news20090917lat

[Today's Newspaper] from [Los Angeles Times]

[World > Asia]
New prime minister named in Japan
Associated Press
September 17, 2009

Tokyo - Japan's parliament named Yukio Hatoyama prime minister Wednesday, as his party took power for the first time with promises to revive the slumping economy and make Tokyo a more equal partner in its alliance with the United States.

The Stanford-educated Hatoyama said he planned to review the American military presence in Japan, where 50,000 U.S. troops are stationed. But he said he wouldn't emphasize that potentially contentious issue in a first meeting with President Obama that could come sometime this month.

The outgoing Liberal Democrats, who had ruled the country for most of the postwar era, are staunchly pro-American.

Some have worried that the incoming Democratic Party of Japan would make changes to the U.S. relationship, but both Hatoyama and Washington have been careful to dispel the notion that any big shift is afoot.

While in the opposition, some in the Democratic Party said they wanted to overhaul the security alliance, and others balked at Tokyo's share of the cost of moving 8,000 Marines from the southern island of Okinawa to the U.S. territory of Guam.

But Hatoyama, 62, has been careful to reassure Japanese and Americans alike that the U.S. will remain the "cornerstone" of his government's foreign policy.


[Business > Energy]
ENERGY
Interest in algae's oil prospects is growing
Firms and scientists are racing to figure out how best to separate the oil produced in the organisms for biofuel. The San Diego area has become a hotbed for these efforts that are drawing investors.
By Tiffany Hsu
September 17, 2009

{General Atomics of San Diego produces a large quantity of algae in a pool of circulating water. The goal for scientists is to separate the oil from the algae and create a clean biofuel.}

To many, algae is little more than pond scum, a nuisance to swimmers and a frustration to boaters.

But to a growing community of scientists and investors in Southern California, there is oil locked in all that slimy stuff, and several dozen companies are racing to try to figure how best to unleash it and produce an affordable biofuel.

The companies and several research labs have set up shop in the San Diego area, many of them in an area nicknamed Biotech Beach. There, about 200 biotech companies of all kinds are clustered near La Jolla on the mesa above Torrey Pines State Beach.

Together, the firms and organizations conducting algae research employ nearly 300 people with more than $16 million in payroll and bring $33 million annually into the local economy, according to the San Diego Assn. of Governments, and local officials see the potential for much more.

"It's a critical industry, and it's kind of exploded," San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders said. "There's a long pattern of huge companies being spawned out of [UC San Diego] and our other research centers, and it's going to create a tremendous number of jobs."

National energy companies are converging on the fledgling industry. Exxon Mobil Corp. announced a $600-million partnership with La Jolla biotech company Synthetic Genomics Inc. in July. San Diego companies General Atomics and Science Applications International Corp. have received nearly $50 million from the Defense Department for algae fuel research.

Last year, $176 million was invested by venture capitalists to develop biofuel from algae, according to industry publication Biofuels Digest in Miami.

With the region's proximity to the ocean and its history with biotech businesses, San Diego is a familiar spot for clean-energy investors, Biofuels Digest editor Jim Lane said.

"It has all the magic conditions for the emergence of business life," he said. "San Diego wants to be associated with algae, while other cities have other fish to fry and think of algae as just one of many things."

Supplementing the research is experimental aquaculture, as farming in fresh- and saltwater is known. The arid Imperial Valley to the east is now home to several massive algae farms, one with nearly 400 acres of ponds in all shades of green being swirled by paddles to expose the organisms to more sunlight.

All of this activity has drawn its share of doubters.

Skeptics say that it's a beachcomber's fantasy, that it's too costly to cultivate any significant amount of algae, that fuel inside -- whether in the form of oil, ethanol, gas or hydrogen -- is too expensive to extract or produce on a large scale.

But in recent years, San Diego, along with Silicon Valley, St. Louis, Seattle and a few other cities, have disregarded the skeptics and emerged as hotbeds of algae biofuel research.

One of the nascent industry's major annual events, the 2009 Algae Biomass Summit, is headed to San Diego next month. It is put on by the Algal Biomass Organization, a Preston, Minn., group that seeks to promote commercial uses of algae products.

Seeking to unite and enhance much of the algae work underway in San Diego County is a new research consortium. It aims to help clear barriers to commercializing algae biofuels by identifying new algae strains and harvesting methods.

The San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology was launched in 2008 with 16 founding partners from UC San Diego, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, biofuel companies and more.

Until recently, "algae has been this complete backwater of scientific research," said the center's founding director, Steve A. Kay, who is also dean of biological sciences at UC San Diego.

"But we've all woken up with the realization that we are junking the planet."

Known as "nature's solar panels," the "amazingly clever little chemical factories" soak up carbon dioxide and sunlight, which is converted into oil through photosynthesis, Kay said.

Algae, he said, can be harvested more often and at greater yields than many other potential biofuel crops such as soybeans or grasses.

Unlike food and several other biofuel sources, algae is being eyed because it can thrive in difficult environments such as salty or polluted water or in the desert, freeing up valuable agricultural space.

Fuel from the microorganisms has already been tested in airplanes and is being groomed for use at NASA test facilities and in the Navy. Last month, San Diego-based biofuel gorilla Sapphire Energy unveiled its Algaeus plug-in hybrid vehicle, which will run on an algae-based renewable gasoline.

Scientists also envision using algae for more than just fuel, tapping it instead for fish or livestock feed, antibacterial products, foams for windmill blades and, in one futuristic vision, in cancer therapies.

In the 1990s, early research into algae biofuels stagnated as oil prices dropped and funding was siphoned off to cancer, AIDS and bioethanol studies, Kay said. Algae is now making a comeback, buoyed by the eco-friendly movement and concerns about dependence on traditional fuels. But the slimy stuff is no magic wand, experts say.

Expecting algae to make a meaningful dent in fossil fuel usage is still a tall order, experts said. The algal biofuel production process is often lambasted as inefficient by other biofuel competitors.

"We can certainly come very close, but we're not there yet and I'm not sure when we'll ever get there," said John R. Benemann, an algae biofuel consultant with Benemann Associates in Walnut Creek. "It's a significant challenge to get down to the price point, or even just the ballpark of fossil fuels."

The problem is translating successful lab experiments to an industrial scale. Mass algae biofuel production could require enormous pools or photobioreactors while growing a proportionally small amount of algae. Technology needs to be developed to systematically extract the oil from the organisms.

Algae-generated oil currently costs $20 to nearly $33 a gallon to produce, with some estimates soaring to $60. Conventional gasoline costs less than $5 a gallon.

"There's a valley of death between research and development and commercial development," said Lisa L. Mortenson, chief executive of Community Fuels in Encinitas.

Add California's heavy regulations, and algae biofuel production becomes an even more difficult business proposition, some complained.

Biofuel companies often have to wade through a tangle of permits, taxes and compliance measures in California. Aquaculture alone requires more than 15 permits, with more for waste disposal and water use.

The intensity of the algae hype is making some investors wary.

"The majority [of the efforts] are a gigantic hassle of time and capital because they're trying to make coal out of diamonds," said David Andresen, a clean-tech investment banker at Oracle Capital Securities. "There's such a high level of scientific illiteracy in the investment community that you can really wow investors."

Still, even Andresen is an investor in the industry, working with Kai BioEnergy Corp., a San Diego company named after the Hawaiian word for "ocean."

Although Kai can produce only about 20 gallons per minute while it needs 300 gallons a minute to be commercially viable on a large scale, Chairman Mario C. Larach is optimistic.

"It's just a matter of scaling at this point," he said. "If nature can do it, we can do it."

news20090917nyt

[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]

[Asia Pacific]
Japan’s New Prime Minister Takes Office, Ending an Era
Yukio Hatoyama was applauded by fellow lawmakers after being elected as Japan's 93rd prime minister by the lower house of parliament in Tokyo on Wednesday.
By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: September 16, 2009

TOKYO — Yukio Hatoyama, who led his party to a landmark victory in elections last month, took office as prime minister and named a cabinet of loyal allies on Wednesday, promising to bring change to a country mired in stagnation after a half-century of virtually uninterrupted, one-party rule.

Mr. Hatoyama has said the Democratic Party will reverse Japan’s long economic malaise, increasing social benefits and aligning policies more closely with the public’s needs rather than those of big business or the country’s bureaucrats. He has also spoken of redefining Japan’s relationship with the United States, its closest ally.

“I am trembling with deep emotion over this moment of historical change, while at the same time I know I have taken on an immense responsibility,” Mr. Hatoyama said at a news conference. “We are entering the realm of the unknown.”

Mr. Hatoyama, 62, is a management professor with a doctorate in engineering from Stanford; a critic of globalization; a political scion who cast out Japan’s postwar political order with a decisive victory over the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

He inherits an economy that is emerging from its deepest recession in decades, brought on by a collapse in the country’s mainstay exports amid the global economic crisis. He must also deal with debt approaching twice the size of its gross domestic product, a legacy of years of government spending on public works projects that fueled the politics of the departing Liberal Democrats.

Unemployment is at a record high of 5.7 percent, while the cost of supporting a rapidly aging population is threatening the country’s public finances.

Blaming years of mismanagement by bureaucrats for Japan’s woes, Mr. Hatoyama has made reining in their power a major goal. His rhetoric struck a chord with voters demoralized after decades of insider-driven politics and wasteful spending.

The Democrats also promise to redistribute more funds directly to the country’s struggling households, and build a stronger social safety net. They hope that more economic security will spur consumer spending, and wean Japan off its dependence on exports for economic growth.

“First and foremost, we will engage in policies that will boost household incomes,” Mr. Hatoyama said. “We will realize a world where politics does not rely on bureaucrats.”

The cabinet Mr. Hatoyama picked reflects those goals.

Hirohisa Fujii, Japan’s new finance minister, is a Finance Ministry bureaucrat-turned-politician likely to play an important role in efforts to control the bureaucracy and rein in spending. He served as finance minister for a coalition government in the mid-1990s, when the Liberal Democrats briefly lost power.

Mr. Fujii will be joined in his task by the deputy prime minister, Naoto Kan, 62, a founder of the Democratic Party who will lead a new agency called the National Strategy Bureau. Mr. Kan will take on tasks once carried out by the bureaucracy, including drawing up national budgets and filling top bureaucratic posts.

Mr. Kan, a former activist, lawyer and lawmaker, has a record of battling bureaucrats, most famously over a government cover-up of tainted blood products that caused hundreds of hemophilia patients to contract the AIDS virus.

Critics say the Democrats, who swept into office with 308 out of 490 Parliament seats, lack a coherent growth strategy. “The Democratic Party is still trying to figure out how best it should engage with the global economy,” said Izuru Makihara, a politics professor at Tohoku University. “They say they will overhaul current policy, but it’s not clear what they will replace it with.”

