Fuel-Making Fungus: Put Some Gliocladium in Your Tank

A fungus discovered in southern South America is capable of turning cellulose into diesel fuel, much like that used to power vehicles the world over. The endophyte (a fungus that lives inside of plant tissues), dubbed Gliocladium roseum, breaks down the cellulose and releases a vapor rich in octane, alcohols and esters in a mixture that burns with greater efficiency than diesel fuels currently on the market, resulting in what could become a lower-cost, cleaner-burning, renewable fuel source. While the fungus has so far been found only in a single tree species, New Scientist reports that

...the fungus can grow on cellulose, which contains huge amounts of hydrocarbon but is notoriously difficult to break down.

"It's the most abundant organic compound produced on earth, but most of it goes to waste," says [discoverer Gary] Strobel. By fermenting the fungus on cellulose, it should be possible to generate huge quantities of the diesel vapour "ready-for-use".

In other words, it might be possible to culture G. roseum in industrial-sized vats of medium made from waste paper products and covert that waste into relatively cheap energy while reducing carbon emissions. More research needs to be done to determine how economically this can be done.

All in all, this is yet another story for the "fungi... is there anything they can't do?" file. It's also another powerful argument about the importance of preserving natural resources and native ecology around the world. New species with applications that can improve our lives in numerous ways are frequently discovered. For every species lost that we know about, how many do we lose before we've ever found out about them in the first place? Gliocladium roseum could just as easily been among that latter category.

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Rocky Twyman Blasphemes and Will Be Smited by Norman Fell

If you're a poor slob like me who still drives a car despite the high price of gasoline (high for Americans, anyhow), you've certainly noticed by now that the price has come down just a little bit in the last couple of weeks. As you may also recall, Rocky Twyman, a Jesus-freak and Oprah Winfrey self-help guru, launched a series of pray-ins at gas stations when the price began to sky rocket back in April. His "Pray at the Pump" campaign was intended to invoke divine assistance in making gas cheaper so that Americans could once again exercise their apparently god-given right to drive Hummers. At that time, I started praying, too, but I prayed to the One True God — the Ghost of Norman Fell. Moreover, I prayed that the price of gas would go up during the period from April 27 until the beginning of June. It was a test I devised to see whether the Ghost of Norman Fell was, in fact, more powerful than Twyman's "Jesus," whom some readers may have heard of before. For those that haven't, Jesus, also known as "Christ" and "Son o'God" and "Jehovah Junior" is a particularly popular ghost amongst certain Western religious sects, said to be the disincarnate spirit of a Middle Eastern prophet and part-time carpenter executed by Roman authorities around 30 CE. You can find out more about him and some of the more popular myths propounded by cults based on his alleged exploits on Wikipedia.

So here we are in mid-August and Rocky Twyman and friends are now claiming credit for a decrease in the price of gasoline:

Petrol pump pilgrims keep faith
By Greg Wood and Sandra Shmueli

Rocky Twyman, 59, a veteran community campaigner, started Pray At The Pump meetings at petrol stations in April.

Since then, the average price of what the US calls gasoline has fallen from more than $4 a gallon to $3.80...

"We were down in Huntsville, Alabama. We finished praying," Mr Twyman said. "Immediately the owners came out and changed the gas prices. They brought it down. We had marvellous success down in St Louis, Missouri."

This week the group returned to the site of their first prayer meeting to celebrate. Singing "We shall overcome," they changed the words of the well-known hymn to "We'll have lower gas prices".

Mr Twyman is sceptical that market forces might be responsible for the lower prices...

Oh, really?

First off, the article is wrong. The US national average price for a gallon of gas when Twyman started his "Pray at the Pump" drivel wasn't $4 but about $3.30; it didn't hit $4 per gallon until Memorial Day weekend, which is at the end of May, or more than a month after Twyman started trying to get Jesus involved and I brought down the power of Norman Fell upon America's gas stations. The price of gas went up, not down, demonstrating that Norman Fell is, indeed, far more powerful than this Jesus fellow.

Moreover, the price of gas continued to climb until peaking in July, or a month after I stopped beseeching Mr. Roper's Holy Spirit to stop increasing it. In all that time, Jesus was unable to reverse the mighty, mighty force of Spectral Fell. In fact, even with the recent decline from the peak price, the average price is still about $3.80 per gallon. That's 15% higher than it was when Twyman started blubbering to his false idol.

