Green Options

Scientists in Africa have uncovered life in a dark but hot ecosystem stretching 2.8 kilometers (1.7 miles) beneath the surface of the earth. There, a single biological species derives power–not from the sun–but from remnants of radioactivity and thrives without oxygen.

Remarkably, it is the first ecosystem ever found having only a lone biological species - a rod-shaped bacterium Desulforudis audaxviator. The cave-dweller bacterium exists in complete isolation, total darkness, a lack of oxygen, and 60-degree-Celsius heat (140 degrees Fahrenheit).

Trajectories of evolution have equipped the bacterium with genes that allow it to cope with a range of different conditions, including the ability to fix nitrogen directly from elemental nitrogen in the environment.

Living in Australia brings with it a wonderful set of environmental circumstances to live with. Not only do we have two weather patterns – El Nino/La Nina and the Indian Ocean Dipole – that are combining to lengthen our drought, but we’re one of the countries that suffer from the ever fluctuating ozone hole in the Southern Hemisphere.

This year, the ozone hole extended to approximately 27 million square kilometers. This compared to 2007’s 25 million square kilometers and 2006’s 29 million square kilometers.

Want a size comparison? That’s about the size of the North American continent!

This is a guest post by Meg Hamill, a freelance writer who also works at LandPaths in partnership with the Open Space District of Sonoma County, California.

California passes its first law protecting farmers who have not been able to prevent GE contamination of their non GE crops.

We’ve all heard the horror stories:  A farmer’s crop is contaminated by Genetically Engineered (GE) seeds, and that farmer is subsequently harassed and brought to court by the biotech patent owners (such as Monsanto) of those seeds.  In some cases, that farmer has also been held liable for contaminating other farmer’s crops with his own unintentionally contaminated crop.  Just this week, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a landmark piece of legislation, protecting California’s farmers from just such liability.

It is the first bill to be passed by the California Legislature that brings regulation to the Genetically Engineered (GE) crops.  The bill, AB541 (Huffman, D-Marin/Sonoma)  protects and compensates farmers who have not been able to prevent GE contamination of their non-GE crop.  AB541 was sponsored by a coalition of agriculture organizations and food businesses, including California Certified Organic Farmers, Earthbound Farm and the California Farm Bureau Federation.

Fabien Cousteau, left, listens to students in Bryn Mawr, Pa. share concerns about the environment.  The Bryn Mawr school was one of the 14 first-place teams from last year’s challenge. Photo courtesy of The Ocean Futures Society.

Lexus and Scholastic announce the launch of the second annual Lexus Eco Challenge. The Challenge is open to middle and high school students with a focus on learning about the environment and taking action to improve it. One million dollars in grants and scholarships will be awarded to winning students, teachers and schools.

This year, The Challenge will be joined by Fabien Cousteau, grandson of Jacques Cousteau. Cousteau currently works with his father, Jean-Michel Cousteau for the environmental organization, Ocean Futures Society. Cousteau’s role with the challenge will be to help inspire more students to participate in The Challenge.

Climate science is a little bit like me and books: I can never get enough of them, and appreciate lots and lots of them. For climate science though, it’s a case of getting more and more data, from as many possible sources as humanly possible.

And now, thanks to Virgin Galactic, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will be getting a bit more data to continue their never ending quest to understand planet Earth.

Over the past few years we have sadly had to watch the Arctic ice concentrations drop significantly. Focus has been primarily centered on the Arctic Circle, but Greenland is also suffering from the increased global temperature.

And now, thanks to researchers from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the Center for Space Research (CSR) in America, a new and accurate picture of Greenland’s shrinking ice cap has been formulated.

Subsequently, the researchers have found that Greenland is currently responsible for an annual increase of sea levels of up to half a millimeter.

Katydids visited our back porch on the past several weekends. The way their bodies were designed to look like leaves impressed me, and also made me think about how much of a conundrum these insects are. In fact, it made very confused as to my beliefs in evolution and god. In the end I suppose that the concepts are compatible. But what a marvel to see something designed to be so camouflaged as a katydid.

After looking on Wikipedia, I learned that there are approximately 6,400 species of katydids around the world. I wanted to see more of these fascinating insects, and so I searched for photos on Flickr. What you see here are some of the more beautiful and interesting photos I found, combined with several of my own.

Scientists from the University of Calgary in Canada have created a method to efficiently capture carbon dioxide directly from the air around us. The device, which is built on near-commercial technology, was built by Uof C climate change scientists David Keith and his team.

“At first thought, capturing CO2 from the air where it’s at a concentration of 0.04 per cent seems absurd, when we are just starting to do cost-effective capture at power plants where CO2 produced is at a concentration of more than 10 per cent,” says Keith, Canada Research Chair in Energy and Environment.

“But the thermodynamics suggests that air capture might only be a bit harder than capturing CO2 from power plants. We are trying to turn that theory into engineering reality.”

Sound familiar?  Unless you’ve had your head stuck in the sand for the past couple of months, you’ve heard variations on this statement from both Barack Obama and John McCain… countless times. High gas and utility prices have collided with a stagnant economy,  and energy issues (and the environmental issues accompanying them) have come to the front and center of the ‘08 election cycle.

My colleagues at Red, Green and Blue have done a thorough job of covering the policy proposals of the presidential candidates. But the devil’s in the details, and NPR’s Talk of the Nation: Science Friday held a fascinating discussion last week on the issues that aren’t being covered in the political rhetoric: namely, the economic and technological challenges that both government and the private sector will have to address to get us to a clean energy future. Host Ira Flatow, New York University professor emeritus of physics Martin Hoffert, and Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in energy studies and associate director of the energy program at Rice University Amy Myers Jaffe took a look at the bigger picture of our energy challenges, and the kinds of leadership a new presidential administration will have to exert in order to facilitate rapid, even revolutionary, changes in how we power ourselves.

Among the questions raised during the discussion:

There is almost nothing quite as intriguing and interesting as learning of a new experiment. And while Bunsen burners and the like may be OK for some of you, for me, get me outside and in some dirt any day.

A new experiment, being conducted at Imperial College London’s Silwood Park campus in Berkshire, will attempt to determine how the British plant ecosystem will be affected by future changes to climate and biodiversity.

With this experiment, however, there will be no computer simulations. Instead, scientists and researchers will be conducting the experiment outside, with 168 plots of grassland ecosystem at their fingertips. This will give a clear insight into how the ecosystems will hold up under a variety of different situations.

Whatever you do, don’t call it a battery.

A research group at the University of Texas at Austin has taken a carbon-based nanomaterial called graphene, and developed it into a device that has the potential to vastly improve upon the energy storage capacity of batteries. Reportedly, graphene could also double the current maximum storage capacity of the group of battery alternatives known as ultracapacitors.

If the research group’s findings bear out when applied to reality, it could mean a complete phase change in the way we approach energizing not only our transportation sector, but our entire energy infrastructure.