The Clean Tech Open held its first bake-off in the more economically optimistic times of 2006 but bleak days doesn’t appear to have cooled the competition. This year 43 finalists vied for “start-up in a box” packages that include $50,000 in cash and $50,000 worth of business services. The contest is backed by a who’s who of Silicon Valley tech firms (Google (GOOG), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) ), utilities (PG&E (PCG), Southern California Edison (EIX), San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) ) and government energy labs. Venture capitalists and other business leaders serve as judges.

Here then are six startups that the judges think point the way to the future:

* Viridis Earth of San Jose, Calif., has developed a product to retrofit air conditioners to reduce their electricity consumption by 20%.
* Focal Point Energy, also of San Jose, is developing industrial solar hot water and steam generation systems.
* ElectraDrive of San Francisco retrofits gasoline-powered cars to run on electricity.
* BottleStone will produce a substitute for stone and concrete building materials that is 80% recycled glass. The Los Altos Hills, Calif., company claims its production process cuts greenhouse gas emissions by 42% .
* Power Assure of Santa Clara, Calif., is developing energy efficiency management software for power-hogging data centers.
* Over the Moon Diapers, another San Francisco startup, makes environmentally friendly diapers.

The alien planet pictured by Hubble appears as a tiny red dot in the midst of a giant red dust ring Photo: NASA

The planet, which has been named Fomalhaut b and is around the same size as our own solar system’s largest planet Jupiter, appears as a tiny red dot in the midst of a giant red dust ring orbiting the star Fomalhaut, which is around 25 light years from Earth.

The picture reveals for the first time what an alien planet outside our own solar system looks like to the human eye. Astronomers believe studying the planet and its star will provide a vital insight into how our own solar system will have looked a hundred million years ago.

Normally the bright glare from stars makes it impossible to see planets any planets that might be orbiting them with visible light and astronomers have to look for planets indirectly by spotting tiny wobbles that their gravity can induce in a star.

The unprecedented image of Fomalhaut b is the culmination of more than eight years of work to find a planet orbiting Fomalhaut after scientists first began to suspect the star may have planets surrounding it.

They now believe that the star, which is one of the 20 brightest stars visible from Earth, may also host other planets around it and could even be orbited by planets with liquid water on their surface, a vital component for life.

“I nearly had a heart attack when I confirmed that Fomalhaut b orbits its parent star,” said Paul Kalas, a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s a profound and overwhelming experience to lay eyes on a planet never before seen.”

“There is plenty of empty space between Fomalhaut b and the star for other planets to happily reside in stable orbits.

“We’ll probably have to wait for the James Webb Space Telescope to give us a clear view of the region closer to the star where a planet could host liquid water on the surface.”

Scientists believe the new planet, or exoplanet as planets outside our solar system are known, has a series of rings around it and orbits at a distance of more than 11 billion miles from its star - about four times the distance between Neptune and the Sun.

The planet takes 872 years to completely orbit the sun.

Mark Clampin, a space telescope scientist with NASA, said: “The Fomalhaut system is on a much grander scale compared to our own solar system, but there are some similarities. For example, Neptune in our solar system sculpts the Kuiper dust belt which is analogous to what we see in Fomalhaut.”

The images of the planet were taken using the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys revealing a sharply defined dust belt around Fomalhaut, which sits in the southern constellation Piscus Austrinus.

The sharp edge and off-centre belt suggested to scientists that a planet in an elliptical orbit around the star was shaping the inner edge of the belt as its gravity sweeps around the star.

New data published online by the journal Science analyses the interaction between the planet and the dust belt. The amount of dust swept out of the way corresponds to a planet around the size of Jupiter in our own solar system.

While around 320 exoplanets have been indirectly detected so far using the wobble they induce in their stars or infrared radiation that is emitted, an exoplanet has never been directly seen by scientists. Previous claims of direct observations of exoplanets have turned out to be other astronomical objects such as brown dwarves.

Professor Sara Seager, a planetary scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, said: “This is a landmark discovery.

“The planet has an 800 year orbit around Fomalhaut, and in that way is very different from our own solar system which really stretches our imagination of what a planet can be and gives us hope about the other exciting discoveries we can find.”

The researchers hope that once Hubble’s Advanced Camera and Near Infrared Camera have been repaired it will allow them to search for other planets orbiting the star.

