing to pay it. One per cent of global GDP is 600 billion dollars, most of which would be paid by the developed world. The idea is that by paying it now we would be keeping the world’s economy on track so that by 2050 the developed world would be 200 per cent richer and the developing world 400 per cent, while our emissions decline by 60 to 90 per cent and theirs increase by 25 to 50. (One problem is that 17 per cent of that growth in developing world emissions has already been used up.) The promised economic growth is jam tomorrow; we would be paying for it today, in the form of increased taxes and lost jobs. These things are all real to voters in ways that climate change perhaps is not. Are people going to give things up in the present in order to prevent things that computer models tell them are going to happen in 25 years’ time? If they – we – aren’t, then we’re heading for breeding pairs, and camels in the Arctic.
New York Times: Kodak, which once considered itself the Bell Labs of chemistry, has embraced the digital world and the researchers who understand it. “The shift in research focus has been just tremendous,” said John D. Ward, a lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology who worked for Kodak for 20 years. Indeed, physicists, electrical engineers and all sorts of people who are more comfortable with binary code than molecules are wending their way up through Kodak’s research labs.
San Francisco Chronicle: General Motors, the nation's largest automaker, is working to reinvent itself as a green company but still opposes California's efforts to set its own global warming emissions standards for cars, Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner said Thursday in San Francisco. In a speech before the Commonwealth Club, Wagoner touted his company's efforts to design and sell cars powered by electricity or alternative fuels.
New Scientist: A normal digital camera can take snaps of objects not directly visible to its lens, US researchers have shown. The "ghost imaging" technique could help satellites take snapshots through clouds or smoke.
Physicists have known for more than a decade that ghost imaging is possible. But, until now, experiments had only imaged the holes in stencil-like masks, which limited its potential applications.
Now Yanhua Shih of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and colleagues at the US Army Research Laboratory, also in Maryland, have now taken the first ghost images of an opaque object - a toy soldier.
Not everyone agrees that quantum effects are at work in ghost imaging, though. Baris Erkmen and Jeffrey Shapiro of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, US, point out in a recent paper that classical physics says light sources produce numbers of uncoordinated photons, not correlated quantum pairs.
They suspect ghost images might be produced without a quantum link between photon pairs, purely because some photons are just similar.
Related Link
Physical Review A (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.77.041801)
Science: Laser technology is present in our daily lives through literally thousands of applications, including surgical instruments, CD and DVD players, optical fiber communications, and even supermarket barcode readers. Despite the fast pace of laser research, the design of most laser devices relies on assumptions in the underlying theory that have barely changed since the early days of laser theory (1). However, this situation is problematic for two reasons. First, the rapid advance of nanofabrication techniques has led to the development of completely new lasing systems whose description falls outside the scope of conventional laser theory. Of these, random lasers (2) are perhaps the most challenging example. Second, more general models could enable the design of substantially different classes of lasers. With their contribution in this week's Science magazine, Türeci, Rotter and Stone have substantially changed this picture. By developing a new theory in which the main properties of a laser can be physically understood as the result of strong nonlinear interactions between lasing modes, they have provided a substantially broader perspective of laser physics that unifies the physical description of many possible laser structures.
Related Article
Strong Interactions in Multimode Random Lasers Science 2 May 2008: Vol. 320. no. 5876, pp. 643 - 646
The New Yorker:In 1999, when physicist and millionaire Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies.
The original expectation was that I.V. would file a hundred patents a year. Currently, it’s filing five hundred a year. It has a backlog of three thousand ideas. Physicist Lowell Wood said that he once attended a two-day invention session presided over by biologist Edward Jung, and after the first day the group went out to dinner. “So Edward took his people out, plus me,” Wood said. “And the eight of us sat down at a table and the attorney said, ‘Do you mind if I record the evening?’ And we all said no, of course not. We sat there. It was a long dinner. I thought we were lightly chewing the rag. But the next day the attorney comes up with eight single-spaced pages flagging thirty-six different inventions from dinner.”
msnbc.com: One of the nation's top fusion researchers is worried that America is already falling behind in an energy race that won't start for 30 or 40 years.
