David Gelbaum has quietly poured nearly $1 billion into environmental companies and causes. He advocates nature preserves and solar energy. (Image: Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times)

It’s not the usual drive of choice for wealthy former hedge fund managers like David Gelbaum. Then again, there’s not much that is business as usual about Mr. Gelbaum, an intensely private person who happens to be one of the nation’s largest — and largely unknown — green technology investors and environmental philanthropists.

Mr. Gelbaum has invested $500 million in clean-tech companies since 2002 through his Quercus Trust, amassing a portfolio of some 40 businesses involved in nearly every aspect of the emerging green economy, be it renewable energy, the smart electric grid, sustainable agriculture, electric cars or biological remediation of oil spills. He has poured almost as much into environmental causes.

Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/business/09green.html

Planarian worms have an amazing ability to regenerate body parts following amputation. These remarkable creatures contain adult stem cells that are constantly dividing and can become all of the missing cell types. They also have the right set of genes working to make this happen exactly as it should so that when they re-grow body parts they end up in the right place and have the correct size, shape, and orientation. (Credit: Daniel Felix/U. Nottingham)

The finding is another step forward in efforts to explore how humans might one day regenerate damaged organs and tissue.

The research led by biologist Aziz Aboobaker at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. shows for the first time that a gene called ‘Smed-prep’ is essential for correctly regenerating a head and brain in planarian worms. The study is published in the open access journal PLoS Genetics.

Read on: http://futurity.org/health-medicine/gene-helps-worm-regrow-missing-head/

Energy secretary Steven Chu has been in office for only a little over a year, but he's nonetheless managed to help lay the groundwork for a fundamental shift in how the US tackles climate change. (Photo: Peter Yang)

It’s late November 2009, and US energy secretary Steven Chu is leaning against a fake sink in a fake kitchen. Chu is 62 years old and athletically trim with graying black hair.

He’s wearing a rumpled pin-striped suit, argyle socks, and gold-framed glasses. Chu is a renowned physicist, a cabinet appointee, and the winner of a Nobel Prize. But that’s not why he’s now being treated like a rock star. This morning a small crowd of scientists, politicians, and local businesspeople are flocking to him because he’s got cash, specifically $75 million in stimulus funds for the Ohio subsidiary of the American Electric Power utility.

Read on: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/ff_stevenchu?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+(Wired:+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Smog in Shenyang in northeast China’s Liaoning Province. (Hei Yubai/European Pressphoto Agency)

If you listen to climate scientists — and despite the relentless campaign to discredit their work, you should — it is long past time to do something about emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If we continue with business as usual, they say, we are facing a rise in global temperatures that will be little short of apocalyptic. And to avoid that apocalypse, we have to wean our economy from the use of fossil fuels, coal above all.

But is it possible to make drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions without destroying our economy?

Like the debate over climate change itself, the debate over climate economics looks very different from the inside than it often does in popular media. The casual reader might have the impression that there are real doubts about whether emissions can be reduced without inflicting severe damage on the economy. In fact, once you filter out the noise generated by special-interest groups, you discover that there is widespread agreement among environmental economists that a market-based program to deal with the threat of climate change — one that limits carbon emissions by putting a price on them — can achieve large results at modest, though not trivial, cost. There is, however, much less agreement on how fast we should move, whether major conservation efforts should start almost immediately or be gradually increased over the course of many decades.

In what follows, I will offer a brief survey of the economics of climate change or, more precisely, the economics of lessening climate change. I’ll try to lay out the areas of broad agreement as well as those that remain in major dispute. First, though, a primer in the basic economics of environmental protection.

Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/magazine/11Economy-t.html?pagewanted=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

(Illustration by Jenny Mörtsell)

Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/04/opinion/04opchart.html

By Randy Shore | Vancouver Sun | March 24, 2010

Mussels grown in experimental multi-species fish farms not only consume waste, they can provide an additional revenue stream to producers (Photograph by: handout, Vancouver Sun)

New designs for fish farms could keep them in the ocean and help restore damaged marine environments at the same time, says a biologist working on a five-year nationwide aquaculture project.

