Sentience Driving Software Can Reduce Fuel Usage 5-24% Starting in 2012

Sentience driving software can control a car or trucks acceleration and braking and enable 5-24% fuel savings and could be installed in vehicles starting in 2012. It is also a transition path to completely robotic driving. For about $30 to install ion each car or truck the system would save an average of 14% of fuel usage.

In evening tests on public roads in ‘real-world’ conditions in the vicinity of TRL (Transport Research Laboratory), achieved mean savings at all times in excess of 5 per cent.

The Full Robotic CAr Vision
Robotic car only zones were proposed at Nextbigfuture.

Masdar City, a place that will 100,0000 people, is being built with only electric robotic pod cars on wheels for transportation.

Massive robotic warehouses have already been built.

Robotic cars can be used to make a safer and more efficient transportation system and would enable revolutionary new modes where almost no cars are parked but are oncall for use by other people.

Back to Sentience Smart Cruise Control with Acceleration and Braking Control

The wide variation in the numbers comes from the type of car -- hybrid vehicles will save more fuel than those with internal combustion engines alone -- and from the driver's driving style.

On an empty road with no other vehicles, the Sentience system could completely control a vehicle.

With other cars on the road, the driver must control acceleration and braking because the Sentience system is not equipped with the real-time location of all the other vehicles on the road. Future versions of Sentience could be, said Overton, although no final decision on that possibility has been made.

The other option is to have Sentience, or a program like it, installed on every car on the road, said Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Joseph Sussman, an expert on intelligent automotive systems.

Tom Robinson, leader of the Sentience project, said that journeys might take a couple of minutes longer but drivers would accept this in return for safer journeys and cheaper fuel bills. A driver who spends about £50 a week to fill their fuel tank would save more than £500 a year.

By being able to anticipate red lights and congestion well before the driver can see them, cars can brake smoothly and minimise fuel consumption. The driver simply steers the car, keeping his feet well away from the brake and accelerator pedals, overriding the system only in an emergency, such as a pedestrian suddenly stepping out.






An analysis of potential total UK fuel saving of 14 per cent, equating to between 1.2 and 2.9 million barrels of oil per year. The UK uses about 570,000 barrel of gas/diesel per day. The USA uses 4.2 million barrels of gas/diesel per day.

Sentience represents a potentially very low cost of implementation. In a vehicle already equipped with a phone and GPS (e.g. for a navigation system) then no additional hardware would be needed for a production implementation. If these systems were not pre-installed, then the project team estimates that these functions could be provided for a unit cost of around €20 in high volumes. Extra control and integration software would be needed but the processing and storage needs would be modest and likely to be readily integrated into almost any existing vehicle architecture. The availability of high resolution mapping would be a prerequisite for implementation but given the increased availability of such data, the project team estimate that a Sentience based system could be put into production in approximately 3-4 years based on technology availability for model year development programmes in around 18 months.

The Sentience system uses a GPS-equipped smart phone, on the cellular phone network Orange, to determine the vehicle's position. Wireless Bluetooth technology links the phone to the other piece of hardware necessary for Sentience, the r-cube, developed by the Ricardo company. The r-cube controls the vehicle's acceleration and braking.

For the initial tests, the Sentience team used an imported Ford Escape hybrid.

The maps generated by Ordnance Survey include everything from speed bumps to school zones. When a Sentience-equipped vehicle approaches, say, a roundabout, the software automatically slows the vehicle down enough to take the turn. Once the turn is complete, the software then accelerates the vehicle in the most fuel-efficient way.

1 MW and 20 Megawatt Kitegen Wind Power Systems Funding of 15 million Euro Announced

The radical italian Kitegen wind power system appears to have funding of 15 million euro (announced not distributed). An interesting synergy is possible with large Kitegen systems and nuclear power plants. Kitegen systems could be co-located with nuclear power plants to help prevent any illegal airplanes from hitting the nuclear plant. (Kite flying would be adjusted to entangle any planes or UAVs that venture into what is a no-fly zone). Meanwhile the extra power generation would be going along the existing built up power grid to the nuclear plant.

UPDATE: the funding has been announced but has not been provided yet as per Italian Technologist commenter Carlo Perassi.

There is a 14 page IEEE Control Systems research paper on the 40KW prototype and progress on the system.

For medium-to-large-scale energy generators, an alternative KiteGen configuration is being studied, namely, the carousel configuration. In this configuration several airfoils are controlled by their KSUs placed on the arms of a vertical-axis rotor. The controller of each kite is designed to maximize the torque exerted on the rotor, which transmits its motion to an electric generator. For a given wind direction, each airfoil can produce energy for about 300◦ of carousel rotation; only a small fraction (about 1%, see the “Simulation Results” section of the IEEE paper for details) of the generated energy is used to drag the kite against the wind for the remaining 60◦. According to our simulation results, it is estimated that the required land usage for a kite generator may be lower than a current wind farm of the same power by a factor of up to 30–50. Electric energy production costs lower by a factor up to 10–20.

At present, a small scale yo-yo prototype has been realized. This system can generate up to 40 kW using commercial kites with characteristic area up to 10 m2 and line length up to 800 m. The prototype is under test. Preliminary tests show that the amount of energy predicted by simulation is confirmed by experimental data.

A new KiteGen prototype is expected to be built in the next 24–36 months to demonstrate the energy-generation capabilities of the carousel configuration. In particular, a carousel structure with a single kite steering unit mounted on a cart riding on a circular rail will be considered. To collect the energy produced by the wagon motion, the wheels of the cart are connected to an alternator. Such a prototype is expected to produce about 0.5 MW with a rail radius of about 300 m. According to scalability, a platoon of carts, each one equipped with a kite steering unit, can be mounted on the rail to obtain a more effective wind power plant. This configuration can generate, on the basis of preliminary computations, about 100 MW at a production cost of about 20 €/MWh, which is two to three times lower than from fossil sources.

A standard 2-MW wind turbine has a mean production of 4000 MWh/year. To attain a mean generation of 9 TWh/year, which corresponds to almost 1000-MW mean power, 2250 such towers are required, with a land usage of 300 km2 and an energy production cost of about 100–120 €/MWh. In comparison, the production cost from fossil sources (gas, oil) is about 60–70 €/MWh. Simulation results show that a KiteGen capable of generating the same mean energy can be realized using 60–70 airfoils of about 500 m2, rotating in a carousel configuration of 1500-m radius and flying up to 800 m. The resulting land usage is 8 km^2, and the energy production cost is estimated to be about 10–15 €/MWh.

