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More Than Half Of The World’s Plants And Animals ‘Facing Extinction’

May 16, 2010 By

For decades, rare exotic species such as the tiger, panda and snow leopard have become symbols of the world’s disappearing wildlife.

But according to a new report, common animals are vanishing at an even more alarming rate.

Over the last 30 years, the total number of mammals, reptiles, birds, fish and amphibians living in the world has plummeted by one third.

Thousands of species – from British honey bees and house sparrows, to Kenya zebra and giraffes – have seen their numbers fall  more quickly than at any time in recorded history.

Over the same period  the human population has doubled, conservationists say.

Experts last night warned that the world was going through the ‘sixth mass extinction’ in history  – and claimed that the scale of the natural losses may soon begin to hit the world’s economies.

The shocking finding comes in the third United Nations Global Biodiversity Outlook report – a snapshot of how the world’s wildlife is changing.

The report warned that natural systems that support economies, lives, food supplies and jobs are at risk of ‘rapid degradation and collapse’ unless political leaders take swift action.

Some ecosystems such as coral reefs and forests could soon reach ‘tipping points’ where they quickly become less useful to mankind.

Ahmed Djoghlaf, Convention on Biological Diversity executive secretary, said: ‘The news is not good.

‘We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history – extinction rates may be up to 1,000 times higher than the historical background rate.

‘Business as usual is no longer an option if we are to avoid irreversible damage to the life-support systems of our planet.’

The report found that up to 55 per cent of animal and plant species are threatened with extinction.

They include iconic species such as rhinos, whales and gorillas, along with blue fin tuna, the pacific walrus and monarch butterfly. Some 23 per cent of plant species are also threatened, along with 12 per cent of all bird species.

But the report – based on 500 peer-reviewed scientific papers and 110 national reports submitted by governments – warned that the amount of wildlife was also falling.

The global abundance of vertebrates – the group that includes mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians and fish – fell by about one-third between 1970 and 2006, the UN said.

In the tropics, the number of vertebrates fell by 60 per cent.

In Africa, populations of giraffe, zebra, warthog and impala – animals once commonly seen by tourists on safari – have fallen by around 70 per cent since the 1970s.

In Britain, the number of farmland birds such as skylarks and lapwings  has halved since 1980, while sparrow and starling numbers have gone down two thirds.

Butterflies, honey bees, bumblebees and moths have all seen dramatic falls in numbers.

The UN warned that the main reasons behind the disappearance of species, including loss of habitats,  including climate change, pollution and over-exploitation of resources, were not going away – and in some cases were getting worse.

The report also confirmed that the world’s leaders had failed to meet their target for curbing the rate of wildlife loss, agreed eight years ago.

The UN estimates that the world is losing habitats and wildlife worth £43 billion a year in food, jobs and natural resources. By David Derbyshire, The Daily Mail

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Lizards Latest On Global Warming’s Hit List

May 15, 2010 By

One-fifth of the world’s lizard species, including iguanas, geckos, skinks and snakes, could disappear in a few decades unless steps are taken to curb global warming, an international team of scientists warns.

The biologists, led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Ohio University, say they’ve already recorded alarming die-offs of lizards in Mexico, France and Madagascar.

The weather in these regions, including Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, has become too hot for many lizards to handle, said Donald Miles, an OU evolutionary biologist.

Stressed by the heat, the lizards spend too much time seeking shelter instead of food. The heat also might affect their ability to reproduce, Miles said.

“What’s surprising is how rapidly this can occur,” Miles said. “In France, we’ve seen the decline of common lizard populations in the span of a decade.”

The study puts lizards, including some in Ohio, on a growing list of animals and plants threatened by climate change. Biologists warn that each species plays a role, and that losing even one animal or plant carries unknown consequences.

Federal officials declared polar bears “threatened” in May 2008 because of the rapid loss of Arctic sea ice. Rising mountain temperatures also have made whitebark pines vulnerable to parasite beetles, which might wipe out the tree species, said Andrew Wetzler, director of wildlife programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“As the world warms and the temperature rises, many animals’ habitat essentially shrinks,” Wetzler said. “It also means that other animals are showing up in places where they’ve never been before, and that can be particularly alarming.”

