Grow-A-Brain has posted an awesome time-lapse video of slime molds and mushrooms growing. Advertent readers will have noted my fascination with the mycological recently, so it’s not surprising that I found this particularly interesting.
Category Archives for Science
Designing for a Green Society
I just read this piece by Alex Steffen on the WorldChanging blog and highly recommend it. The key quote from the piece, in my opinion, is this one:
[I]f we’re going to avert ecological destruction, we need to to not only do things differently, we need to do different things.
What he’s saying here is something that I’ve pointed out to my colleagues in the innovation community: sustainability is not about making things with less stuff, or that last longer, or that aren’t toxic, or even that can be infinitely cradle-to-cradle recycled. Sustainability requires us to invent things that make it possible to live more sustainably. If the things, the stuff, that we have and use make it easier to live sustainable lives than to not do so, then we will live sustainably.
Its not an easy problem to solve, for the same reason that truly groundbreaking innovation is not easy. It is pretty straightforward to imagine a novel solution for a market that already exists. It is much harder to invent a new market. I think that the kinds of products that will help people live sustainably are products for a market that doesn’t exist yet. Our business strategists don’t know how to value them, so our market analysts can’t compute a return on investment, so no investment is made. And truthfully, our scientists and engineers don’t always have the global perspective necessary to understand what types of solutions are necessary.
The point of Steffen’s article was to underline the importance of community in making these changes in our systems. I think that it is also important to understand the systems themselves. As we grow in our understanding the network of interactions and dependencies in our economy and our society, this understanding will allow us to break out of unsustainable patterns and replace them with ones that are equally understood, but are sustainable to the best of our knowledge. And because we’ll be building from a base of understanding, we’ll be able to look at them in a rational fashion 40 years from now when we understand the ways in which the new patterns are not sustainable.
It may be that at first, these more-sustainable patterns will be obvious. Things that folks like Steffen have been telling us for years, like community gardening, reducing sprawl, and increasing bike transport. But as with everything else, the low-hanging fruits will be quickly exhausted. At that point, progress will only be made by deeper understanding. It will be interesting to see how the tools for gaining that understanding develop.
Review and commentary on “Super Crunchers” by Ian Ayres
I recently read Ian Ayres’ excellent book, Super Crunchers. For folks who read and enjoyed Freakonomics, this book is a must-read, covering more cases where clever statistical analyses have uncovered interesting and useful results. The goal in writing the book, according to Ayres, was to encourage people to learn to think statistically. On the other side of the link is a discussion of some errors in experimental design, why their treatment in Ayres’ book frustrates me and why the average person should care.
More on the biofuel controversy
I posted an article earlier critiquing the media reaction to the recent reports on biofuels and land use management. Worldchanging has just posted a similar, fairly in-depth, critique as well. Their analysis goes more in depth into the specifics of each report, so I highly recommend it. What they do point out is that the Science articles are nuanced and that it was clear that the media in general either missed the nuance or ignored it.
Craig Venter wants to save the world
No one grandstands quite like Craig Venter. Whether its leading a team racing the government to the first human genome sequenced, succeeding, or admitting that his team beat the government by sequencing his own genome, this guy has style like few others in science. And while physicists at least have the reputation of having large egos installed as part of their graduate training, Venter’s ego is apparently physicist-sized, at least according to Wired and Forbes.
That being said, there is something phenomenally inspiring about the folks who have no shame about tackling the really big problems. This is a constructive sort of hubris, the kind that Larry Wall correctly identified as a virtue. Venter’s glorious hubris was on display this week at the TED conference, where he announced that he was working on a project to engineer a bacteria that turns carbon dioxide into methane and octane and that he expects results within 18 months on these fourth generation fuels.
Technorati Tags: biofuel, green, worldchanging
Energy from Ocean Currents
Robert Rapier, over at the R-Squared Energy Blog, has posted an interesting quick look at using ocean currents as a source of energy. This is, of course, another way of capturing part of the planet’s total solar energy budget as well as some of the energy from the tides as well. Interesting read.
