by Martin LaMonica

CNet Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of articles discussing how people in the tech industry are working with or around federal and state governments.

NEW BEDFORD, Mass.–Bill Davis has the unenviable job of selling people on the benefits of garbage.

Six years ago, Davis, the president and CEO of Boston-based Ze-gen developed high-tech tools to measure the effectiveness of advertising and marketing campaigns. Now, the 52-year-old entrepreneur can talk at length about waste: the amount of waste Americans produce (over 250 million tons a year), the energy content of different types of waste streams, the character of waste in India and other countries.

It’s a quest to reinvent people’s relationship with waste. Ze-gen has raised nearly $30 million in funding from venture capitalists, a state-run fund, and a Middle East industrial conglomerate. In September, the company opened a demonstration facility that converts woody debris from construction sites into usable energy through gasification. But like many energy start-ups, Ze-gen hasn’t yet landed its first big customer. Suffice to say, financial success still eludes Davis and the company’s investors.

Complicating matters is U.S. energy policy. The Department of Energy under Obama has been a boon to green technologies of all kinds, pumping billions into developing plug-in auto battery manufacturing, the so-called smart grid, and potentially disruptive energy research. Even with all the interest in promoting energy entrepreneurship, though, Ze-gen’s “advanced waste gasification” is something of an orphan in Washington, where there’s already a long line of energy lobbyists.

“The problem is nobody really cares. The Department of Energy is primarily concerned with technologies that can deliver a quadrillion units of energy and we’re not one of them. We’re not solar, not wind, not clean coal, and not ethanol,” Davis said from the control room at Ze-gen’s facility in New Bedford, Mass. “It’s easy to have a technology category that basically falls through the cracks of the traditional funding mechanism.”

If Ze-gen does fall through the cracks, it won’t be for lack of trying. Davis took nearly 20 trips to Washington D.C. in the past year to meet with staffers from members of Congress and pitch waste, along with other types of biomass, as a form of renewable energy. In an April trip, a group of New England entrepreneurs and investors traveled en masse, squeezing in about 20 meetings in one day in an attempt to influence the House energy and climate bill.

Back home, the state government has been supportive by providing the permits to build Ze-gen’s demonstration and pilot facilities. In addition to promoting energy technologies, the state is eager to revitalize the New Bedford area on the southern coast of Massachusetts, a region looking for new industries to replace the jobs lost by declining fishing and manufacturing industries.

But it’s not all smooth sailing there either: Ze-gen is fighting a proposed state regulation that would ban construction and demolition debris–the waste stream Ze-gen wants to mine for energy–for use in other types of waste-to-energy plants. The company has lobbied, unsuccessfully, to qualify for renewable energy certificates, a system of attaching a premium for electricity generated from clean sources. Consumers who install solar panels or wind turbines, for example, get a stream of revenue from these certificates, which provide an incentive to use renewable energy.

Getting a helping hand from the DOE or the Massachusetts Statehouse won’t necessarily make or break Ze-gen. But favorable policies sure would help. A financial incentive, in the form of a tax break or subsidy, would make Ze-gen’s technology that much more attractive and the return on investment more predictable for any would-be customer. Right now, industry’s only incentive is to use the cheapest form of energy possible, but policies that encouraged low-carbon technologies, for example, could lead them to consider alternatives.

Steel in the ground
For an entrepreneur schooled in the traditional high-tech scene of software coders and enterprise customers, the change to energy can be dramatic–and difficult. But Davis has adjusted, says Nick d’Arbeloff, president of the New England Clean Energy Council.

d’Arbeloff, who also migrated from high-tech to energy after the dot-com bust, notes that in 25 years in the software business he himself had little professional concern with what went on in Washington. But navigating policymakers and regulators is required in the energy business. Rather than try to push his agenda on lawmakers in the hopes of “shoving the appropriate clause in a statute,” Davis has calmly argued why it’s logical to favor his technology, said d’Arbeloff.

“Bill’s an incredibly even keel guy,” said d’Arbeloff. “Impacting the process is a pretty tough row to hoe, but he’s brought this quiet tenacity to Washington because he knows it takes a heck of a long time to achieve things.”

Another day at the office. Bill Davis at Ze-gen’s demo facility in New Bedford, Mass.  (Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

Persistence has been needed on the technology side as well. When he started Ze-gen, Davis started with the idea of using liquid metal to gasify waste and hired a handful of experts in the field. But in five and a half years of development, engineers have had to make a number of significant technical changes, often through trial and error. The company was also sued for alleged patent infringement but settled earlier this year. Davis can’t comment on the record about the suit but says the episode didn’t slow Ze-gen down significantly.

