What if the bacteria in your gut could produce a cleaner fuel for cars and trucks? It turns out, with a little fiddling, they can!

Researchers in the United Kingdom took the common gut bacteria, Escherichia coli, and added genes from the camphor tree, blue-green algae and two other bacteria (Photorhabdus luminescens and Bacillus subtilis). The addition of genes from blue-green algae and the two bacteria allow E.coli to make hydrocarbons from fatty acids; the camphor tree genes makes the hydrocarbons a similar length to those found in fossil fuels.

So when the scientists fed the glucose from plants to the souped-up E. coli, the gut bacteria turned the food into a fuel very similar to the diesel fuel derived from crude oil. Voilà! Gut Fuel!

The remarkable thing about this biofuel—a fuel derived directly from living matter— is that it can be pumped into current gas tanks with absolutely no modifications. Most other biofuels require vehicle owners to adjust their engines to operate with the more sustainable liquids, or involve mixing the biofuel with traditional fossil fuels.

John Love, of the University of Exeter, says this was a priority. “Producing a commercial biofuel that can be used without needing to modify vehicles has been the goal of this project from the outset. Replacing conventional diesel with a carbon neutral biofuel in commercial volumes would be a tremendous step towards meeting our target of an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.”

Well, not so fast… Producing this new biofuel en masse will take a lot more work. The scientists are hoping to wean the E. coli off plants and use animal or agriculture waste instead. Otherwise, they foresee a similar problem for their new biofuel as that faced by current biofuels—it’s tough to argue that we should be devoting our farmlands to growing fuels over growing food.

In addition, E. coli hydrocarbons cost more to produce than fossil fuel hydrocarbons. At least on paper. But in the long run, probably not.

The research is published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Image: Marian Littlejohn

Happy Earth Day! We would like to share a few recent headlines for you to peruse to ponder and protect our planet…

Pollution
From high to low, all around the world, pollution affects our world. Recent headlines show that “Toxic chemicals are accumulating in the ecosystems of the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau,” according to Nature. Tiny plastic particles aren’t just trouble in the oceans; the Great Lakes contain millions of microplastics, too. The New York Times’ Dot Earth blog has a short post about the importance of not littering. And National Geographic has an article about how pollution on land can affect marine life like dolphins and local sea otters.

Colorado River
While many U.S. rivers have problems with pollution, the Colorado River’s mismanagement, overuse and drought put it atop the list of Endangered Rivers of 2013. National Geographic has an entire series on the Colorado River delta, and the New York Times has offered both an article and video last week on the region’s hopeful revival.

Drought
Speaking of drought… Do drought-stressed trees cry for help? French scientists are listening for clues. Climate change was not responsible for last summer’s Midwestern drought, according to NOAA, but then what was? And how might we be able to predict future droughts?

Climate Change
Climate change may not have caused of the recent drought, but it is responsible for other devastating events and looming disasters: bumpier flights, more storms, bark beetle plagues, drowned islands, failures in agriculture systems and more extinctions. Researchers are also getting a better handle on tracking climate change through mapping ocean eddies and looking at historic ocean temperatures and air pressure.

Ecology
How do species react to environmental changes? Rapid evolution, according to one study. Another study suggests that endangered species are already doomed. And Nature offers an update on a decades-long study of habitat fragmentation in the Amazon.

Energy
How has energy usage in our country changed over the past two hundred years? NPR has a graph (or four) for that. In response, Scientific American presents a diagram illustrating our potential for future alternative energy use and resources accompanying an article titled, “How to Power the World without Fossil Fuels.” Germany seems to have taken notice—the European country has ambitious renewable plans. But it’s not the only one. The U.S. had a huge year in 2012 for wind power. And, heading across the country soon? How about a solar-powered flight?

Earth Day
Finally, let’s truly celebrate the planet’s holiday with history, maps, jokes about Earth Day, and facts and photos of our beautiful home.

Image: Terra/ASTER/NASA and NASA Earth Observatory

Presenting at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, MIT’s Daniel Nocera, PhD, announced the first practical artificial leaf.

“A practical artificial leaf has been one of the Holy Grails of science for decades,” said Dr. Nocera, who led the research team. “We believe we have done it. The artificial leaf shows particular promise as an inexpensive source of electricity for homes of the poor in developing countries. Our goal is to make each home its own power station,” he said. “One can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic power system based on this technology.”

About the shape of a poker card but thinner, the device is fashioned from silicon, electronics and catalysts, substances that accelerate chemical reactions that otherwise would not occur, or would run slowly. Placed in a single gallon of water in bright sunlight, the device could produce enough electricity to supply a house in a developing country with electricity for a day. It does so by splitting water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen. These two gases would then be stored in an electricity-producing fuel cell located either on top of the house or beside it.