In his cabinet lineup, Mr. Hatoyama also accommodated the Democrats’ two coalition partners — the Social Democratic Party and the People’s New Party, a conservative splinter group.

Those parties, with anti-free-market platforms, are expected to push the Democrats to reverse many of the pro-market reforms championed by the former prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi.

The Democrats’ election platform also called for a re-examination of Tokyo’s ties with Washington, including the presence of 50,000 American service members in Japan. But Mr. Hatoyama’s choice of foreign minister, the 56-year-old moderate Katsuya Okada, signals that Japan’s pro-American foreign policy will not drastically change.

Mark McDonald contributed reporting from Hong Kong.

news20090917wp

[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[Asia/Pacific]
Japan's New Leader Seeks Revision of Relations With U.S.
But Major Shift in Alliance Is Unlikely
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 17, 2009

TOKYO, Sept. 16 -- Hours after he became prime minister Wednesday, Yukio Hatoyama said he wants to change Japan's "somewhat passive" relationship with the United States and review the large American military presence here.

Since his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won in a historic landslide Aug. 30, Hatoyama has tried to reassure the United States that the nation remains the cornerstone of Japan's foreign policy while following through on his party's campaign vow to make the two nations' relationship more equal.

In a sign that he was trying to find the right balance, he said Wednesday that he didn't "believe we can do things without the U.S."

Hatoyama, who has a doctorate in engineering from Stanford University, is expected to travel to New York next week to participate in the U.N. General Assembly session and might meet with President Obama during the trip.

As his party mounted its challenge this year to the Liberal Democratic Party, which had always maintained a close relationship with the United States, it criticized what it described as Japan's excessively docile dealings with its principal postwar ally and military protector. The DPJ said it would renegotiate a "status of forces" agreement that keeps 47,000 U.S. troops in Japan.

In particular, the party wanted the U.S. Marine Corps' Futenma Air Station to move to a new location on the southern island of Okinawa. It said Japan should rethink its pledge to pay $6 billion to the United States for relocating about 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to a new base on Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific. The party also wanted to withdraw Japanese naval vessels from a refueling mission in the Indian Ocean.

After the DPJ's victory, however, Hatoyama and other party leaders appeared to roll back the demands, saying that they might "suggest" revisions in the status-of-forces agreement and in funding for base relocation.

At the news conference Wednesday, Hatoyama seemed to be trying to define a middle ground. He said that he does not "intend to change our basic policy" toward the United States and that he wants "to build a relationship of trust" with Obama. He added, however, that he wants a relationship with the United States "in which I can actively and frankly voice our thoughts."

Under a postwar treaty, the United States is obligated to defend Japan in case of attack.

In recent days, it appeared that soothing statements by Hatoyama's party, as well as private discussions between U.S. and Japanese military officials, had reassured the United States. The commander of American military forces in the Pacific, Adm. Timothy J. Keating, said in Washington on Tuesday that he did not foresee a meaningful shift in the alliance.

"I'm very confident, almost certain, that there'll be maybe some discussions about certain aspects of U.S.-Japan military alliance, but writ large, no significant change anticipated, and that's good," Keating said, according to the Reuters news service.

A Question of Mandate

Rethinking Japan's ties to its closest ally and major trading partner was not the clarion call that induced huge numbers of Japanese to vote for the DJP last month. Polls showed that the the party won in a historic landslide because voters saw it as the only available means of demolishing the despised LDP, a sclerotic patronage machine that ruled the country for nearly half a century.

Voters said they expected Hatoyama and his left-of-center party to take a fresh look at Japan's intractable economic problems. But they were not convinced that the DPJ's campaign promises made much sense, polls found, and there was little evidence of a groundswell of popular support for reexamining Japanese-U.S. relations.

As Hatoyama reminded DPJ lawmakers the night before they named him prime minister, he is taking control of the government at a miserable moment for many Japanese. "This is not a time for rejoicing," he said. "If the Democratic Party does not live up to expectations, the country could lose hope, and there will be no way out."

The world's second-largest economy is mired in its worst postwar slump, with record unemployment, falling wages, declining business investment and a sharp drop in consumer prices that threatens to trigger deflation.

The DPJ will have to address those problems while providing ever-more-costly medical care and other social services to the world's oldest population, while shouldering a public debt that is the highest among rich nations.

"I would be grateful for your nurturing the new government with patience," Hatoyama said during the nationally televised news conference. "I think there will be various trials and errors. I think there will be failures."

The DPJ says increased growth will be driven by expanded consumer consumption. To that end, the party promised during the campaign to give parents an allowance of $276 a month per child. It also pledged to eliminate highway tolls, slash fees at public schools, increase support for farmers and raise the minimum wage as part of $178 billion in new spending.

The DPJ is a mix of LDP defectors, labor activists and assorted progressives. Some worry that the party lacks expertise and governing savvy. Nearly half of its lawmakers in the lower house are first-termers, and many have no experience in government.

Hatoyama appeared to try to address that issue when he named his cabinet Wednesday, filling several key posts, including that of finance minister, with experienced policymakers.

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.

news20090917sa

[Environment] from [scientificamerican.com]

[News > Environment]
September 16, 2009
Lack of U.S. Climate Change Legislation Will Delay Global Treaty Talks
The U.S. special envoy admits that a global treaty may not be ready in time for Copenhagen in December thanks to a lack of final legislation in the U.S.
By Darren Samuelsohn

President Obama's top climate diplomat acknowledged today that Capitol Hill delays over global warming legislation will likely push international negotiations to work beyond a December summit in Copenhagen on a new treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

"I think that we'll shape the thing to get as much done as can be done, and there are some pieces that need to get completed," Todd Stern, the State Department's climate envoy, told reporters. "But I think the mission is to get the most ambitious, most far-reaching accord that we can in Copenhagen, and to the extent there's some things that need to be completed after that, then that will happen."

Stern did not go into specifics about what items will be left for diplomats beyond December. But the diplomat said he agreed with U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer, who earlier this summer made a similar assessment that the Copenhagen negotiations won't be the end-all on a global warming treaty that applies to more than 190 nations.

According to the U.N. Web site, additional climate talks are scheduled for May and November 2010 -- though more negotiations are likely to be scheduled should diplomats fail to make enough headway at the end of this year in Copenhagen.

The prospects for sealing a deal in Copenhagen hinge in large part on how much the United States and China -- the world's two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases -- can agree on leading into the Dec. 7-18 negotiations. President Obama will head to Beijing in mid-November amid expectations the two countries may be ready to unveil some type of bilateral agreement on emission reductions and low-carbon energy technologies.

Obama also is planning to speak Tuesday at the United Nations during a special summit on climate change as diplomats look to kick-start talks that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said this week are stalled.

"We are deeply concerned that the negotiation is not making much headway," Ban told the Guardian newspaper today. "It is absolutely and crucially important for the leaders to demonstrate their political will, leadership and to give clear political guidelines to the negotiators. They should be responsible for the future of this entire humanity."

Speaking today at a Washington forum hosted by The Atlantic magazine, Stern complained about the political fights in Congress in trying to pass cap-and-trade legislation, saying the status quo would hinder U.S. businesses' ability to keep up with their competition.

"We're going to spend the next five years pushing China and all the years after that chasing him if we stay where we are," Stern said. "The competitive threat to the United States is not that there is a modest price on carbon imposed in the context of cap-and-trade allowances. That is not the threat. That's modest, and to the extent that there are trade-exposed industries, that can be dealt with. That's not the threat."

"The threat," Stern added, "is we just stay in this ridiculous ideological box where people are just baldly playing politics with it or taking a know-nothing approach and saying the science that's clear enough isn't clear."

Some Obama officials had wanted Congress to send the president a cap-and-trade bill for signature by December, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) yesterday said the legislation may need to be punted into 2010 because of a packed agenda that includes health care and Wall Street regulatory reform. A Reid spokesman later walked back from that assessment, saying the goal is still to try to debate the bill this year.

Former Rep. Phil Sharp (D-Ind.), now the head of the nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future, said today that he is not ready to rule out action in Congress on a global warming bill. "Until things are pronounced dead, I found they never got alive in a major way on Capitol Hill until people panic and say, 'Is that the alternative?'"

Stern said his ability to negotiate in Denmark will be limited without a final law that spells out exactly how much Washington can commit to. But he maintained that it won't preclude the Obama administration from being a key player in the negotiations.

"It's quite central to being the U.S. domestic effort," Stern said. "If the bill isn't done, if it's moving through the tunnel, but it's just not done yet because it's big and complicated and health care is taking up a bunch of space, I think we can deal with that as long as it's moving along. I hope it's actually done. I think that's possible, too. But there will be negotiation ways that can be dealt with as long as we're pressing forward."

news20090917gdn

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[World News > Obama administration]
Barack Obama abandons missile defence shield in Europe
Decision likely to delight Moscow, which saw itself as the target, but is met with dismay by Poland and Czech Republic
Luke Harding in Moscow and Ian Traynor in Brussels
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 September 2009 12.25 BST Article Barack Obama has abandoned the controversial Pentagon plan to build a missile defence system in Europe. The move has prompted angry accusations of betrayal from Washington's eastern European allies but delighted the Kremlin.

In one of the sharpest breaks yet with the policies of the Bush administration, Obama phoned the leaders of Poland and the Czech Republic last night to tell them that he had dropped plans to site missile interceptors and a radar station in their respective countries. Russia had furiously opposed the project, claiming it targeted Moscow's nuclear arsenal.

Obama is to announce the reversal officially at a news conference today. This morning the Czech prime minister, Jan Fischer, revealed that Obama phoned him about it last night.

During a visit to Moscow in July the US president indicated he was ordering a 60-day review of the contentious plan. According to today's Wall Street Journal, the findings, to be released next week, conclude that Iran's long-range missile programme is progressing more slowly than previously thought. Citing US officials, the paper says the White House believes Iran's short and medium-range programme poses a more potent and immediate danger.

The US decision will cheer many in government in western Europe who believed the project was an unnecessary provocation to the Russians. But today the Czech Republic and Poland expressed extreme disappointment at the White House's decision to reverse track after six years of difficult negotiations. Senior sources in Warsaw and Prague said they would insist on the Americans honouring pledges they made to the Nato allies in return for agreeing last year to the plan for missile defence deployments.

Aleksandr Vondra – a former Czech deputy prime minister and ambassador to Washington intimately involved in the negotiations with the Americans – said he was surprised. "This is a U-turn in US policy," he said. "But first we expect the US to honour its commitments. If they don't they may have problems generating support for Afghanistan and on other things."

Under the Bush administration the Pentagon spent years planning and negotiating to place 10 silos with interceptor rockets in northern Poland and to build a large radar station south of Prague to defend against a perceived ballistic missile threat from Iran.

