Oct

31

Butanol Reality Check – Cobalt Biofuels

October 31, 2008 | 10 Comments

Last week saw Cobalt Biofuels raise $25 million in a ‘C’ round of financing. Cobalt is developing a process for producing biobutanol. This is major news as butanol is a heavy alcohol at four carbon atoms and much more difficult to make than lighter products like one carbon atom methanol or two carbon atom ethanol. [...]

Oct

30

Watching Catalysts Work

October 30, 2008 | 7 Comments

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists have managed to observe catalysts restructuring themselves as gases are moved through. Using a state-of-the-art spectroscopy system the team watched, for the first time, as nanoparticles composed of two catalytic metals changed their composition in the presence of different reactants. Until now, scientists have had to rely on snapshots of [...]

Oct

29

Endless Energy From A New Physics?

October 29, 2008 | 1 Comment

There goes that skepticism trigger again. History is littered with ideas that turned out to be groundless from bleeding people in medicine to the parade of perpetual motion motors in physics. So it’s hard to give such ambition and revolutionary concepts much traction. Except the germ theory panned out and something will have to give [...]

Oct

28

Pop Goes the Oil Bubble – Spraying Goo On Your Finances

October 28, 2008 | 2 Comments

With a rush that may be even faster than the rising price of oil, prices have just collapsed. This is a good thing. In many ways: Many people dream, invest and work at of developing alternative energy and fuel technologies and the price collapse is a reality check illustrating that as alternatives take market share [...]

Oct

27

Fuel From Thin Air

October 27, 2008 | 10 Comments

Headlines like that really set off skeptical responses. But nature is doing it and has been at it for at least hundreds of millions of years. Cleaving off the O2 from water made animal life possible. It exists so it’s only a matter of time until science comes up with ways to do it too. [...]

Oct

24

The End of Food, Fuels and Life on Earth

October 24, 2008 | 6 Comments

Perhaps nothing rates as nutty as the idea now thoroughly adopted by so many that CO2 is a dangerous gas. So lets have a quick review of what it will be like to have it treated as such. Carbon moves through the planetary system’s carbon cycle to the plant kingdom in one form only. Atmospheric [...]

Oct

23

A New Solar Sensation

October 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Ohio State University research leader Professor Malcolm Chisholm at the Department of Chemistry and two noted researchers at the National Taiwan University Department of Chemistry have their new photovoltaic solar material research published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The excitement is about a synthesized electrically conductive plastic combined with metals including [...]

Oct

22

It’s National Security, Stupid! – Reality Check

October 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Somehow since James Carville’s famous comment in the first Clinton campaign of “It’s the Economy, Stupid!” the press/media has dimly followed along and its doing the same idiot practice of letting campaign managers and spin doctors lead the press corps about like leashed pets. Groan . . . Just a few weeks ago the press [...]

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