UC-Santa Cruz biologist Barry Sinervo developed a model that ties lizard die-offs to rising temperatures and predicts where extinctions are most likely to occur.

The study is based in part on a new survey of 48 species of spiny lizards at 200 sites in Mexico that other researchers studied and reported on from 1975 to 1995. Sinervo and Miles found that 12 percent of the species at those sites had gone extinct.

The team reports that 6 percent of lizard species will disappear by 2050 and, if nothing is done, 20 percent will die out by 2080.

Their research, published today in the journal Science, accurately predicted vanishing populations of lizards recorded by biologists in North and South America, Europe, Africa and Australia.

“It is truly global and includes all the families of lizards,” Sinervo wrote in an e-mail. “It is bad no matter where you look.”

Miles said global warming could kill off the eastern fence lizard, Sceloporus undulatus, a 5-inch reptile found in southern Ohio forests. Timber rattlesnakes and northern copperhead snakes also could disappear.

Though people may not shed a tear over the loss of a lizard or venomous snake, each species is an integral part of Ohio’s wildlife and ecology, said Peter Niewiarowski, a University of Akron evolutionary biologist.

Fence lizards, for example, prey on insects such as beetles, flies, grasshoppers and moths, many of which are considered pests. Snakes feed on mice and other rodents.

Lizards and snakes often are food for eagles, hawks and other predators. Their loss could create consequences that are impossible to predict, Niewiarowski said.

“You can’t be concerned about lizards in isolation from other animals,” he said. “They are critical to the overall functioning of the food web.” By Spencer Hunt, The Columbus Dispatch

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CO2 Effects On Plants Increases Global Warming

May 5, 2010 By

Trees and other plants help keep the planet cool, but rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are turning down this global air conditioner. According to a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science, in some regions more than a quarter of the warming from increased carbon dioxide is due to its direct impact on vegetation. This warming is in addition to carbon dioxide’s better-known effect as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas. For scientists trying to predict global climate change in the coming century, the study underscores the importance of including plants in their climate models.

“Plants have a very complex and diverse influence on the climate system,” says study co-author Ken Caldeira of Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology. “Plants take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but they also have other effects, such as changing the amount of evaporation from the land surface. It’s impossible to make good climate predictions without taking all of these factors into account.”

Plants give off water through tiny pores in their leaves, a process called evapotranspiration that cools the plant, just as perspiration cools our bodies. On a hot day, a tree can release tens of gallons of water into the air, acting as a natural air conditioner for its surroundings. The plants absorb carbon dioxide for photosynthesis through the same pores (called stomata). But when carbon dioxide levels are high, the leaf pores shrink. This causes less water to be released, diminishing the tree’s cooling power.

The warming effects of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas have been known for a long time, says Caldeira. But he and fellow Carnegie scientist Long Cao were concerned that it is not as widely recognized that carbon dioxide also warms our planet by its direct effects on plants. Previous work by Carnegie’s Chris Field and Joe Berry had indicated that the effects were important. “There is no longer any doubt that carbon dioxide decreases evaporative cooling by plants and that this decreased cooling adds to global warming,” says Cao. “This effect would cause significant warming even if carbon dioxide were not a greenhouse gas.”

In their model, the researchers doubled the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and recorded the magnitude and geographic pattern of warming from different factors. They found that, averaged over the entire globe, the evapotranspiration effects of plants account for 16% of warming of the land surface, with greenhouse effects accounting for the rest. But in some regions, such as parts of North America and eastern Asia, it can be more than 25% of the total warming. “If we think of a doubling of carbon dioxide as causing about four degrees of warming, in many places three of those degrees are coming from the effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and one is coming from the direct effect of carbon dioxide on plants.”

The researchers also found that their model predicted that high carbon dioxide will increase the runoff from the land surface in most areas, because more water from precipitation bypasses the plant cooling system and flows directly to rivers and streams. Earlier models based on greenhouse effects of carbon dioxide had also predicted higher runoff, but the new research predicts that changes in evapotranspiration due to high carbon dioxide could have an even stronger impact on water resources than those models predict.

