The short video about the Encyclopedia of Life has been nominated for a Webby Prize. Please considering voting for it!

Andrew Revkin of the New York Times posts a blog Dot Earth: Can people Have Meat and a planet, Too? that refers to our ideas and those of our mentor Cesare Marchetti about in vitro protein (meat) production.  For more details of our thinking, enjoy Because the Brain Does Not Change, Technology Must.

The Technology-Entertainment-Design (TED) conference that helped launch the Encyclopedia of Life and connect it with hi-techsters prepared a 4-minute, 13 MB video [download it here] that both reports on progress and shows some nifty features in store for future EOL users.

German journalist Heinz Horeis who specializes in energy and environment visited the PHE in late 2007. The Swiss weekly news magazine Weltwoche published in German 6 March 2008 a substantial version of Heinz’ longer English conversation with Jesse. A couple of excerpts:

“In twenty years, [renewable] sources will have failed economically, leaving renewable energy to be remembered as the energy equivalent of sub-prime mortgages. “

“But humans are not rational. Why do people buy lottery tickets? They hope for a solution, effectively by magic, as lottery jackpot odds are one in millions. Much of the enthusiasm for renewables is belief in magic. People tire of hearing about problems related to fossil fuels or nuclear power, presented in great detail for 30 years. Anything different sounds better. Humans want to believe. In a profound short story called the Kugelmass Episode by the American humorist Woody Allen, the dissatisfied hero rejects the psychoanalyst who has been trying to adjust Kugelmass to reality and chooses to patronize a magician instead, who works the miracle of transporting Kugelmass into the novel Madame Bovary, with whom Kugelmass then has an affair. Kugelmass, biomass.”

With the Encyclopedia of Life  launched, we post a photo of most of the participants in the brainstorming meeting sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in July 2006 where the EOL concept took off.  In the back row from the left: Brewster Kahle, John McCarter, Mark Costello, James Edwards, Jesse Ausubel; front row: John Hurley, David Patterson, Fred Grassle, Andrew Polaszek, Cristian Samper.

The Encyclopedia of Life, for which Jesse served as founding chairman, goes live! Reuters offers a good sample story about the debut of this promising macroscope. Please visit the EOL and provide feedback to the EOL about the site design and operation.

Our work in the 1980s on Cities and Their Vital Systems with Robert Herman, Cesare Marchetti, Alvin Weinberg, Brian Arthur, Nebojsa Nakicenovic and others seems to have acquired cult status, and caused Jesse’s inclusion in a video podcast (high and low bandwidth) to introduce the 8 February 2008 special issue of Science magazine dedicated to cities.The issue also includes an article by Paul Grant on Chauncey Starr’s concept of the supergrid for joint distribution of hydrogen and electricity.

Where did petroleum come from? How did it form? When? These are the first few questions the great scientist Dmitri Mendeleev asked in the chapter “On the origins of petroleum” in his book “Petroleum industry in Pennsylvania and Caucasus“. The year was 1877, 120 years after Mikhail Lomonosov pronounced that oil is a fossil fuel.

We are happy to post Veselin Kostov’s translation of this chapter together with a list of references on the abiogenic theory of petroleum origin (wherever our limited knowledge of Russian interrupted the continuous flow of Mendeleev’s thoughts and ideas, we’ve put XXX or ??). We leave to the reader to decide which theory holds more merit.

Top diver and videographer Rick Morris prepared a cool piece, Counting Creatures, about the Census of Marine Life, mixing footage of submarine life and an interview with Jesse. Thanks, Rick! (Counting Creatures is in QuickTime movie format).

What’s happened to the forests of the former Roman Empire? This and other mysteries are probed in Quandaries of Forest Area, Volume, Biomass, and Carbon Explored with the Forest Identity, a sequel by Paul Waggoner and Jesse Ausubel to our 2006 PNAS paper Returning Forests Analyzed with the Forest Identity.