August 7, 2006, 10:00 PM CT

Storing Man-made Carbon Dioxide

Deep-sea sediments could provide a virtually unlimited and permanent reservoir for carbon dioxide, the gas that has been a primary driver of global climate change in recent decades, as per a team of researchers that includes a professor from MIT.

The scientists estimate that seafloor sediments within U.S. territory are vast enough to store the nation's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for thousands of years to come.

"The exciting thing about this paper is that we show that CO2 injected beneath the seafloor is sequestered permanently," said Charles Harvey, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Harvey is a co-author of a paper on the work that appears in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"CO2 injected underground on land is buoyant, and hence has the potential to escape back to the surface," Harvey said. "This is not the case under the deep ocean. Because the ocean floor is so cold, liquid CO2 stored beneath the floor is denser than water and will not rise to surface. Furthermore, the top of the injected CO2 plume will form a hydrate, an ice-like solid that plugs up the pore spaces, 'self-sealing' the injected CO2 plume into the deep sea sediments."

The leader of the work, Daniel P. Schrag, said, "Supplying the energy demanded by world economic growth without affecting the Earth's climate is one of the most pressing technical and economic challenges of our time." Schrag is a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University.........

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August 6, 2006, 10:08 PM CT

Electronic Capacitors from seaweed

New materials for advanced electronics are commonly expensive, high-tech substances. But a team of scientists in France has shown that energy-storage components called supercapacitors can be made from a remarkably cheap and humble material: baked seaweed.

Francois Beguin of the CNRS Research Centre on Divided Matter in Orleans, France, and his co-workers say that seaweed, when burned to a charcoal-like form, is just the right stuff for making the electrodes in state-of-the-art supercapacitors. It performs as well as the carbon-based substances currently used in commercial devices, the scientists say.

"People working on carbons are always looking for improved properties," says Mildred Dresselhaus, a specialist in carbon materials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She points out that coconut shells are already used as a source of porous carbon for water filtration and other applications. "Low-tech routes are commonly used when they do the job," Dresselhaus says.........

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August 6, 2006, 9:24 PM CT

Brazil Publishes Biodiversity Generic Name List

Brazil has published a list of more than 5,000 generic terms from the Portuguese language correlation to Brazilian plant biological diversity to raise awareness and prevent further misuse of trademarks that hinder Brazilian exports.

The Brazilian government has been, and is, involved in many trademark disputes with companies that, for example, take a name of a fruit in Brazilian Portuguese and trademark it to get exclusive rights to commercialise it under that name in a certain country or region.

This hinders Brazilian exports, particularly when it happens in larger markets, Cristiano Franco Berbert of the Permanent Mission of Brazil in Geneva told Intellectual Property Watch.

Berbert said the mission has sent the list to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) to help raise awareness of the issue. The government also is looking into the possibility of the list being circulated at a future meeting of the WIPO Standing Committee on the Law of Trademarks, Industrial Designs and Geographical Indications, he said.

WIPO members adopted a Revised Trademark Law Treaty in March of this year (IPW, WIPO, 5 April 2006).

In addition, Brazil is looking into the list possibly being presented at the WTO Council on the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, Berbert said.........

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August 4, 2006, 6:59 AM CT

Focus On Synthetic Biology

Five MIT scientists are among the pioneers behind a new research center in synthetic biology, a precocious field whose primary long-term goal is to make it easier to design and build useful organisms.

Current work includes refining pieces of DNA into standard biological parts that scientists could then mix and match to produce novel biological systems -- such as bacteria that synthesize rare cancer drugs -- and also fostering the responsible development and application of next-generation biological technologies.

The Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) is funded by a five-year, $17 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

In addition to MIT, participating universities are the University of California at Berkeley; Harvard University; University of California at San Francisco; and Prairie View A&M University. Matching funds from industry and these universities bring the total five-year commitment to $20 million, with NSF offering the possibility of a five-year extension of the grant. The center is managed via the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research and directed by Professor Jay Keasling of UC Berkeley. The work of the center will be distributed, with major nodes in Cambridge and in San Francisco.