If Davis is calm and methodical in his business dealings, he’s not afraid to speak his mind. During a conference panel earlier this year with other waste-to-energy CEOs, he was blunt about the industry’s lousy track record, calling it “a bit of a minefield. We all run companies where 40 companies have failed before.” He’s not particularly effusive about government bureaucrats, either, saying the government is “particularly bad at being a VC (venture capitalist).”

But he also has a sense of humor and seems legitimately interested in making a contribution to the world’s energy and waste problems. In late November, Davis gave me a tour of Ze-gen’s waste gasification plant. As we said goodbye, I looked over at the plant and searched for words to describe the experience. “It’s…”

“It’s different,” Davis chimed in with a smile before hopping into his Prius and driving off.

Different it is. Walking into Ze-gen’s demonstration facility has the feel of walking into a giant Rube Goldberg science experiment. The core gasifier–a long steel vessel–fills about half of a barn-size room. The additional equipment piles two stories high, with an automated feeding system dropping wood through a chute from above, huge pipes snaking around the top of the unit, and a series of shiny machines to “scrub” the outcoming gas before it’s vented through the ceiling.

The plant is located adjacent to a garbage transfer center, where waste from different sources, including paper that can be recycled, is sorted and processed. Ze-gen’s primary interest is a waste stream called construction and demolition debris which, once ground up, looks something like wood chip mulch. As the system works around high heat, it was a balmy 80 degrees inside even on a cold night with the doors open.

At the beginning of the process, the waste feedstock is dropped into the gasifier, which houses a bath of molten copper kept at over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. In a gasification chamber, the amount of oxygen is restricted so material doesn’t burn and produce carbon dioxide. Instead, the material breaks down into its elemental components in the form of a gas, mostly carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The “syngas” that comes out of this process can be burned to make electricity or to create heat, much like natural gas is used.

Being a start-up, it’s had to make adjustments on the business model a few times. Originally, Davis envisioned Ze-gen’s plants would be co-located with trash-handling stations and supply electricity to the grid. Now, it’s seeking corporations looking for an alternative distributed energy product. A manufacturer, for example, that produces lots of waste is a potential customer if it’s looking to reduce its waste-handling cost and find a less carbon-intensive way to make power and heat on-site. Because the technology can reduce carbon emissions compared to other on-site power and heat systems, it could help corporations comply with oncoming carbon or other environmental regulations, Davis said.

Davis versus Goliath
Policymakers may not be conversant in gasification technology, but interest is perking up at the municipal level. A number of communities are considering waste gasification as an alternative to incinerators, which face public opposition, according to Ted Siegler, a principal at DSM Environmental Services in Windsor, Vt., which authored a report on the potential energy in construction debris.

In theory, waste gasification diverts waste from landfills, which give off the potent greenhouse gas methane as garbage decomposes. The technology is also flexible in that it can produce electricity, heat, or a liquid fuel such as ethanol. But is it a cleaner alternative to incinerators? Not necessarily, said Siegler. “Gasification is one of those technologies people are looking at, but I think the data really aren’t in (because) there aren’t enough full-scale operating plants anywhere in the world to adequately judge what the emissions are going to be at full scale,” he said.

The picture here is familiar to many energy start-ups. The incumbent technology has a long, well understood track record, which means that breaking into the business with an alternative process–be it electricity from solar cells or heat from biomass–is tough because the incumbent technology has the benefits of scale and cost.

This is where policy can play a role, either by creating incentives to, say, reduce air pollutants or favor domestic industries. In Ze-gen’s case, the rules for what qualifies as a renewable energy source are not even sorted out yet. As a result, waste gasification projects will likely move along on a case-by-case basis, as state regulators try to sort out the economic and environmental profile of the technology, Siegler said.

Davis’ next lobbying effort is educating policymakers and environmental advocacy groups on the environmental benefits of diverting waste from landfills and using it for energy, which he says make it a clean fuel on balance. He’s more comfortable calling himself a capitalist than an environmentalist, but he clearly has the green-energy bug: he recently installed a very large 10-kilowatt solar array on his garage.