The central European countries were keen to acquire the US installations and other military hardware as partial security guarantees against a resurgent Russia. Moscow claimed the project was aimed against Russia and threatened to deploy short-range nuclear weapons in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which sits inside the European Union.

Obama's climbdown is likely to be seen by Russia as a victory for its uncompromising stance.

Today, however, analysts pointed out the decision would help Obama secure Moscow's co-operation on a possible new sanctions package against Iran and would further his desire to "reset" relations with Moscow following a dismal period under the Bush administration.

It would significantly boost the chances of a new treaty on strategic nuclear arms reduction between Washington and Moscow, they said. Both the US and Russia have agreed to come up with a successor treaty to Start 1 by December, when the current agreement expires.

"Hardliners in Russia don't want an agreement on Start. It will be very difficult now for Russia to avoid an agreement," said Ruben Sergeyev, a defence analyst in Moscow. "It [the decision to drop the US shield] creates a very positive ambience, despite the fact it was really an artificial thing."

The decision strengthens Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, who is due to make his first presidential trip to the US next week for the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh. The Obama administration has been keen to boost Medvedev's standing and authority at home, seeing him as a more moderate and less hostile interlocutor than Putin.

Today the Nato secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said Obama's decision was "a positive step". Rasmussen said he had been briefed by the US envoy to Nato about it.

But the timing of the announcement is regarded as disastrous by the Poles. Eugeniusz Smolar, a former chief of Warsaw's Centre for International Relations, said: "We are disappointed." But he added that the Polish government had been assured by the Americans that promises of training with Patriot missile batteries and help in modernising the Polish military remained valid.

A few weeks ago, in a cri de coeur to Washington, several senior eastern European officials and public figures wrote a public letter to Obama complaining that their security interests were being ignored by the west in order to improve relations with Moscow.

Rasmussen, in his first big speech, is to call tomorrow for a new relationship between the western military alliance and Russia, taking more account of Moscow's security and strategic interests.

Russian experts said Obama's decision could only be seen as an unambiguous concession to Moscow, adding that it would severely disappoint the new Nato countries of eastern Europe. Yevgeny Miasnikov, a senior research scientist at Moscow's Centre for Arms Control, said the US administration would now consider ways of assuaging the Poles and Czechs, which might include providing Poland with Patriot interceptors capable of shooting down short- and medium-range missiles.

"Obama has taken a step in the direction of improving US-Russian relations. This will definitely help build a partnership," Miasnikov said. "Russia will also now make some concessions, maybe on strategic talks over nuclear arms reduction or maybe over Iran.

"Moscow will try to catalyse the process of improving US-Iranian relations and will facilitate dialogue between the two sides. I don't think threatening Iran is the way to solve this problem."[

news20090917sn

[SN Today] from [ScienceNews]

[SN Today]
Galaxies that go the distance
First results from revamped Hubble identify distant starlit bodies and pose a cosmic puzzle
By Ron Cowen
Web edition : Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Just days after NASA released the first cosmic dreamscapes taken by the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope (SN: 9/26/09, p. 7) three teams of astronomers have used the rejuvenated observatory to find what appears to be a bounty of the most distant galaxies known.

Analyses of infrared images of these galaxies captured in late August and early September with the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 suggest there were fewer bright galaxies early in cosmic history and those galaxies formed stars at an unexpectedly low rate.

Because the researchers do not yet have measurements of the wavelengths that make up the starlight from these galaxies, they do not directly know how far away the galaxies lie. But the starlit bodies’ colors suggest that about 16 reside roughly 12.9 billion light-years from Earth and another five or so sit even further, a record-breaking 13.1 billion light-years away.

“We are looking back 13 billion years and seeing galaxies just 600 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was like a 4-year-old,” says Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a member of one of the discovery teams.

The galaxies all lie within a small patch of the southern sky, called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, that has already been imaged by Hubble and a slew of other telescopes.

It’s the new camera’s greater sensitivity, as well as its larger field of view, that has enabled scientists to rapidly find what appear to be extremely remote galaxies, says Richard Ellis of Caltech in Pasadena, a coauthor of two of four papers that the three teams recently posted online at arXiv.org.

“This is a golden moment,” Ellis says. “All the groups independently analyzed the data with different software and broadly speaking, we’re all in agreement.”

A team that includes Illingworth and Rychard Bouwens, also of UC-Santa Cruz, posted its findings on September 11. Ross McLure and James Dunlop of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, along with Ellis and their colleagues, posted their report on September 15. A team led by Andrew Bunker of the University of Oxford in England, again including Ellis, also posted an analysis of the new Hubble data on September 15.

The researchers all find a marked downturn in the number of bright galaxies as the telescope peers farther away and thus further back in time. That decrease in the galactic population is expected from current models of galaxy formation, comments Harry Ferguson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who was not a member of any of the teams.

The findings “appear to show that galaxy formation is just starting at these [early times],” comments Simon White of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany.

Because the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is tiny — one one-hundred-fiftieth the apparent area of the full moon on the sky — and because the Wide Field Camera 3 has only just begun taking pictures, it is difficult to know how representative the findings are of the rest of the universe at these early cosmic times, Ferguson and Ellis both caution.

Ellis notes that the new findings also hint at a puzzle. His team estimates that the distant galaxies, which are too tiny to be clearly resolved by Hubble, are making stars at a puny rate. In some cases, that rate is as low as the mass equivalent of 0.0025 suns per year. According to current models, that rate couldn’t have generated enough ultraviolet starlight for a critical milestone in the evolution of the universe — the wrenching apart of neutral hydrogen atoms into their subatomic constituents.

About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the cosmos had cooled sufficiently for protons and electrons to recombine into atoms. But the universe has long been reionized, with hydrogen atoms once again split into protons and electrons. Many astronomers have assumed that ultraviolet light from the first galaxies did the splitting.

This is not yet an astronomical crisis, Ellis says. It may be that the first stars were more efficient than expected at producing ultraviolet radiation. Another possibility is that ultraviolet light more easily escaped these early galaxies than it did from later galaxies.

Another possibility, comments White, is that “there might be enough undetected very small galaxies to do the job.”

New data is just starting to pour in that may solve this and other cosmic riddles, Ellis says. “This is a very exciting time.”


[SN Today]
Monkeys get full color vision
Males with red-green colorblindness can distinguish the hues after gene therapy, study suggests
By Tina Hesman Saey
Web edition : Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Two male squirrel monkeys now see the world in a whole new way — in full color.

Female squirrel monkeys can see in color, but male squirrel monkeys are normally red-green colorblind because they lack pigments in the retina that detect those wavelengths of light. Now, researchers have performed gene therapy that allowed two male squirrel monkeys named Sam and Dalton to produce proteins that detect red light. As soon as the red-light-harvesting protein was made in the monkeys’ eyes, the animals were able to discriminate between red and green spots in color vision tests, Jay Neitz of the University of Washington in Seattle and his collaborators report online September 17 in Nature.

The experiment wasn’t supposed to work, Neitz says. People born with cataracts don’t develop nerve connections that help the brain make sense of messages sent by the eye. If the defect isn’t corrected early, these people remain essentially blind even if their eyes return to full function later. Because there was no reason to assume color vision was different from other types of vision, the team had assumed it would not be possible to reverse the deficit in an adult animal.

Neitz polled experts in the vision field on whether they thought producing photoreceptors in colorblind adult monkeys could give color vision. “Every single person said, ‘absolutely not.’” But the researchers decided to move forward with the experiment to see if they could get the pigment protein to be made in the eye.

Male monkeys lacking the red photoreceptor protein were given injections of a virus carrying a gene for the protein. Levels of the protein slowly rose in some retinal cells. After 20 weeks, Neitz and his colleagues started to see differences in the way Sam and Dalton performed on daily color vision tests. Around that time, protein production levels peaked and the monkeys have maintained stable color vision for two years since treatment.

In the tests, monkeys were shown a panel with a patch of colored dots on a background of gray dots. If the monkeys press the area with the colored dots, the animals get a grape juice reward. Even colorblind monkeys guess correctly about a third of the time, Neitz says.

“Sometimes they get on a streak, so those first couple of days when they were on a streak, we tried not to get too excited,” he says. “But by the end of the week it became clear that this was not random chance.”

Sam and Dalton could consistently pick out red, green, blue and yellow dots from the gray background and discriminate between the colors. Before the gene therapy, they could only discriminate yellow and blue. The speed at which the monkeys learned the new colors indicates that no brain rewiring was required for the feat, unlike that needed to restore other types of vision such as distinguishing objects.

The achievement is causing a stir among vision scientists and may have implications for understanding the evolution of color vision, says Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

“Somehow the brains of these monkeys are already wired to decode these color signals,” Conway says. That fact raises the possibility that “the evolution of color vision may have required just one genetic switch.”

But, Conway says, there is an important disclaimer. “We have no idea if this would work in humans or that it would be a delightful experience for the people post-surgery.” People who have surgery to repair sight lost in childhood often report that their new vision is confusing and disorienting, he says. Adding color could prove to be similar.

Other scientists who originally thought color vision couldn’t be generated in adult animals are impressed by Neitz’s achievement.

“They certainly have added some color vision,” says Gerald Jacobs, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “I find the measurements compelling.”

Still, the monkeys’ actual sensation of color — what it looks like to them — remains a mystery.

“The achievement is technically amazing and conceptually very cool,” says Melissa Saenz, a neuroscientist at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif. But even though the monkeys can discriminate some new wavelengths of light, “there's no evidence that the monkeys perceive a new dimension of color,” she says. For example, the monkeys may now perceive red and green as different shades of yellow and blue, colors the animals already knew.

“If it doesn't involve experiencing new sensations of color, it would not dramatically change the experience of colorblind people if the treatment were applicable to humans,” Saenz says.

news20090917nn1

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 17 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.924
News
High window on the past
Microbiologists find living stromatolites in the Andes.
By Ana Belluscio

For billions of years life on Earth was dominated by stromatolites, collections of photosynthetic microorganisms and calcareous concretions that formed dome-like lumps in shallow waters. Now, in a rare find, Argentinian scientists have discovered stromatolites forming today in super-salty lakes high in the Andes.

The extreme conditions in which these stromatolites live might resemble early Earth and help shed light on the geochemical cycles that marked early life on the planet, researchers say. Fossil stromatolites are common, but living stromatolites occur in only a few areas, mostly in shallow seas, as at Shark Bay in western Australia. The Argentinian find is unusual because it is in a closed lake and at such a high altitude.

A team led by María Eugenia Farías, a microbiologist at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET-PROIMI) in Tucumán, Argentina, found the stromatolites on field expeditions in February and August this year. The lakes, known as the Socompa and Tolar Grande lagoons, are located in the arid plateau of the central Andes in the province of Salta, more than 3,600 metres above sea level.