New York Times: Hewlett-Packard scientists reported Wednesday in the science journal Nature that they have designed a simple circuit element that they believe will make it possible to build tiny powerful computers that could imitate biological functions.
R. Stanley Williams, Hewlett-Packard’s director of the quantum science research group, and his team designed a circuit element that may make it possible to build tiny powerful computers. The device, called a memristor, would be used to build extremely dense computer memory chips that use far less power than today’s DRAM memory chips.
The memristor, an electrical resistor with memory properties, may also make it possible to fashion advanced logic circuits, a class of reprogrammable chips known as field programmable gate arrays, that are widely used for rapid prototyping of new circuits and for custom-made chips that need to be manufactured quickly. Potentially even more tantalizing is the ability of the memristors to store and retrieve a vast array of intermediate values, not just the binary 1s and 0s conventional chips use. This allows them to function like biological synapses and makes them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications ranging from machine vision to understanding speech. Independent researchers said that it seemed likely that the memristor might relatively quickly be applied in computer memories, but that other applications could be more challenging. Typically, technology advances are not adopted unless they offer large advantages in cost or performance over the technologies they are replacing.
Chronicle of Higher Education: Two years ago, the National Academies sounded the alarm in a widely cited report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” that America was slipping behind other countries in science and technology. On Tuesday leaders from academe and business met here to try to refocus Congress’s attention on the report’s many recommendations that require lawmakers’ action. One expected topic of discussion on Tuesday is a lobbying effort already under way to persuade Congress to increase federal spending for physical-sciences research significantly this year. The money could be squeezed into a broader supplemental-appropriations bill that legislators are expected to consider in the coming weeks to finance the Iraq war.
New York Times: At a time when the world’s top climate experts agree that carbon emissions must be rapidly reduced to hold down global warming, Italy’s major electricity producer, Enel, is converting its massive power plant here from oil to coal, generally the dirtiest fuel on earth. Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent. And Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are expected to put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.
The Times: Scientists at IBM say they have developed a new type of digital storage which would enable a device such as an MP3 player to store about half a million songs - or 3,500 films - and cost far less to produce.
In a paper published in the current issue of Science, a team at the company's research centre in San Jose, California, said that devices which use the new technology would require much less power, would run on a single battery charge for "weeks at a time", and would last for decades.
So-called 'racetrack' memory uses the 'spin' of an electron to store data, and can operate far more quickly than regular hard drives.
New York Times: Jet fuel is now the largest expense for most airlines, and for American carriers each penny increase in price per gallon costs nearly $200 million a year. The industry is also becoming increasingly nervous about what happens when that fuel is burned. Aviation is responsible for about 2 percent of global emissions of greenhouse gases, and that share will rise as air travel continues to grow.
So the industry is scrambling to build greener airplanes — to save weight and improve engine efficiency, with an eye toward reducing operating costs and emissions.
In the short term, a revolution in jet engines is about to occur, with radically different designs that use gears to cut fuel consumption, noise and pollutants. And those new engines will power planes built more and more with carbon composite materials, which are lighter and may also be safer than the aluminum they replace.
The biggest change with aircraft is electricity: The 777, a mid-1990s design, can generate up to 270 kilowatts of electricity, enough to run a small neighborhood of houses. The 787, would make five times as much, 1.35 megawatts, in order to power a multitude of motors and pumps that help make the place lighter and safer.
space.com: Putin announces new Russian space launchpad, booster rocket.
The Independent: The French nuclear safety agency has uncovered a series of defects in the construction of a European Pressurized Water Reactor (EPWR) in Normandy considered to be the template for the next generation of stations due to be built in Britain. The agency, ASN, says that a quarter of the welds seen in its steel liner – a crucial line of defence if there were to be an accident – are not in accordance with welding norms, and that cracks have been found it its concrete base, also essential for containing radioactivity. The reports – in a series of letters covering inspections made between December and last month – will cause particular concern because similar defects have been listed in a previous report by the Finnish safety authority into the only other reactor of its type being built anywhere in the world.