“These results really show that how plants respond to carbon dioxide is very important for making good climate predictions,” says Caldeira. “So if we want to improve climate predictions, we need to improve the representation of land plants in the climate models. More broadly, it shows that the kind of vegetation that’s on the surface of our planet and what that vegetation is doing is very important in determining our climate. We need to take great care in considering what kind of changes we make to forests and other ecosystems, because they are likely to have important climate consequences.”

The study is published in the May 3-7 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. redOrbit

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How Grass Buffers Keep Agricultural Herbicides At Bay

April 28, 2010 By

Grass buffer strips are commonly used in crop production to reduce herbicide runoff. These practices are encouraged through incentives, regulations or laws, and are effective at lowering herbicide concentration in runoff. However, subsurface filtration (under the buffer strips) is not as well documented, and neither are the effects of trees integrated into buffer strips with grasses. Understanding these effects is crucial as agriculture producers continue to adopt these strategies.

Researchers studied the impact of grass and grass/tree buffer strips on three herbicides commonly used in agriculture. The scientists studied the transport of the herbicides in both surface runoff and subsurface infiltration during two growing seasons.

Vegetative barriers reduce herbicide concentrations in runoff, but movement of herbicides through subsurface filtration actually increased. Total export of herbicides was reduced through the use of grass and grass/tree barriers. The research was conducted by Emmanuelle Caron, Pierre Lafrance, Jean-Christian Auclair of the University of Quebec, and Marc Duchemin of the Institute of Research and Development in Agri-Environment.

The results are reported in the March/April 2010 edition of the Journal of Environmental Quality, published by the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Soil Science Society of America, and the Soil Science Society of America.

The results for the first year showed a 35% reduction in herbicide concentration in grass and grass/tree buffer strips than with no buffer. Herbicide concentrations in subsurface filtration increased 800-1200-% with buffer strips, although total overall concentration was reduced 40-60%. In 2005, total herbicide concentration exported through the buffer strips was 75-95% less than without the buffers. The findings indicate that grass barriers decrease surface water runoff while increasing subsurface infiltration, resulting in an overall loss of herbicides before reaching bodies of water.

Integrating trees into the barriers did not result in any significant differences. This was possible due to the fact that the trees were only two years old at the beginning of the study, and their root systems were not yet developed enough to demonstrate any impact. Further research is needed to determine the effects of long-established trees in buffer strips. Local meteorological conditions also play an important role in the efficiency of buffer strips, and the two years of the study experienced a wide range of variability that future long term research should address. PhysOrg

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Indonesia Aims To Tap Volcano Power

April 24, 2010 By

Kamojang: Indonesia has launched an ambitious plan to tap the vast power of its volcanoes and become a world leader in geothermal energy, while trimming greenhouse gas emissions.

The sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands stretching from the Indian to the Pacific Oceans contains hundreds of volcanoes, estimated to hold around 40 percent of the world’s geothermal energy potential.

But so far only a tiny fraction of that potential has been unlocked, so the government is seeking help from private investors, the World Bank and partners like Japan and the United States to exploit the power hidden deep underground.

“The government’s aim to add 4,000 megawatts of geothermal capacity from the existing 1,189 megawatts by 2014 is truly challenging,” Indonesian Geothermal Association chief Surya Darma said.

One of the biggest obstacles is the cost. Indonesia currently relies on dirty coal-fired power plants using locally produced coal. A geothermal plant costs about twice as much, and can take many more years in research and development to get online.

But once established, geothermal plants like the one built in Kamojang, Java, in 1982 can convert the endless free supplies of volcanic heat into electricity with much lower overheads — and less pollution — than coal.

This is the pay-off the government is hoping to sell at the fourth World Geothermal Congress opening Sunday on the Indonesian resort island of Bali. The six-day event will attract some 2,000 people from more than 80 countries.

“An investment of 12 billion dollars is needed to add 4,000 MW capacity,” energy analyst Herman Darnel Ibrahim said, putting into context the recent announcement of 400 million dollars in financing from lenders including the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

“Field exploration can take from three to five years, suitability studies for funding takes a year, while building the plant itself takes three years,” he added.

