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Friday, 27 June 2008
1. U.S. Energy Department awards fellowships
UPI
June 26, 2008
The U.S. Department of Energy says it will award up to $405,000 in fellowships to nine graduate students pursuing research related to nuclear fuel. The fellowships, valued at up to $45,000 per student over two academic years, are part of the Energy Department's Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative, or AFCI. The research must be related to the nuclear fuel cycle, including separation of nuclear waste components, fabrication of recycled components into reactor fuel and the preparation of new waste forms with increased long-term stability, officials said. The selected students are pursuing master's degrees in nuclear engineering, applied physics or other fields of science and engineering. The 2008 AFCI fellows and their schools [include] ... JEFFREY POWERS, THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY.... Full Story
2. One drop in a leaky bucket won't cool the planet
Globe & Mail [Canada]
June 27, 2008
In Green Shift, his environmental manifesto, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion says that a Liberal government would use carbon taxes on fossil fuels to reduce Canada's annual greenhouse gas emissions by precisely 247 million tonnes of carbon and associated greenhouse gases. He says that these taxes, although “revenue neutral,” will enable the federal government to provide more help to children, low-income workers, middle-income workers, people who live in rural parts of the country, people who live in the Far North, people with disabilities, scientists, researchers and inventors, big corporations and small corporations and (for that matter) essentially everybody.
The handbook raises two interesting questions and answers neither. First, how can the government help so many people in so many ways with no net increase in revenues? Secondly, to what extent will Canada's carbon taxes help cool the planet?...
Eighty-five per cent of the annual increase in carbon emissions now comes from the countries of the developing world....
Based on conservative calculations, MAXIMILIAN AUFFHAMMER (UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY) and Richard Carson (University of San Diego) say that China, by 2010, will increase emissions by a staggering 600 million tonnes a year.
If so, the economists calculate, China's annual increase in emissions alone will exceed all of the commitments made by developed countries to reduce emissions. “Put another way,” the economists say, “the projected annual increase in China alone over the next several years is greater than the emissions produced by Great Britain.”
By examining provincial records in China, rather than national records, Mr. Auffhammer and Mr. Carson determined that many of the power plants built in the country's poorer provinces “replicated inefficient 1950s Soviet technology.”... Full Story
3. Marketplace: California unveils climate reforms
California has released its plans to achieve the goals of landmark global warming legislation it passed in 2006. The state wants to reduce greenhouse emissions and ramp up renewable energy production by 2020. Sam Eaton reports.
NPR
June 26, 2008
...Sam Eaton: Putting the world's tenth largest economy on a low carbon diet is no small task. Today's plan for cutting California's emissions to 1990 levels in 12 years hits nearly every sector of the economy.
A cap-and-trade system with other Western states would let businesses buy and sell the right to pollute. The plan would also create tougher efficiency standards for cars, fuels, appliances and buildings. High speed rail would provide an alternative to flying and utilities would have to generate a third of their electricity from renewable sources.
UC BERKELEY'S DAN KAMMEN says that alone will spawn huge changes in California's economic landscape.
Dan Kammen: It's going to put a big premium on innovation to find ways not only to reduce energy use overall but also to make the technologies that we're likely to be using in much larger amounts -- solar, biofuel, wind -- to make those absolutely as large a part of the economy going forward as possible....
[Link to audio] Full Story
4. Two Testify on Memo Spelling Out Interrogation
New York Times
June 27, 2008
Washington — Two Bush administration lawyers who provided important legal justification for harsh interrogation methods that critics denounce as torture made a rare public appearance on Thursday to defend their actions.
The lawyers, JOHN YOO, the former Justice Department official who wrote several major legal opinions on torture, and David S. Addington, who as Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal adviser provided support for the interrogation policies, spent more than three hours sparring with a House Judiciary subcommittee.
Both men made clear that a controversial torture memorandum of Aug. 1, 2002, was reviewed at the White House and in the office of Attorney General John Ashcroft and was by no means a renegade initiative of Mr. Yoo, its chief author. The memorandum, which said pain had to reach the level produced by “death or organ failure” to be illegal torture, was later withdrawn....
MR. YOO, NOW A LAW PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, was polite and deferential, even as he declined to answer some questions, citing attorney-client privilege or restrictions on classified information....
[Stories on this topic appeared in hundreds of sources worldwide, including the International Herald Tribune] Full Story
5. Bay Area News Roundup
San Francisco Chronicle
June 27, 2008
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SPOKESMAN DAN MOGULOF said campus police delivered water to a remaining group of about six protesters at a grove of oak trees near the university's football stadium at about 1 p.m. Thursday.