Wired.com: A team of scientists has completed a carbon dioxide emissions inventory of the United States plotted down to 100-square-kilometer chunks.
Physics Today: Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL), has announced that it will be acquired by EADS Astrium, the space arm of European Aeronautics Defence and Space (EADS).
"On completion, this will represent one of the largest cash spin-outs from any UK university," said Surrey University vice chancellor Christopher Snowden said. "It will also allow the company to realise its full potential as a rapidly growing and leading supplier of small and micro satellites, whilst the university retains the benefit of close interaction with SSTL and its new partner EADS Astrium. By retaining a small stake in SSTL the university shows its commitment to both the future of the company and space research itself."
ENN: Dell Computer’s 2.1 million-square-foot headquarters in Round Rock, Texas is now powered entirely with renewable energy. 60% of the energy is supplied by wind power generated by Energy Future Holdings Corp.’s TXU Energy and the remaining 40% from Waste Management’s landfill gas-to-energy plant.
The Guardian: Energy companies are planning to revive a polluting technology developed by the Nazis to replace dwindling supplies of oil with synthetic fuels derived from coal.
Senior industry figures told a high-level conference in Paris this week that coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology could fuel cars and aircraft for decades to come.
Green campaigners reacted with alarm because the process produces twice as much greenhouse gas as using oil. Supporters say much of the carbon pollution could be captured and stored underground, and that the synthetic fuel burns cleaner than conventional diesel.
Various: Imposing caps on greenhouse gas emissions to prod energy users to conserve or switch to nonpolluting technologies isn't working fast enough to combat an unexpected rise in global emissions and a decline in energy efficiency say a growing chorus of economists, scientists and students of energy policy. "It will be too little and come too late," writes Andrew C. Revkin in the New York Times.
What is needed says economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in Scientific American, is the development of radically advanced low-carbon technologies, which will only come about with greatly increased government spending by what has so far been an anemic commitment to research and development.
A different mindset is highlighted by Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post who writes about a public discussion between climate scientist James E. Hansen and Duke Energy CEO James E. Rogers, an energy company company with a number of coal-fied power plants. Hansen was complaining that two new power plants built by Duke Energy did not include any carbon-capture technologies to reduce their emissions.
Rogers, said the scientist's demand reflects a "snap-your-fingers, instant transition of the economy" mind-set. "My requirement is to balance reliability, affordability and clean energy," Rogers said. "He's apparently focused on the clean perspective."
Globally, the number of coal power plants that will have carbon capture and storge units is limited. "You don't have other countries lining up and investing serious funding" in this technology," says Rachel Crisp, deputy director of Britain's cleaner fossil fuels unit to the Washington Post.
The Guardian: Britain and France are to sign a deal to construct a new generation of nuclear power stations and export the technology around the world in an effort to combat climate change.
The pact is to be announced at the "Arsenal summit" next week when prime ministers Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy will meet at the Emirates stadium in north London.
Britain hopes to take advantage of French expertise to build the power stations that do not rely on fossil fuels. Nearly 79% of France's electricity comes from its highly-developed nuclear power industry. The UK's ageing nuclear plants are ready for decommissioning and supply 20% of its energy needs.
Brown hopes the partnership will create a skilled British labour force who would then work in partnership with France to sell nuclear power stations to other countries over the next 15 years.
News.com: Nanosolar and Solyndra, which both develop copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) solar cells, are looking at raising additional funds, according to sources, and both companies have put large valuations on themselves.
According to sources, Nanosolar is telling investors it will have a valuation, after another round of funds, of around $2 billion. Solyndra says it is worth $1 billion. Not bad for companies with combined current revenues at the moment that probably would have difficulty rivaling the take of a reasonably located convenience store. Nanosolar just started shipping a few solar cells to customers at the end of 2007, and Solyndra is ramping up toward production.