A mission to upgrade the aging Hubble Telescope was recently postponed until May, raising fears about the future of the 18-year-old telescope. Its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is not due to be launched until 2013.

Fomalhaut is thought to be around 200 million years old and is expected to burn out in another billion years, making it a short-lived star compared to our sun, which is now 4.5 billion years old and expected to burn another 5 billion years.

Its short life is a result of being 16 times brighter than the sun, but this also makes the star appear from the planet’s surface about as bright as our sun appears from Neptune, despite the fact that it lies four times farther from Fomalhaut than Neptune does from the sun.

Professor Kalas said: “Fomalhaut b sits in a frigid location, but it’s not too different from that of Neptune in our solar system.

“Fomalhaut b may actually show us what Jupiter and Saturn resembled when the solar system was about a hundred million years old.”

Ed Weiler, associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate in Washington, added: “In the 1990s just before we launched Hubble, no one had detected other planets around other stars. This is an 18 and a half year dream come true and we are showing you the first image using light that you can see with your own eye of a planet.”

source: telegraph.co.uk

“Space agriculture is what’s required for long-term space exploration,” Mike Dixon, director of the controlled environment systems research facility at the University of Guelph, said Tuesday during a space conference in Montreal. “We can’t afford to keep shipping water, oxygen and Kraft dinner to the moon indefinitely.”

Research being conducted at a state-of-the-art facility in Guelph, Ont., has Canada leading the world in space agriculture.

“We want to grow the first plant on the moon. That’s a Canadian space first that we can actually aspire to,” Dixon said in an interview. “Let’s face it, the next worse place after a snowbank in Canada to do controlled-environment plant production has got to be the moon.”Growing food in space would allow crews to embark on longer expeditions to the moon or even the Red Planet. The plants would be grown in a greenhouse that would provide food, potable water and oxygen as well as recycle carbon dioxide and waste.

The model is a five-foot-square sealed chamber made of stainless steel, Teflon and glass. A set of gloves built into the greenhouse would allow the crew to plant seeds and harvest plants without risking contamination.

The size of the prototype is relatively small - it would take over 10 of them just to feed one astronaut for a day.

To produce a higher yield and grow plants with less water, light, oxygen and atmospheric pressure, researchers are breeding and genetically modifying plants.

“The reality is that we are taking these plants to such a strange ecosystem, where we require them to be the life support engines of our exploration activities,” Dixon said. “So it behooves us to equip those plants with the best genetic tools that they can have to be sustainable and reliable.”

There are about 40 crops on the menu for space, but the focus is on food staples like soybeans, wheat and rice.

“Oh yeah, if you’re going to Mars, you’re a vegetarian,” Dixon said. “After the bacon that you carry in your back pocket is gone, it’s all over. And you can’t carry enough bacon to last 18 months.”

About 65 faculty, staff and students work at the research facility at the University of Guelph, which cost $8.75 million to build in 2001 and another $4 million to run annually.

Funding for the public-private project comes from several sources, including the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Centre for Research in Earth and Space Technology.

In response to criticism that the money could be better spent, Dixon said: “The socio-economic spinoffs are enormous. This is the next Canadarm,” he said, referring to the Canadian-made mechanical arm used at the space station.

The technology could also be applied to improve agriculture and environmental management here on Earth, Dixon said.

“When you go to the moon or Mars, you can’t throw anything away - there is no such thing as garbage. The words garbage and waste will not be in the dictionary when we’re off this planet.

“All of the recycling technologies that we must have on the moon are so eminently useful here on Earth to help us sustain our own ecosystem and survival.”

The space conference, the 37th Scientific Assembly of the Committee on Space Research, has nearly 2,000 participants from 61 countries and runs until Sunday.

The scientists created what they call the Critical Angle Transmission grating, a device that uses nano mirrors to diffract X-ray and extreme ultraviolet range beams without the energy absorption that typically occurs with X-ray diffraction gratings, said Ralf Heilmann, associate director of MIT’s Space Nanotechnology Laboratory at the Kavli Institute of Astrophysics and Space Research.

Scientists use diffraction gratings in space telescopes such as NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory as a tool to aid their search for clues to the formation of the universe. It is work that must be conducted in space because Earth’s atmosphere absorbs X-ray energy. Diffraction gratings, which are a common physical science tool, disperse X-ray wavelengths in much the same way a prism refracts visible light.

