Thanks Claus for the pointer!

Post from: PATRICK SCHULTZ

Thirst

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.

Wood and grasses seem to hold more promise. They contain chains of thousands of glucose molecules that could be made into so-called cellulosic ethanol and then burned like gasoline, while releasing just 15 percent of gasoline’s greenhouse-gas emissions. But there’s a catch. Wood has evolved to keep its sugars to itself, covering them with lignin—a substance that gives cell walls rigidity—and then locking them in a matrix of cellulose and hemicellulose protected by complex chemical bonds. Because these sugars are so hard to get at, our output of cellulosic ethanol is still, after decades of research, just 1.5 million gallons a year—less than 1 percent of one day’s gasoline consumption.

But where humans have failed, the termite succeeds—spectacularly. A worker termite tears off a piece of wood with its mandibles and lets its guts work on it like a molecular wrecking yard, stripping away sugars, CO2, hydrogen, and methane with 90 percent efficiency. The little biorefineries inside each termite allow the insects to eat up $11 billion in U.S. property every year. But some scientists and policy makers believe they may also make the termite a sort of biotech Rumpelstiltskin, able to spin straw—or grass, or wood by-products—into something much more valuable. Offer a termite this page, and its microbial helpers will break it down into two liters of hydrogen, enough to drive more than six miles in a fuel-cell car. If we could turn wood waste into fuel with even a fraction of the termite’s efficiency, we could run our economy on sawdust, lawn clippings, and old magazines.

Here’s the link to the full article again.

Post from: PATRICK SCHULTZ

Termites to the Rescue

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.

Post from: PATRICK SCHULTZ

Exploring the Abyss

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!

Post from: PATRICK SCHULTZ

Our Beautiful Planet

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.

Post from: PATRICK SCHULTZ

The Story of Stuff

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.

Post from: PATRICK SCHULTZ

Amazing Carbon Dioxide Animation

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)

Post from: PATRICK SCHULTZ

My First Scientific Publication

Here are the steps required to get beautiful colored directory listings under Mac OS X.

1. Get “fileutils” from fink:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install fileutils

2. Copy this file to your home directory and rename it to “.dircolors” and edit it to your liking.

3. Make an alias for the command “ls” by editing your “.tcshrc” (assuming your shell is tcsh):

eval `/sw/bin/dircolors -c ~/.dircolors`

alias ls ‘/sw/bin/ls -F –color=auto’

Voila! That’s it. Just restart Terminal or source your modified “.tcshrc”:

source .tcshrc

Post from: PATRICK SCHULTZ

Colored directory listings on Mac OS X

My Thunderbird setup:
Labels in Thunderbird can serve the same function as MailTags in Apple Mail. You can rename the default
labels to your liking – I decided to go with only three: “Response”, “Follow up”, and “To Read”.
The labels can easily be set by pressing 1-3, and 0 to reset the message to unlabeled. “Response” is for all emails that I need to respond to at a later time, i.e. if I can’t do it right away and it takes longer than 2 minutes. “Follow up” is for all messages that require me to follow up with some kind of action, such as taking notes on something, doing some research, making a call. “To Read” is for longer emails that I need to read through at a later time; for example: I am a graduate student in the sciences and I get email notifications when new papers come out in different journals. I go over the abstracts whenever I have a couple of free minutes.

So how about SmartFolders? Thunderbird’s equivalent are saved views. You can easily filter all
your messages by label, i.e. display all messages labeled “Response” in all your mailboxes, and
then save this view as a folder. You guessed right, I saved four searches: “Unread”, “Response”, “Follow Up”, and “To Read”. I never even look at my Inbox. I just look at the “Unread” folder and always make a decision on every message right away. I either answer right away, archive it, or label it for later review.

Caveats:
If you set a label and then move a message to a different folder via the menu or the contextual
menu, the label gets lost. Workaround: only move messages via drag and drop. If you label a message and then move it to an IMAP folder, it will not show up in your saved searches until you open the IMAP folder. This defeats the purpose of labeling and saved searches. Workaround: install the Sync on Arrival extension. Now IMAP folders are automatically updated and messages downloaded as soon as they arrive there. You will also have to select “Check this folder for new messages” in the Folder properties window for all your IMAP folders.

You can find more on this topic on 43folders, Hawk Wings, entropicprincipal and
fyreplace.com.

Post from: PATRICK SCHULTZ

GTD and Thunderbird