If Ze-gen’s Davis has strong opinions on the need to reduce waste and find alternative fuels, he’s not counting on any hand-outs from the state or Washington. A number of energy start-ups have been given a lease on life by government-funded loans or grants for demonstration projects. That’s extremely important in energy because, often, venture capitalists simply aren’t equipped to finance expensive pilot plants, and project finance companies shy away from new technology risk.

Still, Davis is confident that things are going in the right direction at Ze-gen. During an interview, he hinted the company was close to signing a partnership with a global corporation that would help “legitimize” its technology in the real world after six years of development. He’s learned how to play the game in Washington, but he’s more focused on technical progress and commercial acceptance, even if it’s by small steps.

“My view is that this is the hard part right now. We’ve taken a bunch of small steps and now we’re going to build something bigger. That’s the leap because it’s at scale,” he said. “Is there technology risk? Yeah, because we don’t have a five-ton unit built. Is there a lot less technology risk than two years ago? You bet, considerably less.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10413763-54.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1

Indian IT firms cut back, but some U.S. companies used more than in ‘08

By Patrick Thibodeau

U.S. companies were still getting H-1B visa petitions even as they cut jobs, according to data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) that shows who received the visas in the 2009 fiscal year.

A couple of trends are immediately apparent.

First, some of the big India IT services cut back on their H-1B use during the softening job market. For instance, Infosys Technologies Ltd. received only 440 visas in the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, 2008 and ended on Sept. 30, 2009. In the prior fiscal year, it received more than 10 times that number, or 4,559. And while Wipro Ltd. led the FY09 list with 1,964 visas, that number is still down more than 25% from the 2,678 visas it got the year before.

Secondly, U.S. firms, despite cutbacks in their own staffs and an overall decline in IT employment, continued to hire people using H-1B visas. That list includes Microsoft, Intel and IBM’s India operation.

The U.S. can issue 85,000 visas in the current 2010 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1; only 2,500 remain available. In the last several years, the pool of available visas has been exhausted within days of the April 1 filing period.

Even so, the economic slowdown has not dampened efforts by tech firms to get H-1B visa limits raised, if not removed all together. Congress is expected to take up comprehensive immigration reform next year, a move likely to focus renewed attention on H-1B visa restrictions.

The issue came up obliquely earlier this month at a White House “jobs summit” attended mostly by business leaders, labor officials and economists. Just before that summit, the CEOs of more than 50 companies, many of them tech firms, sent out a letter calling for fewer restrictions on hiring of foreign workers.

Among those signing the letter were top officials of Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, Oracle, Microsoft, EMC, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, Dell Inc. and Texas Instruments.

“For the United States to remain a world leader in innovation,” the letter said in part, “we need to increase America’s domestic pipeline of highly skilled workers, while also attracting and retaining the world’s best and brightest workers.”

That point was later echoed by Obama at the summit when he said that “one of the great things about this country is we get the best and the brightest talent to study here, and once they study here they start enjoying the intellectual freedom and the entrepreneurship, they decide to stay, and they start new businesses.”

The list of H-1B visas approved by the USCIS for FY09 is available here. (And here’s the full list from 2008.)

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142163/H_1B_visa_use_by_U.S._firms_holds_steady_in_09

Immigration Services to take a more aggressive stance on H-1B visa enforcement

By Patrick Thibodeau

U.S. immigration officials are taking H-1B enforcement from the desk to the field with a plan to conduct 25,000 on-site inspections of companies hiring foreign workers over this fiscal year.

The move marks a nearly five-fold increase in inspections over last fiscal year, when the agency conducted 5,191 site visits under a new site inspection program. The new federal fiscal year began Oct. 1.

Tougher enforcement from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services comes in response to a study conducted by the agency last year that found fraud and other violations in one-in-five H-1B applications.

In a letter to U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Alejandro Mayorkas, director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the agency began a site visit and verification program in July to check on the validity of H-1B applications. Mayorkas’ letter was released on Tuesday by Grassley.

“[The inspection program determines] whether the location of employment actually exists and if a beneficiary is employed at the location specified, performing the duties as described, and paid the salary as identified in the petition,” said Mayorkas in his letter to Grassley.

Mayorkas is a former federal prosecutor who was recently appointed by President Barack Obama. He was sworn in August and said since then, “I have worked tirelessly to learn of the condition of our anti-fraud efforts and other critical programs in our agency.”