Christian Science Monitor: Concrete, one of the most common building materials in the world, has an ugly secret: It's a major source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which contribute to global warming.
Roughly 5 to 10 percent of global CO2 emissions are related to the manufacture and transportation of cement, a major ingredient of concrete. "There is not one single cement company on this planet that is not thinking about how to [reduce emissions]," says Franz-Josef Ulm, a professor of civil engineering who researches concrete at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
Italy's Italcemente is the world's fifth-largest cement producer. It is looking beyond reducing CO2 emissions by creating a cement that actually breaks down airborne pollutants by adding titanium dioxide, which, in the presence of sunlight, acts as a photocatalyer, hastening the decomposition of such pollutants as nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, and ozone.
Ulm points out that the structure of human bones, at the molecular level, is similar to that of concrete. While cement must be heated to 1,200 degrees C (2,200 degrees F.) before it achieves strength and structure, bone is formed at 37 degrees C (98.6 degrees F.).
"That makes one think that nature can create at 37 Celsius a material that has similar properties as cement," Ulm says. "Can we mimic that?"
Science: The Royal Society, the United Kingdom's academy of science, is taking the unusual step of getting into the venture capital business. Last month, it announced the creation of an Enterprise Fund, with the aim of funneling money into start-up companies seeking to commercialize the fruits of academic research. The society says that although it does much to support science and teaching, as well as contributing to policy debates, it could be more active in applying science for public benefit--either by simply boosting the U.K. economy or tackling problems such as carbon capture, renewable energy, and water purification. "If there are difficulties getting science into the marketplace, the society has a role helping with that," says Andrew Mackintosh, a chemical physicist-turned-businessman who has been brought in to run the fund.
NPR: Larry Abramson reports that the number of University of Maryland computer science graduates has collapsed over the last eight years from 2200 graduates in 2000 to 600 today. Similar trends have been seen at other computer science departments around the country.
Reuters: South Africa's advanced nuclear reactor technology programme will include U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric as a partner and a new shareholders' contract is expected by the end of the month, an official said last week.
South Africa is currently testing elements of the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) and wants to build 24-30 PBMR reactors for its own energy needs.
Lynette Milne, chief financial officer of Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (Pty) Ltd (PBMR) set up in 1999 to develop and market the technology, said a new shareholders' contract will also include South Africa's government, the Industrial Development Corporation and power utility Eskom.
San Francisco Chronicle: The federal government has picked three venture capital firms - two of them from the Bay Area - to take promising energy technology ideas from national laboratories and turn those concepts into companies.
Science: Satellite communications company Iridium is offering space on its next-generation fleet of 66 satellites for researchers to do earth observation. But the $1.6 billion price tag could prove a bit too steep.
Scientific American: A "clean coal" power plant is set to be built in Illinois in 2009; if it works, it could help avoid catastrophic global warming
Los Angeles Times: Pacific Gas & Electric Co. went surfing Tuesday, becoming the first U.S. utility to commit to buying electricity generated by the tumult of the sea.
Reuters: IBM says it has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip.
Guardian Unlimited: Gordon Brown will call for an acceleration of nuclear power today in a speech to business leaders designed to show he is focused on the long term and will not buckle in the face of negative headlines.
The Oregonian : Today, Intel's chief executive oversees the introduction of a breakthrough new chip that represents one of the company's biggest engineering leaps. Otellini said he relies on his technologists to learn what's possible, and then seeks innovations that offer genuine advances for the computer user.
Business Report: The acquisition of IST Nuclear by Westinghouse Electric has expanded the local footprint of the US-based nuclear technology group and will help align its business strategy with South Africa's desire to rekindle a large scale nuclear industry.
Nature: How do nuclear inspectors working for the International Atomic Energy Agency know when all is not as they are told? Geoff Brumfiel joins some inspectors-in-training as they learn the ropes at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
USA Today: Solar power has long been the Mercedes-Benz of the renewable energy industry: sleek, quiet, low-maintenance.