Extreme environments
In the lakes, where salt levels are more than 135 parts per million and nitrate levels are high, the stromatolites have no competition for nutrients and can thrive. The high elevation means that there is relatively little oxygen in the atmosphere, and levels of ultraviolet radiation can be 165% that of sea level1. "This environment is similar to the one in which stromatolites originally developed," says Farías.

Her preliminary results show that the Socompa lagoon has a pH of 8.5, and its stromatolites contain diatoms and cyanobacteria. Tolar Grande is more acidic, at pH 5, and its stromatolites contain a narrower range of diatom species, along with archaea and gamma-proteobacteria.

Stromatolites are not only an important window onto the past; they can also provide clues as to how organisms might cope today, the researchers say. Ancient DNA-repair mechanisms reflect how microbes dealt with ultraviolet exposure, says Valeria Souza, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, who in 2000 discovered living stromatolites in springs in the Chihuahuan desert in northern Mexico. The Andean stromatolites, she says, "have maintained their archaic repair mechanism".

Farías's group is continuing to analyse the species composition of the Andean stromatolites, and has asked the national and local government to help prevent further contamination of the area.

One of the ponds at Tolar Grande is already contaminated, possibly from sewage from local villages, and stromatolites have died. Water from the Socompa lagoon is being diverted over the border to Chile for mining. Authorities are in the process of closing the area to the public.

References
1. Cabrol, N. A. et al. J. Geophys. Res. doi:10.1029/2008JG000818 (in the press).


[naturenews]
Published online 16 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.917
News
Climate change warning from Greenland
Small rise in temperature thousands of years ago caused rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
By Kerri Smith

The Greenland ice sheet melted much more rapidly as a result of warmer temperatures in the recent past than previously estimated, a team of international scientists has revealed. They warn that future warming could have more dramatic effects on the ice than researchers have assumed.

Between 9,000 and 6,000 years ago, Earth went through an unusually warm period. But puzzlingly, unlike data from many other spots in the Northern Hemisphere, measurements of isotopes in ice cores drilled from the Greenland ice sheet (GIS) hasn't reflected that temperature change. So models of the ice sheet's behaviour based on these data have suggested that the height of the ice above bedrock has remained quite stable during the past 12,000 years.

Now, new data from ice cores drilled in six different places on and around the ice sheet reveal that this unusually warm period affected the GIS too, and that in response to these temperatures — which were 2–3 °C hotter than the current temperature — it lost 150 metres in height at its centre and shrank by 200 kilometres at the edges.

Big thaw

A team led by Bo Vinther from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, analysed the ice cores for evidence of the regional temperature and elevation of the Greenland ice sheet in the Holocene, the geological era that began about 12,000 years ago. Each core is basically a long rod of ice, drilled down 3 kilometres to the bedrock. It is sliced up and the content of particular isotopes, such as those of oxygen, in water and air bubbles from the appropriate section is measured in the lab.

To work out the ambient temperature on the ice sheet, the team had to disentangle changes in temperature that were due to the change in elevation from changes in temperature due to climate change — a task that has proved difficult in the past. To do this, they analysed two ice cores from small ice caps that did not form part of the main sheet and which, the researchers believe, did not change elevation. They used these measurements to work out the temperatures on the ice caps, and by comparing these with temperatures obtained from main-sheet ice cores were able to work out the thickness of the main sheet at different times in the past.

"What we can now say for sure is that 8,000 years ago it was in fact 2-3 °C warmer than now, and it was this 2-3 degrees that actually caused quite a bit of melting," says Vinther. "And that of course gives us an indication that if climate was to warm a few degrees, then the ice sheet might start to lose mass again." The team's results are published in Nature¹.

Forcing the issue

Eric Rignot, who studies ice and climate at the University of California, Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, is excited by the new result but cautious about applying it to future warming. He is working with others to develop better models of ice-sheet behaviour for use in the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with the goal of explaining patterns observed in the past decade.

"Climate forcing is of a very different nature today to the Holocene," he says, but notes that analyzing the climate of the past "still gives us information on how sensitive the ice sheet is to climate change."

Rignot agrees with Vinther and his team that in future the ice is likely to melt more rapidly than current models predict. "How quickly is difficult to say," he says. But, he adds, we need to be using this data to think one step ahead. "The climate machine is moving on in the meantime."

References
1. Vinther, B. M. et al. Nature 461, 385-388 (2009). | Article

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[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 16 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.910
News
Why opposites don't always attract
A lucky lab accident helps to explain the mystery of bouncing droplets.
By Geoff Brumfiel

It's a natural fact that opposites attract — or so scientists thought. But a new study of fluid droplets shows that opposites can sometimes bounce right off one another. The results may seem esoteric, but they could have big implications for everything from oil refining to microfluidic 'lab-on-a-chip' technologies.

The work, published today in Nature, began as a laboratory accident. William Ristenpart, a chemical engineer at the University of California at Davis, was studying how the shape of a water column in oil changed as it was drawn towards an electrically charged plate. "I basically messed up," he says. "I was applying a few kilovolts, the system shorted out and the water exploded."

Tiny droplets of water went ricocheting around the oil-filled chamber. But as Ristenpart watched, he noticed something odd: oppositely charged water bubbles seemed to be bouncing off one another. "The first time I saw that I was terribly confused," Ristenpart says.

Charge puzzle

That's because, like other researchers, Ristenpart believed that oppositely charged water droplets would attract each other and form larger drops. This property has long been exploited in the 'electrostatic separation' process used by the petroleum industry to collect and remove bubbles of seawater from crude oil.

Ristenpart and his colleagues studied his laboratory accident for three years, and with the help of high-speed videos and mathematical calculations they now claim to understand the phenomenon. Because of the force of surface tension, water droplets are normally held in tight spheres. But as two electrically charged droplets come close to each other, the spheres begin to warp — and at very short distances, a small bridge of fluid forms between the drops.

When the electrical charge is low, that bridge grows until the drops merge together, but when the charge is high, something else happens: the bridge allows the droplets to exchange their charge and then snaps. The water flows back into the bubbles, and by the time the two drops collide, they are back in their spherical shape. Rather than merging, their surface tension causes them to bounce off one another like beach balls.

Seeing is believing

"Wow, how can that be?" Frieder Mugele, a physicist at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, remembers asking himself on first seeing the result. But Mugele says he is wholly convinced by the group's explanation. "The fundamental principle is captured by what they are saying," he says. "It's a very striking phenomenon."

A bigger question is whether the bouncing effect could actually be useful. Many scientists are working to develop microfluidic systems — known as labs-on-a-chip — that can mix small amounts of chemical reagents or biological molecules. Electrical charge is one way that chemicals can be moved around these chips, and the study's authors say that knowledge of the bouncing bubbles could aid their development. Ristenpart says that the work could also find an application in the oil industry, which currently uses building-sized electrostatic separators to remove seawater from crude oil. The American Chemical Society has given Ristenpart's team a grant to see whether their research can create a more efficient separator, he says.

But even if the myriad potential applications don't pan out, Ristenpart is still planning a long future in droplet studies. His group is now looking at unusual collisions in which the droplets break into a pair of daughter drops, one large and one small. "That is not really well understood at all," he says. "There's a lot more thinking to do for sure."

References
1. Ristenpart, W. D., Bird, J. C., Belmonte, A., Dollar, F. & Stone, H. A. Nature 461, 377-380 (2009). | Article


[naturenews]
Published online 16 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.921
News
Colour blindness corrected by gene therapy
Treated monkeys can now see in technicolour.
By Elie Dolgin

Researchers have used gene therapy to restore colour vision in two adult monkeys that have been unable to distinguish between red and green hues since birth — raising the hope of curing colour blindness and other visual disorders in humans.

"This is a truly amazing study," says András Komáromy, a vision researcher and veterinary ophthalmologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the research. "If we can target gene expression specifically to cones [in humans] then this has a tremendous implication."

About 1 in 12 men lack either the red- or the green-sensitive photoreceptor proteins that are normally present in the colour-sensing cells, or cones, of the retina, and so have red–green colour blindness. A similar condition affects all male squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus), which naturally see the world in just two tones. The colour blindness in the monkeys arises because full colour vision requires two versions of the opsin gene, which is carried on the X chromosome. One version codes for a red-detecting photoreceptor, the other for a green-detecting photoreceptor. As male monkeys have only one X chromosome, they carry only one version of the gene and are inevitably red–green colour blind. A similar deficiency accounts for the most common form of dichromatic color blindness in humans. Fewer female monkeys suffer from the condition as they have two X chromosomes, and often carry both versions of the opsin gene.

"Here is an animal that is a perfect model for the human condition," says Jay Neitz of the University of Washington in Seattle, a member of the team that carried out the experiment.

Neitz and his colleagues introduced the human form of the red-detecting opsin gene into a viral vector, and injected the virus behind the retina of two male squirrel monkeys — one named Dalton in honour of the British chemist, John Dalton, who was the first to describe his own colour blindness in 1794, and the other named Sam. The researchers then assessed the monkeys' ability to find coloured patches of dots on a background of grey dots by training them to touch coloured patches on a screen with their heads, and then rewarding them with grape juice. The test is a modified version of the standard 'Cambridge Colour Test' where people must identify numbers or other specific patterns in a field of coloured dots.

Colour coded

After 20 weeks, the monkeys' colour skills improved dramatically, indicating that Dalton and Sam had acquired the ability to see in three shades (see video). Both monkeys have retained this skill for more than two years with no apparent side effects, the researchers report in Nature1.

Adding the missing gene was sufficient to restore full colour vision without further rewiring of the brain even though the monkeys had been colour blind since birth. "There is this plasticity still in the brain and it is possible to treat cone defects with gene therapy," says Alexander Smith, a molecular biologist and vision researcher at University College London, who did not contribute to the study.

"It doesn't seem like new neural connections have to be formed," says Komáromy. "You can add an additional cone opsin pigment and the neural circuitry and visual pathways can deal with it."

Three human gene therapy trials are currently under way for loss of sight due to serious degeneration of the retina. These phase I safety studies injected a similar type of virus vector (but carrying a different gene) behind the retina as in the monkeys, and people treated have shown no serious adverse effects more than a year after, with some participants reporting marked improvements in vision². These first human trials — which repair rods, a different type of photoreceptor cell — can be seen as a safety benchmark for any future treatment of cone diseases and colour blindness in humans, says Neitz.

"The biggest issue is that people who are colour blind have very good vision," Neitz says. "So before people are going to want to treat colour blindness you're going to want to ensure that this is completely safe, and that's going to take some work."