Kitegen has been covered before at Nextbigfuture A 100 MW Kitegen power plant is estimated to deliver a cost of energy produced lower than 0.03 Euro per kWh.

Note: this article is using a translation of a webpage that was in Italian.

From translation: To june the 2006 kitegen it has received a financing of 15 million euro.

The wind at high altitude (500-600 meters height) is nearly always present and blows 7000 hours during the year while that at ground level wind is present only for approximately 1700-1800 hours per year (hours that represent the Kwh relationship produced in a year regarding the power of the wind turbine generator), a year have 8760 hours.

A Kitegen system able to deliver 1 GigaWatt is projected to cost 80 million euro.

Using the first 4 million euro a 1 megawatt prototype kitegen will be built. The remaining 11 million euro of the public contribution will be used for a 20 Megawatt version. It will be constructed on the old nuclear reactor site at Trino (VC). The area is ideal because already it is protected by a “no fly zone”, will be dealt, in this case, of Aeolic of high quota. In any case, it is believed that the technology of the generators to vertical axis, when mature, will supplant that to horizontal axis, as of the rest it is already, partially, happening.

FURTHER READING
The Kitegen site has research papers and more information.

Nextbigfuture has a section with Kitegen articles.

Gene therapy appears safe to regenerate gum tissue

The figures show microcomputed tomographic images of regenerated periodontium (tooth supporting structures) following delivery of PDGF genes.

Scientists at the University of Michigan have developed a method of gene delivery that appears safe for regenerating tooth-supporting gum tissue—a discovery that assuages one of the biggest safety concerns surrounding gene therapy research and tissue engineering.

Gene therapy is an accepted, viable therapeutic concept, but safety is a major hurdle, said William Giannobile, professor at the U-M School of Dentistry. The most notable incident highlighting the safety concerns of gene therapy research and treatment occurred several years ago when a teenager died when given the adenovirus during a gene therapy clinical trial at the University of Pennsylvania.

The U-M therapy also uses the adenovirus, Giannobile said, but the big difference in the U-M approach lies in the local application and much lower dose. Instead of injecting the genes into the blood vessels, where they can then travel through the bloodstream and result in unexpected and sometimes fatal reactions, U-M scientists put the genes on a localized area, directly on the tissue during surgery much like a paste.

The next step for the U-M team is to use the new gene delivery approach in human clinical trials, Giannobile said. The planning stages for these studies will commence in the next year.

The paper, called "Adenovirus Encoding Human Platelet-Derived Growth Factor-B Delivered to Alveolar Bone Defects Exhibits Safety and Biodistribution Profiles Favorable for Clinical Use," is partially available online. It's scheduled to appear in the May issue of the journal Human Gene Therapy.

RELATED READING
In 2008, there was progress reported on regenerating teeth

China Technology: Supercomputers and Breeder Nuclear Reactor

1. China's first supercomputer with a computing speed of over 100 trillion times per second, the Dawning 5000A, also called the "Magic Cube," will officially be installed in the Shanghai Supercomputer Center in mid-May, according to the Dawning Information Industry Company.

The Dawning 5000A, which is to be installed in Shanghai, will have three important missions— the national grid, Shanghai's basic scientific research platform, and information services for the eastern China region, said Li Jun, President of the Dawning Information Industry Company. It will provide massive information processing, information development services, and high-performance computing services for the purpose of scientific research in all sectors of eastern China.

2. The installation and adjustment of main equipment for the China Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR) has been completed.

The sodium-cooled, pool-type fast reactor is being constructed with some Russian assistance at the China Institute of Atomic Energy (CIEA), near Beijing, which undertakes fundamental research on nuclear science and technology.

Fuel produced by Russia's TVEL will be loaded into the reactor July/August and it is scheduled to be commissioned by the end of 2009.

The thermal power of the CEFR is 65 MW, matched with a 25 MWe turbine generator.

A 600 MWe prototype fast reactor is envisaged by 2020 and there are outline plans for a 1500 MWe version by 2030. In October 2008, the Russian-Chinese Nuclear Cooperation Commission called for construction of an 800 MWe demonstration fast reactor similar to Beloyarsk 4, currently the world's only commercial fast breeder reactor.

Unlike most of the reactors used today for nuclear power generation, fast neutron reactors (FNRs) make maximum use of uranium resources by generating a certain amount more fuel than they consume. They do this by using fast neutrons to 'burn up' uranium and plutonium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel, which can be surrounded a uranium 'blanket' in which slightly more plutonium is created than is used. The MOX fuel uses the plutonium recovered when spent fuel, including that from conventional light water reactors, is reprocessed.

What is DARPA Doing Now ?

1. DARPA has funded Rice University to develop platform-aware compilation environment". Enable compilers which are the everywhere to be faster without needing highly skilled people spending a lot of time tuning each one. If they succeed all computers would become faster.

"When a compiler translates human-written code into executable code, it makes myriad choices that have a direct impact on how fast the application runs, how much power it uses and how much memory it uses," Cooper said.

The tools PACE project researchers hope to build will cut the time needed to create high-quality compilers. In addition, the PACE team will learn as it goes, measuring and weighing the goals, capabilities and performance of each processor, to create compilers that are optimized for particular situations.

Krishna Palem, Rice's Ken and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computer Science, said, "It is a rare treat to be working with this 'dream team' and continue Rice's rich tradition in compiler research. PACE involves many innovations using radical ideas intended to allow compilers to learn and adapt, much as humans do during infancy."

"This is akin to a Turing Test for compilers," Sarkar said. "Our goal is to enable PACE tools to be used as a substitute for the time-consuming human expertise that is currently needed to improve the quality of compilers for any given platform.

"The challenge is daunting," he said. "It's not just hard, it is DARPA-hard."

Because the PACE project will focus on portable performance, Cooper said, the researchers will rely on vendor-supplied compilers -- for languages such as C and Fortran -- to perform the final steps of code generation for the target systems. The output of the PACE tools will be a distinct version of an application's code for each kind of processor in the system. Each of those codes will be specifically optimized for the processor, the surrounding system and the vendor compiler.

2. IEEE Spectrum reports DARPA is funding a system to provide detailed 3d building maps of above and below ground facilities over 3 days.The UK register also has coverage.

All this should be achieved without any US personnel needing to get within 10 meters of the building, and only brief excursions inside 20 meters: and the machinery should have the complete building map produced within 3 days.

3. A summary of other DARPA projects is provided from an interview with Gregory T.A. Kovacs who lead DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office.

