Neal Rauhauser writes: The human race faced the probability of famine at the dawn of the 20th century for a couple of reason which I’ll delve into in a moment. We’ve put off that reckoning for a century but instead of seeing things for what they were and governing ourselves accordingly we used our wits and fossil fuel endowment to climb even further out onto the branch of unsustainability.

Nearly seven billion of us now perch on that branch, meant for a third of that number, and not all of us will pass through the needle’s eye of economic collapse, energy depletion, and environmental change.

The light’s going to start coming on for the masses this summer and we’ve got a choice; a rational explanation and a rational response, or falling down the disloyal Christian Right’s apocalyptic bunny hole. …

The foundation of our government is based on the thinking of
John Locke and he assumed, looking out from 17th century England, that
the world was infinite. Everywhere we look we see limits, from the
North Pacific garbage patch to the inevitable loss of access to low
Earth orbit. Everywhere we go we wipe out resources and leave a mess in
our wake. Locke’s infinite Earth has been replaced by one that is quite
simply irritated with us.

Our economic system depends upon compound interest, compound
interest depends on expanding economic activities, and all of those
activities and the thinking behind them came together in an era of
steadily increasing energy. Wind gave way to coal gave way to bunker
oil and we moved goods and people across the seas at will. Wood gave
way to coal gave way to natural gas and our homes and places of
business were always comfortably warm. Electricity was always a
creature of fossil fuel and it’s path is a curious reverse as we put in
more and more renewable sources. Even with an immediate, forceful move
to a purely renewable future the journey back to this planet’s solar
maximum will look like the Trail of Tears.

The facts of the matter are clear. Less energy means less
economic activity and anything we try to do using our old fossil fuel
addiction to drive it makes our environmental situation worse. Ammonia
production is an energetic and economic activity that produces half of
all the protein humans consume. Our warming, acidifying seas are
responsible for much of the rest. This story does not end with a happily ever after.

We have to interpret our situation so we can find a path forward.
We have the choice of reason, understanding the geology of oil and gas
depletion, understanding the ecology and atmospheric chemistry of
global warming, and debunking the so called ’science’ of economics,
with its disregard for what economists called ‘externalities’ once and
for all.

The other choice is the irrational domain of religious
fanaticism. Instead of seeing cause and effect, see everything that
happens as some master plan on the part of a supernatural force,
leading up to an apocalyptic ‘end of days’. Don’t circle the wagons
here on our relatively safe, relatively lightly populated continent,
but instead focus on those who cleave to a different supernatural force.

I think we’re going to pick both. We’re constrained by our
history, constrained badly. We’ve had a rich, largely empty continent
that took two centuries to fill. We had a civil war once, but with
separate geographic territories and uniformed, organized armies
fighting for formal governments it was like few other civil wars in
history. This next conflict, it’ll pit the rational against the
religious, Hispanics against a subset of the whites, and it’ll put
great stress upon and perhaps bring an end to the continental United
States as we know it today. We don’t have any more room to grow, either
geographical or energetically, and as George Monbiot says we’ll be
“fighting like cats in a sack” soon enough.

I wish I was wrong, I truly do. But I look back over the last
fifteen months of diaries and two jump right out at me: My prediction
of Mexico as a failed state from January 4th of 2008 is first … and 385 days later the U.S. Joint Forces Command agreed with me.

Mexico; poorer than us, drier than us, running smack into the
depletion of its massive oil field in the Bay of Campeche, and coming
apart due to drugs and corruption, all the while with the best and
brightest of the Mexican nation making the way from the Mexican state
to ours. This place is our neighbor, our soon to be our failed state as
Iraq is to Iran, and it’s the canary in the North American coal mine. …

We’ve got a
visible ethnic minority that’ll be a target for scapegoating and a
significant fraction of the population with an apocalyptic worldview
who can no longer be counted as loyal. The rubbing those two groups
together may very well be the spark that ignites a conflagration. (04/02/09)
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BBC Plant Science — A Dundee scientist has been awarded £1m to study the stresses that plants come under and how they will cope with things like climate change.

