Green Energy Incentives

From NYTimes.com:

Solar cells adorn the roofs of many homes and warehouses across Germany, while the bright white blades of wind turbines are a frequent sight against the sky in Spain.

If one day these machines become as common on the plains and rooftops of the United States as they are abroad, it may be because the financing technique that gave Europe an early lead in renewable energy is starting to cross the Atlantic.

Put simply, the idea is to pay homeowners and businesses top dollar for producing green energy. In Germany, for example, a homeowner with a rooftop solar system may be paid four times more to produce electricity than the rate paid to a coal-fired power plant. Read more...

Science Advisors Approved by Senate

From the NYTimes.com:

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee gave unanimous approval this afternoon to two of President Obama's key picks for climate and science positions in his administration. Read more...

A Note on Biofuels

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while now, and a U.N. report came out yesterday ("Water in a Changing World") that just supports my argument too well. Biofuels have been in the news a lot lately, but there is one important fact that doesn't get a lot of attention: the use of corn for ethanol production is essentially a trade of water for energy. When you look at it from this perspective, it really seems pretty stupid. As Sheikh Zaki Yamani, a Saudi Arabian who served as his country's oil minister three decades ago put it:

The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.

But we are in real danger of running out of water:

The (U.N.) report added to recent U.N. warnings about the downsides of developing biofuels to replace heavily polluting hydrocarbons as an energy source, because of the water needed to grow crops like corn and sugar cane to produce ethanol.

Saying about 2,500 liters of water is needed to make 1 liter of biofuel, it said implementing all current national biofuel policies and plans would take 180 cubic kilometers of extra irrigation water and 30 million hectares of cropland.

"The impact could be large for some countries, including China and India, and for some regions of large countries, such as the United States," it said. "There could also be significant implications for water resources, with possible feedback into global grain markets."

When oil prices peaked at over $140 a barrel last year, "the kneejerk reaction was 'well, we are going to grow our energy - biofuels.' But nobody took account of how much water it was going to require," William Cosgrove, coordinator of the report, told journalists.

Read more...(SciAm.com)

That is not to say that biofuels don't have any potential, I just think the focus should be on production of biofuels from waste, not from agricultural crops. Unfortunately, corn (or more accurately, the companies that breed it) has much more lobbying power, so that's where all the money continues to go.

Do Electric Cars Really Save Money?

Short answer: yes, but there is more to think about. Check out the facts:

Electric Cars - How Much Does It Cost per Charge?
SciAm.com

Understanding (and preventing) Aging

The secret to preventing the effects of aging may lie in the most unlikely (and one of the ugliest) organisms: naked mole rats.

With a maximum lifespan of about 30 years, the naked mole rat outlives all other rodents by a long shot. It lives about 10 times longer than the similarly-sized lab mouse and does not show the normal signs of aging such as dementia, menopause, and bone density loss until it's near death (humans start losing bone density in their 30s), says Rochelle Buffenstein, a physiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio who has spent the past three decades studying the rodents (and admits to having 1,000 of the bald critters living in her lab). What's more, she adds, "We have never seen a single instance of cancer in the lab or in the zoos [where these animals are monitored]."

Buffenstein suspects the mole rat's secret to longevity and good health lies in its proteins. She and her colleagues recently published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that proteins in naked mole rat liver cells function much better than mouse liver cells after being exposed to damaging agents such as temperature changes and free radicals (unstable molecules produced by chemical reactions).

The hypothesis is that the naked mole rat is better at identifying and recycling damaged proteins:

This quality control system prevents the animals from accumulating crippled proteins throughout their lives, which is key because many aging diseases such as Alzheimer's are believed to be related to such buildups, says study co-author Asish Chaudhuri, a biochemist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

The next step is to identify what exactly is responsible for the increased efficiency (i.e. which proteins are involved in the process), so that researchers can devise a way to manipulate the corresponding proteins in humans.

Source:
Does the fountain of youth lie in the naked mole rat?
60 Second Science (SciAm.com)

Nation's Best and Brightest Take on Energy

News from The 2009 M.I.T. Energy Conference:

Whether it was a Porsche 914 transformed to run on 18 batteries or the fusion experiment using magnetic levitation to confine into a small space a power source of the same type used by the sun, M.I.T. engineering creativity was on full display on March 6, 2009. (SciAm.com)

Check out a slide show with some of the displays:

Slide Show: From Algae to Wind Turbines

On the Republican Response

Some republicans are calling for a "strike" by the wealthy in response to proposed tax increases:

Do Religious People Have More Self-Control?

From TierneyLab (NYTimes.com):

Dr. McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami, says he learned a lot from the comments here at the Lab:

I was fascinated by the variety of religious activities that many of you have found useful for increasing self-control, including ritual dietary restrictions, meditation, ritual fasting, and rituals of self-examination and repentance. It seems that many readers could also identify with the idea that overdoing it in the religious realm can cause breakdowns in self-control—a sort of “spiritual burn-out.” Finally, many contributors felt that non-religious ideals—one contributor listed equanimity, mindfulness, compassion, for instance—could help to generate the self-control benefits that seem to be associated with religiosity (though some of you were skeptical about this possibility).

Here are answers from Dr. McCullough to three questions repeatedly raised by Lab readers:

1. “Isn’t it possible that religious people are lying about how much self-control they have.” Sure, but this possibility has grown more unlikely as more evidence has come in. We’re doing studies in my lab right now that enable us to measure people’s self-control by way of behavior and physiological functioning, rather than relying solely on what people say about themselves. These results should tell us more about how meaningful the links between religion and self-control really are.

2. “Couldn’t self-control make people more religious, rather than the other way around?” Absolutely. The fact two variables are related doesn’t mean that one causes the other. Some good causal evidence exists, but we’re doing more research that should help us determine whether religion improves self-control, whether low self-control turns people off of religion, or whether some other variable increases people’s self-control and their religiosity.

3.“What about all those pedophile priests and suicide bombers?” Religion spawns a lot of ugliness, it’s true, and some religious people (and religious leaders) are responsible for some truly horrible behavior. However, those facts are a bit of a distraction from the main question we’ve been asking, which, in its simplified form, is this: “If you take two people who are identical in every way except that one is more religious than the other, will the religious person have more self-control?” I’m not claiming that religion is a panacea, but the scientific support for the idea that religiosity is associated with many benefits for health, well-being, and social adjustment is now quite overwhelming. You can review the evidence here (pdf) and decide for yourself.

We want to determine whether these linkages come from religion’s ability to promote self-control. Maybe it does, and maybe it doesn’t. That’s why we do research! A religion/self-control link could also tell us some things about how the propensity for religion evolved to become a universal human characteristic.

5 Steps To A Greener House

From the NYTimes.com:

A RECENT Amazon.com search for “green home” pulled up more than 15,000 book titles. Who has time to read them all? So this week, The Green Home tracked down Eric Corey Freed, the author of “Green Building & Remodeling for Dummies,” and asked him to distill this growing cottage industry of green advice into five must-do steps. Read more...

More on Green Cities

Building More Sustainable Cities (SciAm.com)

The iPhone's Biggest Rival

Forget Blackberry, check out this Palm:

The Who Cares Hindenburg

Who cares what Anne Coulter thinks?