The MTO funds engineering in five general areas: electronics, photonics, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), computer architectures, and algorithms. But as Kovacs has repeatedly said, the role of DARPA is more about integrating these units into interdisciplinary projects.

* The Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) program. Researchers funded under that program are tasked with the creation of moths or other insects that have electronic controls and energy-harvesting devices implanted inside them, making them self-powered remote-controlled spies.

* Trust in Integrated Circuits (TIC) program, which aims to verify the contents of any microchip assembled offshore. This is a punishing task, as only a few hundred transistors out of 2 billion could theoretically wreak havoc; finding them is a classic needle-in-a-haystack problem.

* Integrated Sensor Is Structure (ISIS) aims for the construction of a 150- to 300-meter-long stratospheric airship to deliver real-time surveillance of the battlefield below and the horizon all around.

* Previously you couldn’t carry sizable [GPS replacement location determining] equipment [into the cave]. Unless it’s the size of a couple of sugar cubes, it’s got no hope of helping. DARPA now have versions of that that are very advanced and very small—small enough to be carried.

Another example is the ocean. It’s impenetrable to the radio frequencies that GPS uses. You have no geographic fix at all, and at that point, all you know is your depth. Sure, a compass will work, but if you’ve ever dived, you’re relying on a compass in murky water. It’s not very accurate.

* DARPA is investigating an entirely new type of transistor, called a tunneling transistor, which would operate at lower voltages—a quarter volt instead of today’s 1 volt. That would greatly reduce the active heat dissipation, which is proportional to the square of the voltage.

Three Times Higher Carbon 12 Purity for Synthetic Diamond Enables Better Quantum Computing

Element Six is a global leader (Europe based) and innovator in supermaterials with a history spanning more than 50 years.

Element Six has created synthetic diamond with less carbon 13 isotope and more pure carbon 12, which enables longer quantum coherence times to be maintained longer. Note: Normally 1.07% is carbon 13 isotope. They have reduced this ratio by over three times.

Element Six has been faced with the challenge of simultaneously reducing the concentration of the isotope 13C to less than 0.3% and reducing the concentration of other paramagnetic defects to less than 10^14 cm-3.

The full 5 page paper is available.

With the current limit in dephasing times (1.8 ms), two nitrogen-vacancy electron spins, at a distance of 100nm, will be coherently coupled. This distance is sufficient for the two centres to be addressed and read out separately by modern methods of nonlinear optical microscopy and also manufacturable with current implantation techniques that allow some 10nm precision.

As the distance at which coherent coupling prevails scales as cube root of NC, a further reduction of the 13C concentration by one order of magnitude would enable an increase of the mutual separation by roughly a factor of 2.

Note that the ultimate limit for the coherence time of a spin-free diamond host is given by spin-lattice relaxation, which is expected to occur in a seconds timescale. In this case, micrometre-scale-separated electron spins would show coherent coupling, an almost macroscopic scale quantum array.

Isotopic enrichment was accomplished by using purifiers to reduce non-intentional dopants and isotopically enriched methane at 99.7% in a hydrogen environment (95% by composition). These conditions led to samples in which the paramagnetic impurity concentration (including nitrogen, hydrogen and silicon defects) was minimized.

Longer Quantum Coherence Any unintentional defects with paramagnetic spin in the diamond can result in the qubits rapidly losing their quantum information, severely limiting the number of possible computations. So researchers are putting a great deal of effort into increasing "coherence time" which is one of the many challenges to building practical computers. This requires developing quantum purity diamond with a very low defect spin concentration. In this letter to Nature Materials, the EQUIND consortium report, single electron spins having a room temperature spin dephasing time of 1.8 ms, the longest ever observed in a solid state system at room temperature.

Better Magnetic Imaging Application

Diamond with these properties is also applicable to research into a new type of nanometre-scale magnetic sensors that could be used in biological imaging. In their letter, the researchers note, "The ability of ultrapure isotopically controlled CVD diamond to detect weak magnetic fields with high local resolution might have implications in a wide range of fields such as: life science, metrology and quantum applications. A possible example are diamond magnetometers used to detect magnetic fields associated with the ion flow through membrane channels in cells."

Nature Materials : Ultralong spin coherence time in isotopically engineered diamond Published online: 6 April 2009 | doi:10.1038/nmat2420

As quantum mechanics ventures into the world of applications and engineering, materials science faces the necessity to design matter to quantum grade purity. For such materials, quantum effects define their physical behaviour and open completely new (quantum) perspectives for applications. Carbon-based materials are particularly good examples, highlighted by the fascinating quantum properties of, for example, nanotubes or graphene. Here, we demonstrate the synthesis and application of ultrapure isotopically controlled single-crystal chemical vapour deposition (CVD) diamond with a remarkably low concentration of paramagnetic impurities. The content of nuclear spins associated with the 13C isotope was depleted to 0.3% and the concentration of other paramagnetic defects was measured to be <10^13 cm-3. Being placed in such a spin-free lattice, single electron spins show the longest room-temperature spin dephasing times ever observed in solid-state systems (T2=1.8 ms). This benchmark will potentially allow observation of coherent coupling between spins separated by a few tens of nanometres, making it a versatile material for room-temperature quantum information processing devices. We also show that single electron spins in the same isotopically engineered CVD diamond can be used to detect external magnetic fields with a sensitivity reaching 4 nT Hz-1/2 and subnanometre spatial resolution.

FURTHER READING
E6 makes a lot of other advanced materials

E6 is toughening electronics for extreme environments

The electronics toughening is part of Europe's Morgan project

Diamond work is also part of the Morgan project

The Diamond isotope purification results highlight the progress of research carried out under the three-year project called "Engineered Quantum Information in Nanostructured Diamond" or "EQUIND" which started in early 2007. EQUIND is part of the European Union’s "FET Open Funding Programme", aimed at studying the potential of future and emerging technologies that may have an impact on society or industry.

AI and Robotic Breakthroughs that Multiply Scientific Research Productivity

A series of announcements that will multiply the productivity of scientific research and enhance the ability of lay people to have scientifically correct results. These new programs and robotic systems will be further enhanced with the increasing use of cloud computing, robotic and sensor advances and increased computing power from things like GPGPU. (H/T Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future) These advances go along with other technology and processes that are accelerating scientific research. Examples of other technology are combinatorial arrays for running many tests at the same time, cheap diagnostic devices and sensors and computer simulation.

1. Wired Science reports on a computer program that self-discovers the laws of physics. It is analyzing large datasets and determining laws (some previously undiscovered) which explain the data. More information and video at Cornell University.

