Wednesday, November 28th, 2012
JONATHAN MARGOLIS, - The Guardian/Observer (U.K.)
Stephan: This story is very good news about a real breakthrough solution, to a real problem.
Many years ago one of my partners and I raised the money to start up Solar Aquafarms, a totally self-contained solar powered commercial project growing Talapia -- a farmed fish species grown since Pharaonic times -- in the desert near San Diego. It was the brainchild of a marine biologist and it worked. A dear friend was the business manager. Once up and operating it was bought by a large holding company which subsequently closed it. Long sad story. I have never forgotten this experience though, and this story picks up the thread in an extraordinary and very promising way.
The scrubby desert outside Port Augusta, three hours from Adelaide, is not the kind of countryside you see in Australian tourist brochures. The backdrop to an area of coal-fired power stations, lead smelting and mining, the coastal landscape is spiked with saltbush that can live on a trickle of brackish seawater seeping up through the arid soil. Poisonous king brown snakes, redback spiders, the odd kangaroo and emu are seen occasionally, flies constantly. When the local landowners who graze a few sheep here get a chance to sell some of this crummy real estate they jump at it, even for bottom dollar, because the only real natural resource in these parts is sunshine.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that a group of young brains from Europe, Asia and north America, led by a 33-year-old German former Goldman Sachs banker but inspired by a London theatre lighting engineer of 62, have bought a sizeable lump of this unpromising outback territory and built on it an experimental greenhouse which holds the seemingly realistic promise of solving the world’s food problems.
Indeed, the work that Sundrop Farms, as they call themselves, are doing in South Australia, and just starting up in Qatar, is […]
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Wednesday, November 28th, 2012
ANDREW J. HOFFMAN, - Stanford Social Innovation Review
Stephan: If you have been reading SR for more than a week you know my views about Climate Change deniers, and why I think this is essentially a struggle between those who make decisions based on science and those who do so based on a parallel universe grounded in ideology and theology. (See: Climate Change and Willful Ignorance. http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2812%2900133-4/fulltext
Here is another assessment of this dichotomy from another source.
In May 2009, a development officer at the University of Michigan asked me to meet with a potential donor-a former football player and now successful businessman who had an interest in environmental issues and business, my interdisciplinary area of expertise. The meeting began at 7 a.m., and while I was still nursing my first cup of coffee, the potential donor began the conversation with ‘I think the scientific review process is corrupt.
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Wednesday, November 28th, 2012
, - National Institute for Science, Law & Public Policy
Stephan: When I first heard about Smart Meters I thought, this is a way of getting information on customers masquerading as an energy efficiency program, and a way old energy can maintain a centralized system rather than a much more secure regional or more localized system using new energy technologies. I wrote about this at the time in SR. It turns out I was correct, as this just released report describes.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A new policy report focused on the electric grid and economy of energy, ‘Getting Smarter About the Smart Grid
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Tuesday, November 27th, 2012
JULIAN RYALL, - The Telegraph (U.K.)
Stephan: These Japanese trains will move at aircraft speed. The speed limit for freight trains in the U.S. is 60 mph, but the actual speed averages 20 mph, and is actually slower than it was 20 years ago when it was 23 mph. The average passenger train speed in the U.S. is in the 40s and hasn't really changed nationally in half a century.
The front car of the Series L0 maglev measures nearly 92 feet long – of which 49 feet forms an aerodynamic nose section – and is fitted with 24 seats. A full 16-carriage train will be able to carry 1,000 passengers.
Designed by Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Tokai), the state-of-the-art trains are scheduled to go into use in 2027 and link Shinagawa Station, in central Tokyo, with Nagoya.
At present, it takes 90 minutes for a conventional ‘shinkansen’ bullet train to complete the journey between the two stations, but the new technology will cut the trip to 40 minutes.
The vehicle has no wheels – doing away with friction and, hence, providing a smoother and quieter ride at a faster speed – and is propelled along a track through electromagnetic pull.
JR Tokai has announced plans to more than double the length of the track at its Tsuru development facility to 26 miles and conduct further tests.
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[…]
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Tuesday, November 27th, 2012
PETER WHORISKEY, - The Washington Post
Stephan: For several years now I have been writing about the corruption of the medical literature in the service of the Illness Profit System (See An Appraisal of The Illness Profit System http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2810%2900291-0/fulltext). This trend has received very little attention in the corporate media (this is the first piece I have seen in a major newspaper in months) but it has very dangerous implications for you and your family, and is specifically designed to mislead your local doctor, who guides his practice based on the papers in medical journals.
For drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, the 17-page article in the New England Journal of Medicine represented a coup.
The 2006 report described a trial that compared three diabetes drugs and concluded that Avandia, the company’s new drug, performed best.
‘We now have clear evidence from a large international study that the initial use of [Avandia] is more effective than standard therapies,
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