Still, I could be making all of this up, couldn't I? Well, here's a graph charting the national average cost for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline for the period beginning in February 2006 and ending in August 2008. It is based on information compiled by the US Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration. I took the original graph and added a red "x" to the point at which Twyman started his pray-ins and a green "x" at that which I stopped praying to Norman Fell. As you can see, Twyman's praying was clearly ineffective, and the price of gas decreased only after Norman Fell's divine power to raise prices was no longer invoked:


In case there were any doubters left out there, this is graphic proof of the superiority of Norman Fell to Jesus Christ of Nazareth. For Twyman to continue to claim otherwise is nothing short of blasphemy, a crime against the Holy Roper for which he will surely be punished in the most severe manner.

Death to the Infidel! The power of Fell compels you! Abandon ye your wicked ways of worshiping the wheezing, wonky Jesus and take the step that is new. Get down on your knees for Norman!

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McCain's Energy Plan as Explained by Mark Fiore

Mark Fiore explains John McCain's energy plan as only he can:

Sing along to the tune of the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies!

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Fungus to the Rescue: Applied Mycology Could Help Provide Energy

Biofuels are a fine idea in principle as a solution to the world's fuel crisis, but not everybody has come up with a good way of turning biomass into energy. Using food crops as a raw material, as we've seen, shifts the problem from energy availability to food availability. It's not a real solution. Brazil long ago came up with a better solution, using things like waste from sugar cane processing as their raw material. Still, the method they've used to convert biomass into ethanol requires significant energy input, so it isn't as efficient as it could be.

That's where fungi come into the picture. A team of scientists in the UK is developing a method whereby a fungus (which one isn't specified in the article) is used to break down cellulose-rich agricultural waste into fuel. Good idea!

Fungus fuel of the future say Warwickshire scientists
By Mary Griffin

BRITAIN'S cars could soon be fuelled by fungus, thanks to a team of Warwickshire scientists.

As Gordon Brown this week sounded a warning about biofuels, Warwick University scientists were already working on the solution, using fungus as their secret weapon.

The boom in biofuels - turning crops into energy - has led to fewer food crops, higher food prices and in some parts of the world, deforestation.

But instead of growing crops to make biofuels, scientists at Wellesbourne's Horticultural Research Institute want to use 'second generation' products, like stalks from cornfields, unused stalks from broccoli and sprouts, or the straw left over from wheat.

But because these waste products are hard to break down, turning them into biofuels is costly and energy intensive...

...the Warwickshire team is using super fungus and bacteria to break down the waste, making biofuel production more energy efficient and cost-effective.

And the oil extracted from the waste products can be used not only for energy, but for chemical products like cling film, shampoo and detergent...

Many fungi break down cellulose for a living; some also break down lignin. Those which break down only cellulose are called brown rotters and those that break down both are white rotters. The latter could, in theory, be used to turn wood into fuel, too.

On a more local note, there are talks in the work right now for similar research to start up at my lab in conjunction with a local entrepreneur. That research would be more geared toward the recycling of paper and wood products, but the principle is quite similar.

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Fossilized Thinking Revisited: If It Feels Good, Drill It

Maybe I was wrong about drilling for oil in environmentally sensitive areas as a solution to our energy woes. John McCain made a statement at a town hall meeting in Fresno, CA a couple of days ago that may force me to rethink my opinion. Who can argue with logic like this?

Even though it may take some years, the fact that we are exploiting those reserves would have psychological impact that I think is beneficial.

— Source

I hadn't considered the whole "even if it's not effective, it feels good" angle. Why, that's not fossilized thinking at all! That's touchy-feely, New Age psychobabble scrumptiousness. No sense doing something that might be difficult and require real change and sacrifice when a silky-smooth non-solution can be caressed at will. Why didn't I think of that? Who needs an energy program when we can have psychological impact? We'll generate all the energy we need by banging our heads against a wall!

I'd like to offer the following campaign strategy to the McCain team at no cost:

What could have greater positive psychological impact than passing out free ice cream cones to every man, woman and child in the nation? Nobody can be unhappy when they're eating ice cream.