References
1. Mancuso, K. et al. Nature advanced online publication, doi:10.1038/nature08401 (2009).
2. Cideciyan, A. V. et al. N. Engl. J. Med. 361, 725-727 (2009).

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[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 16 September 2009 | Nature 461, 323 (2009) | doi:10.1038/461323a
News
Vaccine venture boosts health hopes
Industry and academia join forces to develop cheap jabs against diseases that afflict the poorest.
By Declan Butler

US pharmaceutical giant Merck and Company and the UK Wellcome Trust will create a joint, not-for-profit £90-million (US$150-million) research centre in India to develop affordable vaccines against diseases that afflict the poor — including neglected diseases for which inadequate or no vaccines exist. The move marks the first time that a major medical-research charity and a pharmaceutical company have directly partnered to create vaccines aimed at low-income countries.

"It's a tremendous development," says Adel Mahmoud, a former president of Merck Vaccines and now a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey. Unlike drugs for neglected diseases, he says, "vaccines for neglected diseases have not been given any significant attention over the years."

The new research centre will be named after the late Maurice Hilleman, a Merck scientist who developed more than 40 vaccines, including against measles and hepatitis B. Its location in India has yet to be selected, but it is expected to open by the end of next year.

The centre will be headed by Altaf Lal, currently health attaché at the US embassy in New Delhi and the South Asia regional representative for the US health and human services department. Lal says it will bridge the translational research gap that exists between academic scientists and clinical programmes, to help take promising leads to the proof-of-concept stage.

Despite being a non-profit organization, the centre will be run as a business, and will be free beyond its £90-million seed funding to pursue partnerships with academics, companies, governments and philanthropic bodies. The centre's portfolio will include high-risk research into diseases for which no vaccines are currently available, says Ted Bianco, director of technology transfer at the Wellcome Trust in London. It will also aim for more immediate pay-offs, such as improving existing vaccines that are too expensive or poorly adapted for distribution in hot, resource-poor countries, where maintaining a chain of refrigeration is complicated.

"The centre will bring the scientific and technical skills of an extremely advanced vaccine company like Merck to bear," says Marie-Paule Kieny, vaccine-research director at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, adding that the direct involvement of the Wellcome Trust confers considerable credibility on the venture's goals.

Prospects for vaccines in low-income countries have recently improved. Public–private partnerships have been set up to develop vaccines against the big killers, such as HIV/AIDS and malaria, and the drug firm Novartis last year opened an in-house, non-profit research institute in northern Italy to develop vaccines for diarrhoeal diseases (see Nature 451, 1037; 2008). The Geneva-based global health partnership the GAVI Alliance, created in 2000, has also greatly increased and accelerated the introduction and distribution of large volumes of vaccines.

{“We really want to lower a lot of the barriers that exist for developing promising products.”
Mark Feinberg}

But the crucial missing component has been bringing academic development together with industrial expertise, says Bianco. "Merck are terrific partners to have," he says. "When making vaccines, know-how is hugely significant, and vaccines are a struggle to get into developing countries without it." As well as funding the centre, Merck will offer access to its own researchers, its technologies such as adjuvants and its expertise in clinical trials, says Mark Feinberg, the company's vice-president of medical affairs and policy.

The joint venture has yet to decide which diseases it will tackle, but will base the decisions on criteria such as scientific and technical feasibility, affordability and whether vaccine formulations will meet the field and other needs of the large procurement agencies such as the WHO, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the GAVI Alliance. One candidate being explored for vaccine suitability is the Group A Streptococcus bacterium, which causes some 400,000 deaths annually in poor countries but has attracted little research funding.

To start whittling down the list of potential candidates, Wellcome and Merck organized a meeting of scientists and other stakeholders in January this year at a research centre in Kilifi, Kenya, part of the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI). The two partners have also created an advisory group of external scientists chaired by David Heymann, a former assistant director-general of the WHO and now chairman of the UK Health Protection Agency.

The Indian centre will also collaborate with local pharmaceutical companies that can cheaply produce any vaccines it develops. That's novel, says Kieny, and may well pave the way for Western vaccine makers to allow generic versions of vaccines, such as those against human papillomavirus or pneumonia, which are available in rich countries but too expensive for poorer ones.

"Affordability will be key in the technical and other choices all along the product design and development path," says Feinberg. "We really want to lower a lot of the barriers that exist for developing promising products."

news20090917nn4

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 16 September 2009 | Nature 461, 324 (2009) | doi:10.1038/461324a
News
Ear to the Universe starts listening
US radio array starts its search for extraterrestrial life.
By Eric Hand

A large array of radio telescopes has begun its first sustained search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and at rates faster than ever before. Even so, the project has scrambled to find money to stay open and reach its planned size. "We've had a chequered time here," says Don Backer, director of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in Hat Creek, California. "We're skating on thin ice."

The ATA has 42 six-metre dishes swivelling in the high desert, far fewer than the 350 dishes planned. In May, the array began combing the centre of our Milky Way Galaxy for alien signals across a broad slice of the radio spectrum. The effort comes 50 years after the concept of SETI was invented (see Opinion, page 345).

Previous searches relied on weeks-long observing runs at facilities such as the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. The last major search, Project Phoenix — run by the SETI Institute of Mountain View, California — ended in 2004 and required a decade to check 800 stars across a narrow frequency range. The ATA scans the sky much more quickly, allowing a million stars to be checked in just a few decades, says astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute, which operates the ATA jointly with the University of California at Berkeley. Shostak says sampling a million stars would offer a good chance of striking on one of the 10,000 intelligent civilizations that might be broadcasting in the Milky Way, according to an estimate by Frank Drake, who in 1960 developed a formula to estimate this number.

Private donors, often technologists, began to support SETI in 1993, after the US Congress rescinded NASA funding for it. The family foundation of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen provided US$25 million, beginning in 2000, to start the ATA. But in 2006, that stream of money was cut off (see Nature 444, 9; 2006), as the SETI Institute and Berkeley struggled to find matching donations to complete the array, which to date has cost $50 million.

{“We've had a chequered time here — we're skating on thin ice.”}

Last year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) turned down a proposal to support operations at the array. SETI astronomer Jill Tarter says the NSF's decision was "like a Catch-22". The array was big enough at 42 dishes to begin work — and needed money for that — but was not yet big enough to achieve the sensitivity capable of transformational science. Backer hopes that once completed, the ATA, covering vast swaths of sky rapidly, will usher in an era of transient radio astronomy — the study of things, such as supernovae, that go bump in the night rather than shine constantly like stars. Science targets could include the star-fuelling hydrogen that surrounds galaxies, and the radio afterglow of the γ-ray bursts that follow supernovae.

Without the NSF money, the $1.5-million-a-year operation cost is being paid by the US Air Force, which uses the array to track satellites and orbital debris. "It's keeping our doors open right now," says Backer. The Allen Foundation has given an additional $5 million since 2006.

Time at the array is split roughly equally: a third to the Air Force, a third to radio astronomy and third to SETI. Increasingly, however, SETI can piggyback on the radio astronomy work.

The ATA is also a testbed for technologies that will be important for the rest of radio astronomy. The array has a wide view of the sky, and within that picture, multiple stars can be analysed simultaneously. This technology, known as beam forming, as well as the immense computing challenge of making a picture from many individual dishes, will be needed in future projects, such as the Square Kilometre Array, which envisions thousands of dishes. "This is where radio astronomy has to go," says Mark McKinnon, project manager for a $94-million expansion of the 27-dish Very Large Array in New Mexico. The ATA, he says, "are the only people who are actively doing this".

Backer has a proposal before the NSF to double the number of dishes to 84. The request would match $6 million in NSF money with $5 million committed by five donors, including the Allen Foundation and Taiwan's Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Backer says a decision is due before the end of the year.


[naturenews]
Published online 16 September 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.923
News
North American coalition pushes for refrigerant curb
Greenhouse gases closer to Montreal Protocol regulation.
By Jeff Tollefson

Demand for refrigerators and air-conditioning units is boomingPunchstockThe United States, Canada and Mexico have joined a growing movement to regulate a class of powerful greenhouse gases under the Montreal Protocol, rather than curb them using carbon markets under a global climate treaty.

Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are commonly used as refrigerants, and were introduced to replace earlier chemicals that destroyed stratospheric ozone. Although ozone-friendly, they can be thousands of times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. As greenhouse gases, their regulation falls under the United Nations climate framework, but many say they could be phased out faster and more cheaply using the Montreal ozone treaty.

Mauritius and Micronesia took the lead in proposing a Montreal treaty amendment to this effect in April. This week's North American official support brings "the diplomatic muscle that we need to push this over the finish line", says Durwood Zaelke, who has spearheaded the HFC effort as president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development in Washington DC.

"An international freeze and phasedown of HFCs would help avoid creating a serious environmental problem, achieve important climate benefits and send a signal to the market concerning the need to develop and commercialize new alternatives," officials representing the North American coalition wrote in a 14 September letter sent to Marco Gonzalez, who runs the UN's Ozone Secretariat in Nairobi, Kenya. "We believe that global action on HFCs is warranted and that it can be taken under the Montreal Protocol."

US President Barack Obama, Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper had already said in August that they would back the idea. The issue could be decided as early as November, when Montreal Protocol delegates convene in Egypt for their annual meeting.

Expanding horizons

The first explicit moves to address global warming under the Montreal Protocol were made two years ago, when delegates agreed to accelerate the phase out of hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), which represent a second-generation chemical deployed to replace the original ozone enemy, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Last year several countries, including the United States, followed up with calls for an assessment of the climatic benefits of phasing down HFCs.

The North American proposal cites recent research that suggests HFC use is poised to accelerate, due to growing global demand and ongoing efforts to phase out other ozone-depleting chemicals.

In July, a team led by Guus Velders at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in Bilthoven modelled HFC trends and found that HFC emissions could reach 5.5 billion and 8.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents annually by 2050, representing as much as 19% of projected CO2 emissions under business-as-usual scenarios.¹. Their figures showed explosive growth in developing countries and were several times higher than previous estimates.

Despite these concerns, phasing out HFCs under the Montreal agreement will hinge on the participation of all the nations involved in the treaty. The European Union, in particular, has not yet expressed any support for the idea. "We need a full-court press to get the rest of the world on board," says Zaelke.

References
1. Velders, G. J. M. et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 106, 10949-10954 (2009)

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[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 16 September 2009 | Nature 461, 328-329 (2009) | doi:10.1038/461328a
News
Wonder weed plans fail to flourish
The first of four weekly articles on biofuels looks at how investment in jatropha is slowing, as investors realize that basic research is needed.
By Katharine Sanderson

The business of biofuels

The promise of green gold is fading from Jatropha curcus, a shrub that thrives in arid conditions and whose seeds yield a diesel-like oil. Many had seen it as a potential saviour for marginal lands, a plant that could lift developing countries out of poverty and into a sustainable oily future.

