Algae are among the fastest growing plants in the world, and about 50 percent of their weight is oil that can be used to make biodiesel for cars, trucks, and aircraft, although there are suggestions that different algae are suited to different types of fuel.
Glen Kertz, the president and CEO of Valcent Products outside El Paso in California, has previously said that he can produce about 100,000 gallons of algae oil a year per acre, compared to about 30 gallons per acre from corn or 50 gallons from soybeans.
“Algae is the ultimate in renewable energy,” Kertz told CNN last year.
The conference has been organised by Baltic Sea Solutions and an international scientific team led by Dr. Jonathan Trent, Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Science Lead for the Global Research into Energy and the Environment at NASA.
The ultimate? Why has this taken so long to explore?
Algae tests are not new – the United States Department of Energy looked into the feasibility of algae as a fuel source from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s. But the tests were then dropped as oil prices were low, and algae did not seem to be able to compete.
The agency responsible for privacy rights in Denmark questions Facebook:
The Danish Consumer Council has previously attacked Facebook for its policies, but the Data Protectioin Agency declined a request last year to investigate whether Facebook came under Danish legislation.
The agency has now, however, sent a list of questions to Facebook – among other questions asking what is necessary to have a family member who has died removed from the network, as well as what information Facebook shares with third parties.
The Czech government confirmed on Saturday that a computer file containing personal information about European Union leaders was mishandled during the April 5 EU-U.S. summit in Prague.
The statement from the government, which currently holds the EU presidency, was reacting to a report earlier this week by the Finnish news agency STT. It said the private information was found by a Finn on a public computer in a Czech hotel after the summit.
Ghip happens to know such precise details about his cats’ behavior because he has figured out how to make the world’s first photo-tweeting cat door. Penny and Gus both wear collars outfitted with thumb-nail-sized radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips. The chips are passively sensed, which means they don’t require a battery and don’t weigh down the collar. Whenever a cat goes near the door, a small RFID reader scans the tag and determines whether the cat is authorized to go in or out.
If the chip tells the reader that the cat is authorized, it not only activates the door opener; it simultaneously also activates a camera and a program on an attached laptop that sends the captured image to a separate Twitter account, where it is automatically posted on the cats’ microblog with a simple, cute caption that is automatically generated, such as “Gus is out to get rid of a hairball” or “Penny is in to shred the chair.”