"SynBERC is the first time we've had long-term support to improve the technical foundations that underlie the engineering of biology," said Andrew D. Endy, an assistant professor in MIT's Division of Biological Engineering and a co-investigator in the new center.........

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August 3, 2006, 11:54 PM CT

Brownfields May Turn Green

Growing crops for biofuels summons images of fuel alternatives springing from the rural heartland. But a Michigan State University partnership with DaimlerChrysler is looking at turning industrial brownfields green.

Kurt Thelen, MSU professor of crop and soil sciences, is leading the investigation to examine the possibility that some oilseed crops like soybeans, sunflower and canola, and other crops such as corn and switchgrass, can be grown on abandoned industrial sites for use in ethanol or biodiesel fuel production. Another partner is NextEnergy, a nonprofit organization that supports energy technology development.

The results of the work conducted here might sprout similar sites across the state and nation in areas that aren't desirable for commercial or residential uses. The results also will contribute crops for biofuel production and may help clean up contaminated soils.

"Right now, brownfields don't grow anything," Thelen said. "This may seem like a drop in the bucket, but we're looking at the possibilities of taking land that isn't productive and using it to both learn and produce".

The project now is a two-acre parcel that is part of a former industrial dump site in Oakland County's Rose Township. Thelen's group is looking to determine if crops grown on brownfield sites can produce adequate yields to make them viable for use in biofuel production. The crops also need to produce adequate quantities of seed oil.........

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August 1, 2006, 7:13 AM CT

Species unique to tidal marshes face extinction

Tidal marshes occur in mid to high latitudes, along coasts that are protected within estuaries or behind barrier islands. They are most common in North America and China. Some tidal marsh species are protected from high salinity by relatively impermeable skin, and others have kidneys that can concentrate salts from large volumes of water or specialized glands that exude salt. Many are gray or black in color, which is believed to be an advantage because it matches the dark color of the soils often found in tidal marshes. Why endemic tidal marsh species seem to be largely restricted to North America--which has 24 of the worldwide total of 25--is not clear. Although it could reflect differing taxonomic practices in different countries, it may be related to the history of glaciation or of agriculture.
Endemic tidal marsh species are vulnerable to coastal development and to sea level rise, both of which are rapidly reducing the area of tidal marshes. They are also threatened by toxic wastes and invasive species. Greenberg and his coauthors argue for an expanded research program to try to understand how species will respond to these threats.

BioScience publishes commentary and peer-reviewed articles covering a wide range of biological fields, with a focus on Organisms from Molecules to the Environment. The journal has been published since 1964 by the American Institute of Biological Sciences, an umbrella organization for professional scientific societies and organizations that are involved with biology. It represents some 200 member societies and organizations with a combined membership of about 250,000.........

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July 28, 2006, 10:10 PM CT

From Farm Waste To Bio-oil

Samy Sadaka reached into a garbage bag, picked up a mixture of cow manure and corn stalks, let it run through his fingers and invited a visitor to do the same.

It wasn't that bad.

That mix of manure and corn stalks had spent 27 days breaking down in a special drying process. The end result looked like brown yard mulch with lots of thin fibers. There wasn't much smell. And it was dry to the touch.

"That's about 20 percent moisture," said Drew Simonsen, an Iowa State University sophomore from Quimby who's working on the research project led by Sadaka, an associate scientist for Iowa State's Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies.

Other Iowa State scientists working on the project are Robert Burns, an associate professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering; Mark Hanna, an Extension agricultural engineer; Robert C. Brown, director of the Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies and Bergles Professor in Thermal Science; and Hee-Kwon Ahn, a postdoctoral researcher for the department of agricultural and biosystems engineering.