It sounds like this was the direction they were heading in anyhow, so they probably don't need my help. Who needs ideas when you can have ice cream? Voters can't eat ideas!

Readers, clip that coupon now. I'm sure it will be redeemable by November.

Hyphal tip to Thoughts from Kansas.

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Fossil Fuel and Fossilized Thinking

Every time the price of gasoline goes up there's renewed talk about drilling for oil in parts of the United States that had previously been off-limits for it. Whether it's in Alaska or the Gulf of Mexico, the idea is a seemingly simple one. We'll drill some new wells, pull the petroleum out of the ground, and before you know it we'll be paying 99¢ per gallon at the pump. Happy days are here again.

The latest incarnation of this notion comes from John McCain and potential vice presidential nominee Governor Charlie Crist of Florida. Crist had previously opposed drilling in the Gulf of Mexico but now that he stands a chance of advancing politically as a running mate to McCain he's changed his tune. Both Democrats and Republicans in Florida's legislature oppose the idea, though, and so it's unlikely to happen.

For some reason people feel that if you go out, drill these holes, that the price of gas is going to go down... There are oil spills and there are a hell of a lot of them... You get a spill and you're shutting that beach down for 10 or 15 years.

— Dennis Jones (R-Pinellas County)

If I had to vote on it right now, I would not vote for drilling offshore.

— Ron Reagan (R-Bradenton)

A very good question to ask at this juncture would be, "Why are there still politicians running for national office who are thinking about oil as a solution?" This is fossilized thinking. The solution to the problem can't include depending on continuing the same problem into the future. What we need is a New Deal for Energy.

If drilling off of Florida and the like were permitted today, it would be at least five years before production began and then the impact of that production would be to drop the price of gasoline about 3¢ to 5¢ per gallon. Gasoline is already $4.10 per gallon on average across the country. By the time production started, we could reasonable expect that the price would average, conservatively, $5.50 per gallon. At best, we're talking about savings of perhaps 10%, and that's being rather optimistic. Even if the risk of doing harm to already stressed ecosystems were as ideally small as some believe, in terms of risk vs. benefit that's hardly worthwhile. Moreover, if the US increased production, that still leaves us open to the threat of other countries cutting production to keep the price of oil high. A few new oil wells are not going to change the bigger picture in terms of where world reserves actually lie, and even if we conserve energy not only will our demand likely continue to increase — albeit at a slower rate — but demand in India and China will also grow. This doesn't look much like a solution to me.

We really need to start thinking about some fundamental changes, and a good place to start would be to make automobiles less necessary. We need to have a massive project in public mass transit. I don't mean only within the limits of large metropolitan areas, I mean that the US needs to build a mass transit system that can get people anywhere in the country that they want and need to travel. Cars should be relegated to a last resort status. It should be more expensive to travel by car than by mass transit, even if one were going all the way from New York to Los Angeles.

This hypothetical national transit system needs to be designed for flexible energy sources, too. It should be capable of being powered by multiple means — solar, wind, gassified coal and biomass. In fact, it shouldn't matter what the fuel is. It should be able to run on anything, at least in the great majority of applications. If we're low on one energy source, or if we find a new one, it should be a matter of simply plugging that new source into the grid.

I don't think this is a solution that could feasibly be left to the alleged free market, either. It's been more than 30 years since the United States experienced its first massive fuel shortages and we still travel primarily by automobile. If the free market were ever going to fix this situation, we'd have real solutions by now. Corporations see profits by minimizing expenditures and maximizing returns; they'll take the most immediately cost-effective, bottom-line-boosting route every time. That's not what's needed here.

What we need, I think, is a solution that looks a lot like the public works projects of the Great Depression Era, or like the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950's. Both of these revolutionized America's infrastructure, and we need another such revolution right now. This is too big a project for a patchwork of corporate interests to tackle. A centralized solution is needed. Personally, I don't care if such a solution looks like something that one might see produced by Socialism. Who cares? The only entity that can potentially pull together and coordinate the enormous resources necessary is the federal government. They'll screw some things up, no doubt, but right now the closest thing we've got is AmTrack, really. That might be part of the planning, but it's certainly not the solution itself. We need much, much more to happen and the time for waiting for it passed us by in the 1970's. We don't even have a viable alternative energy system after all this time. A top-down approach is called for.