In just over a day, a powerful computer program accomplished a feat that took physicists centuries to complete: extrapolating the laws of motion from a pendulum's swings.

Developed by Cornell researchers, the program deduced the natural laws without a shred of knowledge about physics or geometry.

The research is being heralded as a potential breakthrough for science in the Petabyte Age, where computers try to find regularities in massive datasets that are too big and complex for the human mind.

Lipson and Schmidt designed their program to identify linked factors within a dataset fed to the program, then generate equations to describe their relationship. The dataset described the movements of simple mechanical systems like spring-loaded oscillators, single pendulums and double pendulums — mechanisms used by professors to illustrate physical laws.

The program started with near-random combinations of basic mathematical processes — addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and a few algebraic operators.

Initially, the equations generated by the program failed to explain the data, but some failures were slightly less wrong than others. Using a genetic algorithm, the program modified the most promising failures, tested them again, chose the best, and repeated the process until a set of equations evolved to describe the systems. Turns out, some of these equations were very familiar: the law of conservation of momentum, and Newton's second law of motion.

"It's a powerful approach," said University of Michigan computer scientist Martha Pollack, with "the potential to apply to any type of dynamical system." As possible fields of application, Pollack named environmental systems, weather patterns, population genetics, cosmology and oceanography. "Just about any natural science has the type of structure that would be amenable," she said.

Compared to laws likely to govern the brain or genome, the laws of motion discovered by the program are extremely simple. But the principles of Lipson and Schmidt's program should work at higher scales.

The researchers have already applied the program to recordings of individuals' physiological states and their levels of metabolites, the cellular proteins that collectively run our bodies but remain, molecule by molecule, largely uncharacterized — a perfect example of data lacking a theory.

Their results are still unpublished, but "we've found some interesting laws already, some laws that are not known," said Lipson. "What we're working on now is the next step — ways in which we can try to explain these equations, correlate them with existing knowledge, try to break these things down into components for which we have clues."

2. Wolfram|Alpha's online computed answer engine will be like having a house scientist to consult for you.

Wolfram|Alpha looks like a search engine, in that there’s a one-line box where you type in a question. The output appears a second or two later, as a page of text and graphics below the box. What's happening behind the scenes? Rather than looking up the answer to your question, Wolfram|Alpha figures out what your question means, looks up the necessary data to answer your question, computes an answer, designs a page to present the answer in a pleasing way, and sends the page back to your computer.

Let me give three random examples. If you enter the query, “3/26/2009 + 90 days” you’ll get a page that gives a date ninety days later than the first date. If you enter “mt. everest height length of golden gate” you’ll get a page expressing the height of Mount Everest as a multiple of the length of the Golden Gate Bridge. If you enter “temperature in los gatos,” you’ll get something like the current temperature, a graph of the temperatures over the last week with projections for the next few days, and a graph of the temperatures over the last year.

Wolfram|Alpha can pop out an answer to pretty much any kind of factual question that you might pose to a scientist, economist, banker, or other kind of expert. The exciting part is that you’re not just looking up pages on the web, you’re getting new information that’s generated by computations working from the known data. Wolfram says the response can be so speedy because, “We’ve found that, of all the things science can compute, most take a second or less.”

Wolfram|Alpha will let users input data and models, along the lines of Wikipedia. He says they will in fact allow that, although via a less open system than Wikipedia. Contributors would need to fill out a form, including some references verifying that their information is correct.

3. Adam is an automated scientist programmed by a team of researchers at Aberystwyth University and the University of Cambridge to carry out each step of the scientific process — from generating hypotheses to making conclusions — without any direct help from humans. Adam will help speed up research and enable rapid replication of experiments and speed the extension of previous work.


A freezer, a plate washer, incubators, air filters, other laboratory equipment, and a sophisticated AI system make up Adam the robot scientist.

Using a form of artificial intelligence, Adam first examines a model of the life processes of the yeast and determines which enzymes are orphans. He then compares these orphans to similar enzymes in other organisms. And based on this comparison, he formulates an original hypothesis about which genes might encode for the orphans.

“This robot is very exciting,” says Bart Selman, a computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert at Cornell University. “It demonstrates active machine learning, where a robot actually decides what data to collect and what type of experiment to run.”

Adam offers scientists more than just relief from the daily drudgery of laboratory work. He provides them with a new way to understand and share their research. Each step of Adam’s experiments is recorded in a formalized logical language that can be carefully examined and easily replicated.

The researchers were able to reuse Adam’s experimental data in order to investigate other phenomena. “You would expect that when you remove enzymes from yeast, it would become less efficient because it evolved to have those enzymes for a reason,” King says. “But we found that in many cases the opposite was true.”

Adam is not designed to replace scientists. On the contrary, as the researchers are careful to point out, the idea is to develop a way of enabling teams of robot and human scientists to work together.

General Motors and Segway to Make PUMAs for 2012

Segway reveals specifics on the PUMA on their site

Built off of the proven reliable and safe technology you find in Segway Personal Transporters (PTs), the prototype truly does expand upon the exhilarating riding experience. It increases capacity to two passengers in a seated position; capable of carrying them up to anywhere between 25 and 35 mph (40 - 56 kph) for anywhere between 25 and 35 miles (40 - 56 km) on a single charge.* It does so while taking advantage of the unparalleled maneuverability and advanced control you get through Segway’s use of dynamic stabilization (balancing technology). Add in know-how with large format lithium-ion batteries and you have something that’s zero emissions during operation - likely only costing about $.60 in electricity to recharge.

Pricing has not been announced but will likely be more than a regular Segway $2000-5000 and a regular small car ($6000-10000). The PUMA weighs 300 lbs versus 120-200 lbs for a Segway Personal Transporter. A regular small car weighs 1400-2600 lbs. Venturebeat indicates about a $5000 estimated price.

The Wall Street Journal reports that GM and Segway will cooperate on a 35 mile per hour enclosed Segway.

Car and Driver indicates that it will have seating for two and was revealed at the New York Auto Show.

General Motors Corp. is teaming with Segway Inc., maker of the upright, self-balancing scooters, to build a new type of two-wheeled vehicle designed to move easily through congested urban streets.

The machine, which GM says it aims to develop by 2012, would run on batteries and use wireless technology to avoid traffic backups and navigate cities. It have a top speed of 35 miles per hour and 35 mile range.

A person on foot can comfortably travel in a 2 km area, the Segway PT increased that to 10 km and the PUMA will enable 20+km.










PUMA stands for Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility and a prototype will be shown in Manhattan on Tuesday, April 7, 2009.