Marine biologists in New Brunswick and in B.C. are employing mussels, oysters, sea cucumbers, urchins and seaweed to dramatically increase the amount of food created by salmon farms, and they believe they can extract excess carbon and nitrogen pollution from the sea in the process.

Taking the aquaculture industry onto land could be a missed opportunity to do the Earth some good and help mitigate the impacts of global warming, according to Thierry Chopin, a marine biologist at the University of New Brunswick. Nitrogen from agricultural sources contributes to oxygen depletion in the world’s oceans, resulting in huge dead zones in which nothing can grow. Fixing and storing carbon is believed to be key to fighting global warming.

“We have to think of extractive species as having a cleansing function in the ecosystem,” Chopin explained.

Read on: http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/fish+farming+could+help+environment/2722656/story.html

By Andrew Schneider | AOL Special Report | March 24, 2010

According to a USDA scientist, some Latin American packers spray U.S.-bound produce with a wax-like nanocoating to extend shelf-life. 'We found no indication that the nanocoating ... has ever been tested for health effects,' the researcher says. (Getty Images)

(March 24) — For centuries, it was the cook and the heat of the fire that cajoled taste, texture, flavor and aroma from the pot. Today, that culinary voodoo is being crafted by white-coated scientists toiling in pristine labs, rearranging atoms into chemical particles never before seen.

At last year’s Institute of Food Technologists international conference, nanotechnology was the topic that generated the most buzz among the 14,000 food-scientists, chefs and manufacturers crammed into an Anaheim, Calif., hall. Though it’s a word that has probably never been printed on any menu, and probably never will, there was so much interest in the potential uses of nanotechnology for food that a separate daylong session focused just on that subject was packed to overflowing.

In one corner of the convention center, a chemist, a flavorist and two food-marketing specialists clustered around a large chart of the Periodic Table of Elements (think back to high school science class). The food chemist, from China, ran her hands over the chart, pausing at different chemicals just long enough to say how a nano-ized version of each would improve existing flavors or create new ones.

One of the marketing guys questioned what would happen if the consumer found out.

The flavorist asked whether the Food and Drug Administration would even allow nanoingredients.

Posed a variation of the latter question, Dr. Jesse Goodman, the agency’s chief scientist and deputy commissioner for science and public health, gave a revealing answer. He said he wasn’t involved enough with how the FDA was handling nanomaterials in food to discuss that issue. And the agency wouldn’t provide anyone else to talk about it.

This despite the fact that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies have shown that nanoparticles pose potential risks to human health — and, more specifically, that when ingested can cause DNA damage that can prefigure cancer and heart and brain disease.

Read on: http://www.aolnews.com/nanotech/article/regulated-or-not-nano-foods-coming-to-a-store-near-you/19401246

(Image by snazzo/Flickr)

Read on: http://daily.sightline.org/daily_score/series/the-parable-of-the-electric-bike

Cisco's Wim Elfrink and developer Stan Gale plan to standardize many elements of New Songdo (rendering above) in other cities. (Photograph by James Whitlow Delano)

The world is bracing for an influx of billions of new urbanites in the coming decades, and tech companies are rushing to build new green cities to house them. Are these companies creating a smarter metropolis — or just making money?

Stan Gale is exultant. The chairman of Gale International yanks off his tie, hitches up his pants, and mops the sweat and floppy hair from his brow. He’s beaming like a proud new papa, sprung from the waiting room and handing out cigars to whoever happens by. Beckoning me to follow, he saunters across eight lanes of traffic toward his baby, delivered prematurely days before.

Read on: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/142/the-new-new-urbanism.html

by Mitchell Anderson | TheTyee.ca | January 20, 2010

NASA's stalled Deep Space Climate Observatory (artist's rendering).

The media missed the real story about the so-called “climategate” scandal.

After thousands of emails were mysteriously stolen from the University of East Anglia and distributed just before the climate conference in Copenhagen, many news outlets seemed content to report the story as it was presented to them rather than bothering to read the emails in the context they were written.

A closer look at these candid messages reveals a very different problem than the supposed scientific conspiracy theory that’s been in high rotation in the media. This previously unreported story also shows why launching the long-mothballed Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) is more urgent now than ever.

Read on: http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2010/01/20/DSCOVRSatellite/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=200110