If there is any country in the world where geothermal makes sense it is Indonesia. Yet despite its natural advantages, it lags behind the United States and the Philippines in geothermal energy production.

Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s third biggest greenhouse gas emitter exploits only seven geothermal fields out of more than 250 it could be developing.

The case for geothermal has become stronger with the rapid growth of Indonesia’s economy and the corresponding strain on its creaking power infrastructure.

The archipelago of 234 million people is one of the fastest growing economies in the Group of 20 but currently only 65 percent of Indonesians have access to electricity.

The goal is to reach 90 percent of the population by the end of the decade, through a two-stage plan to “fast-track” the provision of an extra 10,000 MW by 2012, mostly through coal, and another 10,000 MW from clean sources like volcanoes by 2014.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s pledge to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent against 2005 levels by 2020 has also spurred the push to geothermal.

Many of the best geothermal sources lie in protected forests, so the government aims to allow the drilling of wells inside conservation areas while insisting that the power plants themselves be outside.

Geothermal fans welcomed the recent completion of negotiations between a consortium of US, Japanese and Indonesian companies and the state electricity company, Perusahaan Listrik Negara, over a 340 MW project on Sumatra island.

The Sarulla project will be Indonesia’s second biggest geothermal plant, after the Wayang Windu facility in West Java.

“The Sarulla project is a perfect example of how Indonesia can realise its clean energy and energy security goals by partnering with international firms,” US Ambassador Cameron Hume wrote in a local newspaper.

Several firms such as Tata and Chevron have submitted bids to build another geothermal plant in North Sumatra, with potential for 200 MW.

Bureau Report

Kamojang: Indonesia has launched an ambitious plan to tap the vast power of its volcanoes and become a world leader in geothermal energy, while trimming greenhouse gas emissions.

The sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands stretching from the Indian to the Pacific Oceans contains hundreds of volcanoes, estimated to hold around 40 percent of the world’s geothermal energy potential.

But so far only a tiny fraction of that potential has been unlocked, so the government is seeking help from private investors, the World Bank and partners like Japan and the United States to exploit the power hidden deep underground.

“The government’s aim to add 4,000 megawatts of geothermal capacity from the existing 1,189 megawatts by 2014 is truly challenging,” Indonesian Geothermal Association chief Surya Darma said.

One of the biggest obstacles is the cost. Indonesia currently relies on dirty coal-fired power plants using locally produced coal. A geothermal plant costs about twice as much, and can take many more years in research and development to get online.

But once established, geothermal plants like the one built in Kamojang, Java, in 1982 can convert the endless free supplies of volcanic heat into electricity with much lower overheads — and less pollution — than coal.

This is the pay-off the government is hoping to sell at the fourth World Geothermal Congress opening Sunday on the Indonesian resort island of Bali. The six-day event will attract some 2,000 people from more than 80 countries.

“An investment of 12 billion dollars is needed to add 4,000 MW capacity,” energy analyst Herman Darnel Ibrahim said, putting into context the recent announcement of 400 million dollars in financing from lenders including the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

“Field exploration can take from three to five years, suitability studies for funding takes a year, while building the plant itself takes three years,” he added.

If there is any country in the world where geothermal makes sense it is Indonesia. Yet despite its natural advantages, it lags behind the United States and the Philippines in geothermal energy production.

Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s third biggest greenhouse gas emitter exploits only seven geothermal fields out of more than 250 it could be developing.

The case for geothermal has become stronger with the rapid growth of Indonesia’s economy and the corresponding strain on its creaking power infrastructure.

The archipelago of 234 million people is one of the fastest growing economies in the Group of 20 but currently only 65 percent of Indonesians have access to electricity.

The goal is to reach 90 percent of the population by the end of the decade, through a two-stage plan to “fast-track” the provision of an extra 10,000 MW by 2012, mostly through coal, and another 10,000 MW from clean sources like volcanoes by 2014.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s pledge to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent against 2005 levels by 2020 has also spurred the push to geothermal.