In September, Grassley, an ardent critic of the H-1B program, asked Mayorkas to outline the steps his agency was taking in regard to H-1B enforcement. Among the issues that Grassley asked for was specific information about companies that are hiring H-1B workers for jobs that didn’t exist, and who, instead, are not paid until contract work is found.

As part of its enforcement effort, Mayorkas said the Citizenship and Immigration Services has hired Dunn and Bradstreet Inc., which provides credit reports among other services, to act as “an independent information provider” and help verify information submitted by companies hiring H-1B workers.

Grassley, a co-sponsor of legislation that will increase H-1B program enforcement, said in a statement released today, t”If employers are hiring visa holders without actual jobs lined up, American workers are losing out. Employers must be held accountable, and should be required to submit contracts and itineraries to prove that a job exists. Simply having them attest that they are complying with the law isn’t good enough.”

Immigration attorneys have seen an increase in demands for documentation from the Citizenship and Immigration Services as part of the approval process.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141047/Feds_plan_25_000_on_site_H_1B_inspections

by Martin LaMonica

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Monday announced the creation of a program to transfer clean-energy technologies to developing countries at the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen.

Called the Renewables and Efficiency Deployment Initiative (Climate REDI), the goal is to promote the use of efficient and renewable energy products to cut greenhouse gas emissions and improve the quality of life in poor countries, according to the DOE.

Climate REDI will be coordinated with existing technology transfer programs and organizations. Total spending will be $350 million over five years with the U.S. funding $100 million.

Click on image to see photo gallery of low-cost lighting technologies.

The three areas that the U.S. portion will fund will be:

•  Combination solar panels and LED lights, which can be used as an alternative to polluting and unhealthy kerosene lamps.

•  Incentive programs in the so-called Major Economies Forum to make more efficient appliances commercially available.

•  Technical and policy support for low-income countries establish renewable energy strategies.

The details of the green technology transfer program, part of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, comes the same day that delegates from developing countries withdrew participation from negations, although talks were expected to resume later.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10414685-54.html

It’s like SALT for hackers

By John Leyden

The US and Russia have begun talks on limiting the the military use of cyberspace.

Entry into the cyber arms reduction talks – convened by a United Nations arms control committee – represents a significant shift for the US, which has resisted entering such talks for years, the New York Times reports. The change of tack came after the US decided that the cyberwarfare capabilities were spreading across the globe to countries such as North Korea and China.

//

The Russians have long called for talks on spreading the spread of cybermunitions along the lines of treaties limiting the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical warfare forged during the cold war era. The US has resisted such moves for a long time but is now coming around to the view that regulations do have some role to play.

The US wants the talks to cover greater international co-operation in the fight against cybercrime, while Russia is keen to discuss the supposed risks to national sovereignty posed by cyberterrorism.

The Obama administration ordered a review of US internet security strategy in February but is yet to appoint anyone to the cybersecurity czar role established as part of the review.

Actual incidents of cyberattack disrupting online activities on a national scale remain hard to pin down. The internet infrastructure of Estonia was floored by cyber-attacks in April 2007, following a dispute over the relocation of Soviet-era war memorials and graves. In addition, cyberattacks coincided with armed conflict between Russia and Georgia over the fate of Russian-language speaking regions of Georgia in 2008. Other cyberattacks have either caused very little disruption or took place against countries that place very little reliance on cyberspace to deliver government services.

US fears in the area stem from fears that state-sponsored hackers could disrupt the operation of power grids or online banking. A recent power outage in Brazil was initially blamed on hackers, but these claims were subsequently debunked. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/14/cyberwarfare_talks/

by Shawn Oliver

Uh, this is weird. If you’re a judge and/or lawyer in Florida, you should probably go through and clean house on your Facebook account. If you’re a judge, you’re now disallowed from “friending” lawyers for fear of having some sort of bias when or if that lawyer steps into your courtroom. No, we aren’t kidding.

The Florida Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee has just banned all judges in the state from clicking “Confirm” on Friend Requests from lawyers, and the reason why goes a little something like this “It reasonably conveys to others the impression that these lawyer ‘friends’ are in a special position to influence the judge.” We suppose we can kind of understand this. Those in court relying on those lawyers and judges to determine the outcome of huge, pivotal moments in their lives wouldn’t want lawyers and judgings being all buddy-buddy, but here’s the thing. If a lawyer and a judge were friends before (via school or some other means), having that relationship made public on Facebook won’t change the fact that the relationship is real.