And while we're talking about alternative energy sources, why not horses? Yes, it sounds antiquated, but why not put some horses and buggies on the roads for people traveling relatively short distances in cities and towns? Oats are a lot cheaper than oil. We can even recycle horse manure into fuel for the rest of the national transit grid if we're smart about it.

I'm not an urban planner or engineer, but I don't think one has to be one to realize that big changes are warranted here. We should be looking at the end of the automobile era at this point. We should be looking at solutions, not at putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. America has done it in the past and we can do it again if the national will is there and we have people in national office capable of thinking of long term, big picture changes that won't leave us right back where we started by the time one or two more presidential administrations have come and gone. Fossilized thinking that relies on fossil fuels isn't going to cut it anymore. Poking a few more holes in the ground and hoping that rotten Carboniferous Period plant juice will come gushing to the surface is something that might mollify those whose own lifetimes probably won't extend a decade or two but it isn't going to change anything in the ways they need to change.

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Bow Down Before the One Your Serve

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Why Don't All Taxis Have GPS Units?

I was on my way home from the lab just now and stopped off at the Mobil station at Main and Mill to pick up a pack of smokes. As I left the store, a Yellow Cab driver approached me and asked me how to get to Webster. He'd never been there before and had to pick up a fare there. I've never been there either as far as I know, so I first told the cabbie that I didn't know. I wasn't really thinking; it has been a long day.

So the cabbie went back to his cab and started fumbling with a map. I got back to my car and remembered that I have a GPS unit. I took the "lady in the box" out of the glove compartment, switched her on and approached the cab.

I knocked on the window and asked the cabbie to give me the address he was trying to get to, then punched it into the unit and there they were, turn by turn directions right to the door where his far was waiting in Webster. The driver, an African fellow, thanked me profusely and waited for me to pull out of the lot ahead of him.

Now, this is reason to ponder. Why aren't taxis equipped with GPS units? There are always places that some driver is bound not to know how to get to, and a GPS unit is a lot better for such things than a paper map. As someone who absolutely lacks a sense of direction and relies on both a car GPS and a hand held unit to get me where I'm going on-road and off, I can attest to how indispensable these things really are. Moreover, I can't figure out how cabbies can earn a living these days with the price of gas through the roof. I'd imagine the last thing a driver wants to do is waste gas; every excess gallon burned is money out of his pocket and I'd be willing to bet there's not a lot in there to begin with these days.

Why, then, don't the owners of taxi fleets provide drivers with GPS units that they could sign out if they wanted them? It would probably cut a few minutes out of the time it took a driver to pick up a fare and get them where they were going, it would likely save gas, and it would help new drivers learn their way around. There are some pretty good deals on the things these days and I'm sure someone buying multiple units could work out a deal on price with a supplier.

Paper maps waste time and money. Get with the digital age, fleet owners!

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Is God More Powerful Than the Ghost of Normal Fell? Let's Find Out.

There's a preacher named Rocky Twyman who is presently traveling around the country praying, which in itself isn't particularly unusual. It's where he's praying and what he's praying for that are maybe just a little bit silly:

Pray-in at S.F. gas station asks God to lower prices

Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.

Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer...

"God is the only one we can turn to at this point," said Twyman, 59...

...he says anyone who wants to follow his example should keep it simple.

"God, deliver us from these high gas prices," Twyman said. "That's all they have to say."

...he says his prayer for gas-price relief from God is sincere.

"I've seen him work miracles in my life," Twyman said. "He told us that all we need to do is ask and believe. He can do it, and he will do it, but we have to ask him to do it."

Ummmm, yeah.

I'm a relatively empirically-minded individual, so I think an experiment is in order. While Twyman is praying to the Invisible Man in the Sky to lower gas prices, I'm going to make supplications to the ghost of Normal Fell to raise them. Fell, who was most famous for playing Mr. Roper on the 1970's hit TV series Three's Company, died in 1998. As far as I'm aware, no miracles have been attributed to him and nobody attaches any particular spiritual significance or beliefs to the deceased actor. He appears to wield no particular supernatural powers in the afterlife.

