Chicago Plans to Cut Greenhouse Gases

The City of Chicago wants to cut its emission of greenhouse gases to three-quarters of 1990 levels by 2020, and one-fifth of 1990 levels by 2050. The Associated Press reports that the plan includes updating the city’s building code to improve insulation and heating and cooling systems in all buildings, increasing recycling and carpooling, and promoting alternative fuels. Chicago emits 34.6 metric tons of greenhouse gases each year.

Scientist Automates Nanotube Production

Carbon nanotubes hold the promise of making lighter aircraft, splitting hydrogen from water to use as fuel, and making high-density batteries, among other innovations. But it can takes researchers hours of fussing with tiny adjustments to a nanomaterial-building furnace to make enough of the little buggers to perform experiments. Now Wired tells us that Stephen Steiner, a graduate student at MIT, has written a program based on English syntax and fuzzy logic to automate the furnace and produce longer and more uniform nanotubes.

Researchers Synthesize Cancer Protein

Scientists trying to cure cancer have a new tool in their arsenal, thanks to researchers who have figured out how to synthesize a protein that plays an important role in some types of cancer and immune system diseases. Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have applied for a patent on a protein known as a chemokine, UPI reports. The researchers say having the protein available will allow them to perform studies on new methods of treating cancer.

Web Running Out of Early Adopters

With all the users of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and their associated applications, developers of new Web 2.0 services are facing application overload, a column in the New York Times warns. Developers are finding that there are so many applications out there, getting people to try your new one often means convincing them they should drop one they’re already using. This may explain why I haven’t looked at my Friendster account in months.

Future May Bring Intelligent Cloud

Over at the official Google blog, Google employees are speculating about what the future holds for development of the Internet. An engineer and a research scientist look at the growth of parallel-processing computer clusters becoming increasingly linked and handling more and more data, and suggest that the computing cloud may develop a form of intelligence. I’m pretty sure I read that in a Heinlein novel, and it didn’t work out so well for the builders of the computer.

IBM Looks Ahead to Even Smaller Transistors

Computer chips have become more powerful by cramming more and smaller transistors into the same space, and the industry right now is moving from technology where the key size measurement is 65 nanometers to 45-nanometer technology. But as CNET News reports, IBM is looking a couple technology generations ahead, to 22-nanometer devices. The challenge they’re tackling: Technology to produce such small features doesn’t yet exist, and it’s not obvious how to create it.

New Device Could Replace Batteries in Electric Cars

Capacitors, which store energy electrically instead of chemically, the way batteries do, may be better than batteries in electric vehicles because they can charge and discharge energy much faster. The problem is that they don’t typically hold very much of a charge. Now Chinese scientists say they’ve designed an ultracapacitor, based on an array of carbon nanotubes, that can store enough energy to be practical for use in a car, New Scientist reports.

Web Science Aims to Study the Internet

The development of the World Wide Web has brought about developments that nobody predicted back in the early days of the Internet, from the rise of social networking to the increase in identity theft. As Scientific American tells us, in an article co-authored by WWW creator Tim Berners-Lee, a new discipline known as “web science” is arising. The aim of web science is to discover how society-changing effects arise on the Web and to try to harness them for the common good.

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NSF Grant Supports Study of Next Generation Internet

A project to re-think the Internet from the ground up has received $12 million in funding from the National Science Foundation. The Associated Press reports that the money will go toward developing prototypes for the Global Environment for Network Innovations, a testbed to try out new networking ideas. Actual construction of GENI would cost about $350 million.

Social Networking May Stimulate Science

A new social network site, Labmeeting, is designed to let scientists easily upload their papers and lab notes to be shared with other members of their research team. TechCrunch tells us the site was started by Harvard graduate Mark Kaganovich with $500,000 in seed funding and opened last week to anyone with a college email account. His hope is to spur researchers to talk with each other more.

California Sues EPA Over Greenhouse Gases

The state of California is suing the Environmental Protection Agency, claiming the EPA has ignored its duty to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from ships, aircraft, and construction and agricultural machinery. Reuters reports that state Attorney General Jerry Brown says he tried to work with the EPA but was met with only weak responses.

Is the FCC Ignoring Metered Broadband?

The Federal Communications Commission has been cracking down on Comcast for slowing down connections of customers using peer-to-peer networks to share files. But a columnist at GigaOm argues that that’s just a diversionary tactic to draw attention away from the lack of FCC action on proposals to charge extra to customers who use more than a certain amount of broadband each month. Om Malik worries such a policy will reduce use of services from YouTube to Facebook.

British Hacker to Face Trial in U.S.

A British computer hacker who rummaged through military computer systems looking for evidence of space aliens will be extradited to the United States to stand trial. Gary McKinnon is charged with accessing computer networks at the Pentagon, the Army, the Navy, and NASA in 2001 and 2002, New Scientist reports. If found guilty, he could face up to 70 years in prison.

California Sticking to Paper Ballots, Hand Counting

Given the fears about possible flaws and abuses with electronic voting machines, the California Secretary of State has announced the state will be relying on paper ballots that can be optically scanned and recounted by hand this election season. Debra Bowen says she opted for the paper ballots because they preserve the original vote, CNET News reports. Bowen commissioned a study last year that showed that electronic voting can be tampered with or have programming mistakes that alter results.

Air Force Developing Anti-Laser Protections

Anticipating a day when enemy combatants will be armed with lasers capable of melting holes in its equipment and weapons, the U.S. Air Force is looking for technology that will protect its weapons. Among the possibilities listed in a request for proposals is a spray-on coating to deflect laser energy or a broadband reflector that can be embedded in a weapon’s skin, Wired tells us. Such technologies, the Air Force suggests, could also protect commercial airliners from terrorists with lasers.

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