Professor John Brown is investigating alternative splicing - the process by which individual genes can produce several different proteins. His research should give a clearer insight into why certain plants react better to changes in the environment. His laboratory is at the Scottish Crop Research Institute.

Prof Brown, who is also with Dundee University, said: “It’s known in plants that there are many many genes that undergo alternative splicing, which means many genes can give rise to many different proteins and under different stress conditions this alternative splicing can change. So under cold stress or hot stress for example, or when a pathogen or pest infects the plant, these can affect the expression of genes in a plant. So it’s really about how plants deal with their external conditions because, unlike us, if it’s cold they can’t go inside and sit by the fire. They have to have this flexibility where they have all their normal cellular functions even though the temperature is minus four up to plus 30.” (04/02/09)
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BBC Medical Science — Stem cells that could be used to restore hearing have been successfully created, scientists have said. A Sheffield University team took stem cells from embryos and converted them into cells that behave like sensory hair cells in the human inner ear. Their discovery could ultimately help those who have lost hair cells through noise damage and some people born with inherited hearing problems. But any cure is still some years away, experts told the journal Stem Cell.

The Sheffield team is now working on the next stage of the research to check if the cells can restore hearing. Currently, hair cell damage is irreversible and causes hearing problems in some 10% of people worldwide.

Embryonic stem cells could change this because they have the unique ability to become any kind of human cell. Not only could they be used to replace the lost hair cells, but also any damaged nerve cells along which the signals generated by the hair cells are transmitted to the brain. …

Dr Ralph Holme, director of biomedical research at RNID, said: “Stem cell therapy for hearing loss is still some years away but this research is incredibly promising and opens up exciting possibilities by bringing us closer to restoring hearing in the future.”

Vivienne Michael of Deafness Research UK said: “This study highlights the importance of stem cell research. In addition to the future potential for restoring hearing with stem cell therapy, the recent research success means that we may now have better ways to test the efficacy and toxicity of new drugs on auditory cells.”

Professor David McAlpine, director of the Ear Institute, University College London, said: “Is this the ultimate upgrade for the iPod generation? The possibility of regenerating the sensory cells of the inner ear, so easily damaged by exposure to loud sound, has just moved a step closer. If scientists can find out ways to deliver new cells to the inner ear, and wire them up correctly, then “plug and play” hearing could be the future.” (04/02/09)
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BBC Machine Intelligence — Scientists have created an ideal colleague - a robot that performs hundreds of repetitive experiments. The robot, called Adam, is the first machine to have independently “discovered new scientific knowledge”. It has already identified the role of several genes in yeast cells, and is able to plan further experiments to test its own hypotheses.

The UK-based team that built Adam at Aberystwyth University describes the breakthrough in the journal Science. Ross King from the department of computer science at Aberystwyth University, and who led the team, told BBC News that he envisaged a future when human scientists’ time would be “freed up to do more advanced experiments”. Robotic colleagues, he said, could carry out the more mundane and time-consuming tasks. “Adam is a prototype but, in 10-20 years, I think machines like this could be commonly used in laboratories,” said Professor King.

Adam can carry out up to 1,000 experiments each day, and was designed to investigate the function of genes in yeast cells - it has worked out the role of 12 of these genes. Biologists use the yeast cells to investigate biological systems because they are simple and easy to study. “When you sequence the yeast genome - the 6,000 different genes contained in yeast - you know what all the component parts are, but you don’t know what they do,” explained Professor King.

The robot was able to work out the role of the genes by observing yeast cells as they grew. It used existing information about the function of known genes to make predictions about the role an unknown gene might play in the cell’s growth. It then tested this by looking at a strain of yeast from which that gene had been removed. “It’s like a car,” Professor King said. “If you remove one component from the engine, then drive the car to see how it performs, you can find out what that particular component does.”

Duc Pham from the Manufacturing Engineering Centre at Cardiff University described the robot scientist as “a clever application of robotics and computer software”. But, he added, “it’s more like a junior lab assistant” than a scientist. “It will be a long time before computers can replace human scientists.” (04/02/09)
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