Last week NASA chief Michael Griffin made some statements about global warming during an interview on NPR. He said among other things, that it would be "arrogant" to assume the world's climate should not change in the future.
and
"I have no doubt that global — that a trend of global warming exists,"
and
"I guess I would ask which human beings, where and when, are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now, is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take"

Spain has completed a 377 ft tall 'power tower'. The tower is surrounded by mirrors that reflect the heat up to the tower. The heat is then transformed into steam generated power. The 624 large mirrors around the tower will heat the top of the tower to around 482 ° F. This is expected to produce around 11MW of electricity. This project from Spain also includes the construction of a second, larger tower which is expected to produce twice as much power.

The article ends on a sour note, however, when they mention the sad fact that it costs twice as much money to generate electricity from solar sources as from conventional sources.

Researchers in Australia are using titanium dioxide to split seawater into oxygen and hydrogen gas. The hydrogen gas can then be used to generate electricity. Somehow I find claims such as these amusing the university team was confident it would be able to make the process efficient enough within 10 years for it then to be developed commercially. Although they also say that covering an area of 40 square kilometers with these generators would be enough to produce enough hydrogen for all of Australia's energy needs.

Konarka Technologies' will receive funding from President Bush's Solar America Initiative. Konarka received funding from the Pentagon 3 years ago to develop a flexible solar power generator. One of their financial backers is Chevron. Konarka's technology is flexible plastic solar cell strips - material that could be embedded into the casings of laptop computers and even woven into power-producing clothing to energize digital media players or other electronics. The idea is that this technology can be mass produced in large rolls of photographic film, and result in cheaper solar power. I wonder if this will result in a material that is cheaper per watt?

Paul Hellyer, a former Canadian Defense Minister, believes that we should utilize some of the alien technologies gained from UFO crashes in order to fight global warming. He says that governments should 'come clean' with the information they have regarding UFO's gained in incidents such as the 1947 Roswell, NM crash. This information was originally published in the Ottawa Citizen. Mr Hellyer was the Canadian defense minister in 1963, he is currently 83 years old.

By using a protein found in the human ear, scientists have found that they can generate electricity. The protein is called prestin. In the human body the protein is responsible for moving hairs in response to an electrical stimulus from the brain. This process also works in reverse, allowing sources of motion (wind, body movement, etc) to generate electricity.

This research has given rise to the concept of a 'power skin'. The idea being that a building can be covered in this protein and thereby generate electricity from the prevailing winds, which may prove useful on structures built in space.

Richard Branson is offering a $25 million dollar prize to the inventor who can create a machine to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. One stipulation is that the method must be cost effective. More information can be found at Virgin Earth.

The Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was on the short list of suspects in the recent orange snow event of the Omsk region of Siberia. The orange snow has been described as oily and rotten smelling. It also contains levels of iron, acids, and nitrates that are four times higher than ordinary snow. It is said that the region has plenty of other industrial polluters who may be to blame for the fortean weather.

Don Norman writes about the pursuit of good aesthetic design. Actually good design in general. I tagged this as Ecology because one of the main aspects of good design is creating objects that are not only useful, but engage people. If a product can keep us engaged we will be less likely to throw it away to trade for a new, similar product. If we don't throw as much stuff away there will be less waste and less industrial pollution. Don Norman calls this 'emotional design'.

A few years ago I submitted a patent application for a desalination device. I received a call from the USPTO in December saying that the application has been officially abandoned. The patent was abandoned sue to a snafu in changing my mailing address. Now, after 3+ years and a couple hundred bucks, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) wants me to send them additional money to revive the application process. Unfortunately, I’m broke. To further lessen my initiative, I don’t really care about patenting an idea that isn't going to make money. The only reason that I applied for a patent in the first place was so that someone else couldn’t patent my idea and charge a whole bunch of money for it. So I am going to release the idea using a GPL license. The idea I sent to the USPTO is for a very simple, cheap, and durable design that provides fresh water to a very small niche market, namely farmers and farmland located in coastal regions. I’m not even sure how well it will work because I haven’t had the money to run any real tests. Although, I have run a small test with decent results.

Back in 2001 I was sitting on my couch thinking about why there wasn't enough food in some places of the earth. I ran through the usual suspects of quandaries that face developing and usually less fertile nations. The last sentence sums up two big difficulties nicely. Countries with food shortages are often not very fertile countries, often the soil type in not overly conducive to Western farming techniques; but more often there is a simple lack of fresh water. Secondly, developing countries do not have a lot of money.

The lack of water can be solved using desalination techniques, seeing as almost every country in the world has some access to the ocean or salt water. However, water desalination is not cheap. Projects can cost in the 500 million dollar range and often require the establishment of very high output power systems such as nuclear power plants. These are needed to generate the heat needed to vaporize enough water to properly support all water needs of the populace. This paradigm keeps fresh water from irrigating fields in developing countries.

So, I thought to myself "what if they did something like this". Thus my idea for a cost efficient system of pipe which desalinates water was born. Read the now publicly available patent application in html, an rtf file is available as well as .tiff files of the drawings for your downloading pleasure.

Invention of Solar Desalination or Distillation Apparatus
Copyright (C) 2007 Gregory E Kontos

This information and design is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This work is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

EEStor claims that it can store 10 times more power with a barium-nitrate ultracapacitor than can be stored with a lead-acid battery. They also claim that due to the nature of capacitors, it can be completely recharged in 10 minutes. This translated to an electric car that can drive for 500 miles on about $9 worth of electricity. EEStor claims that they will be shipping the new ultracapacitors to ZENN motor within the year on an exclusive contract.

Before you get too excited, one of the fine Boing Boing users posted this little cautionary tale.

Europe is anxious to cut back its usage of oil based energy. They are also looking to close an increasing number of their nuclear reactors. All this means that there is going to be an awful lot of investment in renewable energy in the next few years. Biofuels and Wind energy were two of the types mentioned in the article.