Green Options

(Image courtesy of www.sporeflections.wordpress.com)

Can you imagine anything worse than being somewhere in public and realizing your breath is loaded with a smell so pungent that it’s offending everyone in a one mile radius from you?

It may be fair to say that garlic tops the list there.

Yikes. I’ve nightmares about this and think having a constant supply of a combination of mouthwash and chewing gum in my bag would be a great [...]

(Images courtesy of www.braquiplan.com & www.britannica.com)

Revered in India as “holy” this golden-yellow colored powder is worth its weight in gold, that too nutritionally, but not monetarily.

Any guesses what I’m talking about?

This ingredient has been hailed for centuries for its ability to treat wounds, infections and other health problems. But until recently, the science of the healing remained a mystery.

We’re talking, of course, [...]

Researchers have found a way to create a battery out of Nickel and Lithium that can store more than 3.5 times the energy of lithium-ion batteries and are much safer to boot.

Lithium-ion batteries are great and all—having heralded in a new age of portable electronics and allowed for the possibility of mass-market electric cars—but they have a few major drawbacks. For instance, they have a propensity to catch fire and explode and, although they have a much better energy storage capacity than say lead-acid or nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries, they still weigh too much to pack more than a couple hundred miles of range into a passenger car.

It’s good to have West Coast Green back in SF. Not that San Jose didn’t play a fine host to last years bigger conference but the show lacked something last year, call it a vibe, or energy but something didn’t gel. So, this year’s scaled down but energetic and education West Coast Green found itself a new home at the Fort Mason. Maybe the ocean air and bay views added a green spark to the conference.

The economy definitely had an impact on this year’s West Coast Green with less venders but with less money that mean that people just had to get more creative with less moola such as the floating island, show gardens and even the sustainability built Jewish Sukkoth. The usual green rock stars like Eric Corey Freed and Michelle Kaufman made their presences felt with their energetic personalities.

As part of a National Science Foundation grant program to examine cutting edge ways to make nature work for us, a team of scientists at Iowa State University have been awarded $2 million to unravel how some plants and algae can make hydrocarbons and discover if the genes that govern that process might be isolated.

“These plants are capturing solar energy and creating something that’s chemically identical to petroleum,” said Jackie Shanks, Iowa State’s Manley R. Hoppe Professor of Chemical Engineering, in a statement.

This post is going to be another struggle for balance.  The threat from this particular mycotoxin in the food supply is a so large that it makes the risks that worry most people look tame.  It makes the subject of one of my previous posts about another mycotoxin, vomitoxin, look like a virtual non-issue. Aflatoxin is one of the most potent acute toxins known and one of the most carcinogenic.  Because of this the average international tolerance for aflatoxin B1 in food is 4 parts per billion (PPB).  The average tolerance for food for children is 0.2 PPB and for milk 0.05 PPB (USDA ERS publication source for this data).  These are seriously low numbers.  I want to accurately represent the seriousness of this risk.  

At the same time I also want to accurately represent the extent to which the commercial food supply is now protected from that risk.  The same ERS document above reported US crop losses in 2003 from mycotoxins in corn, wheat and peanuts of $932 million and another $466 million for testing.  That is all for preventing this toxin from getting to us. There is a lot going on in the background that few people recognize.

Folks in the food industry may well ask “why even bring it up!?”  First of all, this is no secret.  My Google Alert for “Aflatoxin” sends me articles nearly every day.  Also I raise this issue to try to “calibrate risk.”  I saw an entry in a comment string on another blog the other day where someone wrote, “I hope this is a move towards chemical-free food.”  I’ll give that person the benefit of the doubt that they know that all food is made of chemicals (proteins, fats, carbs…).  Their concern was about synthetic pesticide residues.  I doubt that they know about “chemicals” like aflatoxin.  They should.  It is thousands of times more toxic than a typical pesticide residue.

Just about this time last year I reported on the very promising and innovative Mcgyan® biodiesel process. It was one of the most popular stories gas 2.0 ran that year, and rightly so: the breakthrough seemed to deliver the possibility of making biodiesel in mere seconds from start to finish, reducing costs by half the price of other biodiesel, producing no waste, using no chemical reactants, and using any animal fat or vegetable oil as a feedstock.

At the time the company in charge of the project, Ever Cat fuels, had only succeeded at making a small-scale pilot operation of 50,000 gallons per year. But, as of 2 days ago, the process has been completely commercialized.

The demise of retail giant Filene’s Basement may have a positive effect on proponents of vertical urban farming and algae biofuels alike. Since 2007, the developers of a Filene’s site in downtown Boston have been unable to find funding to move the project forward. But now Höweler + Yoon Architecture and their partner Squared have put forth a proposal to erect a temporary vertical, modular, algae bioreactor high-rise in its place.

This is one of those topics I’m just not sure what to think of…

When the average person hears the term fuel cell, typically what comes to mind is something that mysteriously makes electricity from hydrogen. In reality the process isn’t all that mysterious—basically the hydrogen is split into its component parts (electrons and protons) and the protons are allowed to flow through the cell, but the electrons are forced to travel another path, which creates the current (and charges the battery or runs the motors or turns on the lights).

Although the hydrogen fuel cell is the most common type of cell, you can make fuel cells that use many different things, including hydrocarbons and sugars. They all work on the same basic principal, but hydrogen fuel cells are considered superior because their only emission is water vapor and they produce lots of energy.

A team of researchers at MIT are engineering a strain of bacteria, which is similar to the type that causes tuberculosis, to produce biofuel.

The researchers say that the bacteria are useful because they are hungry for a number of sugars and toxic compounds and produce lipids that can be converted to biodiesel.

In the Australian outbacks, 18 scientists have just discovered over 850 new species living underground.