Biofuels
This looks like a pretty big breakthrough:
Just how fast are Rice’s single-celled chemical factories? On a cell-per-cell basis, the bacteria produced the butanol, a biofuel that can be substituted for gasoline in most engines, about 10 times faster than any previously reported organism.
“That’s really not even a fair comparison because the other organisms used an expensive, enriched feedstock, and we used the cheapest thing you can imagine, just glucose and mineral salts,” said Ramon Gonzalez, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice and lead co-author of the Nature study.
Gonzalez’s laboratory is in a race with hundreds of labs around the world to find green methods for producing chemicals like butanol that have historically come from petroleum.
“We call these ‘drop-in’ fuels and chemicals, because their structure and properties are very similar, sometimes identical, to petroleum-based products,” he said. “That means they can be ‘dropped in,’ or substituted, for products that are produced today by the petrochemical industry.”
I wonder what the catch is, if any?
[Update a while later]
The man-made miracle of oil from sand. And as Glenn Reynolds points out, it’s “ethical oil,” not “conflict oil.” And we’re a lot farther from “peak oil” than many want to think.
Stories like this make baby Algore, their lord and savior, weep bitter tears.
The Tea Party In Space
…gets noticed by the “progressives.” The amount of idiocy and ignorance in the comments is gobsmacking.
Britain’s Failure
There is no longer a rule of law.
Limited Government, Federalism…
…and the Affordable Care Act.
I think that historians will note that the passage of that bill was a catalyzing event in history, in that it made crystal clear the antipathy to which the statists held the Founders vision of limited government, particularly with their breezy dismissal of Constitutional concerns, and in fact their complete indifference to them.
Unions Lose Again
Despite all their millions, they came up short:
…almost 350,000 people voted in Tuesday’s recall elections — and Republicans won 53 percent of the total vote. After blowtorching the state with negative ads and benefiting from a favorable timetable, the unions could still only get 47 percent of Wisconsinites to support their effort.
This should make the unions think long and hard about whether they want to embark on a mission to recall Gov. Scott Walker next year. Doing so successfully would easily cost them five times as much as they just spent — and even with their recent deluge of cash, most of the public still didn’t support them at the polls. Additionally, the extra time will also give Walker’s reforms more time to work — and once the public sees that schools can manage their affairs effectively without being hamstrung by union regulations, organized labor’s argument gets even weaker.
That’s a) in an off-year election where union turnout usually makes the difference b) in famously progressive Wisconsin c) after spending many millions d) with a nationwide media and organizing push e) when labor had a galvanizing issue in Gov. Scott Walker’s direct assault on the institutional collective bargaining power of public employees, which led to a dramatic walkout by Democrats.
They’re slow learners. Though when it comes to one of the unions, they’re slow teachers as well.
An Ad Campaign
…by and for stupid people.
Hey, maybe the Obama campaign can hire them. It would be at least as smart as keeping Plouffe and Axelrod.
I Love The Smell Of Fear In The Morning
The Dems are starting to get worried about their presidential prospects next year. They should be. But here’s the myth that will apparently never die:
Some Democrats are even feeling “snookered” that Obama fooled them with his brilliant 2008 campaign…
There was no “brilliant 2008 campaign.” They ran the only campaign they knew how to run, because they had a cipher on which everyone could project their fantasies. Given the level of Bush fatigue, how awful the McCain campaign was, and his response to the midst of the bank meltdown, any Democrat would have likely won. I hope that they continue to nurture this myth, though, because it will result in many mistakes in the campaign next year from hubris (including keeping people like Plouffe and Axelrod, who mistook their own luck for brilliance).
A Disarmed Society
…is a violent society.
The Jokes Write Themselves
This really is a potentially big breakthrough for people with continence problems, but the commentary on it is entirely predictable:
OMG they’re cloning Barney Frank.
See?