February 25, 1923, Sunday

The Army Air Service, which has been experimenting with the rain-making and cloud-dispelling process of Warren and Bancroft at McCook Field, will use a captive balloon at the flying field at Moundsville, W. Val., to test the power of electrified sand to banish fogs permanently.

One frequent concern is the state of oxygenation of the oceans. Although mammals aren't capable of gas exchange in water, pretty much everything else in the sea is, but only when the amount of oxygen dissolved in that water is sufficiently concentrated. Unfortunately, a number of factors can affect this, from algal blooms that use up the available oxygen, to warming oceans and altered currents, the result can be hypoxia (low oxygen) or even anoxia (no oxygen) in some regions, where the amount of dissolved O2 cannot support macroorganisms such as fish.

8/23 HOOD CANAL Hood Canal, known for its deadly oxygen problems, has experienced record-high levels of oxygen since the beginning of the year — but a day of reckoning could be approaching. Researchers have never seen dissolved oxygen levels that stayed as high as they did during the first four months of 2009. That includes measurements taken from 1952 through 1966 and again from 1998 until today. At the moment, the average oxygen concentration remains in a healthy range, but it has been declining rapidly since May. Nobody can predict how low the oxygen level will go as summer turns into fall. When levels become low, the risk of a sudden fish kill increases under certain wind conditions.

Here’s a thought: what if we could let some of the heat trapped in the atmosphere back out? A few scientists have proposed making skies cloudier in order to reflect light away from Earth, but now David Mitchell of the Desert Research Institute and colleagues are suggesting an opposite approach—get rid of cirrus clouds in the upper troposphere.

Mitchell says it may be possible to increase ice fall speed (i.e. how quickly the ice crystals in clouds “rain out”, essentially) by seeding the atmosphere with extremely efficient ice nuclei, such as silver iodide, which would outcompete natural ice nuclei and create larger ice crystals that fall out more quickly.

DRI's Joseph McConnell, Ph.D., received over $3.2 million in NSF awards to study Arctic and Antarctic ice cores for clues regarding the Earth’s climate.

"...the core partially melted across the Equator during transportation before it was analysed (Etheridge et al., 1988), but this was neither mentioned by the analysts nor the researchers later using the data (see Jaworowski et al., 1992 b). Rather it was characterized as "the excellent quality of the ice core" and its CO2 concentration data "are assumed to represent the global mean concentration history and used as input data to the model" (Siegenthaler & Oeschger, 1987)."

"In order to make a matching construction between the two age-different non-overlapping curves, it was necessary to make the assumption that the age of the gas inclusion air would have to be 95 years younger than the age of the enclosing ice. But this was not mentioned by the originators Siegenthaler & Oeschger (1987)."

"Both argon-39 and krypton-85 isotopes show that large amounts of ambient air are indeed included in the air inclusions in deep ice cores, and air from the inclusions will not be representative of paleoatmospheres (Jaworowski et al., 1992 b)."

"Contamination from drilling fluids and more than twenty physical-chemical processes occurring in the ice before, during, and after drilling, make ice cores unsuitable for paleoatmospheric work (Jaworowski et al., 1992 b)."

LiveandLearn wrote:stompk, absolutely wonderful research with putting the pieces together. So I am guessing the use of algae would replace oil, satisfy the 'go green' and be much more profitable. An idea that needs to be followed. Time will tell. Keep us updated if more information comes out.

Winterkitty wrote:I've heard this algae angle before as well. I guess we'll see soon enough if the ocean and great lakes start sprouting massive algae blooms all of a sudden.