It will utilize dual electric in-wheel motors powered by a lithium-ion battery, the PUMA uses the same balancing technology as its smaller brother—although it leans forward onto a second set of wheels for greater stability during loading and unloading.

Highlights

* Dynamic stabilization: The ability to balance on two wheels and have a true zero turning radius. It gives you incredible maneuverability.
* Electric propulsion: It’s extremely efficient and gives us significant fine control over vehicle dynamics. You also can use regenerative braking to charge back the batteries.
* Smart battery management: We’re one of the world’s largest customers of large format lithium-ion batteries. As such, we’ve become experts about the safe and efficient use of their chemistry.
* Drive-by-wire digital controls: Think about this whole thing as a digital solution to an analog problem. All steering inputs, acceleration, and deceleration are done with zeros and ones instead of levers, cables, and pads.
* Intuitive user interface: Shifting the center of mass of the vehicle controls how fast it goes and how quickly it stops. Check out the video to see it in action.
* Digital dashboard: Data from the vehicle such as speed, battery life, and other information can flow wireless to a handheld device wirelessly. Add in real-time traffic and other connectivity info. and you’ll be armed with enough information to sail through your commute.

Interview with Peter Antoinette, President and CEO of Nanocomp Technologies

This site has been following Nanocomp Technologies which makes sheets of carbon nanotubes. Nanocomp Technologies had 3X6 foot sheets back in early 2008. Then in early 2009, they announced that they had 4X8 foot sheets. So close to double the square footage of the 16 square foot sheets at 32.

In a single process, they have integrated the continuous growth Of Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) and the formation of functional products (sheets of carbon nanotubes).



Volume of Production and Properties of the Bulk Sheets

* Nanocomp Technology is making hundreds of square feet of sheets each week. They are scaling up to tons of material in sheets next year (2012)
* the 3X6 and 4X8 foot sheets can and are being bonded together with a little overlap to make larger sheets for different applications
* Other companies are producing more carbon nanotubes but those are primarily only carbon nanotubes that are so short that the material is like powder
* The electrical properties of the sheets are already superior to existing materials by weigth for applications ilke radiation and electromagnetic shielding
* They can achieve the same electromagnetic shielding at one third to one half of the weight of traditional material (copper wires)
* Superior electrical properties already exist for antennas
* Nanocomp has developed the capability to tune multiple properties in their carbon nanotube sheets. Multiple functions can be addressed at the same time with this capability.

Nanocomp Technologies bulk properties.

High Strength – spun conductive yarns exhibit breaking strengths up to 3 GPa expressed or in other terms: 1.5 Nt/Tex or 450,000 psi and with fracture toughness that is higher than aramids (such as Kevlar or Twaron). CNT sheets have breaking strengths, without binders, that range from 500 MPa to 1.2 GPa depending upon tube orientation. Aluminum breaks at 500 MPa, carbon steel breaks around 1 GPa.

Electrical Conductivity – Capable of carrying more current than copper and are also more conductive than copper at high frequencies.

Thermal Conductivity - Capability to transfer more heat than copper or silver on a
per weight basis.

Thermoelectric behavior - Demonstrate a Seebeck coefficient of greater than 60 µV/ºK
and power greater than 1 watt/gram.

Extremely Lightweight – Less than half the weight of aluminum


The outside of the current Nanocomp furnace. Production facilities are being scaled up from 11,000 square feet to 40,000 square feet (next year/2010) and then to 100,000 square feet (a few years out).






Windle's Carbon Nanotubes versus Nanocomps

In Cambridge, Prof Windle is making carbon nanotubes that are several centimeters long and several times stronger than the Nanocomp carbon nanotubes. Nanocomp has been able to make a 40 centimeter long carbon nanotube as well but is focusing on what can be built in higher volume with a cost of $100/kg or less. The research on longer and stronger carbon nanotubes is vital but there will be the delay while high volume and reasonable cost production is achieved with stronger and longer carbon nanotubes.

Similarly other properties can be enhanced to higher levels in tiny quantities but industrial levels need high volume and reasonable cost.

Applications and Benefits of the Sheets and As Production Scales Up

* The production that Nanocomp is planning to achieve over three years would be enough to retrofit all of the EMI shielding in all commercial jets.
* 787 would save 2000 lbs using the Nanocomp CNT product for EMI shielding. This would save the airline money with lower fuel costs
* 200 lbs of weight could be saved in a typical satellite. Currently it costs $20,000-100,000 per pound to launch a satellite into geosynchronous orbit. Therefore, $4-20 million in launch cost savings for each launch.
* Alternatively or in combination superior EMI shielding could be employed at lower or equal weight.

DIY e-bombs could bring down current commercial aircraft, but superior shielding could prevent that vulnerability and shield from lightning strikes and allow passengers to use electrical devices like cellphones and wireless communication.

* the material is still ten times inferior to copper for the power grid in terms of ohm centimeters. Plus the cost is too high for the CNT and production is way too low.
* Where wires and cables need high frequency characteristics or other electrical and heat properties in lower volume (a few tons per year now and a few hundred tons per year in 5-10 years) then these CNT sheets should be superior.
* Other space applications that are being investigated are carbon nanotube solar sails and electric solar sail wiring

Momentum Towards Making Mother Nature a Genetically Engineered and Geoengineered Bitch

This is a brief overview of the current trends toward larger scale genetic engineering of agricultural crops and animals and geoengineering and mega-engineering adaptation to offset or adapt to environmental changes. Primarily these are observations at which solutions are getting significant increases in research and development resources and are getting or are close to being deployed at significant levels.

Weaker and slower interventions and adjustments to address the sources of environmental change will mean stronger and more urgent efforts in the future. History of changes to forests and wild areas on land indicate that the choice has generally not been to roll back efforts to low energy naturalistic lifestyles but to use more technology and processes to obtain necessary food and other resources.

More "naturalistic" solutions could be possible if there were far stronger efforts on converting coal and fossil fuel plants with factory mass produced nuclear fission reactor such as current efforts in China. The greater naturalistic part would be less genetic engineering and less geoengineering could be required. Those could still be done but there would be less required interventions of those types.

ie. You can allow your human population to fluctuate with the levels of buffalo herds or you take control of the food population with domesticated cows and chickens on farms.

You could allow your human population to fluctuate with the levels of wild fish catch and other farm production or you find ways to increase food production in spite of environmental variables. Fish farming provides over half of the worlds fish for human consumption.

When some soils deteriorated from farming techniques there was new farm management practices and fertilizers usage and modification of crops to be tougher and able to grow in inferior soils.