Many of the best geothermal sources lie in protected forests, so the government aims to allow the drilling of wells inside conservation areas while insisting that the power plants themselves be outside.

Geothermal fans welcomed the recent completion of negotiations between a consortium of US, Japanese and Indonesian companies and the state electricity company, Perusahaan Listrik Negara, over a 340 MW project on Sumatra island.

The Sarulla project will be Indonesia’s second biggest geothermal plant, after the Wayang Windu facility in West Java.

“The Sarulla project is a perfect example of how Indonesia can realise its clean energy and energy security goals by partnering with international firms,” US Ambassador Cameron Hume wrote in a local newspaper.

Several firms such as Tata and Chevron have submitted bids to build another geothermal plant in North Sumatra, with potential for 200 MW.  Zeenews

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NYC Study: 50 Native Plants Disappearing

April 3, 2010 By

Oriental Bittersweet was an exotic foreigner still found mostly in East Asia when the New York Botanical Garden planted its first specimen in 1897.

Today, it is everywhere. The shrubby vine is common in woodlands and fields in 21 states, ranging from North Carolina, to Maine, to Illinois.

The American Bittersweet, meanwhile, has been in a slow decline.

Once common across the eastern two-thirds of the U.S., the native version of the plant still is around, but it has vanished from many areas now dominated by its hardier, faster-breeding Asian cousin.

“We go entire seasons now without seeing it,” said Gerry Moore, director of the science department at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

The rise and fall of the two plants has been chronicled by the Botanic Garden as part of a 20-year study that offers a dispiriting outlook on the future of some native flora.

So far, the project has identified 50 native species that have disappeared from metropolitan New York during the last 100 years, and others that have become far less abundant due to factors including the destruction of their habitat, pollution and competition from foreign interlopers.

In some areas, the landscape is also becoming less biologically diverse.

“While you used to have a marsh of 50 or 60 species, you might now have an entire marsh of phragmites, the common reed,” Moore said.

The study focused on counties within 50 miles of New York City, but experts say other scientists have made similar findings nationwide.

In the West, sagebrush has been giving way to cheatgrass, which found its way to the U.S. in packing materials and ship ballast in the late 1800s.

Nature lovers strolling through wooded glades, thinking they are among trees that have stood since the Revolution, are actually looking at Norway Maple native to Europe.

Kudzu, which hails from Japan and China, infested the South after farmers in the 1930s through the 1950s were encouraged to use it to stop soil erosion.

Even the pristine open spaces of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming are now populated with Houndstongue and Yellow Toadflax, both from Europe.

Bit by bit, scientists say, the American landscape is becoming less American.

“We are going to our national parks now and seeing Europe,” said Tom Stohlgren, a research ecologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. “We are homogenizing the globe at a very fast rate.”

Experts say the trend has many causes, but the biggest one may turn out to be globalization.

European traders and settlers have been bringing Old World plants to the Americas since colonization, but the process has accelerated with every advance in travel.

Now, foreign species arrive so frequently aboard planes, trucks and cargo ships that the odds of the next Oriental Bittersweet arriving are exponentially greater.

“That’s the scary part, and the $64,000 question,” Stohlgren said. “What we have had is an explosion in trade and transportation, and we have yet to see the full effect of that.”

“It took 170 million years for the continents to drift apart, but only 400 years to move them all back together,” he said. “I describe this as Darwin on steroids, and we are going to see extremely fast changes because of it.”

Climate change and pollution may only worsen the problem, as they make the habitat of many native plants less hospitable, said Peter Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.

“Obviously the loss of wild areas and their reduction in size makes it harder for natives to persist. As global warming proceeds, it will get worse,” he said.

The problem is one that has attracted attention both in the U.S. and globally.

The Nature Conservancy, a leading environmental group, has persuaded some major home and garden retailers to stop selling invasive trees like the Norway maple and Lombardy poplar in regions.

It also has been working with researchers and government regulators on developing models that might predict when a nonnative plant might have the potential to become dangerously invasive, if imported into the U.S.

Several states have established advisory committees on invasive species and a few have banned the sale of plants like the Purple Loosestrife and the Japanese barberry, both of which came over the late 1800s and are now out-competing native flora.