The New York Times: The National Science Foundation is planning to award I.B.M. a contract to build the world’s fastest supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, according to documents that were accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week
Renewable Energy Access: University of Delaware-led team sets solar cell record, joins DuPont on $100 million project
PC World: Intel is close to creating chips that transmit data at high speeds using light instead of electrons.
University at Buffalo Reporter: Mention "outsourcing" and people tend to think of fields like manufacturing or telemarketing; theoretical physics isn't even on the list.
Toronto Star: Huckster or genius? An Irish firm is the latest to trumpet a `perpetual-motion machine'
BBC: Industrial groups in Europe are about to look in detail at ideas for a new launch system to put humans in space.
NewsHour (audio): Intel's new computer chip, due out later this year, uses hafnium rather than silicon in its transistors. This innovation will double the number of transistors that can fit on a chip, Intel says, leading to faster and more powerful computers. Meanwhile, other companies such as IBM have their own chip innovations in the works.
The New York Times: A New Zealand company said Monday that it had secured financing from an investor in Silicon Valley to produce ethanol from an untapped source — carbon monoxide gas.
Science: The world's production of oil will peak, everyone agrees. Sometime in the coming decades, the amazing machinery of oil production that doubled world oil output every decade for a century will sputter. Output will stop rising, even as demand continues to grow. The question is when.
The New York Times: Convoluted economics and intense speculation have pushed up the price of uranium to levels not seen since the heyday of the industry in the mid-1970s.
Sci-Tech Today: In detailing the new optical chipset that can transmit data at 160 Gbps, IBM said it provides the highest record ever of transmitted information per unit of physical space. Measuring 3.25 by 5.25 mm, IBM's optical chipset contains both driver and receiver circuits, and was built using complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology.
Wired: How do you get 120 terabytes of data -- the equivalent of 123,000 iPod shuffles (roughly 30 million songs) -- from A to B? For the most part, the old-fashioned way: via a sneakernet. It's not glamorous, but Google engineers hope to at least end the arduous process of transferring massive quantities of data -- which can literally take weeks to upload onto the internet -- with something affectionately called "FedExNet" by the scientists who use it.
The New York Times: American Electric Power, a major electric utility, is planning the largest demonstration yet of capturing carbon dioxide from a coal-fired power plant and pumping it deep underground.
The New York Times: Silicon Valley’s dot-com era may be giving way to the watt-com era.
news.com: The Nevada Solar One power plant is essentially a tea kettle, just one that happens to take up 300 acres and can provide enough power for 15,000 homes.
The plant, which will start to generate electricity for nearby Las Vegas in April, consists of approximately 184,000 mirrors arranged in long, parabolic arrays that focus the sun's energy on a receiver--a metal tube filled with oil that's encased in specialized glass--from German conglomerate Schott.
The Economist: Technology firms have left the big corporate R&D laboratory behind, shifting the emphasis from research to development. Does it matter?
BBC: UK science has become an unexpected victim of the Rover collapse as funds used to soften the impact of the failure were clawed back from research.
Business Week: IBM, Intel, and AMD are finding ways around the physical problems that have hampered their efforts to make chips faster
AZoNano.com: The boom in Finnish nanotechnology is uncovered by the 'Nanotechnology in Finnish Industry' survey. The biannual survey studied the evolution of the Finnish nanotechnology scene in the period 2004-2006. The 2006 survey identified 129 Finnish companies that either had commercial products or research activities focused on nanotechnology, or who had participated in the Tekes FinNano technology programme. The previous 2004 survey had found 61 companies that had activities related to nanotechnology.
The Boston Globe: Intel Corp. is set to capitalize on a new breakthrough in microchip technology more quickly than its rival AMD, but analysts say the advantage will only be temporary.
The New York Times: On the vanguard of venture capital, the buzzwords of late have been “alternative energy” and “China.” Are the two worlds about to collide?
Seed investors are financing, or considering financing, start-ups in China that are developing equipment for wind and solar power, clean water and food alternatives and technology to promote energy efficiency.
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