Genetically Modified Plants
In 2008, Time Magazine discussed "China's Genetically Altered Food Boom"

Most of China's cotton is already transgenic, and rice, wheat, maize, soybeans and livestock are in the pipeline. "China decided that conventional technology would not allow it to feed its people," says Clive James, chairman and founder of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA). In the 12 years since GM crops have been commercially grown, James says most planting has been in the Americas. "I believe that the second decade will be the decade of Asia," he says.

Genetically modified rice is expected to be approved by Feb, 2011 in China. This is expected to open the gates to other grain crops and to other countries approving genetically modified crops.

A 2008 research report on the status of China's transgenic rice research.

Of all of the work being done in field and environmental release trials, four which have been engineered to be resistant to major pests in China, have advanced to the final stage of field trials, the preproduction trials stage. Two insect-resistant hybrids—GM Xianyou 63 and Kemingdao contain stem borer–resistant Bt genes. According to experimental trial data, the Bt varieties are resistant to three stem borers in China: Tryporyza incertulas Walker, Chilo suppressalis Walker, and Cnaphalocrocis medinalis Guenee (Zhu, Huang, and Hu 2003). The hybrid GM II Youming 86 contains the CPTi gene, which provides resistance to six pests: the same pests that are targets of varieties containing Bt plus Sesamia inferensWalker, Parndra guttata Bremeret Grey, and Pelopidas mathias Fabricius. MOA (2002) reports that in 2000 and 2001, stem borers affected between 68% and 75% of China’s rice area. Given that China’s rice area is nearly 30 million hectares, this means that the main pests targeted by China’s experimental GM rice varieties (that are currently in preproduction trials) affect more than 20 million hectares annually, nearly 13% of the world’s total rice sown area. A fourth hybrid contains the Xa21 genes, which provide resistance to bacterial blight, one of the most prevalent diseases in rice production areas in central China (Zhu et al. 2003).

Before commercialization, a new GM variety that passes the environmental
release stage of the biosafety testing process in China must also pass through
preproduction trials. According to China’s biosafety regulations, the total area
for each preproduction trial should be more than 30 mu but not exceed 1,000
mu, or 66.7 hectares (MOA 2005).

Although China’s rice scientists are developing the first generation of GM rice in hybrid varieties, which may indeed be suffering from falling demand, they are doing so because of the relatively weak intellectual property rights environment inside China. The use of hybrid varieties allows for some degree of protection from piracy since the GM hybrid varieties are more difficult for other farmers and seed companies to duplicate. However, if China can improve intellectual property rights or if the government were to step in and support research without regard to the question of whether the new GM rice varieties can be protected or not (since they may have a benefit to society as a whole), the current technology can be used in all varieties, not just hybrids.

Should China decide to commercialize GM rice, the implications could far exceed the effect on its own producers and consumers. Paarlberg (2003) suggests that if China were to commercialize a major crop, such as rice, it is possible that it would set off a chain reaction in the world. For example, if China were to commercialize rice, it possibly would clear the way for the production of GM wheat, maize, and other crops inside China. If China proceeded in this direction, this could encourage the large grain-producing nations, such as Canada, the Unted States, and Australia, to continue to expand their programs in GM wheat and other crops, since China is a likely target for their exports in the future. In addition, the commercialization of rice and other crops may induce other developing countries, such as India or Vietnam,
to expand their plant biotechnology programs. On the one hand, other developing countries might follow China in an effort to remain competitive. On the other hand, with a clear precedent, other leaders might be willing to adoptGM food crops to increase the income of their farmers as well as to improve their health. It is in this very real sense that the future of GM rice in China may have an important influence on the future of GM crops in the world.

Genetically Modified Animals
Genetically modified (GMO) fish are likely to dominate future fish farming by growing over two times faster than regular fish and being up to 30% more efficient with feed than regular fish. This would also make the GMO fish 350% more efficient with feed than cows are.

The FDA is clearing the way for genetically modified fish and animals to be supplied as food.

The FDA said genetically engineered animals, created for human use or consumption, will be regulated in the same way as veterinary drugs, meaning they will go through a safety review process. Aqua Bounty of Massachusetts is hoping to market its genetically engineered salmon, which grows to maturity in less time than wild or farmed salmon, but it awaits approval.

A cow requires around seven kilograms of feed grain for each kilo of meat, while a carp requires around three kilos or less. Fish farming economizes on feed grain, and of course on the land area needed to produce it.

Aqua Bounty Farms on Tuesday announced it is hopeful the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will in 2009 approve the company’s AquAdvantage Advanced farmed Atlantic salmon hybrid.






Geoengineering

There are many geoengineering projects that have been proposed and are now being modeled and studied in detail.

The longer that no effective action is taken to rapidly shift transportation and power production and energy usage to environmentally benign sources then the more likely it is that planned geoengineering will be necessary.

Currently any changes to the environment which are being caused as a side effect of civilizations industries and people are unintentional. This also means that humans have the capability to intentionally alter the environment.

More moderate scale efforts at adaption to environmental changes are the tidal barrages, storm surge barriers and other adaptation projects.

Halcrow’s concept is based on a similar project that the firm has been involved with in St. Petersburg, where the Russian government has funded a 15-mile-long barrier that is due for completion in 2010.


The proposed extent of the barrier and causeway system is shown on the schematic plan above.

Here is a 58 slide presentation on the effects of specific storm surges and environmental effects that New York must prepare. It also show the history of similar projects.



According to the International Rivers Network, the cost of building the Three Gorges Dam will be $25 billion by the time it is completed, including relocation expenses for communities inundated by the dam. It is likely that building the tidal barrage in the Bay Area would likely be double or triple the cost of building a similar structure in China. A barrage may allow the Bay Area to avoid certain small-scale sea level rise adaptation costs such as population relocation and levee construction. So a more elaborate system of dikes and levees seems like the likely solution.



So each major city would need multi-billion projects (4-8 years to build) to create dikes or barriers to rising water or stronger storm surges. Geoengineering becomes an affordable option against the cost of other measures or no measures.

Many other cities and nations are looking at building or enhancing dike systems.

McKinseys View of Chinas Future Urbanization: Chinese Cities in 2025 and 2030

A 560 page report on the future of China's cities.

