PATRICK SCHULTZ

Providing an ever-growing world population with safe and reliable drinking water supplies is the challenge of the century. Want to learn more? Have a look at this award-winning presentation:

Thanks Claus for the pointer!

Lisa Margonelli over at the Atlantic has a very in-depth article on termites, cellulosic ethanol and low-carbon energy supplies. Will termites solve the climate crisis? I don’t know, but it sure is a fascinating topic!

Here’s an excerpt from the article “Gut Reactions”:

With oil prices at historic highs, the quest is on to turn such plant materials into a replacement for gasoline—call it grass o line. Since 2007, U.S. energy policy has been shaped by the premise that we can brew enough biofuels to replace 35 billion gallons of gasoline by 2017, and 60 billion by 2030. Corn ethanol has been a bust, blamed for wasting water, exhausting croplands, and causing tortilla shortages in Mexico and rice shortages in Asia. For all these problems, it currently contributes the equivalent of only about 4.2 billion gallons of gas a year. And the carbon dioxide emitted in the process of growing and fermenting corn and then distilling and burning ethanol is nearly as much as that emitted by extracting, refining, and burning gasoline.

[...]

Glass Squid

“The new vehicle is to replace Alvin, which was the first submersible to illuminate the rusting hulk of the Titanic and the first to carry scientists down to discover the bizarre ecosystems of tube worms and other strange creatures that thrive in icy darkness.”

The website of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution does a great job of introducing the first such submersible, Alvin, including a slide show and a few movies.

Satellites help us appreciate the beauty of our planet. But they also help solve many of today’s most pressing scientific issues. It is this second reason, why I was excited to get an email from NASA earlier this week announcing that the SeaWiFS instrument is fully operational again after a few months of technical difficulties. Much of my research relies on observations of the world’s oceans by this mighty little satellite. What’s most amazing about it: SeaWiFS was launched in 1997 and was expected to provide satellite coverage for maybe four or five years. It’s been up there for 11 years now, still going strong and still providing one of the most valuable and comprehensive time series of earth system data ever produced.

But enough for the geeky science talk. Let’s get back to the beauty of our planet. The Ocean Color Group at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has put together an impressive gallery of simply beautiful images from the SeaWiFS instrument and its younger brother, MODIS. Enjoy!

Im Winter 2003/2004 war in Deutschland die Debatte für oder gegen die sogenannte Elite-Uni und für oder gegen Studiengebühren voll im Gange. Ich selbst hatte gerade mein erstes Semester als Doktorand an der Princeton Universität – ein gutes Beispiel für eine sogenannte amerikanische Elite-Uni – hinter mich gebracht. Vor diesem Hintergrund ging mir die, wie mir erschien, typisch deutsche Diskussion um Eliteförderung so richtig gegen den Strich. Um meinem Unmut Luft zu verschaffen, schrieb ich einen kurzen Artikel und schickte ihn zur Veröffentlichung an Die Zeit. Leider wurde der Artikel abgelehnt, aber er ist nach wie vor äußerst relevant, und nun veröffentliche ich meine Gedanken eben hier. [...]

Click for PDF

Im Sommer 2002 interviewte mich Spiegel Online für eine Serie zum Thema Stipendien in Deutschland. Zum damaligen Zeitpunkt war der Plan, im Jahr 2008 unsere eigene Firma zu gründen — wir hatten sogar eine Homepage. Aus der Firmengründung wurde dann doch (noch?) nichts, aber der Artikel ist eine nette Erinnerung an den Optimismus der frühen Jahre…

Click to see the movie

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

My friend Andy Jacobson, who works at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, CO, has put together an amazing animation of the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide since the beginning of the industrial revolution (if the movie doesn’t play directly in your browser, you can download it here):

In case you were wondering what causes the fluctuations in the Northern hemisphere (the bouncing dots towards the right of the animated graph), it’s the effect of the terrestrial biosphere. Since most of the continental landmass is concentrated north of the equator, atmospheric CO2 decreases noticeably in the Northern hemisphere during the growing season as a result of photosynthetic uptake by plants. During the winter months, decay of organic material exceeds photosynthetic uptake of CO2, and atmospheric concentrations increase.

Click for ScienceDirect web site

After a few years of struggling with slightly (?) unorganized editors at “Ecological Modelling”, my first paper is finally in press. The article that I co-wrote with my Master’s advisor Noel Urban is a modeling study of bacterial dynamics in lake sediments.

Click the image for a link to the paper (the full text version requires an institutional subscription or costs $30, sorry)

Update: I am reposting these instructions from my retired other blog, since others are linking to the post and I am noticing tons of hits in my log files. When first setting this up, I was using Mac OS 10.3 and it worked like a charm. Now I am running Mac OS 10.5.4 and it still works great. So enjoy! [...]

UPDATE: This entry is a re-post from my currently retired other blog. In January 2006, I was actually using Thunderbird instead of Apple Mail, but times have changed. By now my Getting Things Done setup is firmly in the capable hands of the wonderful application Things, which interacts quite smoothly with Apple Mail on Mac OS X Leopard. Nonetheless, for those still seeking GTD-bliss with Thunderbird, see below for my old implementation (I can’t guarantee it works with newer versions of Thunderbird, but feel free to try and let me know in the comments). [...]