Synthetic biology against global warming and energy crisis

Craig Venter gave a talk at the TED conference this year in which he presented a synthetic biology approach to create an organism that might solve two major problems of mankind: The increasing CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere and limited fuel resources. Venter claimed that the project will take further 18 month. The video of the talk is now available.

Running out of oil

EN: What would happen if we run out of oil today? World Without Oil, an alternate reality game, simulated this scenario. Different online media like blogs, podcast and videos are used to create this made-up reality and draw a picture of the peak oil situation. Hopefully it stimulates thoughts about the topic and real action, too.

[vie O'Reilly Radar]

Lack of water

EN: The lack of water is already a major problem in certain areas of the world and as the world's population and living standards increase, the situation will aggravate. An interview in the ZEIT (german) with the CEO and president of the advisory board of Nestlé Peter Brabeck-Letmathe gives more insight into that topic. Brabeck-Letmathe explains that water should be considered as a fossil resource and why it does not make sense in many parts of the world to produce biofuels. The reason for this is that the crops necessary to produce biofuels require the water (and other resources) that would otherwise be used to grow food crops. It is mentioned that agriculture consumes 93% of all fresh water used and that one vegetable calorie needs around 50 liters in production while one animal calorie needs 500 liters. Brabeck-Letmathe proposes less wasteful technologies, genetic engineering and higher water prices to improve the situation.

I assume a reduced consumption of animal products and the industrial usage of organisms that naturally uses less water would also help. Algae like Spirulina might be candidates as they require less water than common crops. If you have a better/newer/contradicting source please let me know. More proposals?

The Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition

EN: Even if you are usually not interested in Metagenomics - the pure size of the Global Ocean Sampling Expedition results is impressive. The Craig Venter Institute published a collection of papers (and other media) about that was expected already for a long time ago. Seems like this huge amount of data and other technical issues were hard to handle. But now the first part of the the ocean sequencing trip analysis is out.

These samples, collected across a several-thousand km transect from the North Atlantic through the Panama Canal and ending in the South Pacific yielded an extensive dataset consisting of 7.7 million sequencing reads (6.3 billion bp).

The number of interesting biological observations and novelties is lower than expected for such a giant project (Roland once mentioned this discrepancy for metagenomic studies) but there is still much potential in the data for further analyses.

Update: The video of the press conference is online now. Pedro followed it live and blogged some comments. This publication brought up again some voices questioning the (expensive) general metagenomic method. Working with this noisy data I can tell that it is often quite a pain. But to get the big image even if it would just show us we have seen already everything we have to go that way. Hopefully improving technologies - I once mentioned single-cell sequencing combined with microfluid separation systems - will make it easier for us to explore the unknown wold out there.

Google Earth for spotting environmental damages

EN: The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and Google started a collaboration to show hot spots of environmental damages in Google Earth. Here is an article about that in NewScientistTech.

Dezentrale Energieversorgug durch Mikro-Blockheizkraftwerke

DE: In der aktuellen Techology Review (12/2005) ist ein Bericht über Mikro-Blockheizkraftwerke für den Hausgebrauch, die Wärme und Strom aus Holzpeletts gewinnen, zu finden. Auch ohne auf die momentanen Probleme der Stromversorgung durch den Wintereinfall in einige Teilen Deutschland zu schauen klingt das nach einem sehr sinnvollen Konzept.