Unless you spent last week celebrating Apollo 11’s fortieth anniversary cut off from the world in your backyard model of the lunar module, you are no doubt familiar with the story of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s arrest two weeks ago, the “race in America” sturm and drang that surrounded the story last week, and the headline-grabbing role President Obama stumbled into at the end of his prime time presser.
Listening to NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday, there was a segment in which some environmentalists lamented Obama’s new fuel economy standards as being a small drop in the bucket for what needs to be done to solve our climate problems.
While this is true, two comments made by Harvard University Professor, Robert Stavins, during that segment struck me as weird and based in something less than reality — a kind of academic fantasy if you will. At the time, I was driving and the comments slid out of my mind. But last night an old friend from college brought it up again in a Facebook thread and it got me thinking more in depth about it.
A well-known biofuels researcher at Harvard has developed a synthetic ribosome — one of the fundamental building blocks for creating artificial life — which, initially, could have major implications for the creation of designer enzymes to make cheaper and more energy efficient cellulosic ethanol.
Dr. George Church, co-founder of the next generation biofuels company LS9, made the stunning announcement in a telephone call with reporters.
“If you are going to make synthetic life that is anything like current life … you have got to have this … biological machine,” Dr. Church said in comments to Reuters.
Harvard Medical School Professor Greg Church and Research Fellow Michael Jewett extracted ribosomes from E. coli bacteria, processed them, and then made new ones from the molecules.
This week at ZapRoot: Is Google destroying the planet one search at a time? The recycling market has gone bust. And check out “That’s Just Weird.”
Researchers at IBM and Harvard are using the power of community to create cheap, efficient solar cells. The Clean Energy Project will use small amounts of computing power from volunteers— like in the SETI project— to run calculations on compounds in the hopes of finding a combination of organic materials that can be used to make cheap, flexible plastic solar cells.
In keeping with Harvard’s university-wide commitment to sustainable building practices and campus operations, the university has just completed graduate housing that is set to achieve a high level of LEED certification. The 115,000 sq ft project houses 215 beds in over 30 different suite types, and includes a faculty director’s suite, a fitness room, study lounge spaces, a multipurpose room, and a garage that extends under the building.
The swanky housing is [...]
A newly discovered material called ‘black silicon’ is between 100 and 500 times more sensitive to light than conventional silicon, and could be used to revolutionize solar energy generation.
The material was discovered when a team of Harvard University scientists shone an ultra-powerful laser (briefly producing the same amount of energy as the sun falling on the entire surface of the Earth) on a silicon wafer, before adding sulphur hexafluoride. The result was a silicon wafer that looked black to the naked eye, but when examined under an electron microscope turned out to be covered with a massive amount of ultra-tiny spikes.
Harvard University has achieved several firsts with the recent renovation of an old power plant into an office building. It is the first LEED Platinum certified university building renovation, as well as Harvard’s first Platinum building. More interestingly though, it is the first Platinum building built before the turn of the the century–last century, that is. Further, the university was able to complete this building without an increase in the up-front construction costs.
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