Smart Energy

The El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico is a tropical rainforest where a strain of the microbe Enterobacter lignolyticus was found that can tolerate an ionic liquid used to dissolve cellulosic biomass for microbial-based biofuel production. (Credit: Photo by Kristen DeAngelis)

In the search for technology by which economically competitive biofuels can be produced from cellulosic biomass, the combination of sugar-fermenting microbes and ionic liquid solvents looks to be a winner save for one major problem: the ionic liquids used to make cellulosic biomass more digestible for microbes can also be toxic to them. A solution to this conundrum, however, may be in the offing.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a multi-institutional partnership led by Berkeley Lab, have identified a tropical rainforest microbe that can endure relatively high concentrations of an ionic liquid used to dissolve cellulosic biomass. The researchers have also determined how the microbe is able to do this, a discovery that holds broad implications beyond the production of advanced biofuels.

“Our findings represent an important first step in understanding the mechanisms of ionic liquid resistance in bacteria and provide a basis for engineering ionic liquid tolerance into strains of fuel-producing microbes for a more efficient biofuel production process,” says Blake Simmons, a chemical engineer who heads JBEI’s Deconstruction Division and one of the senior investigators for this research.

Adds Michael Thelen, the principal investigator and a member of JBEI’s Deconstruction Division, “Our study also demonstrates that vigorous efforts to discover and analyze the unique properties of microorganisms can provide an important basis for understanding microbial stress and adaptation responses to anthropogenic chemicals used in industry.” Read the rest of this entry »

Early birds, save your creative challenges for just before bed. Your least productive time of day may be the perfect opportunity for a moment of insight, according to a study from a recent issue of Thinking & Reasoning…. Mareike Wieth, an assistant professor of psychological science at Albion College, and her colleagues divided study participants into morning types and evening types based on their answers on the Morningness Eveningness Question­naire… [and] subjects’ performance on tasks requiring creative insight was consistently better during their nonoptimal times of day.

via Sleepy Brains Think More Freely: Scientific American.

Climate change in the form of reduced snowfall in mountains is causing powerful and cascading shifts in mountainous plant and bird communities through the increased ability of elk to stay at high elevations over winter and consume plants, according to a groundbreaking study in Nature Climate Change.

The U.S. Geological Survey and University of Montana study not only showed that the abundance of deciduous trees and their associated songbirds in mountainous Arizona have declined over the last 22 years as snowpack has declined, but it also experimentally demonstrated that declining snowfall indirectly affects plants and birds by enabling more winter browsing by elk. Increased winter browsing by elk results in trickle-down ecological effects such as lowering the quality of habitat for songbirds.

via Dramatic links found between climate change, elk, plants, and birds.

A new University of Florida study shows genomes of a recently formed plant species to be highly unstable, a phenomenon that may have far-reaching evolutionary consequences.

the study is the first to document chromosomal variation in natural populations of a recently formed plant species following whole genome doubling, or polyploidy. Because many agricultural crops are young polyploids, the data may be used to develop plants with higher fertility and yields. Polyploid crops include wheat, corn, coffee, apples, broccoli and some rice species.

“It could be occurring in other polyploids, but this sort of methodology just hasn’t been applied to many plant species,” said study co-author Pam Soltis, distinguished professor and curator of molecular systematics and evolutionary genetics at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “So it may be that lots of polyploids — including our crops — may not be perfect additive combinations of the two parents, but instead have more chromosomes from one parent or the other.”

Researchers analyzed about 70 Tragopogon miscellus plants, a species in the daisy family that originated in the northwestern U.S. about 80 years ago. The new species formed naturally when two plants introduced from Europe mated to produce a hybrid offspring, and hybridization was followed by polyploidy.

via Newly formed plants could lead to improved crop fertility.

This came in the form of an email from Bruno Clarke to the SLSA listserv. I’ve loved Margulis and Sagan’s books for years. In her youth, Margulis was married briefly to Carl Sagan, the father of her son, Dorion.

