Can algae feed the world and fuel the planet?

Tackling the science behind the headlines, Liz journeys to meet a US scientist who is developing his own controversial solution to solving the world's energy crisis.
(Aired July 27, 2009 on BBC's new show 'Bang Goes The Theory')
Craig Venter, one of the first people to sequence the human genome, is working to create the first generation of artificial life.

From ScientificAmerican

A Q&A with Craig Venter : the geneticist and entrepreneur hopes to use synthetic biology to transform microscopic algae into cells that eat up carbon dioxide, spit out oil and provide meals

Microbes will be the (human) food- and fuel-makers of the future, if J. Craig Venter has his way.
The man responsible for one of the original sequences of the human genome as well as the team that brought you the first living cell running on human-made DNA now hopes to harness algae to make everything humanity needs.
All it takes is a little genomic engineering.

"Nothing new has to be invented. We just have to combine [genes] in a way that nature has not done before. We're speeding up evolution by billions of years," Venter told an energy conference on October 18 at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.
"It's hard to imagine a part of humanity not substantially impacted."

Venter turned his attention to the genetic manipulation of algae after a two-year cruise to sample DNA in the ocean. (see Sorcerer II Expedition)
The goal was to harvest the building blocks of the future for a biology that has been converted from the bases A, C, G and T into 1's and 0's—a digitized biology.
He found that most of the millions of genes collected came from algae, one of the tinier organisms on the planet but one that already has an outsized planetary impact, providing more than a third of the oxygen we breathe.

Venter is looking to boost that impact further.
His reengineered photosynthetic cells would take in carbon dioxide and sunlight and spew out hydrocarbons ready for the ExxonMobil refinery (the oil giant that has provided Venter's company Synthetic Genomics with $300 million in funding to date).
In the process, the algae will turn a problem—CO2 causing climate change—and transform it into a solution—renewable fuels and slowed global warming.
"Trying to capture CO2 and bury it is just dumb; it's going to be the renewable feedstock for the future," he said.

His commercial enterprise, Synthetic Genomics, has now also formed a new company with Mexican investment firm Plenus dubbed Agradis.
Given algae's multibillion-year track record with photosynthesis and genetic experimentation Agradis's purpose is to turn that genetic cornucopia into improvements in agricultural crops, whether corn or canola—as well as use algae as a model for testing various new genetic combinations.
A similar partnership between Monsanto and algae company Sapphire Energy will "use our algae platform that we developed to mine for genes that can transfer into their core agricultural products," explained Tim Zenk, Sapphire's vice president for corporate affairs in a prior interview with Scientific American.
"When you do genetic screening in algae, you get hundreds of millions of traits in the screen and that accelerates the chances of finding something that can be transferred."

If that's not enough, Venter sees a role for synthetic biology in food beyond crops and livestock—specifically the growing hunger for meat around the world.
"It takes 10 kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef, 15 liters of water to get one kilogram of beef, and those cows produce a lot of methane," another potent greenhouse gas, Venter observed.
"Why not get rid of the cows?"
The replacement: meat grown in a test tube from microbes thanks to synthetic biology.

It's not likely you'll be buying microbial meat in the immediate future, but it's also clear that biology should not be overlooked as a font of solutions for that future.
"The problem with existing biology is you change only one or two genes at a time," he noted of today's genetic engineering.
"We're building a robot to make a million chromosomes a day and be self-learning. … The only limitation is our knowledge of biology."

Scientific American spoke with Venter about his hopes for algae and synthetic biology.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

Why algae?

Looking at the yield of different agricultural crops, none of them is very impressive compared with what needs to be done [to replace oil].
Then you look at the potential output from algae, and it's one to two orders of magnitude better than the best agricultural system.
If we were trying to make liquid transportation fuels to replace all transportation fuels in the U.S. and you try and do that from corn it would take a facility three times the size of the continental U.S.
If you try to do it from algae, it's a facility roughly the size of the state of Maryland.
One is doable and the other's just absurd, but we don't have an algae lobby.

