At a New York Seminary, a Green Idea Gets Tangled in Red Tape

At one point, the seminary waited three months for the city Department of Transportation’s permission to drill into the sidewalk, Ms. Burnley said. “The conversation went like this: ‘What is the status?’ ‘It has no status.’ ‘Do you need more information?’ ‘No, we have what we need.’ ‘Then how can we get it moving?’ ‘You can’t get it moving.’

Lets get one thing clear from the start, I do not think that bureaucracy is always the problem. Most bureaucracies were put in place because there was an issue that needed to be addressed. People were putting bad wiring into houses, the electricity would short, start a fire, and burn down three houses; answer, electrical inspections. But we all know there comes a point when the bureaucracy becomes so dense it takes on a life of its own, and halts progress.

I think we might see more of this as individual groups take the Green Energy movement into their own hands. From making sure solar panels are installed on homes properly, to deciding if your neighbor gets to put up a small wind turbine, to colleges installing larger turbines and geothermal heat pumps. We need to be able to get this technology in use, but we can't give it a free pass. Look at corn-based ethanol and the damage it has done to local aquifers; we can't let the Green-ness of a thing blind us to the potential problems. But neither can we let a good idea die in the thickets of red tape.

But are there enough people like Ms. Burnley and Mr. Frawley — human drill bits — to drive through the crust of the status quo? She laughed. Not drill bits, she said, “human battering rams.”

I hope so, we badly need them.

Small nuclear reactors, Safe?

Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes
I don't know how I feel about this at all.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.
....
Because the reactor is based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use, few countries are expected to object to plants on their territory. An application to build the plants will be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year.

First off, I'm pretty much opposed to nuclear power across the board. The reactors may be safe, but it's the waste that is dangerous for millennia. Then again, I'm not sure I trust the reactors either. That said, these do have a pretty strong potential to bring electrical power to many people without producing CO2 on site.

CO2 output is only part of what we need to look at when trying to make decisions about new sources of energy. We have to look at every component, and we have to look at each one from cradle to grave as it were. Where would they get the radioactive fuel? Where would it go in the end? So they're encased in concrete, what about regions that are prone to earthquakes?

'You could never have a Chernobyl-type event - there are no moving parts,' said Deal. 'You would need nation-state resources in order to enrich our uranium. Temperature-wise it's too hot to handle. It would be like stealing a barbecue with your bare hands.'

I beg to differ Mr. Deal, the whole contraption has to move to get there, as does the spent fuel and the refill fuel. Transport of spent fuel rods around the US has been opposed time and time again.

I think I would want to hear a LOT more about how this works before I let them install one in my neighborhood. But I live in a nation where we have the luxury of opposing things like this. I'm sure there are plenty of places where the need for electricity outweighs the (apparently minimal??) risks.

Enzymes vs. Metal Catalysts

Mushroom enzyme could strip pollutants from fuel cells

This had to come up sooner or later.

They have demonstrated that laccase, an enzyme produced by fungi that grow on rotting wood, can be used as a cheaper and more efficient catalyst. Fuel cells use chemical reactions — such as that between hydrogen and oxygen — to produce emissions-free electricity. But current technology is expensive and requires electrodes that contain rare metals such as platinum.

When we talk about sustainable technology, one of the things that often gets over looked is the metals. Especially the heavy, toxic, and rare ones. And especially the ones mined in terrible conditions in poorer nations. We really don't like to think about the way our lovely technologies are dependent upon plundering the natural resources of other nations.

Scientists and entrepreneurs have come up with ways to replace the oil used in energy and the oil used in making some plastics with other things. So this step of replacing metal catalysts with biological enzymes was bound to start happening.

Materials that can hold the enzymes, such as carbon, are cheap and plentiful. But the second problem could prove a more difficult problem to crack. "This has puzzled scientists for decades, why are enzymes so large?" said Fraser Armstrong, a professor of chemistry at Oxford University. "There are a lot of people trying to work out how to make small molecules do the same thing. If you could do that, you could put a thousand times more enzymes on a surface."

This is where it pays to try to figure out the shape of the enzyme and the way the active site works. There is probably a large portion of any given enzyme that goes towards putting it in it's proper place in the cell, and interacting with other proteins, that wouldn't be needed in a fuel cell. The key is to take away the parts you don't need, keep the parts you do and then get the cell to produce this new stripped down protein in high concentrations. That takes some serious protein analysis and genetic modification. This biotechnology is decades out. But its being thought about and worked on, that's the first step.