Technorati Tags: electricity, energy, green, worldchanging
More on biofuels vs. greenhouse gases
In regards to my previous post on the recent studies on biofuels, WorldChanging has posted an article about the issue, citing a study released by the Sierra Club as well as the Science report. The WorldChanging blog post mentions that the Science report “reinforced the urgency of moving to second-generation biofuels.”
In considering this topic, I think something else extremely valuable is coming out of the biofuel boom. We’re learning how to quickly estimate environmental costs.
Technorati Tags: biofuel, energy, worldchanging
More on porous asphalt
I posted a quick note earlier about installing porous asphalt in a green community in Oregon. In that note, I made an offhand comment questioning the water quality coming off the road. After posting the article, I also wondered if the lifetime of the surface would be shorter in areas prone to freezing weather due to the expansion and contraction of ice in the pores.
It turns out that had I been less lazy in doing my research, I’dve had all these questions answered much more quickly. I just found a great article on porous asphalt that covers a lot of topics, including water quality (82% removal efficiency for organic carbon) and lifetime in freezing weather (longer than standard asphalt).
Additionally, the article points out that the porosity allows for less use of salts for deicing and that:
The water drains through the pavement and into the bed below with sufficient void space to prevent any heaving or damage, and the formation of “black ice” is rarely observed. The porous surfaces tend to provide better traction for both pedestrians and vehicles than does conventional pavement. Not a single system has suffered freezing problems.
Pretty darned cool, if you ask me. One has to ask what the factors are that are keeping this from being installed in every new parking lot being built. Undoubtedly, the subsurface strata affect the design – this is also covered in the article – but I suspect strong that the major factor is simply ignorance.
On a lighter note, the best quote from the article is this one: “Fortunately, even without regular maintenance, the systems continue to function (we routinely send graduate students and recent hires out in hurricanes to confirm this).”
Technorati Tags: asphalt, water, worldchanging
Does the blame fall on biofuels
In the alternative energy circles, a recent Science magazine online article published by a group from Minnesota has been making a lot of waves in the media. This article from the Seattle Times is typical of the coverage. There are a couple of issues with both the article and the coverage of the article that I’d to point out.
First, let me tackle the article. While no one will argue that corn ethanol is an extremely poor choice for a biofuel feedstock, it is also inarguable that the article focused on current biofuel technology. This implicitly assumes that all new biofuels will be roughly equally bad for the environment. Clearly, this is not the case, since algal-derived biodiesel and similar biomass-derived fuels will not contribute equally to global warming through the destruction of ecosystems. The article also assumed by implication that biofuels are the primary driver behind conversion of ecosystems to cropland. Past data would indicate that this is almost certainly not the case, since slash-and-burn was prevalent in the Amazon basin well before biofuels become a cause celebre. The issues around land use in the developing world would exist with or without biofuels contributing, since there is rarely an incentive for the governments who control these lands to preserve them. Rain forests do not yield significant economic benefit to those who live near them. All the biofuel boom has done is exacerbate the situation. Hopefully, this will bring attention to dealing with the root causes of the destruction of these ecosystems – namely, food security and poverty.
The media has been largely guilty of indulging in shrill hachet jobs on the nascent biofuel industry based on this article. I am certainly not implying that the authors of the Science report intended this; rather, I think that the natural tendency to want to take potshots at large targets is to blame here. Nevertheless, I think its important that people interested in short term energy development continue to work on capturing energy from biomass. With any luck, we’ll solve both the petroleum problem and the disappearing ecosystems problem at the same time.
Porous streets
After reading this post from WorldChanging, I wondered a bit about the wisdom of porous pavement. Sure, I understand the issues that are caused by stormwater runoff, but I’m a little concerned about what gets washed off the streets through the pores in the pavement.
There are probably good ways to handle this, including beds of Stropharia mushrooms on either side of the road to mycoremediate the waste water stream or even a filter layer underneath the pavement.
I also wonder what is actually underneath that pavement. Is it the sand and gravel bed that typically underlies roadways? Or is it something else more porous? The percolation through a layered gravel bed might reduce the pollution in the water that passes through.
Technorati Tags: worldchanging, water
Brent Neal 