LS9, the South San Francisco-based maker of renewable biofuels, has been hot stuff in the cleantech world for a few years. The company counts a trio of star scientific founders in UC Berkeley’s Jay Keasling, Chris Somerville of the Energy Biosciences Institute, and Harvard University’s George Church

In 2001, Craig Venter made headlines for sequencing the human genome. In 2003, he started mapping the ocean's biodiversity. And now, in 2010, he's created the first synthetic lifeforms

The buzz came from being part of the nascent field of synthetic biology. As Craig Venter has recently demonstrated, scientists are getting better at manipulating the fundamental unit of life, the cell. In the case of LS9, the company has sought to swap in and out a few enzymes inside bacteria so that instead of converting sugars into fatty acids, they could become super-efficient engines for converting sugars into fuels like diesel

LS9, the Renewable Petroleum Company(TM), today announced the acquisition of an existing production facility in Okeechobee, Florida.

First it was "gray goo," the threat of self-replicating machines populating the planet. Now an environmental think tank is raising the specter of "green goo," where biology is used to create new materials and new artificial life forms.

In its report, published on July 8, the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration said the risks from green goo demand the most urgent foresight and caution. "With nanobiotech, researchers have the power to create completely new organisms that have never existed on Earth," said the ETC release accompanying its report.

Read More http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/new ... z0vSOWK0lE

Algae bloom grows in Lake Erie
http://www.thenews-messenger.com/articl ... 01/7300307

LONG BEACH -- Swimmers, surfers and fishermen are being warned of a mysterious green, slimy substance seen floating in the ocean along the Southern California coast.
Health officials say the floating green stuff is actually a common algal bloom that is the result of increased temperatures, the Long Beach Press-Telegram reported.
http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-o ... 8775.story

Katie Oxford is on the ground and in the boats in Louisiana, reporting from the heart of the Gulf oil spill disaster. This is the fifth of her columns from the scene.
Finding the green slime

About 10 miles farther down the road, I saw something in the ditches that my friend Robert Smith had talked about a few days earlier. “I’m going to call it something not correctly,” he warned, “but I call it green slime. You talk about the food chain now … this is the stuff that feeds all of us starting from the bottom up! What happens when that’s gone?” he wondered, “and no one’s talking about it!”
http://culturemap.com/newsdetail/07-21- ... een-slime/

MEADE —

The blue-green algae bloom at Meade State Lake is toxic.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment confirmed test results Friday showing the bloom's concentration exceeds recommendations from the World Health Organization for recreational water use.

A satellite image has revealed the scale of a vast algal bloom spreading in the Baltic Sea.

The potentially toxic bloom, covering 377,000 sq km, could pose a risk to marine life in the region, warn scientists.

'Green goo' biofuel gets a boost


updated 10:28 p.m. EDT, Sun August 23, 2009

(CNN) -- Three years ago many would have dismissed the notion that a significant supply of the world's automotive fuel could come from algae. But today the idea, while still an adventurous one, is getting much harder to ignore.
Making green from green: Biofuel from algae has been given a boost in investment in recent years.

Making green from green: Biofuel from algae has been given a boost in investment in recent years.

Back then there were only a handful of companies seriously focused on producing algae fuel. Now there are well over 50, according to Samhitha Udupa, a research associate with Lux Research.

The number should double within the next year or two, she adds, and private investment in algae fuel ventures has at least doubled every year since 2006, a trend likely to continue.

Last month ExxonMobil-- which has been publicly skeptical of other biofuels in the past -- invested up to $600 million into a collaborative R&D program with Synthetic Genomics, a startup founded by J. Craig Venter.

Winterkitty wrote:Great find, Stompk!

This should really help folks put the pieces of the puzzle together and see for themselves what is really going down. ***** :D

Synthetic Genomics Inc. was founded to commercialize genomic-driven technologies. Our scientific strength lies in the decades of pioneering research by founders, J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., Nobel Laureate Hamilton O. Smith, M.D., and the leading scientific teams they have assembled. Dr. Venter and his teams have proven track records of making scientific breakthroughs that translate into viable commercial solutions.

Investors

The company's largest investors include: BP plc; Biotechonomy LLC; Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Plenus, S.A. de C.V.; ACGT Sdn Bhd; and Meteor Group.