Right now, the artificial leaf is about 10 times more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis than a natural leaf. However, Nocera is optimistic that he can boost the efficiency of the artificial leaf much higher in the future.

And that’s not all. Science Now reports:

The new catalyst also appears highly stable. Nocera says his team has been operating the device for a week, using water from the nearby Charles River in Cambridge, without any drop in efficiency. The next step is to find out whether the device works equally well in seawater. If so, it could dramatically lower the cost of producing hydrogen fuel.

Use in the real world is not so far in the future, according to Discover’s 80beats blog:

Tata Group, an Indian conglomerate, plans on creating a power plant based on this research within the next year and a half.

“Nature is powered by photosynthesis, and I think that the future world will be powered by photosynthesis as well in the form of this artificial leaf,” said Nocera.

Deal me in!

Image courtesy of Wikimedia

Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia

According to The Official Google Blog:

When built out, the Atlantic Wind Connection (AWC) backbone will stretch 350 miles off the coast from New Jersey to Virginia and will be able to connect 6,000MW of offshore wind turbines. That’s equivalent to 60% of the wind energy that was installed in the entire country last year and enough to serve approximately 1.9 million households.

The construction on the line—a copper cable with insulation and shielding that will not be buried—will not begin until 2013. Initially, the line will potentially carry cheap electricity from Virginia to New Jersey, where costs are high. The plan calls for offshore wind power transmission to begin in 2021.

The entire project is set to cost $5 billion and Google and their partners realize offshore wind is not the cheapest investment, but they’re in it for the long haul. From the New York Times:

Generating electricity from offshore wind is far more expensive than relying on coal, natural gas or even onshore wind. But energy experts anticipate a growing demand for the offshore turbines to meet state requirements for greater reliance on local renewable energy as a clean alternative to fossil fuels.

The Academy reported on offshore wind in April, when a paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describing the need and efficiency of a transmission line, linking the offshore wind turbines for consistent delivery. The Green Blog in the New York Times describes this project fulfilling that idea:

… the new proposal for an Atlantic Wind Connection is actually about a series of links terminating at substations built on platforms that would sit in the ocean like oil drilling platforms, except, of course, these are clean-energy installations harnessing wind power. They would have to be hurricane-proof and include a spot where a service vessel could moor. Wind farms would tie into the system here.

One step closer to greener, cleaner, and consistent energy…

Auroras

National Geographic had some great images of the auroras that came out of the solar activity on August 1st.

WISE Losing its Cool

Universe Today reported this week that the WISE satellite only has a few more months of operation:

The spacecraft is running out of the frozen coolant needed to keep its heat-sensitive instrument chilled, and will only be in operation for 2-3 more months. While the spacecraft was designed to be rather short-lived – 7 to 10 months — it still is sad to see the mission winding down.

Alternative Energy Bonanza

We reported on renewable energy in the news earlier this week, and today, Science magazine devotes an entire special issue to clean energy. Even if you don’t have a subscription, you can download the entire section for free before the end of the month.

Frog Hunt

Earlier this week, news outlets reported a new search for amphibians, organized by Conservation International, that will take place over the next two months. From Wired:

Scientists in 14 countries on five continents are teaming up to hunt for as many as 100 species of amphibians that are thought to possibly be extinct, but may be surviving in remote corners.

We’ll stay tuned to see what they discover…

Climate

Climate was covered in many news items from the floods in Pakistan to the fires in Russia to the all-time heat records worldwide to the iceberg that broke away from Greenland. From the Huffington Post:

No one knows for sure whether any of these natural disasters — with the possible exception of the floating iceberg — are directly traceable to climate change, but they are certainly consistent with climate change forecasts. And, if they are, they clearly suggest that more records and more disasters are on the horizon.

What did you find interesting in science news this week? Why? Share with us.

California seems to lead the charge here in the US. Many of the stories are developing right here. KQED Quest has an entire series on renewables called 33×20—named for California’s goal to have 33% of our electricity come from renewables by 2020.

Earlier this week, the program had a great radio story about wind and solar energy development on Indian land. They site two examples in southern California, but there are several more. According to reporter Amy Standen,

Over the last two years, the pot of federal aid for Indian energy development has doubled to about $7 million a year. Tribes are also eligible for stimulus grants.

The people of the Campo Kumeyaay Nation have found a great way to use land that’s otherwise unusable:

This project… is an enormous source of pride for the Campo people, in part because it makes use of a resource that until recently, didn’t seem to offer a lot of options.