The MIT grating was invented during research and development for NASA’s Constellation-X program, a proposed mission to fly several X-ray telescopes working in unison. These telescopes will investigate black holes, galaxy formation, the recycling of matter and energy, and dark matter and dark energy.

Based on more than two decades of work that included optics for Chandra, MIT scientists set out to create a device that would disperse X-ray wavelengths without absorbing the wavelengths’ energy. The scientists found that tightly spaced silicon mirrors reflect wavelengths rather than absorbing them, allowing the wavelengths to be redirected at angles that allow a broader view of their spectra, said Mark Schattenburg, director of the Space Nanotechnology Laboratory.

“We’re getting five times more throughput than with Chandra,” Schattenburg said. “For every 10 X-rays through Chandra’s telescope, only one to two gets detected. At least five times more get through the nano mirrors so we’re boosting the percentage of efficiency.”

The silicon slats are as thin as 35 nanometers - the size of some of the smallest computer chip transistors and wires under commercial development. The thousands of long, thin slats are spaced about 150 nanometers apart at a shallow angle that allows the X-rays to skip from the smooth sidewalls of the slats through the spaces between the slats.

Heilmann said the new technology could be used in a wide array of instruments, from those involved in plasma physics to the life and environmental sciences. The principles of diffraction and efficient reflection below a critical angle apply to neutrons and whole atoms as well, he said.

Carlos Ghosn, chief executive of the French and Japanese automakers, and Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates said they would work together to raise awareness about the vehicles and try to make them easier to fuel.

While other car manufacturers concentrate on fuel cells and hybrids, Nissan is going all out on electric vehicles, promising to sell them globally in 2012, with the first models arriving in Japan and the U.S. in 2010.

“We are feeling more strongly than ever that we must speed up our development of electric vehicles,” said Nissan Senior Vice President Minoru Shinohara. Nissan is in talks with parking lot and railway companies to set up recharging stations, he told The Associated Press.

The lack of charging stations has made electric cars impractical in the broader market. Skeptics say electric vehicles will stay niche for some time. Combined with high costs and other technological hurdles, electric vehicles for the broader public are still experimental.

Proponents say tax breaks, preferential highways lanes and other incentives would boost the appeal.

Shinohara said Japanese urbanites drive about 12 miles a day _ so the limited range of electric vehicles isn’t a problem for daily grocery shopping and other errands.

Fuji Heavy Industries, which makes Subaru cars, and Mitsubishi plan to offer electric vehicles in Japan next year. Mitsubishi’s electric vehicle travels 99 miles on a single charge, while Subaru’s goes 50 miles.
Mitsubishi plans to sell its electric vehicle in Europe in 2010, while tests are planned for the U.S. for 2009. Subaru has not decided on overseas sales plans for its electric vehicle.

Masahiko Otsuka, president of Automotive Energy Supply Corp., a joint venture between Nissan and Japanese electronics maker NEC Corp. said Nissan has a history dating back to 1992 of testing lithium-ion batteries for cars. Lithium-ion batteries are now more common in laptops and other gadgets but can pack more power than the kind of batteries in the gas-electric hybrids made by Toyota.

U.S. automaker General Motors Corp. is developing an electric vehicle called the Chevrolet Volt, which it hopes to launch in 2010. Ford Motor Co. has a demonstration fleet of 20 plug-ins.

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Researchers stopped short of making recommendations based on these findings, but some experts are already suggesting the implementation of coffee programs in American schools starting as early as 1st grade.

Major findings from the study* are summarized below:

• Coffee has long been known to be have nootropic effects (showing improvement of human cognitive ability), but this is the first study to conclusively prove that coffee causes increased levels of intelligence.
• For every cup of coffee consumed on a daily basis, IQ scores increased by an average of 7 points with 48% of participants scoring as high as 150. (Decaf was shown to have the opposite effect, causing a drop in IQ among adults).
• In 97% of the subjects, any pre-existing sickness or other malady was cured by coffee.
• 9 out of 10 coffee drinkers were found to be “significantly more attractive” than non-coffee consumers.

*These results were from independent coffeehouses only. Results tended to reverse themselves when Starbucks coffee was substituted

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