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 »

Having natural habitat in farming areas that supports ladybugs could help increase their abundance in crops where they control pests and help farmers reduce their costs, says a Michigan State University study. Read the rest of this entry »

Image from bagitmovie.wordpress.com

A 100-fold upsurge in human-produced plastic garbage in the ocean is altering habitats in the marine environment, according to a new study led by a graduate student researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

In 2009 an ambitious group of graduate students led the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX) to the North Pacific Ocean Subtropical Gyre aboard the Scripps research vessel New Horizon. During the voyage the researchers, who concentrated their studies a thousand miles west of California, documented an alarming amount of human-generated trash, mostly broken down bits of plastic the size of a fingernail floating across thousands of miles of open ocean.

At the time the researchers didn’t have a clear idea of how such trash might be impacting the ocean environment, but a new study published in the May 9 online issue of the journal Biology Letters reveals that plastic debris in the area popularly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” has increased by 100 times over in the past 40 years, leading to changes in the natural habitat of animals such as the marine insect Halobates sericeus. These “sea skaters” or “water striders”—relatives of pond water skaters—inhabit water surfaces and lay their eggs on flotsam (floating objects). Naturally existing surfaces for their eggs include, for example: seashells, seabird feathers, tar lumps and pumice. In the new study researchers found that sea skaters have exploited the influx of plastic garbage as new surfaces for their eggs. This has led to a rise in the insect’s egg densities in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. 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.

Back in 2007, I presented a paper at an academic conference arguing that it should be possible to read clues about previous climate regimes in literary works. My paper was short and only offered a few examples from 18th century English-language novels, but the idea, I think was sound. And thus was climato-criticism born.

So I was especially interested to see that a group of Spanish scholars are mining 8th – 10th century Arabic manuscripts for hints about past climate regimes and events. According to a news release on Eureka Alert, “The sources, from historians and political commentators of the era, focus on the social and religious events of the time, but do refer to abnormal weather events.

” ‘Climate information recovered from these ancient sources mainly refers to extreme events which impacted wider society such as droughts and floods,’ said lead author Dr Fernando Domínguez-Castro. ‘However, they also document conditions which were rarely experienced in ancient Baghdad such as hailstorms, the freezing of rivers or even cases of snow.’ ”

I think that’s a great approach, natch, and it is pretty much the one I took in examining early Gothic novels: the weather (it was the tail end of the Little Ice Age) heavily influenced the tone of these works, and heavy cloud cover, extreme storms, and the like dominate the descriptions of the natural world therein.

It turns out a group of psychics believe Apollo 16 might have found an alien ship on the moon. Plus, the sun is spitting giant magnetic bubbles of radiation at the Earth like we talked about its sister! Enjoy This Week in Discovery News.

via Psychics on the Moon and Incoming Sun Spit : Discovery News.

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.

There’s been a lot of buzz in the science blogosphere recently about the Research Works Act, a piece of legislation that’s been introduced in the U.S. that may have big impacts on open access publishing of scientific results. John Dupuis has an excellent round-up of posts on the subject and Kevin Zeinio has a great rant on the topic of keeping scientific knowledge open and accessible, too. What follows is an analysis by Janet D. Stewwedel from the Scientific American blog. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »