Insurance companies: unlikely planet saviours

From ABC Environment, 5 July 2010:

Insurance companies stand to lose a lot of money if the climate changes in unpredictable ways so they have become partners in the push to save the globe.

EVEN ON THE ALREADY enlarged scale of renewable energy projects, DESERTEC is ambitious. It aims to build more than 16,000 square kilometres of solar thermal and wind power plants in the sun-drenched deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. It would meet most of the power needs of those regions and supply at least 15 per cent of Europe's electricity by 2050, backed by an enormous high-voltage DC grid. The cost? A cool 400 billion Euros.

The money has to come from somewhere, and the DESERTEC project, initiated by the environmental think tank, the Club of Rome, is backed by a consortium of some of the world's most powerful blue chip companies, led by reinsurance giant Munich Re.

It may come as a surprise to see an insurance company at the head of list, given how notoriously tight-fisted the insurance industry is. But what's even more surprising is that Munich Re is not alone in sinking staggering amounts of money into a vision of a sustainable future. All around the world, including Australia, the insurance industry is doing what few other industries, and even fewer governments are prepared to do - putting their money where their environmental mouth is. Read more.

Waste to wonderful

From ABC Environment, 21 June 2010:

Under our noses, our bottoms, in our garbage bins, on our streets and in our landfills is waste. Lots of it. But for some very lateral-thinking entrepreneurs, finding the waste, meant finding an opportunity to make money. The 10 ideas that follow are no simple cash-a-can exchange scheme, however. They are some of the oddest uses for waste you're likely to hear. Read more.

How to be a successful freelancer

Interested in getting into the wonderful world of freelance journalism? Founder of the Sydney Writers Centre Valerie Khoo and Bianca Nogrady recently gave a talk to the NSW branch of the Australian Science Communicators about how to be a successful freelance journalist.

Bianca's top five tips on how to succeed in freelancing are:

1. Use your networks and contacts

2. Find good stories and pitch them to the right publications

3. Write good, comprehensive pitches

4. Make your editor's life easy

5. Keep up-to-date on your areas of interest

Find out more here.

What would nature do?

From ABC Science Online, 20 May 2010:
It's a simple question, and one we're going to be asking ourselves more and more over the coming years. Why? Because that simple question is going to save the planet.
Humanity has made spectacular technological progress over the last couple of centuries. We are healthier, wealthier, more mobile, better educated, more interconnected and more comfortable than ever before thanks to innovations ranging from cars to computers and MRIs to mobile phones. But there's one field in which we still perform abysmally —resource efficiency.
We waste an appalling amount of resources such as oil, energy and fresh water. Our cars waste around 85 per cent of the energy put into them, transmission losses from the power grid are as high as 10 per cent and our industrial processes generate huge amounts of waste such as pollution and heat. After more than two centuries of rampant, unsustainable resource consumption, we are now facing the very real possibility that some of those resources are going to run out, or at least become prohibitively expensive to extract.
The solutions are to be found in the same place we plunder. Nature has been playing the sustainability game for around 3.8 billion years, and has become extremely good at it. The natural world is balanced, efficient, resilient and responsive. It has to be because, as Charles Darwin so elegantly explained, only the fittest — those best suited to their environment — survive to pass on their genetic material.
A creature that lives beyond its means, that is dependent on resources transported from far away, that relies on combustion for energy, that discards much of what it uses and which pollutes its environment can hardly be described as well suited to the environment.
In contrast, in the natural environment, nothing is wasted. It's a closed-loop system where the outputs of one process eventually become the inputs of other processes. Nature uses only what it needs, and recycles everything.
And so, as we stare down the barrel of dwindling resources, an increasingly polluted environment and climate change, many are looking to Nature for inspiration. Read more.

The Sixth Wave of innovation

From ABC Environment, 4 April 2010:
If we were in an action movie right now, we'd be thinking, "How can the hero possibly escape from this, kill the baddie, win the girl and save the planet?"
The global financial crisis has sent shockwaves through the world's economies the likes of which have not been experienced since the Great Depression. Peak oil, diminishing fresh water supplies, global food shortages and dwindling resources hang over us like the Sword of Damocles; an avalanche of waste threatens to engulf us and climate change menaces us with future catastrophe.
But a hero may yet save the day. What if these factors were all pointing to, and part of, a much bigger picture - one which presents a far more optimistic and exciting view of the next thirty years of humankind? Read more.

The Sixth Wave book

After nearly two years of work, The Sixth Wave book is finally in print. This is a collaboration with James Bradfield Moody, and explores the next wave of innovation - the sixth wave.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the tide of progress has ebbed and flowed: five distinct waves, each starting with disruptive new technologies and ending with a global depression, have transformed our industries, societies and economies almost beyond recognition. We are now on the cusp of another massive transformation – the sixth wave.
In this wave a spectacular boom in technology and powerful new markets will drive a shift away from resource dependence to a new way of life: resource efficiency. Waste will be a source of opportunity and nature a source of inspiration.
The Sixth Wave is a business book, a motivational book, a bold prediction and a roadmap to the future. It is for anyone interested in understanding how the next wave of innovation will change our lives, and how to succeed in a resource-limited world.
For more information, visit www.sixthwave.org.

Deep into the red

From Scientific American, July 2009 (online May 8, 2009):
Mind control has been traditionally the realm of the hypnotist, but research in the field of fluorescent proteins is opening up the possibility of controlling cellular processes, gene activity and even behavior using nothing more than infrared light.
Fluorescent proteins, which are compounds that can absorb and then emit light, have become a powerful instrument in the cell biologist's toolkit—so powerful, in fact, that the discovery and development of green fluorescent proteins from jellyfish earned the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. These proteins have limitations, however: They need to be excited with the blue to orange part of the visible spectrum, at wavelengths of 495 to 570 nanometers. These wavelengths of light are too short to penetrate tissue very well, and so green fluorescent proteins are mainly used in test tube studies to watch cell division or to label certain cell types.
But one of the 2008 Nobelists, Roger Y. Tsien of the University of California, San Diego, and his U.C.S.D. colleagues report in today's issue of Science that they have developed a new fluorescent protein that could enable scientists to tag and visualize cellular activity as it happens inside a live animal. The protein, after absorbing light from the far-red part of the spectrum, shines in the near-infrared, at wavelengths of around 700 nanometers. Read more.