It's been tried before, going all the way back to the turn of the last century.
It's not a new notion to use algae to try to do something.
But nobody's achieved the necessary level of production.
Everybody is looking for a naturally occurring algae that is going to be a miracle cell to save the world and, after a century of looking, people still haven't found it.
We hope we're different.
The [genetic] tools give us a new approach: being able to rewrite the genetic code and get cells to do what we want them to do.

What are the big hurdles?

Everybody trying to grow stuff has all the same challenges.
On the growth side, what we're doing with the [Synthetic Genomics] Exxon program, we're actually testing every technology on the growth side.
Then there's the cell biology side, the manufacturing side.
How do you manufacture on the scale of multiple–square-mile facilities and billions of gallons of liquid hydrocarbons that can go into ExxonMobil refineries?
Half the money of the $600 million on the table is going to major engineering tests and concepts.

It's just the size, the expense—billion-dollar–plus facilities.
Getting algae that are really robust and can withstand true industrial conditions on a commercial basis.
You can't afford to shut down a plant for contamination.
Most algae growers have to do that at a fairly frequent pace.

On the cell biology and strain development side of things, we have a large, greenhouse test facility in La Jolla [Calif.]
We don't claim to have instant answers.
We are talking a systematic scientific approach to trying all the past technologies and new ones with new twists.
The thing that will make the difference is the engineered cell, cells that can produce 10 to 100 [times] as much.
The same genetic engineering and genome engineering we have, we can make cells that are resistant to viruses.
The scientific breakthrough that we made early—that attracted Exxon—we engineered [a] cell to pump hydrocarbons out of the cell.
Algae is a farming problem: growing, harvesting, extracting.
It's a work in progress, and we're working hard.

How long will this take?

We don't have the final answer to anything.
We're evaluating thousands of strains and large numbers of genetic changes.
The long-term solution is to make the entire genetic code from scratch and control all the parameters.
To us, this is a long-term plan.
It's a 10-year plan.
We're not promising new fuel for your car in the next 18 months.

So how long would it take before people can gas-up with algae fuel?

The time it takes to build a large-scale facility to produce billions of gallons; it takes three to four years just to build the facility once we know what to build.
There's a lot of what I call bio-babble and hype out there from a lot of bioenergy companies.
I don't see it.
These are huge challenges.
Nobody has the yields, that I'm aware of, to make it economical—and, if it's not economical, it can't compete.
It's going to be the ones with scientific innovation and deep-pocket partners that can see to making the long term investment to get someplace.

How will you get nutrients, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, to stimulate algae growth?

We need three major ingredients: CO2, sunlight and seawater, aside from having the facility and refinery to convert all those things.
We're looking at sites around the world that have the major ingredients.
It helps if it's near a major refinery because that limits shipping distances.
Moving billions of gallons of hydrocarbons around is expensive.
But refineries are also a good source of concentrated CO2.
It's the integration of the entire process.
[Synthetic Genomics] is not trying to become a fuel company.
You won't see SGI gas stations out there, we're leaving that to ExxonMobil.
We will help them shift the source of hydrocarbons to material recycled from CO2.

What about water? Algae would need a lot of it to grow.

We think we can recycle a lot of what we're doing. …
Novel technologies for recycling wastewater [like microbial fuel cells].
Water is a problem, recycling it and capturing back all the nutrients.
If you have to add tons of fertilizer per acre you're not really solving anything.

What was the bigger challenge: the human genome or algae?

There are 500 different parameters in the cells and in the systems.
Absolutely, algae is the bigger challenge.
I did [the human genome] in nine months.
This is definitely a bigger challenge.
It also has a lot bigger implications for the world if we're successful.

How will synthetic biology play a role?

Genome design and genetic code synthesis play a huge role.
We need to control all those parameters.
I doubt there's any naturally occurring cell that would combine all those in an optimal fashion.
It wouldn't have any value in terms of natural evolution.
We have to make it happen and do it synthetically with our programs.

The synthesis side of it is no longer a challenge.
The cell we started with is a goat pathogen. It has 1.1 million base pairs.
Some of the simpler algae are not even twice that size.
We can routinely make chromosomes in megabase size range.
Synthesizing is no longer the rate limiting step of this problem.

