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).