Regardless of the status on some social networking site, a lawyer and a judge that are friends are still friends. In other words, Facebook won’t introduce bias into a ruling; if two people know each other, there’s a real possibility for bias with or without a Facebook confirmation. We can definitely see this spreading into other areas of government and the like. It’s just too easy for plaintiffs and the like to complain that a ruling wasn’t fair if they can easily see that a lawyer and a judge (or a committee member and a lobbyist, for example) are friends. It’s like filling out those legal forms promising not to sue should something go awry on your thrill ride; one bad apple (or potential bad apple) ruins the fun for everyone. Here’s a quote from the decision:
The Committee believes that listing lawyers who may appear before the judge as “friends” on a judge’s social networking page reasonably conveys to others the impression that these lawyer “friends” are in a special position to influence the judge. This is not to say, of course, that simply because a lawyer is listed as a “friend” on a social networking site or because a lawyer is a friend of the judge, as the term friend is used in its traditional sense, means that this lawyer is, in fact, in a special position to influence the judge. The issue, however, is not whether the lawyer actually is in a position to influence the judge, but instead whether the proposed conduct, the identification of the lawyer as a “friend” on the social networking site, conveys the impression that the lawyer is in a position to influence the judge. The Committee concludes that such identification in a public forum of a lawyer who may appear before the judge does convey this impression and therefore is not permitted.

http://hothardware.com/News/Florida-Judges-Cant-Facebook-Friend-Lawyers-Thats-The-Law/

Hiding drugs: In this human blood smear, a modified protease inhibitor (shown in green) is sequestered inside a white blood cell. The cell’s DNA is shown in blue. The drug slowly leaches out into the plasma, greatly extending the drug’s half-life.   Credit: Paul Merrinak

Longer-lasting drugs could mean more effective treatments.

By Emily Singer

Taking a hint from natural antibiotics, a startup spun out of Stanford University is developing a way to chemically alter existing drugs to dramatically improve their half-life.

Researchers at Amplyx Pharmaceuticals decorate drug compounds with molecules designed to bind to specific proteins within cells, as well as binding to the drug’s treatment target. By sequestering the drugs within cells, the researchers hope to protect them from the body’s efforts to destroy them. So far, the company has developed long-lasting versions of a protease inhibitor to fight HIV, as well as the antibiotic carbapenem. Amplyx is now developing new versions of a number of drugs that fight infection, and aims to test them in clinical trials within the next two years.

An effective drug needs to have a relatively long half-life in the bloodstream so that it has time to get to its target before metabolizing enzymes in the liver break it down. Other researchers and biotechnology companies are attempting to deal with this problem by enveloping drugs in nanoparticles or other materials that slow their breakdown. Amplyx is instead altering the molecules themselves.

“We’re hoping this will be quite generally useful,” says Gerald Crabtree, a biologist at Stanford, in whose lab the research originated. “One of the things I like about this approach is the combinatorial nature of the synthesis of the molecules.” Researchers have developed a number of stabilizing structures–those that bind to intracellular proteins–as well as a number of “linkers,” which connect the stabilizers to the drug.

Amplyx’s technology emerged from the study of a handful of large-molecule drugs, such as the immunosuppressant rapamycin, that are derived from microbes. Large molecules often make poor drugs, in part because the body quickly metabolizes them–but despite this, drugs such as rapamycin actually last longer in the blood. Crabtree and his team discovered that rapamycin, originally derived from bacteria in the soil on Easter Island, and related compounds, works well because it attaches to a group of proteins within cells called FK506 binding proteins.

“We wondered if we could generalize this to a way of increasing stability for many drugs with problematic pharmacology, which can make them unusable or inconvenient to take,” says Crabtree. “Some drugs have to be taken five times per day, which in turn leads to patient compliance issues.”

To create longer-lasting drugs, the researchers generated chemical structures that mimic those found in rapamycin and are designed to bind to the FK506 binding proteins inside the cell. Researchers then attached the structures to the drug chemically. “Red blood cells have a lot of the binding proteins, so the drug binds tightly to them and slowly leaches out of blood cells,” says Jason Gestwicki, a biologist at the University of Michigan who is collaborating with Amplyx.

Story Continues - http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/24150/?a=f

It takes longer to sign words than to say them. So how is it possible to sign and speak at the same rate?

Here’s a curious paradox related to American Sign Language, the system of hand-based gestures used by around 2 million deaf people in the US and elsewhere to communicate.