The state of biological knowledge in the world is so limited.
Even those Mycoplasma cells with less than 500 genes, there are still 200 genes of unknown function in that cell.
There is not a living system where we understand even most of the genes in the cell and what they all do.
That's our biggest challenge: overcoming the limits of biological knowledge at this point.

Now what we know because of our synthetic cell is that once we are able to design what we want, we can build it.
That's not something we knew five years ago.
Nobody made things.
The largest piece of synthetic DNA was 30,000 base pairs.
Now we're making these large constructs and being able to do something with them to test the biology.

Tell me about the two-year Sorcerer II cruise, where you sampled a huge amount of ocean DNA—so large that you concluded you found 95 percent of all genes known to science.

We didn't know at that time we would end up in the algae business.
We sampled in fact by just looking at the genetic code to understand what was out there.
We have a broader view than almost anybody about the diversity of genetics and algae around the planet.
That's why we're not so sanguine about finding the magic bug out there to do everything.
Those 50 [million] or 60 million genes that Sorcerer II has discovered are the design components of the future.

Why do this? What's the motivation?

We all live on the same planet.
The bad cliché is: we're all in the same lifeboat.
If somebody takes a power drill and drills a hole in the bottom of the boat, we're all screwed.
The changes to the atmosphere and the changes to the resources we have on this planet from depleting our resources and taking carbon out of the ground is something, regardless of somebody's politics—you can't keep doing that long-term.

Even the ones not smart enough to know the science and the implications of it are smart enough to know the world is shifting to some type of tax on carbon.
Sooner or later, the oil and coal industries won't have any choice.
The forward-looking companies are trying to get a real jump on that now.
None of these solutions are things you just pick up a book and find the solution.
It is long-term research.

What is government's role in pushing sustainable solutions?

It should be trying to be a whole lot smarter, which is maybe asking too much of government.
If we're successful and others are successful in producing alternative sources of hydrocarbons for fuels, eventually we could be shifting the supply and shifting the demand for oil.
The consequence of doing that would be we would be constantly dropping the price of our key competitor.
Governments are going to play a critical role in this working.
If governments don't constantly put a higher price on carbon as CO2-based fuels emerge, it'll be like the Jimmy Carter era, where all kinds of things got started and the price of oil crashed again.

In the past scientists have spent a lot of time trying to make algae produce oil or solve other problems, most famously at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory [pdf].
But the government shut down that program in the 1990s, concluding algae would not be able to compete with oil, due to the expense of systems to grow it, nutrient needs and other hurdles.
Given algae's checkered past, what makes you confident of success?

It's like the claims of arsenic-eating bacteria: people making extraordinary claims have the obligation to provide extraordinary evidence that their claims are true.
I like to win arguments by having the data.
Right now, nobody has the data in any of these fields.
We have some new tools to approach these same problems.
Algae has had a lousy history.
There is no guarantee we will succeed either.

Links :

• TEDxtalk : Craig Venter, a voyage of DNA, genes and the sea
• YouTube : Craig Venter - The Sorcerer II Expedition
• DailyMotion : Craig Venter on the Sorcerer II Expedition / Craig Venter on fourth generation fuel
  

Cornell’s Ocean Atlas

New pilot charts for all oceans of the world

Jimmy Cornell, experienced sailor and bestselling author, has launched a new product that is already being greeted with great enthusiasm by sailors worldwide.

The founder of the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers, noonsite.com and author of the sailor’s bible World Cruising Routes (book) has teamed up with his son Ivan to produce Cornell’s Ocean Atlas, an atlas of 129 up-to-date pilot charts aimed at sailors planning offshore voyages.
The charts in Cornell’s Ocean Atlas are based on the most recent weather data gathered by meteorological satellites over the last twenty years.

60 monthly pilot charts of all oceans for the world show wind speed and direction, current speed and direction, approximate extent of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, the most common tracks of tropical storms, and the mean location of high pressure cells for each hemisphere.

69 detailed charts of the most commonly sailed transoceanic routes make it easier for cruising sailors to plan a route that takes best advantage of the prevailing weather conditions at that time of year.
Sidebars with tactical suggestions have been added to the months when most passages are undertaken.
The comments and tips on tactics, as well as weather overviews for each ocean, were contributed by meteorologists and routers specializing in those oceanic areas.

