News

To lift enthusiasts of distributed generation to heaven, our 1996 paper Elektron on pp. 157-158 proposed a “splicer”, a multi-purpose household energy alliance of 5 kW, to produce electricity, heat, or whatever you like. Honda and Plug Power report progress toward a kind of splicer with their “Home Energy Station.”

Torrance, CA-based Honda R&D Americas, Inc., together with its partner Plug Power, Inc. Latham, NY has launched Home Energy Station III providing electricity for the home and hydrogen for future fuel cell-powered vehicles (H&FCL July 05). This third-generation system which operates on natural gas as primary fuel, is roughly 30 % smaller than its predecessor and produces about 25% more power. It’s rated at up 5 kW. Honda says it’s more energy efficient, hydrogen storage and production capacity is up about 50% via a new improved natural gas reformer, and start-up time has been cut to about one minute. The system will be tested at Honda R&D Americas.

The New York Times reported 8 December that USA corn yields have risen 31% since 1995. Despite the drought in Illinois in the summer of 2005, that State produced a bumper crop. While for more than 30 years, many experts have forecast a leveling of yields, farmers keeping lifting yields and creating the chance to spare Nature. Alternatively, the success of corn farmers feeds the rise in meat consumption by the Chinese and others. Cesare Marchetti shows that increases in Chinese meat consumption in kilocalories per day fits well a double logistic that will saturate in a few years (not far from European meat eating but below USA). The early deviations from the second logistic also show the havoc that politics can create. Mao was an enemy of meat.

We and our associates are well-known fans of magnetically levitated trains for high-speed transport. We are pleased to learn that the experimental Japanese maglev train attained speeds as high as 500 km/hr during tests in 2005. In a low pressure tunnel, one might say the sky would be the limit for maglev speed!

The All Birds Barcoding Initiative (ABBI) issued its Inaugural Workshop Report. The meeting was attended by 48 participants from 23 countries. At the close of the meeting, co-chair Allan Baker drew a comparison with the Human Genome Project. There was early resistance to and skepticism of the Genome Project that gave way to collaboration and success. Based on his experience and research results to date, Baker predicted that the ornithological community would come to accept and support barcoding and that ABBI would be highly successful.

The Census of Marine Life issued today a press release, largely prepared by Jesse, about its highlights for 2005. 2005 has been a great year for the CoML.

In 1992 we began to work on the question “How Much Land Can Ten Billion People Spare for Nature?” that led to our recognition of the Great Reversal of human extension on the land surface and the chance for a Great Restoration of forests. Most colleagues and reviewers fought furiously against these ideas and our papers such as on Lightening the Tread of Population on the Land: American Examples and How Much Will Feeding More and Wealthier People Encroach on Forests?. A standard refrain was, “Maybe in the USA but never in a country such as El Salvador.” Now a report on The Secret Forests of El Salvador from the Center for Forestry Research confirms forests in that country grew almost 40% between 1992-2001.

https://www.cifor.cgiar.org/docs/_ref/polex/english/

The full reference of the article is: Hecht, S.B., S. Kandel, I. Gomez, N. Cuellar, and H. Rosa. 2006. Globalization, Forest Resurgence, and Environmental Politics in El Salvador, World Development, Vol. 34 (2), February.

Our colleague with the magic eye, Cesare Marchetti, fits the data on car
fires from the Ramadan Intifada in France with the Loglet Lab model in both
S-curve and linearized formats.

https://phe.rockefeller.edu/PDF_FILES/Car1.pdf

https://phe.rockefeller.edu/PDF_FILES/Car2.pdf

DNA barcoding, like other rapidly diffusing technologies, elicits worries. Jesse Ausubel and Paul Waggoner have made a list of Barcoding Worries and Limits 1-9. We think it valuable to recognize and catalogue them. At a later time, we may post our responses to the worries. We think the worries are mostly phantoms, but also accept that humans see phantoms.

Back in early 2002, concerned about ways to preserve and keep accessible websites important for history of science and technology, Abby Smith and David Kirsch brought Jesse in contact with the Internet Archive, its founder Brewster Kahle and extraordinarily talented associates such as computer scientist Raymie Stata. Soon after, expert PHE computing advisor Perrin Meyer joined Jesse on a visit to the Archive headquarters at the Presidio in San Francisco, where we were able to appreciate the fantastic concept and excellent early implementation of the Internet Archive. We were pleased to help arrange for the Sloan Foundation to become one of the Archive’s major supporters. The ever-inventive Brewster Kahle has meanwhile progressed with his audacious plan for universal access to all recorded knowledge , and on 25 October 2005 the Archive held a meeting to form the Open Content Alliance to speed the scanning of books into a digital library. Our colleague, Doron Weber, attended the widely reported meeting and is quoted in the Reuters coverage.