The project is being supported by $190,000 in grants from the Iowa Biotechnology Byproducts Consortium.

The scientists are working to take wastes from Iowa farms -- manure and corn stalks -- and turn them into a bio-oil that could be used for boiler fuel and perhaps transportation fuel.........

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July 28, 2006, 9:40 PM CT

Cell-shaped Building In Making

An innovative cell-shaped building will house a new biomedical research institute in Chengdu, China, thanks to an unusual crossdisciplinary collaboration between Shuguang Zhang, a world-renowned bioengineer and scientist at MIT, and his former student, architecture major Sloan Kulper.

Kulper (S.B. 2003) designed the cell-shaped building for the Institute for Nanobiomedical Technology and Membrane Biology in Chengdu, China, the regional capital of Sichuan province in southwestern China. The proposed new facility will contain 170,000 square feet of laboratory, research and meeting spaces; it is slated for construction over the next three years. The building is intended to look like a cell from the outside and to include an assortment of forms inspired by molecular biology inside.

Shuguang Zhang, associate director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering, will serve as founding advisor of the new Nanobiomedical Institute, to be sited at Chengdu's Sichuan University, where Zhang received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry.

Zhang met Kulper in 2002, when he took Zhang's course, "Molecular Structure of Biological Materials: Structure, Foundation and Self-assembly".

In the class, Zhang frequently discusses the striking similarities between architecture and biological structures, he said. "Nature has produced abundant magnificent, intricate and fine molecular and cellular structures through billions of years of molecular selection and evolution.........

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July 26, 2006, 5:33 PM CT

Invasive Plants Prefer Disturbance

One of the most invasive exotics in the western United States, the yellow starthistle, is successful both at "invasion" in non-native areas and "colonization" in native ones. However, new research from an international team of scientists finds that a disturbance such as fire or grazing actually increased the success of yellow starthistle far more in non-native than in its home regions. Furthermore, yellow starthistle was able to establish virtual monocultures in disturbed plots only where it is exotic.

"Our results are novel," says Jose Hierro (University of Montana and Universidad Nacional de La Pampa). "No one else has ever shown that ruderals, that is, plants that are generally adapted to disturbance, respond differently to disturbance in native versus non-native regions".

The scientists conducted their research over three years in southern Turkey, where the weed is native, and in California and central Argentina, two regions where the weed is non-native and remarkably abundant. Their findings, reported in the recent issue of The American Naturalist, question the assumption that disturbance alone is sufficient to explain the remarkable success of invasive plant species in non-native ranges. Instead, the scientists argue, the common and powerful effects of disturbance must act in concert with other factors to allow certain species to dominate plant communities only where they occur as exotics.........

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July 26, 2006, 5:03 PM CT

Global Coral Reef Assessment

A first-of-its-kind survey of how well the world's coral reefs are being protected was made possible by a unique collection of NASA views from space.

A team of international researchers using NASA satellite images compiled an updated inventory of all "marine protected areas" containing coral reefs and compared it with the most detailed and comprehensive satellite inventory of coral reefs. The global satellite mapping effort is called the Millennium Coral Reef Mapping Project and was funded by NASA. The study was reported on recently in the journal Science.

The assessment found that less than two percent of coral reefs are within areas designated to limit human activities that can harm the reefs and the sea life living in and around them. Countries around the world have created these protected ocean and coastal zones where human activities such as shipping, fishing, recreation and scientific research are restricted to varying degrees.

"The contribution of NASA images to this project was crucial," says study lead author Camilo Mora, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University, Canada. "The satellite images allowed us to pinpoint where coral reefs are actually located within coastal marine ecosystems".

The Millennium Project collection of global satellite images of coral reefs was first released in 2003; maps derived from these images were released in 2004. The images are now publicly available from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Landsat 7 was designed by NASA and launched in 1999. The Landsat Program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the Department of the Interior's U.S. Geological Survey.........

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