Cornell’s Ocean Atlas will be available in the US in January 2012 from this website (www.cornellsailing.com), Cruising World magazine, Paradise Cay Publications, and at Sail America’s Strictly Sail boat shows in Chicago in January, Miami in February, and Oakland, CA in April, 2012.
The atlas will be officially launched at Strictly Sail Chicago in January 2012 where Jimmy Cornell will offer his popular Long Distance Cruising Seminar plus shorter seminars on a broad range of cruising topics.

More information on Cornell’s Ocean Atlas

Pilot charts, also referred to as routing charts, have been the most important passage planning tool since the middle of the nineteenth century.
The first systematic study of ships’ sailing routes, and the weather conditions that affect them, was undertaken in the 19th century by Lieutenant Maury of the US Navy with the aid of shipmasters’ logbooks.
Much of the information contained in the pilot charts that are in use today is still based on those observations and, although they have been updated at regular intervals, the scarcity of reliable sources, inaccuracy of the observations, or the climate changes that have occurred over the years, have rendered some of the information shown on those charts to be now inaccurate.

To present as true a picture as possible of the actual conditions which prevail in today’s oceans, the charts in Cornell’s Ocean Atlas are based on extensive data collected by meteorological satellites from 1987 to the present.
This data was processed by Ivan Cornell, whose programming experience has made both noonsite.com and this atlas possible.

Sailors who have consulted advance copies of the atlas are describing it as ground-breaking for its content, but also for its organization and layout, which reflect Jimmy Cornell’s unmatched world voyaging experience.
The scale and range of charts are carefully chosen so that sailors can see all the relevant information and plan their passages on a single chart.
As one world cruiser stated, on seeing the format and detail of the atlas “This is a game-changer. It should be hidden away and kept a secret so that it is as hard for future cruisers as it was for us.”

As Jimmy Cornell says “Our main objective has been to create the kind of publication we would have greatly appreciated if it had been available when we sailed on any of the five circumnavigations of the globe which we share between us.”

Links :

• NGA : Atlas of Pilot Charts

Squid and octopus switch on camouflage

The little Japetella heathi octopus can switch from transparent to opaque in an instant, enabling it to hide from bioluminescent predators.

From BBC

Scientists have discovered how two marine creatures are able to rapidly "switch" their colours - from transparent to reddish brown.

The species, an octopus and a squid, use their adaptable camouflage to cope with changing light conditions in the deep ocean.
The creatures' skins respond light that deep-sea predators produce to illuminate their prey.

The findings are reported in the journal Current Biology.

Sarah Zylinski and Sonke Johnsen from Duke University in North Carolina, US, carried out the research.
They say this switchable camouflage allows the animals to hide more effectively in their uniquely gloomy marine environment.

When sunlight diffuses evenly through the water, it passes through transparent animals too, rendering them almost invisible.
But, as Dr Zylinski explained, "transparent tissues are actually quite visible when you shine a light directly on them".
And this is exactly what many deep-ocean predators do.

LED lights similar to predator's bioluminescent "spotlights" trigger red pigment.

Prof Michael Land, a biologist from the UK's University of Sussex explained that by a depth of 600m, sunlight fizzles out, and hiding becomes much trickier for prey animals.
This is the depth at which the octopus Japetella heathi and the squid Onychoteuthis banksii live.
Prof Land told BBC Nature: "[At that depth], you have all these nasty fish that are trying to illuminate you, so it's best to be a dark colour."
These "nasty" predatory fish are equipped with light-producing organs that function as biological headlamps.

To cope with this, the two creatures the scientists examined have evolved a clever way to hide.
Having already seen the two creatures in their two different colour states, Dr Zylinski and Dr Johnsen wanted find out how they switched between the two.

To do this, they had to examine the animals more closely, so they set out to capture them from deep-ocean trenches in the Pacific.
With special nets that held the animals in the cold water from the deep, the team managed to bring the two species on board their research vessel.
To test the animals' camouflage, the scientists simply shone a blue light onto them and watched their reactions.

