Dr. Tom Hansen has a vision for clean power. It’s big and bold. Dubbed the ‘Hansen Plan’ in a January 2008 Scientific American article, it would completely replace fossil fuels and nuclear power generation across the country. The idea is gaining fervent followers for its seeming simplicity, and equally passionate detractors for the cost and effort required to implement it.

At first blush Dr. Hansen seems an unlikely visionary. The mild, even humble manner, worn running shoes, plaid shirt and rumpled khakis belong to a man who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty. For years he ran coal-fired power plants for Tucson Electric Power, now serving almost four hundred thousand customers in Arizona. Not having much to do because the plants “ran themselves,” he started researching how to transform TEP and the industry. In the early 90s he quit running the coal plants to focus on renewables, and is now TEP’s Vice President of Environmental Services, Conservation and Renewable Energy.

Last week I chatted with Dr. Hansen at TEP’s bustling Green Team office. We talked about the company’s goals, the Hansen Plan, state of the art energy storage, plug-in hybrids and the new Smart Grid demo projects, as well as his concerns about natural gas. He also reveals his pick for the best thin film solar panels . They may be less efficient but are becoming less expensive than the standard silicon-based ones, which he calls “crystallines”.

While studying towards his doctorate of philosophy, Anders Jørgensen discovered a previously undescribed species of parasite that infects farmed fish and produces serious disease.

Single-celled parasites of the genus Spironucleus are known to produce serious illness in farmed and aquarium fish. In farmed salmon, these parasites create foul-smelling, puss-filled abscesses in muscles and internal organs. After the first outbreaks of this disease were described in farmed salmon in the late 1980’s, it was assumed that the cause was Spironucleus barkhanus, which is a fairly common parasite in the intestine of wild grayling and Arctic char. In these fish species, however, the parasite is benign.

As oceans warm and become more acidic, ocean creatures are undergoing severe stress and entire food webs are at risk, according to scientists at a press briefing this morning at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

Gretchen Hofmann, associate professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has just returned from a research mission to Antarctica where she collected pteropods, tiny marine snails the size of a lentil, that she refers to as the “potato chip” of the oceans because they are eaten widely by so many species. The National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs funded the expedition.

Farmers, food suppliers, policy-makers, business leaders and environmentalists are joining forces to confront the threat of the ‘forgotten greenhouse gas’ by taking part in an influential new forum at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

Launched on February 22, the Nitrous Oxide Focus Group will engage with many influential organisations including the National Farmers Union, Marks & Spencer, British Sugar, Defra, the Country Land and Business Association and Unilever.

Não sei se chore, se ria.
Algumas ideias da conferência da American Association for the Advancement of Science, e sobre Saúde e Nutrição, onde se fala:

…da pegada ecológica originada pelos excessos alimentares…

The Korean War lasted from June 1950 to July 1953. It served as the basis of the 1968 book MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors by Richard Hooker (pen name of former army surgeon H. Richard Hornberger), describing the experiences of surgeons at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the war. This was adapted into a film (MASH) starring Donald Sutherland in 1970, which in turn inspired the TV series M*A*S*H starring Alan Alda.

Scientists at UCL (University College London) have found the link between what we expect to see, and what our brain tells us we actually saw. The study, published in this week’s PLoS Journal of Computational Biology, reveals that the context surrounding what we see is all important – sometimes overriding the evidence gathered by our eyes and even causing us to imagine things which aren’t really there.

The paper reveals that a vague background context is more influential and helps us to fill in more blanks than a bright, well-defined context. This may explain why we are prone to ‘see’ imaginary shapes in the shadows when the light is poor.

Supposedly nanobacteria are cell-walled organisms much smaller than the generally accepted lower limits for cell size. The existence of nanobacteria has been a hot topic because of their putative roles in and heart disease and kidney stones.

The Journal "Open Medicine" has published a very thoughtful editorial on "Open science, open access and open source software at Open Medicine" by Sally Murray, Stephen Choi, John Hoey, Claire Kendall, James Maskalyk and Anita Palepu. Not only are they writing about it but they want to get their hands dirty as well:

People across the western hemisphere may be surprised to see a rust-colored Moon in the sky in a few days - an ominous omen to ancient people but a more predictable occurrence now. Early on 21 February (the evening of the 20 February for observers in North and South America) will be this year’s first and only total eclipse of the Moon.

Bonus: unlike the solar equivalent, the whole event is safe to watch and needs no special equipment.

In a total lunar eclipse, the Earth, Sun and Moon are almost exactly in line and the Moon is on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. The Moon is full, moves into the shadow of the Earth and dims dramatically but usually remains visible, lit by sunlight that passes through the Earth’s atmosphere.