Mogulof said CAMPUS POLICE CHIEF VICTORIA HARRISON, ASSISTANT CHIEF MITCH CELAYA and other university officials expressed concern about the protesters' health and inquired about their remaining supplies of food and water....
Mogulof said that after Harrison was told by the protesters that they were in fact in need of food and water supplies, she offered to begin providing them with food and water in return for a commitment to begin lowering their waste on a daily basis.
Mogulof said the protesters rejected that offer, but campus police "decided to act unilaterally in the interests of health and safety" and placed a case of 24 half-liter bottles at the base of the tree....
Harrison said, "At this point, with but a handful of people in a single tree, we now have a more manageable situation in the grove." Full Story
6. IBM's "Noise Free" Nano Lab
The company believes that shielded labs are vital to the future of nanoelectronics
Technology Review
June 27, 2008
This week, IBM announced plans to build the world's largest "noise free" nanoelectronic fabrication facilities in Switzerland. By shielding equipment from external electromagnetic, thermal, and seismic noise, the new facilities should help advance research in a wide range of fields, such as spintronics, carbon-based devices, and nanophotonics, says IBM.
As electronics research shifts to ever smaller scales, a stable laboratory environment becomes increasingly important, says Matthias Kaiserswerth, director of the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory. If you're trying to design a new transistor by manipulating individual electrons moving through a carbon nanotube, any disturbance--a truck rumbling past or a nearby vacuum cleaner--can disrupt your experiment and leave you with irreproducible results.
...XIANG ZHANG, DIRECTOR OF THE NANO-SCALE SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING CENTER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, says that it's precisely IBM's willingness to take risks with its new facility that will create excitement in the nanotech community. "This is a good sign," he says....
"And as nanotechnology progresses in making ever smaller structures that demand higher precision, many labs will increasingly find this a problem," says Kaiserswerth. Zhang agrees. "It's something the industry will have to address," he says.... Full Story
7. Field Museum's genetic study rewrites family tree on birds
Chicago Tribune
June 27, 2008
When a falcon swoops from the sky to seize its fleeing prey, no one would mistake the sleek predator for a gaudy parrot.
Yet the secret kinship of falcons and parrots is one of many surprises in a landmark genetic study of 169 bird species being published by Field Museum researchers....
One likely consequence of the study in Friday's edition of the journal Science is a re-ordering of the field guides that many of America's 80 million bird-watchers use. Most bird guides are based on scientific classifications, which experts said the new work could change in numerous ways....
CARLA CICERO, CURATOR OF BIRDS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY'S MUSEUM OF ORNITHOLOGY and a member of the committee that decides on changes to the checklist, said the committee typically waits for many teams to duplicate new findings before changing its bird classifications.
Still, "there are going to be a lot of changes, I can tell you that," Cicero said.... Full Story
8. Un-busy bees a disaster for almost everyone
San Francisco Chronicle
June 27, 2008
Washington -- Could strawberry ice cream disappear from our lives? What about vanilla Swiss almond?
The folks at Haagen-Dazs are worried enough that they and others have mounted a campaign to halt the shocking decline of honeybees and other pollinators of strawberry plants, almond trees and the rest of the roughly 90 percent of terrestrial plant life that needs pollination.
Officials of the Oakland company told Congress on Thursday that more than 40 percent of its product's flavors, derived from fruits and nuts, depend on honeybees. Without bees, fruits and nuts cannot exist....
Fruits, nuts, seeds and many vegetables are the foundation of California's $34 billion agricultural industry, the nation's largest, and the basis of a healthy human diet. About a third of human food requires pollination. The plants cannot grow without it.
...Providing habitat is one way to help bees and other pollinators....
Learn more
UC BERKELEY BEE EXPERT GORDON FRANKIE provides tips for urbanites at nature.berkeley.edu/urbanbeegardens. Full Story
9. Oakland: Update: Bomb Squads Investigating Suspicious Package, Station Reopens
KPIX Online
June 27, 2008
The Oakland City Center/12th Street Bay Area Rapid Transit station that was closed after a "suspicious package" was discovered on a train reopened just before 9 a.m. today, a spokesman said....
A station agent brought the bag to BART police, who brought in two bomb-sniffing dogs that "both confirmed something was wrong," Johnson said.
The Alameda County Sheriff's Office Bomb Squad and UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY BOMB SQUAD investigated the package, according to Johnson.... Full Story