Most of the time, the Japetella heathi octopus is transparent.

"The really striking thing was the speed of their response," said Dr Zylinski.
"We shone a light on them and they would immediately switch from transparent to pigmented."

The animals' skins contain light-sensitive cells called chromatophores, which contain pigments.
When these cells detected the blue light of a bioluminescent predator, they immediately expanded, "dyeing" the animal a deep brown colour.

Dr Zylinski said the this dramatic colour change showed just how important camouflage was "in a habitat where there is nowhere to hide".
Neither transparency nor pigmentation is a complete solution to the hunting strategies used by predators in the deep ocean, she explained.
"By switching between these two forms, these cephalopods are able to optimise their camouflage in response to the optical conditions at that moment in time."

Dr Zylinski said studying camouflage gave a wonderful insight into how animals perceive their world very differently from humans.

Links :

• LiveScience : Transparent octopus goes opaque in blink of an eye

Rosenfeld collection

The Rosenfeld Collection, acquired in 1984 by Mystic Seaport, is one of the largest archives of maritime photographs in the United States.
This Collection of nearly one million pieces documents the period from 1881 to the present.
Images are captured in a variety of formats, from glass plate negatives to color transparencies, and from glossy prints to photographic murals.
The Collection represents the evolution of photographic technology and developments in the maritime industry over the last century.

M-boats

The Rosenfeld Collection is built on the inventory of the Morris Rosenfeld & Sons photographic business, which was located in New York City from 1910 until the late 1970s.
The firm grew as Morris' sons David, Stanley, and William joined the business. Although they became famous as yachting photographers, the early work of the Rosenfelds included assignments for such firms as the New York-based entities of the Bell System (currently known as AT&T, Western Electric, and Bell Telephone Laboratories) from the 1910's through the 1940's.

Even though the Rosenfelds maintained a busy schedule, they always made time for yachting photography.
As a result, the America's Cup Races are fully represented from 1885 to 1992.
The early America's Cup images, from 1885 to 1910, are from separate collections acquired by Morris Rosenfeld.

Cornell crew (1930)

These collections of remarkable glass plate images are the work of Arthur F. Aldridge, Charles Edwin Bolles, James Burton and Edwin J. Carpenter.
It should be noted that these collections also contain images of subjects as varied as socialites participating in leisure activities, steam yachts, battleships, and riverboats on the Ohio River.

Flying spinnakers

The America's Cup races, starting in 1920, were exhaustively covered by the Rosenfelds themselves.
As a family of photographers, they quickly became a part of the America's Cup tradition.

Magic Carpet

The respect they received from some of the greatest yachtsmen of the day gave them unusually close access to races, and the result is a remarkably dynamic and often intimate view of the sport.

Bolero, large modern ocean racer (Sparkman and Stephens Design), Heading East, 1954

A broad spectrum of competitive sailing is also reflected in the Rosenfeld Collection.
Images of children participating in sailing lessons are housed next to views of maxi-boats competing on the international circuit.

The world of powerboating, both competitive and recreational, received equal attention from the Rosenfelds.
The development of powerboat racing in America is chronicled in the Collection.
Of particular interest to powerboat historians is the Collection's extensive coverage of early Gold Cup and Harmsworth Trophy Races.

River of silk

Due to the chronological arrangement of the negatives in the Collection, the evolution of sail, hull and engine design across the span of more than a century can be observed by the researcher.

Today, the Rosenfeld Collection is stored in a climate-controlled vault in the new Mystic Seaport Collections Research Center.
Image content as well as photographers' notes from the prints and the negative sleeves are currently being catalogued and entered into the museum's computer data base.
Approximately ninety-seven thousand images have been catalogued by Rosenfeld Collection staff, assisted by volunteers.
Sixty-seven thousand images, captured from both prints and negatives, are available in video disc form for research purposes.

Currently the Rosenfeld Collection staff is involved in the preservation of negatives and prints.
The goal is to transfer all of the historic images, many of which are presently in acidic storage housing, into archival storage containers.
This task will help to retard the deterioration common to all photographic materials.