Canada moving to ban BPA

Canada Likely to Label Plastic Ingredient ‘Toxic’
I've talked about this before, and I basically came up with, "Eh, we're poisoning ourselves anyway." So now the Canadian government is taking steps to ban BPA.

The public and industry will have 60 days to comment on the designation once it is released, setting into motion a two-year process that could lead to a partial or complete ban on food-related uses of plastics made using B.P.A.

This is the sort of thing that takes time; there are plenty of industry groups that are going to want to talk the Canadian government's ear off. But ultimately, the health of the people and the environment will hopefully win out.

Jack Bend, a professor of pathology at the University of Western Ontario in London and one of the Canadian government’s outside scientific advisers, declined to comment on what action Health Canada would take. But he said he was concerned about the widespread use of B.P.A.

“The first thing is that it’s an endocrine disrupter, there’s no question about that,” Professor Bend said, referring to the chemical’s impact on the hormonal system. “Should people that are exposed to these low levels of this chemical be outrageously concerned? I’d err on the side of not creating panic. We simply don’t know. But we should find out.”

We seem to be quite good at letting one part of science get far ahead of other parts. We make chemicals and integrated them into our lives before we have even scratched the surface of how the chemicals will effect our bodies or other living things. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring really got us moving on looking closer at the environmental impacts of the chemicals we put out there. But the closer we look, the worse it seems to get. Dioxins in Vietnam, PCB's in polar bears, endocrine disruptors in hermaphroditic fish and on and on and on.

Maybe I'll use my liter Nalgene to hold knitting needles. Oh, and I like that the NYT used the same picture in both articles.

UPDATE: Nalgene has decided to drop BPA containing plastics from their production line. They didn't go so far as to say that BPA was dangerous, but said that consumers would prefer plastics without BPA. NYT notes that the canning industry says that there is no replacement for their use of BPA. I don't buy that for a second.

La Nina doesn't negate climate change

Global temperatures 'to decrease'
La Nina is once again going lead to cooler temperatures this year but that doesn't mean that the earth isn't warming overall.

"When you look at climate change you should not look at any particular year," he (The World Meteorological Organization's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud) said. "You should look at trends over a pretty long period and the trend of temperature globally is still very much indicative of warming.

"La Nina is part of what we call 'variability'. There has always been and there will always be cooler and warmer years, but what is important for climate change is that the trend is up; the climate on average is warming even if there is a temporary cooling because of La Nina."

But just you wait, the Republicans and other climate change deniers will seize on this summer's cooler temperatures to tell us again that anti-business liberals are just making this up. Michelle Bachmann will come up with something about how its all just made up by the CFL manufacturers.

Now I don't expect all of my elected officials to understand the quantum physics behind how CO2 converts infrared radiation to heat (I only just understand it), but I do expect them to be humble enough to not blow their mouths off about things they really don't understand. In my more cynical moments I'm sure that the strong ego and thick skin needed to run for national office kills off any naturally occurring humility that might be in them.

Enough of that, back to the science. La Nina and El Nino, as Jarraud says, are natural variations. Global warming and the resulting climate change are long term changes due to levels of CO2 in the atmosphere that don't seem to have occured in the past 400,000 years. (For a sense of scale, the last ice age ended 12,000 years ago.) My question is how are the El Nino and La Nina events changing as the global mean temperature rises? How the ocean temperatures will change as the air temperature changes is not clear. Will the Pacific Ocean be even warmer in El Nino and even colder in La Nina, or will the difference get smaller so that the effect gets smaller? Or will the events happen more often?

The problem we run into here is how far back our data goes. We've got air temperature readings in the US going back to the Civil War, but we've only been taking satellite readings of the temperature of the oceans for a few decades at most. We just don't know exactly whats going to happen, we have more questions than answers, and I have to admit that it scares me sometimes.

A bus full of secrets and hydrazine.

Missile Defense Future May Turn on Success of Mission to Destroy Satellite

I know this satellite thats coming down on our heads has been blogged about a lot but thats because it so darn interesting. I mean its the size of a bus, its full of secret spy stuff and deadly gas, and it might fall on our heads unless the military can blast it out of the sky. Life rarely sounds this much like a movie.

