The Dish: Sampling Today’s News – February 15, 2008

David Baltimore, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, opened the Association’s annual meeting in Boston yesterday with a critique of United States science and technology policy. The theme of the five-day meeting is “science and technology from a global perspective,” and Baltimore contrasted the U.S. focus on counterterrorism with European, Indian, and African concentrations on scientific research. Baltimore lambasted President Bush for cutting National Institutes of Health funding: “The president must believe himself immortal or in the hands of God to decimate” its budget, he said.

Ecologists have produced a global map of human impacts on marine ecosystems. They synthesized 17 data sets of changes from coastal pollution, climate change, sea floor damage, fishing, and other factors, and colored the ocean map according to six levels of impacts. The spectrum ranges from “very low impact” in the polar regions “very high impact” along coastlines in the Northern Hemisphere. The researchers hope the map, presented at the meeting and published today in Science, will aid in the allocation of planning, conservation, and ecosystem management resources. Duke University ecologist Larry Crowder, who was not involved in the study, pointed out that some small, severely threatened ecosystems, such as rare coral reefs, are too small to show up in the new map (via Nature).

Chemists at the University of California, Los Angeles have developed a method for creating a porous material that can store up to 83 times its own volume of carbon dioxide. The extremely porous material, called a zeolitic imidazolate framework, could potentially be useful for capturing carbon dioxide from smokestacks and coal gasification plants. “Now it’s in the hands of industry,” said Omar Yaghi, a lead researcher on the project. He hopes the material could be commercialized in two to three years (via Technology Review).

Harnessing the energy of sea currents, tides, and waves off the coast of Florida could provide a third of the state’s electricity, according to researchers planning to test an underwater turbine in the gulf stream in the coming months. Although the technology is in its infancy, tide and current energy could eventually supply 6.5 percent of the nation’s electricity according to Roger Bedard of the Electric Power Research Institute. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has handed out 47 permits for projects studying the potential of ocean, wave, and tidal energy, and research is underway to determine the cost-effectiveness and environmental effects of ocean energy technologies.

The Sunshine Project, an organization that investigated safety at the nation’s biodefense labs, has been forced to close up shop (subscription) due to lack of funding, reports Science. News of the watchdog’s demise, whose accomplishments include uncovering safety violations at Texas A&M’s biodefense labs and helping destroy smallpox stocks, was met with mixed feelings among scientists and university officials. Some who were subjected to constant probing were relieved, while others lauded the efforts to make the “community more careful” about biosafety.

Tags: biotech, Energy, oceanography

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