Just last year, some analysts were predicting that the area planted with jatropha worldwide — at the time, 721,000 hectares — would rise as high as 22 million hectares by 2014. The Jatropha Alliance, an advocacy group based in Berlin, was estimating that investments of up to US$1 billion could be expected annually. More than 130 companies were in the race, dominated by D1 Oils of London, which in 2007 had landed a $160-million deal with oil giant BP.

But this July, BP and D1 announced that their deal was off. And of 140 investments made in biofuels so far this year, says analyst Harry Boyle of London-based New Energy Finance, only four or five have been in jatropha projects. "Jatropha has gone very quiet," he says.

What happened? It's difficult to untangle the impacts of the global financial downturn from disappointment with jatropha in particular, says Rob Bailis, an environmental scientist at Yale University. But "over the past three years, the investment got way ahead of the plant science", he says.

{“Over the past three years, the investment got way ahead of the plant science.”}

Early investors are now realizing the plant's limitations. Jatropha can live in very dry conditions, but doesn't necessarily yield a lot of seeds. The plant takes three years or more to reach maturity, requiring care along the way. And jatropha seedlings are often not well-suited to the climate in which they are planted.

Even supporters acknowledge that the allure of jatropha is fading somewhat. "This year, a lot of projects did not continue," admits Thilo Zelt, director of the Jatropha Alliance.

One blow came with the publication of a controversial paper in June, in which a team led by Arjen Hoekstra at the University of Twente in the Netherlands suggested that jatropha needs more water than other bioenergy crops, such as maize (corn), to produce the same amount of oil (W. Gerbens-Leenes et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 10219–10223; 2009). Jatropha had nearly four times the water footprint of sugar-cane ethanol, for instance.

Critics point out what they see as flaws in that analysis, including the fact that it is difficult to compare jatropha, which is wild, with crops such as maize that were domesticated for optimal use thousands of years ago. In addition, the analysis looked at a small number of plantations, all of which had young trees, which could skew the conclusions, says Bart Muys, a forest ecologist at the University of Leuven in Belgium. But Hoekstra says that more thought needs to be given to variables such as where jatropha is planted and how it is harvested. "Jatropha was the hallelujah crop," he says, but in reality "it is just another crop with its own characteristics".

The split between D1 Oils and BP has hurt jatropha's reputation as a good business investment, says Boyle. In a statement, BP spokeswoman Sheila Williams said that "the decision to pull out of this is purely based on economics and a decision to focus on key strategic areas", such as sugar-cane ethanol from Brazil, cellulosic ethanol from the United States and biobutanol. In the meantime, D1 Oils has shifted from planting jatropha to focusing on basic research — including starting a breeding programme to develop seeds with high oil yields, says Henk Joos, the company's head of plant science.

Another company concentrating on basic science is SG Biofuels, based in Encinitas, California. It has collected samples from jatropha plants growing wild in different environments and is creating a library of genetic material from which it intends to develop enhanced seed strains to test, says chief executive Kirk Haney.

Eventually, jatropha might prove more useful on a local scale. For instance, Diligent Energy Systems, a company based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, has set up small-scale operations in Tanzania, where it provides jatropha seeds for farmers to plant among other crops or on spare land that is unsuitable for food crops. The farmers are guaranteed a price for the oil seeds they produce, and so have an incentive to tend the crop and harvest it carefully, says company founder Ruud van Eck. Some 5,000 farmers are involved, he says, with a total of 3,500 hectares of jatropha planted between them. "The idea is to grow to 10,000 by the end of this year," he says.

In other countries, jatropha has yet to capture local support. In the Lao People's Democratic Republic, farmers have been bombarded with seeds and promotional material from companies but received little to no support, says Jakob Rietzler of the Lao Institute for Renewable Energy in Vientiane. As a result, he says, the jatropha they planted reached harvest at the same time as the rice crops. "Farmers neglect their jatropha seeds because they have to harvest their rice," he says.

In India, where much of the jatropha hype originated, success will come only if a conservative, realistic approach is adopted at the beginning, says Pushpito Ghosh, director of the Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute in Bhavnagar. Biodiesel from his institute's jatropha project (see Nature 449, 652–655; 2007) has been used in test cars belonging to the project and in collaboration with General Motors. Ghosh's team has been working to improve the genetic stock of their jatropha, and is about to embark on a life-cycle analysis of how much biodiesel jatropha can generate from a 50-hectare plot.

Even so, "it would be premature to call [jatropha] a success in India", says Ghosh. "It is still in the take-off stage."

He sees the hype and subsequent disappointment surrounding jatropha as a weeding-out process, leaving behind smaller, more professional players. These include the Australia-based Jatoil, which in August announced a memorandum of understanding with the European biofuel producer PT Waterland. The deal is expected to give Jatoil between 1,000 and 2,000 hectares of established jatropha-bearing land in Java. And China, one of the world's leading biofuel manufacturers, is also taking an interest in jatropha, with 105,000 hectares planted in the country by 2008 and a total of 700,000 predicted by 2015.

The next year is likely to see more basic research into the crop. Muys and his team, for instance, have analysed global land suitability and developed a high-resolution map to show where jatropha might grow best; Madagascar, Tanzania and Ethiopia are likely candidates. Meanwhile, Bailis is conducting jatropha life-cycle analyses to account for land-use change in India and Brazil. Zelt says that seeds optimized to produce more oil will be entering the market in the coming months, and the first real second-generation plants will be planted next year.

So although jatropha may not be a saviour plant, transforming vast quantities of desert land into biofuel-producing moneymakers, it is likely to find its niche as a local alternative in certain developing countries. "We need to find ways to use local business resources more efficiently," says Jeremy Woods from Imperial College London's Centre for Environmental Policy. "And jatropha can play a big part in that."

ews20090917bcc1

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 11:35 GMT, Wednesday, 16 September 2009 12:35 UK
Profile: Miyuki Hatoyama
Japan's new first lady is something of a Renaissance woman: designer, former actress, cookbook author, television personality - and perhaps most controversially a self-professed space traveller who has visited Venus with aliens.
No signature

If that were not enough, she also claims to have met Tom Cruise in a former life, when he was Japanese.

Miyuki Hatoyama, married to Japan's new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama since 1975, looks set to break the usually reserved mould of Japanese political wives.

But Mr Hatoyama has not tried to tone down his wife's eccentric ways. He has made no secret of his devotion to her, saying "she is like an energy refuelling base".

'Life composer'

Her life was unusual by Japanese standards even before meeting Yukio in a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco in the early 1970s.

Born in 1943 in Shanghai, while the city was under Japanese occupation, she then grew up in the western Japanese city of Kobe.

{When the sun is up, I always eat it
Miyuki Hatoyama}

As a teenager she joined the Takarazuka Revue, a troupe of female singers and dancers who have achieved cult status in Japan for their glitzy interpretations of romantic musicals.

She divorced her restaurateur first husband and married Yukio Hatoyama in the US - a mild scandal for the son of an established political family.

Since then, Mrs Hatoyama has built a career as what she calls a "life composer" - a clothes designer, interior decorator and author of cookbooks including one called Miyuki Hatoyama's Spiritual Food.

She styles her husband's hair and chooses his clothes for public appearances.

She has also become a regular on the chat show circuit, discussing topics ranging from food, to politics to religion.

But as her husband emerged as a clear favourite for the premiership earlier this year, it was her comments on her past lives and travels aboard an alien spaceship that attracted the most attention from the international media.

"While my body was sleeping, I think my spirit flew on a triangular-shaped UFO to Venus," she said in an interview for a book on prominent people entitled Most Bizarre Things I've Encountered, published last year.

"It was an extremely beautiful place and was very green."

On a daytime chat show she revealed that having met Tom Cruise in a past life, she now wanted to make a film with him.

"He was Japanese in his past life, and we were together so when I see him, I will say 'Hi, it's been a long time' and he will immediately understand."

"I will win the Oscar for sure."

Mrs Hatoyama also explained how she "eats the sun" every day, to gain energy.

"When the sun is up, I always eat it... I tear it off and eat if like this," she said on the chat show, joking with the host.

"Yum, yum, yum," she said. "That gives me great power."


[Business >Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 09:59 GMT, Thursday, 17 September 2009 10:59 UK
Japan central bank eyes recovery
The Bank of Japan (BOJ) has signalled more optimism about the future of the world's second-largest economy.
No sign

"Japan's economic conditions are showing signs of recovery," it said, as it kept interest rates at 0.1%.

BOJ Governor Masaaki Shirakawa said there had been improvements in Japan's corporate financing, but that small firms still faced tricky times.

He also sounded calm about the yen, which has been rising, saying it may help the economy in the long run.

Stronger yen

"To give our general view on the yen, the short-term impact of a stronger yen would be to lower prices," Mr Shirakawa said.

"It is possible for a stronger yen to support the economy in the long run."

His comments come a day after Japan's incoming finance minister said he opposed intervention in the currency market.

The yen is up 6.7% against the dollar since June, and the authorities' inaction could be seen as surprising given that a stronger yen makes Japanese exports less competitive.

Japan recently emerged from recession in the April-to-June quarter, after four consecutive quarters of deep contraction.

The improvement came after stimulus measures totalling $260bn (£159bn) were introduced to help boost the economy

Mr Shirakawa said that the downside risks for the economy were lessening, but that the BOJ still remained cautious.


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 12:08 GMT, Thursday, 17 September 2009 13:08 UK
Bali suspect 'dies' in Java raid
Indonesia's most-wanted Islamist militant, Noordin Mohamed Top, has been killed during a raid in central Java, say police.
No signature

{Three suspected militants were also killed in the raid}

The man wanted for a series of deadly attacks across the archipelago was among four killed in a raid near Solo city, said the national police chief.

It is not the first time Indonesian officials have claimed Noordin is dead.

The BBC's Karishma Vaswani in Jakarta says police are sure this time he is dead because of fingerprint tests.

"Thank God on this holy month of Ramadan - it's Noordin M Top," police chief Bambang Hendarso Danuri told a nationally televised news conference to cheers, reports AFP news agency.

Cheers

He added that alleged bomb-maker Bagus Budi Pranato, alias Urwah, was also among those killed.

{ NOORDIN MOHAMED TOP
Born in Malaysia, fled to Indonesia after 9/11
Wanted over bombings on Bali in 2005 and other attacks
Said to have split from Jemaah Islamiah and set up new group
Main accomplice Azahari Husin killed by police in 2005
Escaped police raid in 2006 and continues to evade capture}

A member of the national parliament's security committee said he and other lawmakers had been allowed to inspect the bodies of the four militants.

"Today, God willing, the radical movement has been disabled. One of the biggest terrorist masterminds, Noordin M Top, has been shot," said the MP, Sidarto, reports AFP.