Often compared to hitting a bullet with a bullet, the shooting down of ballistic missiles with an interceptor rocket is difficult, as an adversary’s warheads would be launched unexpectedly on relatively short arcs — and most likely more than one at a time.

So it should be easier for the Standard Missile 3, a Navy weapon launched from an Aegis cruiser in the northern Pacific, to find and strike a satellite almost the size of a school bus making orbits almost as regular as bus routes around the globe, 16 times a day.

Even if they manage to hit this one, its not exactly something they can point to and say "Look we can do it, we need 80 gazillion dollars to make us safe from the terrorists with ballistic missiles!" But watch, they'll try. And they probably will get the money. We don't seem to be able to say no to the military and its demands for money.

But what really interests me in all this is the fuel, hydrazine, that if it were to break only upon landing and not before, would be really bad. Hydrazine is N₂H₄ and its corrosive and noxious as a liquid. If it crashed much of it would vaporize and that would lead to a cloud of hydrazine gas. CNN reports Gen. James Cartwright saying that the cloud would be the size of two football fields.

So shooting it down is probably a good idea. I wonder if we'll be able to see an explosion? The hydrazine is on there as fuel and while the reaction isn't an oxidation reaction its still highly exothermic. Its also taking place while in orbit and outside of the atmosphere so that probably would effect any exothermic reactions that would take place. I don't know enough about explosions to speculate more than that. I hope we get to hear more about the physics of it.

Small town turns down Nobel laureate

Climate Talk’s Cancellation Splits a Town

When you don't know who you're dealing with, its much easier to make a fool of yourself.

But when some residents complained that his presentation here would be one-sided because no opposing view would be offered, the superintendent of Choteau School District No. 1, Kevin St. John, canceled it.
.....
Those who complained misunderstood the content of the talk, Mr. St. John said, but there was no time to explain to all of them that Dr. Running was a leading scientist rather than an agenda-driven ideologue.

A portion of the community seemed to think they were turning down someone crazy tree hugger. But this isn't about laughing at the people of the town for acting like back water hicks; this is about the fact that the superintendent caved into the pressure and treated the scientific consensus as a merely one opinion that would need another to balance it out. Truth is not determine by a vote.

Some students however are smart enough to recognize when their elders are not as wise as they claim.

The controversy here intensified when a local student’s article criticizing school officials was published Monday on the student-created “Class Act Page” of The Great Falls Tribune, a statewide daily.

“I was insulted as a high school student prepared to enter the world I need to hear both sides of the story,” the student, Kip Barhaugh, 17, said in an interview Tuesday. “I don’t feel there is another side. Global warming is not a controversial issue, it’s a fact. We need to be prepared to deal with it.”

Hearing this makes me slightly more optimistic. Just because the other generations are still fighting a pointless "debate" about global warming, doesn't mean we can't see the truth of the situation. We've already figured that part out and are moving on to the real questions; how are we going to take care of this problem?

That sound you here is an entire generation sighing and rolling their eyes as their parents argue about whats happening and why, when they've already started changing the light bulbs and researching how to switch the truck to veggie oil.

Another genotype susceptible to vCJD

Brain disease death raises fear of link to BSE meat of 90s

A woman who has died of vCJD, varient Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease aka mad cow disease, did not have the same type of the protein/prion that most victims have.

Her brain was examined by researchers at the Institute of Neurology, at University College London, who found it had an unusual pattern of disease and carried out a genetic analysis. This showed that her version of the prion protein was different from all other previous victims of the infection. In vCJD it is the patients' own prion protein that is subverted by the infection; it alters shape, forming clumps that fatally clog up the brain. About 40% of the population carry the so-called MM variant, found in all victims so far identified, but her VV type is shared by around 10% of the population.

I don't know what exactly is the difference between the VV and MM genotypes or how that changes the resulting structure of the prion protein. But if another genotype can contract vCJD from having eaten contaminated, there maybe a few more people that will suffer. It also means that whatever makes MM different from VV is not enough to stop a prion from changing the original protein to another prion.

There is a precedent for prion diseases affecting people with MM and VV prion-types differently. Kuru, a brain-wasting disease similar to BSE which struck a cannibalistic tribe in Papua New Guinea, had different incubation times according to people's genes. The word kuru means "trembling with fear".

