Opec nations earned as much in the first half of this year as they did in the whole of 2007 – thanks both to record oil prices and record production – triggering a big increase in its spending. Members of the Saudi ÂArabia-led oil exporters’ cartel took home $645bn (£335bn, €430bn) between January and June, just below the record $671bn they earned last year, according to the US department of energy. At the current pace, Opec nations would earn about $1,245bn this year, a record. The recent 20 per cent drop in oil prices below $120 a barrel is unlikely to damp the earnings significantly, as higher output will offset the impact. Industry estimates suggest that Opec production in July hit a record 32.6m b/d. The current oil price, at $116.53 a barrel, is still higher than the first half of the year’s average: $111.1 a barrel. The flood of petrodollars has boosted Opec’s overseas spending, with imports rising up to 40 per cent from last year’s level. Binky Chadha, of Deutsche Bank in New York, said that Asian emerging markets were now the primary beneficiaries of oil exporters’ rising trade expenditure, followed by […]
Despite appearances, T. Boone Pickens has not become an instant environmentalist. But he has become an advocate of wind power, because he sees the country’s dependence on imported petroleum as a security threat. As he puts it, ‘You don’t have to attack the United States to put us on our back. You just cut 30 percent of the oil.’ Pickens advocates replacing natural gas with wind power to generate electricity. In turn, that natural gas would fuel cars, buses and trucks, replacing gasoline, and reducing petroleum imports. Out of concern for national security, he has devised a strategy that is attractive to environmentalists. Much of the detail of Pickens’ plan remains to be filled in. Aside from a vague reference to the need for tax credits, he has not publicly dealt with the issue of financing the enormously expensive construction of new wind turbines and the vast extension of the national electrical grid that will be required. He is similarly silent about wind power technology not having advanced sufficiently to carry the burden he assigns to it and will require government investment in research and development before it can. Pickens is a steadfast Republican who notoriously financed […]
In January, renowned scientists and researchers lauded the success of Stemagen Corp., a small biotechnology firm in La Jolla, when it became the first to document the successful cloning of human embryos by fusing donated egg cells with the DNA from the skin cells of an adult man. Eggs Wanted # The Issue: Under state law, women are allowed to be paid thousands of dollars for eggs they donate to fertility clinics, but compensation for eggs donated for research is banned. # What It Means: Some scientists say there is a shortage of eggs fueled by the payment ban. The result is a slowdown in medical breakthroughs, they say. # The Other Side: Fans of the ban say paying women to donate eggs for science would create a market for human eggs with so much demand, women may not consider the risks when selling. The research is widely considered a major step toward creating embryonic stem cell lines from cloned human embryos. Those cells are capable of evolving into the more than 200 different cell types in the body and, in theory, could one day be used to replace cells that have been destroyed by […]
While our scientists struggle with ethics, the Islamic world forges ahead Stem cell researchers are branded by the Catholic church as playing God, but Iran’s geneticists are unhindered by doctrine In recent days I have been asked on three separate occasions whether I think physicists are going to destroy the world the moment they switch on the Large Hadron Collider – the huge underground particle accelerator in Geneva – later this year. They ask if, as has been reported, the energies it will produce when beams of near light-speed subatomic particles are smashed together will create mini black holes that will swallow up the whole planet. Add to this the more rational worries many people have about the global catastrophe of climate change if we don’t act fast enough to curb our reliance on fossil fuels, or about GM crops producing Frankenstein food, hybrid embryo research producing Frankenstein babies, and nuclear power leaving future generations a legacy of toxic radioactive waste, and one is left with the impression that the average person is pretty scared about the rate of current scientific advances. Of the above doom-laden list, the only issue I am unable to provide any sort […]
WASHINGTON — Scientists have created two new types of materials that can bend light the wrong way, creating the first step toward an invisibility cloaking device. One approach uses a type of fishnet of metal layers to reverse the direction of light, while another uses tiny silver wires, both at the nanoscale level. Both are so-called metamaterials — artificially engineered structures that have properties not seen in nature, such as negative refractive index. The two teams were working separately under the direction of Xiang Zhang of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Berkeley with U.S. government funding. One team reported its findings in the journal Science and the other in the journal Nature. Each new material works to reverse light in limited wavelengths, so no one will be using them to hide buildings from satellites, said Jason Valentine, who worked on one of the projects. ‘We are not actually cloaking anything,’ Valentine said in a telephone interview. ‘I don’t think we have to worry about invisible people walking around any time soon. To be honest, we are just at the beginning of doing anything like that.’ Valentine’s team made […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
