Sustainable Energy - without the hot air

David MacKay (Professor of Natural Philosophy, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge) has just finished writing his book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. The online version of the book is free.

You can learn what the purpose of the book is from this extract quoted from the book's preface:

I’m concerned about cutting UK emissions of twaddle – twaddle about sustainable energy. Everyone says getting off fossil fuels is important, and we’re all encouraged to “make a difference,” but many of the things that allegedly make a difference don’t add up.

Twaddle emissions are high at the moment because people get emotional (for example about wind farms or nuclear power) and no-one talks about numbers. Or if they do mention numbers, they select them to sound big, to make an impression, and to score points in arguments, rather than to aid thoughtful discussion.

This is a straight-talking book about the numbers. The aim is to guide the reader around the claptrap to actions that really make a difference and to policies that add up.

Nice one! I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to base their knowledge about sustainable energy on science rather than hot air.

Molecular manufacturing

The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology has a nice overview of its current findings on molecular manufacturing here, which summarises the pros and cons of being able to manipulate matter in a controlled way at the molecular scale.

Molecular manufacturing is fundamentally different from the "heat and stir" approach to building things with molecules, because it aims to directly control the placement and interaction of individual molecules. This opens up lots of new possibilities for building things (beneficial or dangerous), and the world will not be the same when the transformation to molecular manufacturing has occurred.

This revolution in manufacturing will make the Industrial Revolution seem trivial in comparison, and it will happen within a small number of decades (CRN says 2 decades). This means that it is likely to have a big impact on the lives of most people alive today, which gives you an incentive to read all about it here.

Ig Nobel Prizes 2007

The Ig Nobel Prizes 2007 have now been awarded. Quoting from News24 here this year's winners include:

1. Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin, or vanilla fragrance and flavouring, from cow dung.
   "She seems to claim if companies start using this method it might help with global warming because some of all the cow dung that causes problems in the atmosphere will start getting used," Abrahams said in an interview.
   
2. Linguistics: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, of Universitat de Barcelona - for a study showing rats sometimes fail to distinguish between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
   
3. Peace Prize: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon, the so-called "gay bomb", that "will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other".
   
4. Biology: Dr Johanna EMH van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for their census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi that share our beds at night.
   
5. Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device in 2001 that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them, known as the "net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately".
   The inventor, however, could not be found by Ig Nobel representatives in Taiwan "We had people in Taiwan looking for him. He's vanished. Somebody suggested to us the possibility that maybe the poor man was trapped inside his own machine," Abrahams said.

SciVee - a YouTube for science

I learn from ars technica here about SciVee which will

...provide a form of scientific communication that's intermediate between abstracts (which take a few minutes to read) and a full reading of a paper (which can take hours). The primary type of video presentation that SciVee intends to host could be called a "pubcast," in which a researcher provides a short video description of their work that's synchronized to the display of text from the paper.

and also about the process of creating a SciVee presentation

What's the incentive for researchers to put the effort into creating a pubcast? "There's actually a low barrier to entry," Bourne said. "All you need is a webcam and iMovie or Movie Maker." The SciVee site has tutorials for recording and editing video content on both Mac and Windows platforms. Once the resulting video is uploaded, the site's software walks users through synchronizing it with the text of the paper.

I think SciVee will catch on very quickly indeed. There is a large gulf between reading just a paper's abstract and reading the entire paper which SciVee fills well, and because it is video it is (potentially) a very engaging medium with which to attract people's attention. No doubt I will try out SciVee before long, and I will write about my impressions of it here.