"There were signs that pointed to it being Noordin M Top, such as a big mole on the left side of his nose," he added.

Noordin, 41, is accused of leading a more hardline splinter faction of the regional terror group Jemaah Islamiyah.

Police are reported to have closed in on the rented house late on Wednesday after arresting two suspects nearby.

Witnesses said they heard gunfire through the night and then an explosion early on Thursday.

A pregnant woman was among those arrested during the operation, said police.

Explosives and grenades were found in the house, Maj Gen Sukarna said.

The operation reportedly left behind a charred house with no roof and collapsed walls.

Malaysian-born Noordin was also reported to have been killed during a raid in central Java last month, but it later emerged he had slipped through the net again.

Sidney Jones, an expert on Islamist militants with the International Crisis Group, told Reuters news agency: "It's a major success for the police but it doesn't mean, unfortunately, that the problem of terrorism is over.

"It's still unclear how many people were in Noordin's group and there are a number of fugitives still at large who have at least the potential to replace him."

Noordin is not thought to have been behind the 2002 bombings on Bali, but was allegedly involved in the blasts on the holiday island in 2005.

He was also blamed for a 2003 attack on the Marriott hotel in Jakarta that killed 12 people, and the 2004 Australian embassy bombing in the Indonesian capital.

A lull ended in July with twin suicide bomb attacks on the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta that killed nine people and injured scores of others.

On raids in Cilacap, central Java, in July, police said they found bomb-making material at an Islamic boarding school, and explosives buried in the garden of a house of Noordin's father-in-law.

Noordin was said to have been a key financier for Jemaah Islamiah, but was thought to have set up his own more hard-line splinter group.

news20090917bbc2

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 13:36 GMT, Thursday, 17 September 2009 14:36 UK
China jails four over stabbings
Four more people have been found guilty of carrying out attacks with syringes in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang, state-run television says.

The four received sentences ranging between eight and 15 years in jail.

Three other people received prison sentences for similar attacks earlier this month.

Reports of stabbings with needles began in August, a month after clashes between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese left almost 200 people dead.

Despite rumours that the needles contained toxic substances, officials say they have found no evidence of poisoning in blood samples from alleged victims.

Correspondents say the names of the latest four to be convicted indicate they are Uighurs while the name of the female victim indicates she is from the Han community.

Officials in Xinjiang say more than 500 people have reported being attacked with needles, with 171 showing "obvious syringe marks".

Thousands of Han Chinese in the regional capital Urumqi have staged angry protests calling for better security since the attacks began.

At least five people have died in the unrest.

Chinese authorities have blamed Uighur separatists for July's violence.


[South Asia]
Page last updated at 14:04 GMT, Thursday, 17 September 2009 15:04 UK
Italian forces die in Kabul blast
At least six Italian soldiers have been killed in a bomb attack on a military convoy in the Afghan capital, Kabul, Italian defence officials say.

Two military vehicles were reported to have been hit by a suicide car bomb. At least 10 civilians were also killed and dozens injured, officials said.

The Taliban have claimed responsibility for the attack in the city centre.

The blast comes as Afghan President Hamid Karzai reaffirmed his belief in last month's election process.

August's presidential election has been overshadowed by widespread allegations of fraud.

Deadly attack

Witnesses say an explosives-laden vehicle rammed into the Italian military convoy on Kabul's busy airport road.

"It was a suicide car bomb attack... It was against Italian forces," Kabul's chief of criminal investigations told the AFP news agency.


{ ATTACKS ON FOREIGN TROOPS
Sept 09: Six Italians killed, four wounded after attack on Kabul convoy
Aug 08: Ten French soldiers killed in ambush east of Kabul
July 08: Nine US soldiers killed in an attack in Kunar
June 08: Four British soldiers killed by a landmine in Helmand
July 07: Six Canadian soldiers and their Afghan translator killed by roadside bomb in Kandahar
June 05: Sixteen US special forces and crew killed when helicopter shot down in Kunar }

At least four Italian soldiers are also said to have been seriously wounded.

Eyewitnesses said the explosion shook buildings and that a plume of black smoke hung over the area where it occurred.

Student Jamal Nasir was in his car when the bomber struck and described an almost deafening blast.

"I could see thick black smoke behind us... There were screams and car horns. People were running over each other and in the panic cars were driving on pedestrian lanes," he told the BBC.

The blast caused considerable destruction in the immediate vicinity, with a number of shops badly damaged.

Witnesses described blood-stained roads and twisted metal littering the area.

Television footage of the blast site showed the Italian flag on Isaf armoured vehicles, one of which was destroyed.

Fierce insurgency

There have been several bomb attacks in Kabul this year.

{At least 10 Afghan civilians are said to have been killed.}

Shortly before nationwide elections in August, Nato's Kabul headquarters was hit by a suicide car bomb attack which killed at least 10 people.

But this is thought to be one of the deadliest attacks on foreign troops in recent months.

On Wednesday, three US troops were killed by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan.

There are about 3,200 Italian troops in Afghanistan, mostly in the west of the country.

Around 20 Italian soldiers have died in Afghanistan. The BBC's Duncan Kennedy in Rome says that despite the killings, ministers have reiterated their commitment to keep troops in Afghanistan.

US and Nato-led forces across Afghanistan are battling a fierce Taliban insurgency.

In recent months the US has poured more forces into the Taliban's heartland in the south of the country.

And on Wednesday, the top US military officer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm Mike Mullen, told the US Senate that yet more troops might be required in Afghanistan.

The year 2009 has been the deadliest for foreign troops in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.


[Asia Pacific]
Page last updated at 11:31 GMT, Wednesday, 16 September 2009 12:31 UK
New PM cements Japan power shift
Japanese PM Yukio Hatoyama has promised economic revival and strong US ties, hours after taking office.
No signature

In a news conference, he vowed to deliver a "people-oriented society", quick economic improvements and frank but trusting ties with Washington.

Mr Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan won a huge poll victory last month, ending 50 years of almost unbroken Liberal Democratic Party rule.

His untested government now controls the world's second biggest economy.

The new cabinet are due to be sworn in by Emperor Akihito later in the day.

Former DPJ leader Katsuya Okada becomes foreign minister and Hirohisa Fujii, a veteran bureaucrat, takes over as finance minister.

{ ANALYSIS
Roland Buerk, BBC News, Tokyo
Yukio Hatoyama looks like many who have gone before him, the scion of a wealthy dynasty, the grandson of a former prime minister. But his DPJ has promised profound reform.
For decades the LDP, bureaucrats and big business held sway, steering the country from wartime defeat to economic might. But in recent years this brought stagnation, rising unemployment and increasing inequality.
Mr Hatoyama wants to build a more 'fraternal' society, with a social safety net including a generous child allowance. He wants to turn away from export-led growth and encourage domestic demand.
But there are deep concerns over whether the untested new government can deliver the new era they promise. }

Another former DPJ leader, Naoto Kan, will head a new National Strategy Bureau set up to oversee the bureaucracy. He also becomes deputy prime minister.

The defeated LDP, meanwhile, will hold an election later this month to choose its new leader, after former Prime Minister Taro Aso stepped down.

The DPJ has entered into a coalition deal with two smaller parties, the Social Democratic Party and the People's New Party, and controls both houses of parliament.

Its priorities include tackling a rapidly ageing society and an economy still struggling after a brutal recession.

"We would like to carry out policies that will stimulate households so the Japanese people can have hopes for the future," Mr Hatoyama said.

He has promised to increase social welfare spending, cut government waste and rein in the powerful bureaucracy.

''Now is the time to practise politics that are not controlled by bureaucrats,'' he said.

｛ JAPAN'S NEW GOVERNMENT
> The DPJ, which has never been in government before, is taking over the world's second biggest economy
> new PM Yukio Hatoyama is a political blue-blood but largely unknown outside Japan
> He is nicknamed the 'alien', and his wife claims to have travelled to Venus in a UFO
> DPJ promises to increase spending on health and childcare, but without increasing taxes
> Other pledges include climate cuts, better ties with Asia and a more "equal" alliance with the US｝


On foreign policy, he said ties with the US were a priority.

But he said he wanted a relationship in which Japan "can act more proactively and tell them our opinions frankly", adding that his party's position on reviewing deals relating to the US troop presence had not changed.

The DPJ was elected as a wave of discontent with LDP rule swept across Japan.

Opinion polls have shown many people did not vote for the DPJ because of their policies - but because they wanted change.

Analysts say the electorate will be watching the DPJ closely in the next few weeks and months to see if it can deliver.

The BBC's Roland Buerk, in Tokyo, says that in defeating the LDP, Yukio Hatoyama has already achieved what many people thought for years was impossible.

But now the really difficult part - governing Japan - begins, our correspondent says.

news20090917reut1

[Top News] from [REUTERS}

[Green Business]
Toyota plans $1 billion marketing, more hybrids: report
Thu Sep 17, 2009 9:30am EDT

DETROIT (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp is preparing a $1 billion marketing campaign to boost U.S. sales in the fourth quarter, while also planning to expand its line of hybrid models under the Prius name, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

Toyota President Akio Toyoda was among those briefing U.S. dealers at a meeting in Las Vegas where the plans were laid out, the newspaper said.

The $1 billion marketing and advertising plan is 30 percent to 40 percent more than Toyota typically spends in the quarter, the report said, citing a person familiar with the matter.

The plan includes subsidizing leases and loan rates, offering other customer incentives and helping pay for dealer ads, the Journal said.

The plan comes as Toyota is struggling with its worst downturn since it was founded in 1937 and is expecting to report a loss for the second straight fiscal year.

Toyota also plans to raise the projected resale value of its vehicles, a figure used in calculating monthly lease payments, the report said, citing dealers briefed on the plan.

Toyota landed three models among the top 10 sold in the recent "Cash for Clunkers" incentive program by the U.S. government.

The media blitz comes less than a week after General Motors Corp announced its own media campaign, in large part aimed at recapturing consumers who believe Toyota and other foreign automakers make better products.

Toyota executives in Frankfurt this week said the company planned to sell 500,000 to 600,000 hybrid vehicles globally by the end of 2009.

(Reporting by Bernie Woodall; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)


[Green Business]
California moving to boost small solar projects
Thu Sep 17, 2009 11:07am EDT
By Laura Isensee - Analysis

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Solar power makers will get a boost in California, already their largest U.S. market, as it sharpens its focus on small-scale projects as part of efforts to get a third of its power from renewable energy.

Executives with solar industry heavy-weights California- based SunPower Corp and China's Suntech Power Holdings Co Ltd and other supporters are optimistic the commission's proposal for a new solar feed-in tariff will take effect and jump-start development.