Mystic Seaport encourages the use of the Collection for research purposes.
Inquiries are handled through staff researchers by letter, fax, email, or scheduled office appointment.
Fees are charged for research services.

Reproductions of Rosenfeld images are available to the public, for both personal and commercial uses.
Prints generated by the Mystic Seaport Photography Department are used for a variety of purposes, including book illustrations, corporate brochures and promotions, exhibitions, and personal and scholarly research.
Print reproduction fees and image use fees for commercial uses, will be quoted upon request.

Rosenfeld Collection images are also available for exhibitions and permanent installations.
Selections from an inventory of over one hundred and forty 16" x 20" matted and framed photographs are available for exhibitions and traveling shows.

Please note that Rosenfeld Collection fees and reproduction revenue go into a Museum fund for the preservation of the existing collection.

Surfer rides 90 foot wave (World Record)

The Hawaiian surfer Garrett McNamara breaks the world record for the largest wave ever surfed navigating this 27-metre (90ft) wall of watery death. (in Nazaré Beach, in Portugal) other video
The previous record—77 feet monster at Cortez Bank in 2008—was set by Mike Parsons (the previous unofficial record for the biggest wave ever surfed was held by Ken Bradshaw who rode an 85-footer in Hawaii’s Waimea Bay in 1998.)
According to Geology.com, the biggest wave ever recorded was the result of a 1958 earthquake in Alaska and was estimated to be 1,720 feet.
The Hawaiian surfer Garrett McNamara catches the wave of a lifetime while tackling the Nazare Canyon off Portugal.
The 3-mile deep underwater canyon – which stretches for 105 miles – acts likes a funnel when it receives Atlantic swells, creating huge waves.

From SurfBang

The current official world record for largest wave ever surfed is held by Mike Parsons who tackled a 77 foot wave at Cortes Bank back in 2008.

Hawaiian big wave surfer, Garrett McNamara is looking to take that record from Parsons with, what is said to be, a 90 foot wave he rode last week in Portugal.

On November 1st, Garrett McNamara was out tow surfing with Al Mennie and Andrew Cotton in the waters off a small fishing town in Portugal. McNamara was in Portugal as part of the ZON North Canyon Project which was created by the Portuguese Hydrographic Institute to better understand the gigantic waves that are formed by the deep water canyons off the coast of Praia do Norte, Nazaré, Portugal.

“I feel so blessed and honored to have been invited to explore this canyon and its special town. The waves here are such a mystery,” said McNamara.

Al Mennie who was sitting in the channel watching Garrett on this monster wave had this to say, “Everything was perfect, the weather, the waves. Cotty and I surfed two big waves of about 60 feet and then, when Garrett was ready, came a canyon wave of over 90 feet.”

“The jet ski was the best place to see him riding the biggest wave I’ve ever seen. It was amazing. Most people would be scared, but Garrett was controlling everything in the critical part of the wave. It was an inspiring ride by an inspiring surfer.”

Riding a wave of this size and magnitude is something that Garrett is never going to forget.

“As I rode this wave, it seemed pretty massive, but I couldn’t quite tell how big it was,” he said. “When I got to the bottom and turned and got around the wave and went to kick out, it landed on me and it felt like a ton of bricks. Probably one of the most powerful waves to ever land on me at the shoulder. It was pretty amazing.”

Jackson Chadwick doing some towing on the Outer Reefs

Links :

• YouTube : Shane Dorian had an amazing ride with a 57-feet bomb at Jaws.
• YouTube : Giant wave 64 ft,Mike Parsons final part I Billabong Odyssey (part II)
  
• Wunderground meteorologist Jeff Masters describes the atmospheric setup:
  ...an approaching cold front extending southwards from a low pressure system centered just south of Iceland generated strong winds off the coast of Portugal, and a west-northwest swell of 8 meters (26’). The canyon generated three big waves in excess of 60 feet that day, and McNamara was able to catch the tallest, 90-foot wave.
• SurfayToday : Garrett McNamara rides the biggest wave of all time in Nazaré
• SurferVillage : North Canyon tow-in trials to roll in Nazaré...
• ABCNews : Hawaiian daredevil surfer survives 90-foot wave