Now that is interesting. It could be that people with different genotypes will suffer differently. A different time scale could be one way that it could manifest. A slightly different change in the brain tissue could be another part of that.

Its sad that people have to suffer because we turned herbivorous cattle into cannibals. At the same time it has spurred research into what otherwise may have languished in the annals of biochemistry as another strange way proteins act. Creutzfeldt-Jakob and scrapies are rather rare, as are other prion diseases such as Fatal Familial Insomnia, and while curious, they probably wouldn't have lead to the funding that this outbreak in the UK has lead to. Squeaky wheels getting oil and stories that bleed, lead.

Rock Snot, I'm not kidding. Rock Snot.

Rock Snot Hitches Ride on Fishing Gear
I've never heard of this diatom before but its really slimy and has a really literal name. Rock Snot. Wow.

"You try to reel it back in, and you end up with a giant gooey cottony wad (on your hook)," he said. "There is nothing like that that I have experienced. It makes streams essentially unfishable."

I think its interesting that many hunters, fishers and farmers are no longer automatically opposed to the environmentalists. They see how human impact has changed the land that they live with. In this case the fishers, the environmentalists and the scientists are all worried about this (totally weird) invasive species.

As a native Minnesotan, I've been hearing for years about how you need to clean your boat and other toys in order to try to stop the spread of Zebra mussels and Eurasian watermilfoil. This mostly involved spraying down the boat and trailer, and not spreading ballast water. At the same time, I wonder if there is some fisher in Virgina thinking back to his fishing trip in Colorado and going "Awe, shi...." To this hypothetical fishers credit, diatoms are really tiny and a small amount can do a lot of damage and would be rather hard to see.

"Something changed the diatoms in ways that made them more aggressive," said researcher Andrea Kirkwood of the University of Calgary. She says the change may have taken place when a European version of the rock snot diatom was accidentally brought to Canada. Kirkwood says it's also possible that the native version of this algae evolved in ways that created much more massive and more frequent blooms.

This is where science now can see things that no one could fifteen or twenty years ago. We could take samples from the most distant bloom in Virgina, the European version and maybe we could find an isolated Western sample that is different from the Virgina bloom.

The scientific name for rock snot is the much more dignified sounding Didymosphenia geminata. Its a diatom, a group of single celled organisms with a unique cell wall made of silica, the same chemical glass and sand are made of. For single celled organisms some of them are quite large, up to two millimeters, which means they can be seen under relatively cheap microscopes. They look quite pretty.

And this is the diatom.

Domestic polution

Everyday Items, Complex Chemistry

Scientists are starting to raise questions about the safety of the chemical that are used to make the objects around us. I've talked about this before, there are tons of chemicals around us and many of them were never in significant levels, or at all, before the twentieth century.

“The bottom line is that there isn’t widespread evidence that exposure to consumer products is causing public health problems,” said Mike Walls, director of government affairs at the American Chemistry Council.

This is misleading. There isn't widespread evidence because there are so many new chemicals. The studies that we do have discuss acute exposure, one exposure to a high level of one chemical. The real situation that we are living is constant, low level exposure to thousands of chemicals. Like I said in Choose your Poison, there are so many chemicals we are exposed to, that choosing one to personally obsess about it futile. What is needed is a change at a national and international level to try to limit many of these.

There is a precedent for this. The Montreal Protocol banned chloro flouro carbons and is the best example of international cooperation working to save our planet from the poisons we have made. But because this appears less pressing, less obvious than a hole in the ozone layer, it is less likely to be acted upon.

An interesting addition to this article is the interactive picture that comes with. It mentions BPA (which I've already talked about), phthalates, brominated diphenyl ethers, formaldehyde, perflourinated compounds and lead acetate. I haven't talked about the chemical that is the name for this blog yet, but since I get a lot of references from google for lead acetate, I've decided that on Sunday I'm going to do another special post and talk about it in detail.

Choose your poison

Canadian Retailer Bans Some Plastic Bottles

The retailer said that it would not restock the bottles, which are made by Nalge Nunc International in Rochester, a unit of Thermo Fisher Scientific, until Health Canada completed a review of bisphenol-a, or B.P.A., a chemical used to make hard, transparent plastics as well as liners for food cans.

This is bisphenol-a.

The rings with the -OH on the end are the phenol groups.