They believe smaller systems can get to market quicker and overcome transmission issues that have put California behind schedule reaching a 2010 renewables goal.

"I think the feed-in tariff in California is a step in the right direction (for) customizing policy to the market segments," said SunPower's chief executive Tom Werner at the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco last week.

Werner expects that, if enacted, the PUC's proposal would "absolutely" increase SunPower's sales.

Detailed rules for how California will meet its 33 percent renewables goal -- and which renewable energy sources they may favor or hamper -- are yet to be determined and are in the hands of the state's chief climate change agency, the Air Resources Board.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an order this week that the state get 33 percent of its energy from clean sources by 2020, while the state aims to get 20 percent of electricity from renewables by 2010 -- and faces long odds.

The proposal by the California Public Utilities Commission would give an incentive for small-scale solar systems of up to 10 megawatts, for a total of 1 gigawatt for the program.

A 10 MW system is fairly small in the solar industry, with utility-scale systems reaching hundreds of megawatts.

The entire U.S. solar market reached 8,775 megawatts at the end of 2008, according to Solar Energy Industries Association. Power generated by solar installations is expected to more than double in California this year, according to research house iSuppli. But the PUC estimates the state needs to almost triple its renewable electricity to meet the 33 percent goal.

Feed-in tariffs generally guarantee a higher price for renewables. In Germany, solar feed-in tariffs have pushed the country to be the world's market leader in solar power.

The PUC plan includes a pricing mechanism meant to appease skeptics of regulation and create market-driven pricing.

"By having competition, you're ensuring that you will definitely get market activity and that you will get the best possible price," said Adam Browning, executive director of the Vote Solar Initiative, a national advocacy group.

Through the mechanism -- dubbed a reverse auction -- developers would bid projects to utilities similar to the regular solicitation process, but with some differences. The costs would be passed to the rate-payers, Andrew Kotch, a PUC spokesman, said in a email.

While California currently has an feed-in tariff for solar projects, critics say the current cap of 1.5 megawatts is too small to drive new projects. The PUC proposal would not set prices administratively, but use the auction to set them.

"I think it's definitely worth a shot," said Steven Chadima, Suntech's vice president of external affairs for its U.S. unit.

Chadima said some would like tariffs like in Europe.

"But there's this belief or legal opinion that that's not possible to do," he said, due to federal energy law.

Chadima said the proposal could clear some of those legal hurdles. If it is enacted, Suntech would likely partner with local developers to bid projects, Chadima said.

The California legislature is also pushing for a solar feed-in tariff, which would increase the existing incentive to 3 MW and allow the PUC to increase the rate utilities pay. FBR Capital Markets analyst Benjamin Salisbury wrote in a note to clients that a "feed-in tariff could be an important RPS (Renewable Portfolio Standard) tool."

(Reporting by Laura Isensee; editing by Andre Grenon)


[Green Business]
Denmark showcases world-biggest offshore wind park
Thu Sep 17, 2009 9:41am EDT
By John Acher

ESBJERG, Denmark (Reuters) - Denmark on Thursday inaugurated the world's biggest offshore wind farm in time to serve as a showcase of its green technological prowess before a global climate conference in Copenhagen in December.

The 91-turbine Horns Rev 2 wind farm off the west coast of Jutland in the North Sea will generate enough electricity for 200,000 Danish households.

"Horns Rev 2 is an important step in our energy policy," Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told guests gathered for the opening ceremony in the west-coast town of Esbjerg.

"It's our ambition that Denmark will be a green growth laboratory," Rasmussen said after he joined Crown Prince Frederik in inaugurating the park on its offshore platform.

The 209-megawatt development by state-owned DONG Energy took 18 months of construction to complete and is the offshore wind farm situated furthest out to sea, 30 km off the coast, northwest of Esbjerg.

The total investment stands at 3.5 billion Danish crowns

The 3.5 billion crowns ($694 million) wind park overtakes another Denmark installation, the 166-MW Nysted wind farm -- also DONG Energy's -- as the world's biggest offshore wind park.

But it will be superseded by the 630-MW London Array wind park in the Thames Estuary once that comes on stream in time for the London Olympics in 2012.

The wind park, consisting of 13 parallel rows of seven turbines each that spread out fan-like, is the world's first to have an offshore accommodation platform that can house up to 24 workers. Plans call for it to be manned year-round.

The turbines are from Siemens and rise to a total height of 114.5 meters above sea level. An additional 30-40 meters are below the surface. Each has a capacity of 2.3 megawatts, and the blade diameter is 93 meters.

Current from the turbines goes by buried cables to a transformer on the platform from where the electricity is brought ashore by a subsea cable.

World leaders will meet in the Danish capital on December 7-19 to try to hammer out a new global climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012.

Denmark, which gets a fifth of its electricity production from wind, aims for an ambitious treaty in Copenhagen and hopes the conference will also boost its environmental technology industry.

If a new U.N. climate pact imposes tough emissions cuts, wind power stands to benefit as countries will be forced to turn increasingly to non-carbon renewable energy sources.

Rasmussen said the "green agenda" will play an important role at the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen in December. "Nobody can stop the growth of green energy," he said.

(Additional reporting by Karin Jensen, editing by William Hardy)

news20090917reut2

[Top News] from [REUTERS}

[Green Business]
German mini power stations augur change for big firms
Thu Sep 17, 2009 9:11am EDT
By Vera Eckert - Analysis

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Energy conscientious Germans taking power production into their own hands may give a wake-up call to established utility firms, as innovators roll out new competition on the clean energy front to grab market share.

A daring plan by alternative power firm LichtBlick and carmaker Volkswagen to put mini power stations into people's basements from next spring shows big generators that their fossil-fuel-based power stations could become replaceable faster than they thought.

Germany faces elections this month and the country's four big suppliers have been banking on a conservative win that would give them time to adapt slowly to the low carbon emission future that is so dear to consumers in Europe's biggest energy market.

"The big power companies are still earning good money with the old structures but it is essential that the top managers can think up ways to put money from the generation business into investment areas closer to the customers," said Holger Krawinkel, energy expert at German consumer organization VZBV.

"That could be decentralized power and heat units in basements or solar panels on the roofs," he added.

Upstart green technologies have a mountain to move, though, as the big guns defend the status quo.

"The structural change of the current generation mix has to be both long-term and flexible," Rolf Martin Schmitz, a board member at coal-biased group RWE, flatly told a conference earlier this month.

RWE, sector peers and parties across the spectrum do support targets for renewables such as solar and wind power to provide at least 30 percent of the power mix, double the current 15, and have made efforts to tap into the potential.

But environmentalists want a quicker pace and warn that Germany's green-minded consumers will vote with their feet once alternatives become widely available.

"Renewables will become price competitive within 10 years and customers will leave the big companies in droves," said Hans-Josef Fell, parliamentary energy spokesman for the country's Greens, which could well be in the next government.

As retail markets are open to choice, consumers will turn their back on the operators of nuclear and fossil-fuel-based power plants, which burden the environment and face expiring feedstock resources as fossil fuels dwindle, Fell argued.

"Big utilities still cling to these options because they have not abandoned their old ways of thinking, but they will be proven wrong," said Fell, who founded the Berlin research body the Energy Watch Group.

These remarks chime well with a population keen to adapt anything "green" from wood pellets-to-power to electric bikes and one which could well take to energy generators in their basements.

On a day-to-day basis, the power industry is still ruled by E.ON, RWE, EnBW and Vattenfall whose large centralized power stations provide over 80 percent of German power via layers of transmission grids they operate.

If still in its infancy, the Volkswagen/LichtBlick project challenges this 30 billion euros ($44.1 billion) industry.

The new units, of which they aim to install 100,000, would run on natural gas piped to consumers and produce power plus heat at higher efficiency rates than generation plants.

If carbon-free biogas from renewable crops was used to fire them later on, the sector would become carbon neutral.

Engineers plan a further step whereby the users could turn producers by feeding power back into the grid, triggered by data connections, on days of low usage.

Some 2,000 megawatts could be produced initially, which is the size of two nuclear blocks and enough to power a metropolis.

Plenty of opposition has been expressed toward the energy industry in election debates by lobbies demanding more energy savings, increased efficiency drives, and a renaissance of local utilities away from the control of the big groups.

All fuel sources have come under attack. Campaigners dislike coal for its high carbon emissions, nuclear for security risks, and gas for its dependency on Russia and oil-linked costs.

Industry association BDI has already warned the population's sensitivities could lead to "creeping de-industrialization."

But once the election produces new political constellations, time will be devoted to a more sober review of Germany's energy options, said Matthias Heck, analyst at Sal Oppenheim.

"For example, several nuclear plants are scheduled to be phased out, so the next government will have to take the responsibility for nuclear plants' lifetimes and bear the consequences," he said..

(Reporting by Vera Eckert; Editing by Keiron Henderson)

[Green Business]
India unveils tariff norms for renewable power
Thu Sep 17, 2009 10:40am EDT
By Nidhi Verma and Krittivas Mukherjee

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India laid out on Thursday new tariff norms for electricity from renewable energy sources, offering a higher return on investments to spur a sector that is at the center of the country's plans to fight climate change.

Just three percent of the country's total power mix now comes from renewables, but the government is targeting 25,000 megawatt from renewable energy over the next four years, more than double the current generation of 12,000 MW.

The new policy announced by India's power tariff regulator could strengthen India's position in crucial negotiations in Copenhagen in December on a treaty to regulate global greenhouse gas emissions.

"The new tariff regulations are expected to promote new investment so that renewable electricity supply could expand to meet the goals stipulated in the National Action Plan," said Pramod Deo, head of Central Electricity Regulatory Commission.

India hopes to attract about $21 billion worth of investments in renewable energy by 2012.

The new norms promise to provide about 19 percent pre-tax return on investment for renewable energy plants for an initial period of 10 years, said Alok Kumar, the Commission's Secretary.

For details of new norms double click: here _17_sept_09.pdf

Benefits from thermal power plants, which account for about 60 percent of India's total generation, work out to about 18.4 percent, he added.

The regulator has also fixed the tariff for renewable energy-based power plants, barring solar and small hydro, for the first 13 years.

Tariffs for solar power plants, which require higher investment, have been fixed for 25 years and for small hydro plants with less then 5 MW annual capacity for 35 years.

According to the new tariffs, per kilowatt hour of power generated from solar power will range between 13.70 rupees (28 cents) and 18.80 rupees, while that from wind power stations will range from 3.76 rupees and 5.64 rupees.

In comparison, a unit of thermal power costs between 1.70 rupees and 2.60 rupees.

India makes loans to companies building alternative energy power plants and provides tax breaks and tariff subsidies to encourage the renewables industry and gradually shift to a low-carbon economy.

($1=48.2 rupees)

(Editing by Peter Blackburn)