MONIQUE LACHAPPA: Look where we’re located. We’re out here in the middle of nowhere. It makes it difficult for anybody who wants to be able to do more for their family, or send their kids to college.

The New York Times tackles unusable California land—salty or dry earth previously used for agriculture—in their recent article “Recycling Land for Green Energy Ideas”. In the San Joaquin Valley, a large project is underway to bring solar to 30,000 acres of land too salty from years of irrigation to support agriculture any longer. And it’s a win-win situation: landowners and regulators are on board as well as environmentalists:

Unlike some renewable energy projects blocked by objections that they would despoil the landscape, this one has the support of environmentalists.

The project helps ease ever-present drought conditions for farmers, as well:

For Westlands farmers, the promise of the solar project is not clean electricity, but the additional water allocations they will get if some land is no longer used for farming.

With water deliveries slashed because of drought and environmental disputes, he [Mark Shannon] could plant only 20 percent of his property with irrigated crops this year.

“Come hell or high water, there just is not enough water to farm this whole district,” Mr. Shannon, 41, said. “If I lease my land for solar, we can farm elsewhere.”

Finally, in another article, The New York Times looks at Portugal’s aggressive development of clean energy. This year, that country will get 45% of their electricity from renewables—solar, wind and more (Science In Action’s “Wave Power” story included many images from operations in Portugal). By 2011, there will be a national network in place for charging electric cars.

There’s a reason for this forward thinking:

Portugal’s venture was driven by necessity. With a rising standard of living and no fossil fuel of its own, the cost of energy imports — principally oil and gas — doubled in the last decade, accounting for 50 percent of the country’s trade deficit, and was highly volatile.

We can learn a lot of lessons from what they’ve done in such a short time, the article states. The country has developed new skills for new technologies, and they grab power from even the smallest producers—residential solar roof panels, for example. But there are drawbacks, too.

While Portugal’s experience shows that rapid progress is achievable, it also highlights the price of such a transition. Portuguese households have long paid about twice what Americans pay for electricity, and prices have risen 15 percent in the last five years, probably partly because of the renewable energy program, the International Energy Agency says.

Although a 2009 report by the agency called Portugal’s renewable energy transition a “remarkable success,” it added, “It is not fully clear that their costs, both financial and economic, as well as their impact on final consumer energy prices, are well understood and appreciated.”

Only time will tell how it all plays out on our soil. Let’s just hope the process of converting to cleaner energy continues to move swiftly forward.

Creative Commons image by Ceinturion

One of the places it may grow most lies miles from land. Offshore winds are much stronger and offshore wind farms aren’t limited to oceans—they can also be set up on lakes and rivers.

China, already a major player in the wind power game, will start its first offshore wind farm in the Yangtze River delta this month. According to an article this week on the website of Popular Science, “Energy experts predict that China will have invested $100 billion to install 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2020. Such projects would help supply energy to 40 percent of China’s population that lives along the eastern seaboard.”

Europe already has around 30 operating projects but in the U.S., offshore wind farms are still just in the planning and permitting phase. The East Coast is close. According to Monday’s Technology Review, the permitting process is taking a long time, but “last week Cape Wind, which has proposed a wind farm off Nantucket, announced it had ordered 130 turbines.”

A paper published earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may further boost wind power in that area. Scientists from the University of Delaware studied five years of wind data from eleven meteorological stations along the East Coast, trying to answer the challenge of fluctuating offshore winds in maintaining a steady power supply.

They found that if they connected proposed offshore wind farms along 1500 miles of the Atlantic, while the wind may die down in some areas, it will pick up in others. According to the paper, “The output from the entire set of generators rarely reaches either low or full power, and power changes slowly,” making it a consistent source.

And what’s happening on our coast right now in terms of offshore wind power? “Not much, yet,” according to PG&E’s Uday Mathur, a Principal in Emerging Clean Technologies. Despite the fact that Stanford came out with a report about the offshore wind potential of California at 75GW, the realities are a little more difficult to achieve.

The main hurdle? Water depth. The continental shelf off California falls off so quickly that the wind turbines that are used elsewhere would be too close to shore in California to be practical.

A floating structure to support a wind turbine could be a solution in our deeper waters, according to Mathur. In fact, he hopes it is. “PG&E would become more interested in offshore wind as floating platforms become more proven and cost-effective. We are continuing to work with industry participants to evaluate the opportunity.”  A handful of companies are currently working on the technology, one even locally.

With a little more time and technology, offshore wind power could be everywhere. Good thing Don Quixote wasn’t a sailor.

Creative Commons image by Phil Hollman