The chemical in question is an endocrine disruptor. Specifically, its an estrogen receptor antagonist. The biochemistry of receptors and antagonists has become more complicated in recent years and I would need to read up on this to explain it fully, but the end effect is similar to increased levels of estrogen. The physiological effect this has is complicated by age and gender. The effect of any chemical on the young is more pronounced not only because of their smaller size, but also because their bodies are actively growing and chemistry we don't see in adults is going on. In adults it is possibly carcinogenic.

While there is little dispute about that, the plastics industry, supported by several studies from government agencies in Japan, North America and Europe, contends that polycarbonate bottles contain very little of the chemical and release only insignificant amounts of B.P.A. into the bodies of users.

At the same time that BPA is not terribly good for you, it seems that it only leaches from the bottle at high temperatures, or when acidic chemicals are used. So what does this all mean, together?

What it really means is that we are slowly poisoning ourselves. But thats not new and its not just from plastic bottles. There are all sorts of anthropogenic (man made) chemicals in our lives, that we humans put there, that are killing us slowly. To pick out one source over another is an exercise in futility. Sure, you can limit your exposure to certain chemicals, but you can't let that be all consuming. I feel bad for the people who eat organic food just because they're afraid of pesticides.

“Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in one pretty and well preserved piece, but to skid across the line broadside, thoroughly used up, worn out, leaking oil, shouting GERONIMO!” ~Bill McKenna, professional motorcycle racer, Cycle magazine Feb. 1982

I'll keep using my nalgene for water and I'll wash it by hand in the sink from time to time, but I'm not going get freaked out.

Algal Oil

Algae Emerges as a Potential Fuel Source
Another possible energy source. I really like reading about these, there is such creativity and possibility in them.

Some algae is as much as 50 percent oil that can be converted into biodiesel or jet fuel. The biggest challenge is cutting the cost of production, which by one Defense Department estimate is running more than $20 a gallon.

I can honestly say that I didn't know the chemical composition of algae. I wonder what specific oil they produce and what kind of processing is needed. What chemicals are needed, what catalysts? This is the point at which corn ethanol production becomes so inefficient. Those steps between the thing that grows and that which ends up in the gas tank are the most important part, and sometimes it gets only mentioned vaguely as processing.

If the price of production can be reduced, the advantages of algae include the fact that it grows much faster and in less space than conventional energy crops. An acre of corn can produce about 20 gallons of oil per year, Dr. Ruan said, compared with a possible 15,000 gallons of oil per acre of algae.

That is impressive. All of these alternative energy processes require that we look at whats needed as input and how much those are going to cost. Land use, water use, chemicals as fertilizer or in the processing, energy input for production and transport, and so on. I don't think one can honestly look at an alternative energy without looking at all of it. If a process requires several kilograms of a metal that has its ore mined in Africa and a ton of ore produces a few grams of metal, you can't honestly call it a viable alternative energy. If a process requires so many gallons of water that it dries up huge aquifers, the I don't think that can be called viable.

This seems like a good one though. Easy to grow, doesn't require pure water, and no fertilizer. So I really want to hear about the steps between green thing in a tank and diesel in my car tank.

The other part of this that I find interesting is that the funding is coming from oil companies and the Pentagon. There was a time not long ago that when an alternative energy process started making noise, the oil companies would buy the patents just to make it go away. But with the Pentagon, they really are looking at other sources for fuel. Say what you will about the Pentagon, some one there seems to have figured out that the remaining fossil oil is under countries that we don't always get along with.

The Japanese go Whaling

Japan Hunts the Humpback. Now Comes the Backlash.

Vessels from the groups Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace tail and harass the whaling fleet, while strong protests are lodged by environmental groups, many marine biologists, and officials from the United States, Australia and other countries. But this year those complaints have intensified, largely because Japan has added a new animal to its planned harvest of more than 1,400 whales from seven species — the humpback, Megaptera novaeangliae.

Usually I can understand both sides of a debate and at least appreciate where those I disagree with are coming from. I can usually understand that reasonable people can disagree. I can usually accept that people coming from different cultural backgrounds can look at the same thing and see different things.

Usually I don't feel like I need to dress in black and hurl Molotov cocktails.

On this point I feel the need to do spectacular physical damage, I feel the need to send these people to Sea World followed by a long stint in a small cell.

There is no reason for the Japanese to continue to hunt any whales. Their appeal that they are doing real scientific is totally undermined by the fact that most of the whales end up on the market as food.