I hypothesize, however, that he's at least every bit as powerful as the deity to whom Rocky Twyman is praying for lower gas prices. By praying to him daily for gas prices to go up, I will test whether or not he is actually more competent at effecting change in the physical world through supernatural intercession. If the price of gas continues to increase overall during the next 30 days, we can conclude that the ghost of Norman Fell is, in fact, more powerful than Twyman's Jehovah of the Gas Pump.

Considering that the price of gas has been increasing by 2¢ per day here in Worcester, Norman Fell may already be at work!

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Fully Synthetic Bacterial Chromosome Produced in Lab: First Fully Artificial Life Coming This Year

It looks as if 2008 is going to be the year that we see the first living thing manufactured in a laboratory from nonliving precursors. As it stands right now, an entire genome the size of that of the smallest known bacterium has been assembled from nucleotides. All that's left now is to implant it into a membrane containing a few needed proteins — although don't understand why they haven't done that yet.

Like all Mycoplasma, M. genitalium doesn't have a polypeptide cell wall, just a cell membrane, which in part accounts for its relatively tiny genome. It's a good choice of organism to start with, obviously. Ultimately, we may well see a chromosome capable of building itself a whole prokaryotic cell from precursor materials out of this project.

None of which takes away from what's already been accomplished and stand to be accomplished this year.

Creation of synthetic chromosome a step closer to artificial life

Sabin Russell, Chronicle Medical Writer
Thursday, January 24, 2008

(01-24) 12:13 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- American scientists have built from scratch a synthetic chromosome containing all the genetic material needed to produce a primitive bacterium - a giant step toward the creation of artificial life.

The feat is described in an online edition of the journal Science released Thursday by researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute, in Rockville, Md...

...a team led by Dr. Hamilton Smith, director of the Venter Institute's Synthetic Biology Group, has manufactured from laboratory chemicals a ring of DNA containing all the genes of Mycoplasma genitalium - the tiniest bacteria ever found.

That means the team is tantalizingly close to slipping these artificial genes into the microscopic skin of one of these bugs, and if their plans work, sparking self-replicating life with a set of genes made by machines.

"If we'd done that already, we'd be letting people know. That's not the kind of secret you keep," said Venter, by telephone from Davos, Switzerland. "But I am virtually certain it will happen this year..."

What is different here is that the bacterial genome Venter's lab has fabricated is about 20 times larger than the longest viral genome ever made by machines... a computer printout of the Mycoplasma chromosome fills 147 single-spaced pages of paper. The actual synthetic chromosome, Venter said, is "the largest molecule ever built by humans, by a large margin."

Once the laboratory produces living, replicating bacteria using this artificial chromosome, Venter scientists plan to strip away genes systematically, to find how few are truly necessary to sustain life. It is largely an academic exercise, but in the process the scientists hope to refine the tools for building living organisms from this fundamental base, and custom-design them to perform certain tasks - such as manufacturing fuel...

The first living cells manufactured from scratch. 2008 is shaping up to be a momentous year in many ways.

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Fellow Americans, Get Ready for Hard Times

As if it weren't bad enough news that oil is on the verge of breaking $100 a barrel, news is beginning to come out that China is about to start selling off US dollars. The dollar is about to take a huge plunge in value. We're on the verge of some very, very hard times as China sells off some or all of the $1.25 trillion worth of our economy that it owns. I think 2008 is going to turn out to be a lousy year economically; it may even be the beginning of a serious recession, the likes of which we haven't seen since the 1970's.

Back then, the US still made things. Now we import everything. If the value of the dollar falls, the money in our pockets (for those who have some; I don't) won't buy much of anything anymore. Tack onto that the increase in the prices of everything that are already coming down the pike at us as energy costs rise and you've got a serious mess.

You know, we blew it. The USA really blew it during the 1990's. Remember those budget surpluses? We should have used them on moving away from a petroleum-based, single-user infrastructure and put it into building a national mass transit system and sugarcane ethanol, such as Brazil was wise enough to do back in the 80's (Brazil no longer imports much, if any, petroleum). But, you know, a government-mandated and funded program to do that would have been Socialism, and that's always bad. Conservative ideology tells us so.

We're going to pay for that little mistake now, though. If you thought we were a debtor nation now, just wait a few months. The long, cold winter is coming.

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