* China is leading the global urbanization trend of developing countries and in 2025-2030 one in five of the global city dwellers will be in Chinese cities
* Based on current trends, China in 2025 will have 221 cities with more than one million people compared to Europe with 35. 25 of China's cities will have more than 5 million people
* China's cities in 2025 will generate about 95% of its GDP (versus 75% today)
* Of the 350 million people added to chinese cities by 2025 (about the population of the USA) 240 millinon will be migrants
* More concentrated higher density cities will have higher per capita GDP and require less infrastructure
* China has relaxed the Hokou system of household registration which restricted movement and migration within China






























FURTHER READING
The Atlantic looks at the financial meltdowns impact being to strengthen the productive organization of American cities

The mega-region view of the world

The urbanization of China could create 11 mega-regions (up from 3 mega-regions now) or a smaller number of larger megaregions. A megaregion must meet two criteria: First, it must be a contiguous lighted area that includes at least one major city center and its metropolitan region. Second, it must have an LRP (economy) of more than $100 billion.

Carnival of Space 97

Carnival of Space 97 is up at Cheap Astro and it has a lot of good articles.

This site contributed the article on the layer of ice found less than one meter below the surface of Mars.

Meridiani Journal looks at the sub-surface water on Titan

Titan is already known to have lakes and seas of liquid methane, but now the evidence is growing that it also harbours a subsurface ocean of water, which may come to the surface periodically via cryovolcanoes (spewing ice or water instead of lava). As the two linked articles describe, studies of Titan’s variable spin rate have bolstered the case for an interior water / ammonia ocean, while new evidence for ice flows resulting from cryovolcanic eruptions have been found on the surface.

A Babe in the Universe explores the many different view and theories of Dark Energy.






Bad Astronomy gives us a virtual 3d close-up view of the mass-extinction-sized Near Earth Object 1996 HW1.

Astroengine outlines a new technique to listen out for habitable exoplanets.

Centauri Dreams looks at a high speed solar sail that will coast on a microwave and could get to Pluto in half the time it will take the New Horizons spacecraft.

Check out this superior edition of the Carnival of Space at Cheap Astro

McKinsey View of the Future Cars and Fuel of 2020 and 2030

McKinsey has a 36 page analysis of a path to low carbon cars and trucks in 2020 and 2030. This projection is dependent upon a forecast and assumption for a range of energy costs and on the general availability cost and effectiveness of automotive technology. In the first picture we see the chart of technology and costs for lighter and more efficient regular cars and trucks and hybrids and electric cars.

Big game changers would be algae, seaweed, and microbial biofuels that would be able to displace all or most oil usage and very cheap and good performance electric or plug in hybrid cars.

McKinsey also has a 150 page analysis of the liquid fuel (oil and biofuel) energy future and recommendations to avoid the next energy crisis.




The next chart shows how the estimated introduction of new vehicle technology could reduce the carbon impact of cars and trucks.




















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Some of the recommended measures from the McKinsey Global Institute are removing subsidies for oil (mainly in the middle east) and allow trucks to be longer. A big medium term win would be to not use liquid fuel in power plant biolers.











































US oil usage is about 40 quads. So the increase in light vehicle, trucks and airplanes and petrochemicals is over 40 quads from the projected increase to 2020.

Mars has a layer of Ice

Formed sometime between January and September 2008, this fresh crater has dredged up barely buried water ice and splashed it onto the Martian surface. The HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recorded this colour close-up image on 1 November 2008. The scene is about 30 metres across. (Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Mars has a layer of ice as shallow as a few tens of centimeters below the surface. If the Viking lander had been able to dig deeper it would have found it in the 1970s. Analysis of recent impact craters show the exposed ice, which then is sublimated into the atmosphere.

UPDATE:
The water ice seems to have a high salt content based on the analysis.

BBC news has more coverage

Over tens to hundreds of millions of years, the ice has been transported to lower latitudes. We have found evidence for huge tropical mountain glaciers where the sides of big volcanoes at the equator have these huge deposits - 170,000 sq km - on their north-west flanks that are caused by big changes in Mars' obliquity.

On Earth, obliquity variations actually caused the Ice Ages that we experienced over the last tens of thousands of years. But changes in Mars' obliquity have been significantly greater. So we're seeing evidence for ice having been transported all the way down to the equator.

Some of it has gone to make the polar caps. Some amount, certainly, has left the planet through dissociation in the upper atmosphere. But what we're finding is that a significant amount may have been sequestered in glacial deposits.

Data from the Sharad (SHAllow RADar) instrument (on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), document that some of these glacial-like features, which you find at Mars' mid-latitudes, have a significant volume of ice left below a surface of rock debris.

END UPDATE

The expected depth to ground ice is close to 84cm while the crater depth is 65-70cm. This particular model uses an average water vapor concentration of 20pr μm and these new data are so far consistent with this value or perhaps one slightly higher. This contrasts with the current observations of average atmospheric water vapor of ~14pr μm or ~10pr μm. Thus the ground ice exposed here is probably in the process of retreat from a previously larger extent perhaps due to recent variations in the argument of perihelion

New Scientist also has coverage.

The disappearing act might also be due in part to a coating of dust blown in from the atmosphere. Either way, notes HiRISE investigator Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona, the icy deposits had to be at least a couple of inches (several centimetres) thick, and they couldn't have been unearthed from more than a foot or two (0.3-0.6 m) down.

Byrne announced these findings on Friday at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. He points out that prior surveys, particularly one done by the neutron spectrometer aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, show that vast reservoirs of ice lay barely buried across most of the planet's polar and mid-latitude regions.

Trend Tracking and Projections

The first 6 weeks of technology developments in 2009 and
the second 6 weeks have seen a lot of big developments. One of the comments was to have trend tracking and projections included in the big development highlight roundups.

That will be included as part of future highlight packages.

Here are the trends and projections for the first two highlight packages.

Graphene electronics, material applications and commercialization is happening faster than many expected.

Eric Drexler also covers the graphene nanotechnology progress.

Production volumes and specifics of what is being produced, quality and sizes are key to tracking the progress of carbon nanotubes and graphene. It mostly not a question of can something be done, it is can it be commercially developed and brought out of lab demonstrations and scaled up to industrial quality, consistency and volume.

The target markets for graphene and carbon nanotubes will be places where superior properties are useful and enable something highly valuable to be done which was not possible with cheaper alternatives and niche markets with lower volumes of material requirements.

Replacing and improving all of the electrical shielding in airplanes with a volume of carbon nanotubes formed into tape instead of copper wiring can save one third of weight currently and production volumes of the required form of carbon nanotubes is being rolled out. The retrofits and production can occur over the next 2-5 years. This will be discussed in detail in an upcoming post from an phone interview with Nanocomp Technologies. Flat out replacing copper for the electric power grid using carbon nanotubes is still many years away. Those kind of bulk applications need many thousands to millions of tons of carbon nanotubes and production is less than a couple of hundred tons for carbon nanotubes that are mostly like powder. The millimeter(s) long carbon nanotubes are going to be produced a few tons at time perhaps next year. The many centimeter long carbon nanotubes are expensive lab curiousities at this point.