The interesting comment comes near the end of the article.

The Japan Whaling Association, a private group representing the whaling operations, has described complaints as cultural imperialism on its Web site, whaling.jp:

“Asking Japan to abandon this part of its culture,” the association says, “would compare to Australians being asked to stop eating meat pies, Americans being asked to stop eating hamburgers and the English being asked to go without fish and chips.”

Whaling was part of American culture once too. At some point we got over that. Yeah, it hurt, whole communities were upset and people were put out of work. And while thats horrible, society moves on and culture adapts. Besides, how much of Japanese culture is still dependent upon this whaling culture? Falling back on the idea of respect for other cultures to defend this horrible act is a pretty ridiculous.

There is no reason for Japan to be whaling and the rest of the world needs to call them on it. In fact you should go over to Green Peace and send a letter to Condoleezza Rice urging her to put pressure on Japan. I am doubtful that Condoleezza is going to actually do much, but something is better than nothing.

When does a species cease to exist?

Off Endangered List, but What Animal Is It Now?

The historic Great Lakes wolf is an enigma, with scientists debating whether it is a subspecies of gray wolf or a distinct species. The Fish and Wildlife Service officially considers the western Great Lakes wolf a “distinct population segment” of the gray wolf, found in a discrete geographic area.

That population today is made up largely of hybrids between the gray wolf and coyote, but some 31 percent of the animals carry genetic material from the native wolf, which appears to no longer exist in pure form. The researchers analyzed mitochondrial DNA, inherited through the mother and often used to distinguish lineages in humans and animals, from 17 early-20th century wolves and 68 contemporary wolves.

I must admit I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, saving species from extinction resulting from human actions is a noble goal and one that we need to work harder on. On the other hand, there is a point at which a distinct species ceases to exist in a pure form. When that happens, in order for any part of the genome to survive, hybridization happens. There is a point at which it is too late to save a species, and if that species is so lucky as to have a near relative with whom to interbred, its better than going totally extinct.

So should the Great Lakes grey wolf, be taken off the endangered species list? I don't think so. The pure species is still endangered and very possibly totally extinct. The hybrids are not the same species, even if their genome is similar. Just because some animals out there are similar doesn't mean that the animal is safe. This isn't just about the loss of a set genome, its about the loss of an ecosystem and everyone in it. The existence of the hybrids does not change the ideals of the endangered species act.

There is something bigger here that I could talk about, either the political (This administration and their utter disregard for this sort of thing) or more philosophical about the change in populations over time as they interact with other species ( H. sapiens in this case). However an accident here at home has me a bit wiped out so we'll just have to live with the implication that I do in fact think deeper about these things.

A bit more precise than burning trash

Fuel Without the Fossil

They believe techniques borrowed from oil refining and other chemical industries will allow them to crack open big biological molecules, transforming them into ethanol or, even more interesting, into diesel and gasoline. Those latter fuels could be transported in existing pipelines and burned in existing engines without fuss. Advocates of the chemical methods say they may be flexible enough to go beyond traditional biomass, converting old tires or even human waste into clean transport fuel.

This isn't the first time I've heard of using waste biomass to make fuels, nor is it the first time I've seen the emphasis on Chemistry rather than Biology. So lets look chemically at what they are trying to make. No matter what the fuel is, whats happening is the oxidation of carbon to release the energy in the carbon-carbon bond.

Ethanol: Has one carbon carbon bond and already has one carbon-oxygen bond. It burns to CO2 more readily because of that carbon-oxygen bond. But it doesn't have as much energy as other hydrocarbons because it only has one c-c bond. Ethanol is usually made using the same process we've always used, brewers yeast digesting sugars. This only produces so much ethanol, because eventually the ethanol concentrations kill the yeast. Some research is looking into using bacteria to make the ethanol rather than the yeast.

Diesel and gas: These are both hydrocarbons, diesel with ten to fifteen carbons and gasoline with 5 to 12. There are no carbon-oxygen bonds and you are more likely to get carbon monoxide, but there are so many more carbon-carbon bonds mean there is a lot more energy in there. I don't know exactly how you get those out of biomass, but I'm guessing that most of it comes from different lipids, thought I don't know how they get broken down. I'm guessing that this is where the chemical processes come in.

