Bacteriophages, a class of viruses that only attack bacteria, have been controversial ever since their discovery by a brash, young, self-taught researcher named Felix d’Herelle nearly a century ago. In the 1920s and ’30s, before the advent of antibiotics, doctors using phage therapy reported near miraculous cures for infections, even at the critical stage. The treatments, however, didn’t work in every case, and after the discovery of much more reliable antibiotics, starting with penicillin in the 1940s, phage therapy was ushered off the medical stage in the United States and Western ... Read More
Can Farmed Fish Flourish on a Veggie Diet?
February 16, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Seafood reached a tipping point in 2009 when, for the first time, more than 50 percent of fish used for human consumption came from farms. That might sound like good news for oceans, but farmed fish largely subsist on a steady diet of smaller fish, which are caught from fragile fisheries. It’s not a sustainable equation. Aaron Watson, a researcher at University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science, says there is clear evidence that we are “fishing down the food chain, catching smaller and smaller fish to bring to the table and to bring to market, depleting wild ... Read More
Among Antibiotics, Resistance Knows No Bounds
September 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Since penicillin was isolated from a fungus in 1929, mankind's stockpile of antibiotics has expanded to include a diversity of life-saving compounds. However, from streptomycin in the 1940s to synthetics such as ciprofloxacin in the late 1980s, they are losing their effectiveness. While the idea that we are losing some potent antibiotic weapons is widely known, that's not the same as it being widely understood, says Jo Handelsman, Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor of microbiology at Yale University. She cautions that what researchers know and what the public knows are not the ... Read More
Building Cities With Sustainability in Mind
April 12, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
A leading ecologist says if we want to build sustainable cities, we need to start with our money on our minds, and our minds in the gutter. William Patrick Lucey, an aquatic ecologist and special adviser to the British Columbia government on water policy, says little has changed in the way we have built cities in the 2,000 years since the Roman empire. Aside from some notable improvements in sanitation, and perhaps civility, our infrastructure still follows the Roman model; centralized water works, all-weather roadways with engineered drainage, and municipal sewers to whisk away our ... Read More
Pollinating Local Is the New Buzz
February 1, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Scientists say if bees were better homebodies it might be better for them and for us. During a few weeks in February, some 1.5 million honeybee hives will be drawn from all over North America for a pilgrimage to California, in which they will descend on the state's almond groves at a critical moment in the trees' flowering cycle. More than three quarters of North America's honeybees will arrive in the Central Valley just in time to pollinate the $2.3 billion almond crop. And when their work there is done the beekeepers will fan out with their bees to provide the same service for nearly ... Read More
Teaming with Technology to Fight TB and HIV
November 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Tuberculosis — already infecting the global population about one new case a second — is considered one of the most dangerous opportunistic infections attacking people with HIV. The STOP TB Partnership reports that TB is the leading cause of death among persons infected with HIV in Africa. Worldwide, 1 in 4 TB deaths is HIV-related. While the calculus seems straightforward — get HIV, see your immune system falter, then get TB — the tangled tango between the two deadly diseases is more complex. According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health Division of Acquired ... Read More
Balancing the Power of Offshore Wind
April 29, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
Despite the buzz this week from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approving the controversial Cape Wind project off Cape Cod, the United States has yet to construct any offshore wind farms despite a slew of ideas blowing around and 11 specific proposals on the table. Europe, meanwhile, has taken a lead in offshore wind, and is looking at more. While those U.S. projects inch forward, researchers see a wealth of wind being wasted. Willett Kempton, a marine policy professor and offshore wind expert at the University of Delaware, calls the wind off the Mid-Atlantic coast "a huge resource. ... Read More
Shining Light on Clean Energy Superbugs
April 9, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
Over the past year, amid falling oil prices, an ongoing food vs. fuel controversy, and a few over-anxious market predictions, the bioenergy bandwagon may have picked up a few scratches and dings. But James Liao and Anastasios Melis say a new kind of photosynthetic biofuel could provide the spark for a clean energy revolution. President Barack Obama announced earlier this year that by 2022, he wants to "more than double the amount of biofuel produced in the United States" to an annual rate of 36 million barrels. But the most popular biofuels on the market today, such as ethanol and ... Read More
New Agency Puts Clean Energy on Front Burner
March 14, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The job of developing really big clean-energy initiatives is perhaps beyond the capacity of the private sector. Lacking any assurance that radically different new products will be accepted by consumers, the market provides few incentives for companies making money from their current products to take the risk to research radical new energy concepts. And needless to say, companies that don’t have successful products on the market are not likely to have the money to invest in big ideas. Plus, government priorities don’t include developing saleable products for market. However, countries ... Read More
The Empowering Power of Ice
February 8, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
Just when most of the country has "had it up to here" with ice, a coalition of publicly run electric utilities in Southern California say it has plans to cool the state's energy problems by making even more. The Southern California Public Power Authority announced last month it plans to construct a 53 megawatt energy storage project over the next two years to store power — in blocks of ice. David Walden, energy systems manager for the authority, said on-peak power demand is the one of the biggest problems facing the region's electric utilities. He told Miller-McCune that power ... Read More