Carbon fiber which many people have already bought sporting goods built from those more crude materials are still only about 52,000 tons/year in global production. Steel is over 1 billion tons per year. World copper production is about 18.5 million tons.

Carbon nanotubes and graphene do not need to replace ton per ton. Higher performance means you can use less to do the same thing. Also, you can mix the pure material in with polymers to enhance properties. The final product might only be a few percent carbon nanotubes or graphene. Still as commonly as we see carbon fiber products that is at 52,000 tons/year and we do not have carbon fiber as major part of the power grid.





DNA nanotechnology, self-assembly, synthetic biology, synthetic life, quantum dots, and other nanotechnology seem to be on the verge of commercial breakthroughs to significant first markets.

There is a lot of interesting capability at just above the atomically precise level. 2-15 nanometers scaled control, science and capabilities are looking to be very useful.

Something to keep a close eye on is the guided self assembly of 2 nanometer precise structures for computer chips. This is claimed to be easily commercializable. Whether tens of thousands of wafers per month can be produced by a factory is what needs to be tracked if we were to see a major replacement of existing silicon technology.

The scale of our current technological society is why it takes time for superior technology to make a big impact. How long has it taken Flash Memory to get to where it is now ? Hard drives also kept improving at the same time.

Stem cells, gene therapy, regeneration, tissue engineering, super-cheap biometrics and diagnosis are all areas where the science is advancing rapidly and I expect many more announcements of development of lab capabilities. There is a lag in implementation and deployment, which is made even longer because of regulations and societal resistance. Super-cheap biometric marker analysis and diagnosis will likely have a major impact first because the approval and deployment processes are easier. Stem cell therapies, gene therapies and other advanced medicine will likely be tested and tried first in overseas markets.

I am becoming more and more confident that breakthroughs in energy technology will be happening. Energy technology game-changers would be absolutely certain with a greater shift from incremental refinement to a willingness to build more, test more and fail more instead of debate and paper and lab studies. Technological progress in aircraft was purposely slowed down by Robert McNamara because the X-plane projects were complicating arms control negotiations by advancing capabilities too quickly.

It helps no one and makes no one safer to take 20-40 years to build or fix a bridge or skyscraper. Do 5-10 years of regulatory work help make nuclear plants safer ? Will the tons of paperwork be used as extra radiation shielding ? China is only building as fast as the USA used to build. Over 99% of what the US built in the old days has done just fine in terms of safety over the decades. Design improvements and other advances could be incorporated for added safety without the delays.

Where the future of key technologies starts to have big impact will be greatly determined by regulations and policies. Clearly the economic incentives will force some of those restrictions to be lifted.

The tree of market niches for each area of technology needs to be known in terms of size and requirements (including marketing and regulatory requirements and willingness and cost to switch) to displace the current technology. This will determine which areas are conquered first and the impact that it will have.

Microbes to Convert Coal to Methane and Algae Fuel are Both Close to Industrial Scaleup

Microbes to Convert Coal to Methane Scale Up Announcement Soon

At Synthetic Genomics, the San Diego startup he co-founded in 2005, Venter said scientists are using such techniques to create new microbial species with enhanced and even unique capabilities. For example, he said Synthetic Genomics has created new species of microbes that grow on the surface of coal particles—and produce methane by consuming the coal.

He displayed a black-and-white image of a piece of coal that appeared to be carpeted with a mossy substance, saying it’s an organism that eats coal and makes a cleaner-burning fuel. “We and BP think we can scale this up substantially,” Venter said, referring to the global energy giant that became a development partner and investor in Synthetic Genomics two years ago. “We’re not too far away from making an announcement to scale this up.”


Venter says the team at Synthetic Genomics also has created new types of cells that consume carbon dioxide and hydrogen and make methane and long chains of organic molecules with as many as 18 carbon atoms “in a pure form.”

Algae Biofuel Prospects
Sapphire Energy’s algae fuel process has been used successfully to make the three most important fuels, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, Pyle says, and all three products have been independently certified to meet fuel standards set by the American Society for Testing and Materials. In September 2008, Sapphire Energy raised $100 million in a second venture round from Bill Gates, Arch Venture Partners and others.

Biofuels technologies appear capable of someday producing 200,000 barrels of jet fuel a day—enough to supply the needs of the U.S. Air Force—from algae grown on less than 800,000 acres. [10-11 gallons per day or 3650-4000 gallons per year] “It’s not crazy to imagine that by the year 2050 we (the United States) could become an oil exporter again,” Briggs said. 80 million acres would replace the current oil demand of the United States. 3% of total land in the United States. Other estimates are 1-2% or less as the processes are improved. Light pipes allow for deeper algae ponds and over ten times more efficient land usage.

UPDATE:
H/T and references at Alfin

There are algae fuel companies that are targeting near term (5 years or less) production costs of $1.50/gallon of algae produced biofuel.

The tantalizing quality of algae is that some algal species contain up to 40 percent lipids by weight. And therefore, according to some sources, an acre of algae could yield 5,000 to 10,000 gallons of oil a year, making algae far more productive than soy (50 gallons per acre), rapeseed (110 to 145 gallons), mustard (140 gallons) jatropha (175 gallons) palm (650 gallons) or cellulosic ethanol from poplars (2,700 gallons).

More optimistic data from less informed people indicate the theoretical biodiesel yield from microalgae is in the range of 11,000 to 20,000 gallons per acre per year.

But according to Dr. John Benemann, a cantankerous algae consultant whose research is widely cited in the field, the realistic potential production level (despite claims to the contrary) is about 2,000 gallons of algal oil per acre per year.

At the 20,000 gallons per year level that is 16 million acres to replace the current US oil demand. At 10,000 gallons per year that is 32 million acres to replace the US oil demand.





Biofuels Compared and Land Use

Here is comparison of some biofuel sources


Unmodified Miscanthus has been found to be 2.5 times more efficient than corn and switchgrass. 9.3% of cropland equivalent to grow Miscanthus to offset 20% of fuel. 23.25% to offset 50% of fuel. Genetic modifications can boost Miscanthus efficiency by 300%. Modified Miscanthus 8% of land to offset 50% of fuel.

So algae and Modified miscanthus should be pushed for biofuels. Plus the other stuff as stopgap.

The cropland argument against biofuels is not correct