The real question is about how well this is going to work. In my opinion its all a matter of time. This is one of those things where the market is going to make this look better and better. The price of oil is going to come up, thats just the way it is with finite resources. Is this specific process viable? At this point just about anything that doesn't burn oil is on the table and really only time will tell.

Another disease has anothere gene

New gene clue to arthritis is found

Scientists have found a genetic marker that might predispose people to developing rheumatoid arthritis. The discovery could lead to a better understanding of the debilitating disease and provide clues for treatments or even cures.

Now you're never going to find me saying that research into which genes are associated with which diseases is a bad thing. These write ups in newspapers however are pretty useless. Its getting to the point where we don't need to hear about ever gene, just like at some point launching a satellite stopped being news.

Tell me when the scientists get a model for what is going on with rheumatoid arthritis, but I don't need to hear every time we can add another acronym for a gene to the list for every disease.

Bah, maybe its just a slow science news day.

Another hypothesis for the crime drop in the late 90's

Idea Lab: Criminal Element

Reyes found that the rise and fall of lead-exposure rates seemed to match the arc of violent crime, but with a 20-year lag — just long enough for children exposed to the highest levels of lead in 1973 to reach their most violence-prone years in the early ’90s, when crime rates hit their peak.

Many, many reasons have been floated as to why crime dropped in the late 90's. The one I remember best was the one put forth in Freakonomics by Steven Levitt. His hypothesis had to do with thousands of unwanted children not being born to mothers who couldn't provide for them thanks to the legalization of abortion. This hypothesis is based upon another absence. Not of people this time but the absence of toxic lead.

Now this idea doesn't usurp Levitt's idea, in fact the two might fit together well. Together, the two predict the birth of children who are more likely to be wanted, more likely to be fully provided for and healthier. More than just the levels of lead in the air have improved since the mid-seventies. There is little doubt in my mind that the formation of the EPA and the implementation of the Clean Air and Clean Water acts has improved the lives of those born since then. But how much can you blame the criminality of past generations on the amount of lead they were breathing? Rather quickly we reach a broader discussion about nature, nurture and the free will of the criminal. But thats not where I want to take this. I want to talk about the science, this is Science Monday after all.

To understand why people put lead in their gasoline in the first place, you have to understand a little about how a internal combustion engine works. The best animation is this one, the 4-stroke at Wikipedia. Lead reduced "knocking" which is premature ignition, the gasoline ignites during compression in the second stroke rather than at the boundary between the second and third stroke. The form of lead used was tetra-ethyl lead. Thats lead with four two-carbon ethyl groups. In the engine, the TEL was combusted to CO2, H2O and lead oxide, which was picked up by a chlorine based scavenging compounds. So out the tailpipe came lead (II) chloride.

In the end it doesn't really matter what form the lead takes when it enters your body, lead oxide, lead acetate, or lead chloride. Your body has no use for lead and the lead will replace other metal atoms that form the active sites in many enzymes in your body. So what does that have to do with crime levels here? Well thats an interesting question.

Lead exposure early in life has been shown to have a link to learning disabilities later in life. Having a learning disability alone doesn't make one a criminal. But if you didn't learn in school, couldn't sit still, and no one was trying to help you learn, what are the chances you would be able to make it through high school untouched by violence?

In the end the really science-y part of this article isn't about the chemistry of lead, the biology of lead poisoning or the psychology of learning disabilities. The really science-y part comes near the end.

If lead poisoning is a factor in the development of criminal behavior, then countries that didn’t switch to unleaded fuel until the 1980s, like Britain and Australia, should soon see a dip in crime as the last lead-damaged children outgrow their most violent years.
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The theory will be put to the test as children grow up in Indonesia, Venezuela and sub-Saharan Africa, where leaded gasoline has just recently been phased out. Meanwhile, the list of countries that still use lead in gas — Afghanistan, Serbia and Iraq, as well as much of North Africa and Central Asia — does not rule out a connection with violence.

That right there is the most science-y part of the whole thing. It makes a prediction. It says "hey, I have this data and this really neat conclusion, plus I have a way to test this!" In a few decades we'll be able to see if Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, the economist at Amherst College who's research is the basis for the article, found a correlation that holds up to its own prediction. That ladies and gentlemen, is science!

Reyes working paper is available as a pdf here. Page 69 has a very nice graph of violent crime and kilos of lead with a 22 year delay. Its really a pretty graph, as far as graphs go.