Almost 40 years ago, researchers discovered that although it takes longer to make signs than to say the equivalent words, on average sentences can be completed in about the same time. How can that be possible?

Today, Andrew Chong and buddies at Princeton University in New Jersey give us the answer. They say that the information content of the 45 handshapes that make up sign language is higher than the information content of phonemes, the building blocks of the spoken word. In other words, there is greater redundancy in spoken English than signed English.

In a way, that’s a trivial explanation, a mere restatement of the problem. What’s impressive about the Princeton contribution is the way they have arrived at this conclusion.

The team has determined the entropy of American Sign Language experimentally, by measuring the frequency of handshapes on video logs for deaf people uploaded to youtube.com, deafvideo.tv and deafread.com as well as from video recordings of signed conversations taken on campus.

It turns out that the information content of handshapes is on average just 0.5 bits per handshape less than the theoretical maximum. By contrast, the information content per phoneme in spoken English is some 3 bits lower than the maximum.

This raises an interesting question. The spoken word has all this redundancy for a reason: it allows us to be understood over a noisy channel. Lessen the redundancy and your capacity to deal with noise is correspondingly reduced.

Why would sign language need less redundancy? “Entropy might be higher for handshapes than English phonemes because the visual channel is less noisy than the auditory channel…so error correction is less necessary,” say Chong and co.

They go on to speculate that signers cope with errors in an entirely different way to speakers. “Difficulties in visual recognition of handshapes could be solved by holding or slowing the transition between those handshapes for longer amounts of time, while difficulties in auditory recognition of spoken phonemes cannot always be easily solved by speaking phonemes for longer amounts of time,” they say.

And why is all this useful? Chong and friends say that if sign language is ever to be encoded and transmitted electronically, a better understanding of its information content will be essential for developing encoders and decoders that do the job. A worthy pursuit by any standards.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0912.1768: Frequency of Occurrence and Information Entropy of American Sign Language

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24521/

California Academy of Sciences Image by Jaymi Heimbuch

by Lloyd Alter, Toronto

There is a lot to like about green roofs; they help keep cities cool, create habitat for birds and insects, provide wonderful amenities and just look so good on google earth. But do they actually sequester any CO2? Of course, any green plant does, but there isn’t much to a green roof. Is there enough to matter?

Researchers at Michigan State University have measured it. According to Enrique Gili in Miller-McCune, they studied 10 existing green roofs and planted 20 one-meter square plots. They looked at sedums, the most common, and thinnest green roof. It is also one of the hardiest: “We planted what we knew would grow,” said researcher Kristen Getter.

Research at University of Michigan’s Green Roof Research Program

The results?

Over a two-year period, the plants on the East Lansing campus were periodically harvested. Leafy parts stored on average 168 grams of carbon per square meter, the roots and the soil respectively stored 160 and 300 grams on average. Combined, each plot had the capacity to store 375 grams of C02 per square meter.

That’s not very much. But it is better than nothing. Getter notes:

“Green roofs certainly don’t store the kind of carbon that a forest or productive grassland stores, but a traditional roof is essentially a wasteland — no carbon storage whatsoever.”

They calculate that if all of the roofs in Detroit were green instead of black, it would offset the Carbon Dioxide emitted by 10,000 SUVs.

More at Miller McCune

More on Green Roofs:
Green Roofs are Changing Architecture and Planning
Are Green Roofs the New Mirrored Glass?

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/12/green-roofs-suck-co2.php

By Mark Wilson

How could Christopher Nolan ever follow up on the Tumbler? Maybe he won’t. Maybe Batman will just walk. But should Nolan give in to inevitable studio pressure to design another new, marketable Battoy, I humbly propose this modified Lamborghini Ankonian.

A concept Russian design student Slavche Tanevski, the Ankonian, named after a breed of black-haired bull, combines sleek and angularity through a series of winged panels that appear carved from some metal obsidian alloy engineered for sheer badassery. And OLED lights built directly into the body, while a slight stretch of the imagination, are a welcome touch.

If Batman won’t take it, we most certainly will. (Though if Bruce Wayne could still provide the funds, that might help.)

[Car Design via AutoMotto via LikeCool]

Send an email to Mark Wilson, the author of this post, at // <![CDATA[
Rot13.write('znex@tvmzbqb.pbz');
// ]]>mark@gizmodo.com moc.odomzig@kram.

http://gizmodo.com/5425858/one-potential-batmobile