The U.S. Coast Guard has been working on draft regulations for ballast water, aimed at preventing ships from picking up invasive aquatic organisms on foreign coasts and bringing them into North American waters.

Any changes will come too late to prevent some of the native losses identified by Brooklyn Botanic Garden researchers.

Their comprehensive and ongoing survey has found that wildflowers such as the Scarlet Indian Paintbrush, pennywort, Sidebells wintergreen and the Sundial lupine have all seriously declined in the region

At the same time, camphor weed, one found only in the South, has become common throughout the metropolitan area.

“There is still a lot of native diversity out there, but this is an alarm,” said Troy Weldy, director of ecological management for the Eastern New York chapter of the Nature Conservancy, and co-author of the New York Flora Atlas.

Species shift due to globalization, he said, “could turn out to be much more of a threat than climate change.” By David B. Caruso, Philadelphia Daily News

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Researchers Convert Solar Energy To Sugars

March 17, 2010 By

Engineers from the University of Cincinnati devise a foam that captures energy and removes excess carbon dioxide from the air — thanks to semi-tropical frogs.

For decades, farmers have been trying to find ways to get more energy out of the sun.

In natural photosynthesis, plants take in solar energy and carbon dioxide and then convert it to oxygen and sugars. The oxygen is released to the air and the sugars are dispersed throughout the plant — like that sweet corn we look for in the summer. Unfortunately, the allocation of light energy into products we use is not as efficient as we would like. Now engineering researchers at the University of Cincinnati are doing something about that.

The researchers are finding ways to take energy from the sun and carbon from the air to create new forms of biofuels, thanks to a semi-tropical frog species. Their results have just been published online in “Artificial Photosynthesis in Ranaspumin-2 Based Foam” (March 5, 2010) in the journal “Nano Letters.” (It will be a cover story for the print edition in the fall.)

Research Assistant Professor David Wendell, student Jacob Todd and College of Engineering and Applied Science Dean Carlo Montemagno co-authored the paper, based on research in Montemagno’s lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Their work focused on making a new artificial photosynthetic material which uses plant, bacterial, frog and fungal enzymes, trapped within a foam housing, to produce sugars from sunlight and carbon dioxide.

Foam was chosen because it can effectively concentrate the reactants but allow very good light and air penetration. The design was based on the foam nests of a semi-tropical frog called the Tungara frog, which creates very long-lived foams for its developing tadpoles.

“The advantage for our system compared to plants and algae is that all of the captured solar energy is converted to sugars, whereas these organisms must divert a great deal of energy to other functions to maintain life and reproduce,” says Wendell. “Our foam also uses no soil, so food production would not be interrupted, and it can be used in highly enriched carbon dioxide environments, like the exhaust from coal-burning power plants, unlike many natural photosynthetic systems.”

He adds, “In natural plant systems, too much carbon dioxide shuts down photosynthesis, but ours does not have this limitation due to the bacterial-based photo-capture strategy.”

There are many benefits to being able to create a plant-like foam.

“You can convert the sugars into many different things, including ethanol and other biofuels,” Wendell explains. “And it removes carbon dioxide from the air, but maintains current arable land for food production.”

“This new technology establishes an economical way of harnessing the physiology of living systems by creating a new generation of functional materials that intrinsically incorporates life processes into its structure,” says Dean Montemagno. “Specifically in this work it presents a new pathway of harvesting solar energy to produce either oil or food with efficiencies that exceed other biosolar production methodologies. More broadly it establishes a mechanism for incorporating the functionality found in living systems into systems that we engineer and build.”

The next step for the team will be to try to make the technology feasible for large-scale applications like carbon capture at coal-burning power plants.

“This involves developing a strategy to extract both the lipid shell of the algae (used for biodiesel) and the cytoplasmic contents (the guts), and reusing these proteins in the foam,” says Wendell. “We are also looking into other short carbon molecules we can make by altering the enzyme cocktail in the foam.”

Montemagno adds, “It is a significant step in delivering the promise of nanotechnology.” By: Wendy Beckman, redOrbit

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