Lynn Margulis was Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, and in 1999 received the Presidential Medal of Science from Bill Clinton. Read the rest of this entry »

KJ and I recently visited southern California. We spent a day in the Mojave Desert, my old stomping grounds, and shot this video in Joshua Tree National Park. It’s unusual to see water in the desert, much less a big puddle of it like we saw at Barker Dam. And below that, an amazing site: hundreds and hundreds of wind turbines down near the intersection of highways 62 and 10.

So I’ve turned into a time lapse junkie and KJ seems to think it’s pretty cool, too, so here we go again. Just what we need: another project.

I’ve always loved t/l, especially of plants growing, but until recently it’s been expensive to produce decent footage. I mean, you have to leave a camera in a field or the woods for some period of time, taking it out of production and risking it being stolen. Recently, though, I was lucky enough to meet Roger P. Hangarter, a botanist at Indiana University, and an expert and artist of the time-lapse medium. He’s a scientist… and an artist!

He told me to give PlantCam a try. It’s cheap and produces an HD-ish image. It’s early days yet and I’m still learning how to best deploy the cameras, but here is an early effort that isn’t too dumb. This is about 5 days worth of images compressed into 50 seconds. Warts and all.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo on DVD. The beetle may have conquered Japan, but the film conquers nothing.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
Grade: C-
reviewed by Brian Charles Clark
directed by Jessica Oreck

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo promises much more than it delivers. Directed by Jessica Oreck, a contributor to PBS’s Nature, the PR for the film alludes to science and a probing of the Japanese fascination with insects. Although Beetle Queen is a good-looking film with some interesting facets, it on the whole disappoints for its lack of narrative drive and its insistent but meandering obsession with tying together bits of Japanese poetry with shots of landscapes and bugs.

If we expected an in-depth look at Japanese culture and its people’s fascination with insects, I suppose we must be satisfied with the filmmaker’s visual anthropology. There are many arty shots in the film, that’s for sure, but they do not synergize into a narrative, nor do they create lyric intensity. With the emphasis on quoting snippets of Japanese literature, I suspect the latter, lyric mode was Oreck’s intention. I don’t think it works. The film is dry, full of lush (and creepy, no doubt, to the insectophobe) close-ups that ground us in nothing and leave us nowhere, offering nothing more than a macro shot of one bug after another. Read the rest of this entry »

A new study confirms it: Google is altering your brain. More precisely, our growing dependence on the Internet has changed how — and what — our brains choose to remember.

When we know where to find information, we’re less likely to remember it — an amnesia dubbed “The Google Effect” by a team led by psychologist Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University.

The finding, published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, doesn’t prove that Google, Yahoo or other search engines are making us dumber, as some have asserted. We’re still capable of remembering things that matter — and are not easily found online, Sparrow said.

Rather, it suggests that the human memory is reorganizing where it goes for information, adapting to new computing technologies rather than relying purely on rote memory. We’re outsourcing “search” from our brains to our computers.

“We’re not thoughtless empty-headed people who don’t have memories anymore,” Sparrow said. “But we are becoming particularly adept at remembering where to go find things. And that’s kind of amazing.”

via Google is changing your brain, study says, and don’t you forget it – San Jose Mercury News.

Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels
review by Brian Charles Clark
4 out of 5 stars
Countryman Press, Paperback, 160 pages, September 2010

Forest Forensics

What snapped that tree? Everybody is asking this and similar questions, obsessed as we are as a culture with forensic investigation. Was it weevils gnawing from within? Was it wind or snow load that toppled it? Or did it die for some other reason and snap due to lack of internal structural integrity?

Read Tom Wessels’ wonderful little book and learn. Better, pop it in your backpack and learn as you hike. Although written for forests of the northeastern part of the U.S., the principles involved are pretty much the same in all forest. (The particulars surely do vary by bioregion, though.)

With dozens of color photos and clear, concise writing, it’s hard to go wrong with this book if you’re interested in forested landscapes. For instance, Wessels’ chapter on how to tell if a forest has overgrown an agricultural field is full of cool details that are widely applicable. Part of this has to do with the fact that – at least in North America – farmers have cleared and abandoned fields in pretty much the same way for hundreds of years.

Read the signs like a real detective and appreciate your forest walks even more with this handy guide from ecologist and environmental biologist Wessels.