The Difference Engine: No more addresses

REMEMBER the panic over the “millennium bug”, when computers everywhere were expected to go haywire on January 1st 2000 thanks to the way a lot of old software used just two digits to represent the year instead of four? Doomsters predicted all sorts of errors in calculations involving dates when the clocks rolled over from 99 to 00. In the event, the millennium dawned without incident. That may have been because of the draconian preparations undertaken beforehand. Or perhaps, as many suspected, the problem was grossly exaggerated in the first place. Certainly, the computer industry made a packet out of all the panic-buying of new hardware and software in the months leading up to the new millennium.

Well, something similar is about to happen in the months ahead. This time, the issue concerns the exhaustion of internet addresses—those four numbers ranging from 0 to 255 separated by dots that uniquely identify every device attached to the internet. According to Hurricane Electric, an internet backbone and services provider based in Fremont, California, the internet will run out of bulk IP addresses sometime next week—given the rate addresses are currently being gobbled up.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) will then have doled out all its so-called "slash-eight" blocks of addresses to the five regional internet registries around the world. In turn, the registries are expected to have allocated all their remaining addresses to local network operators by October at the latest. After that, any organisation applying for new addresses will be told, sorry, none left.

The issue is real and has been a long time in the making. The Economist first warned about it ten years ago (see "Upgrading the internet", March 22nd 2001). The problem concerns the address space of the existing version of the internet protocol (IPv4), which is only 32 bits wide. The total number of binary addresses possible with such an arrangement is therefore two raised to the power 32—or roughly 4.3 billion in decimal terms. Back in the 1980s, when the internet connected just a couple of dozen research institutes in America, that seemed like a huge number. Besides, the internet was thought at the time to be just a temporary network anyway.

But with the invention of the web in 1990 came an explosion in popular demand. It was soon clear that it was only a matter of time before the internet would exhaust its supply of addresses. Work on a replacement for IPv4 began in the early 1990s, with IPv6 finally being made available around 1998 (IPv5 was an experimental protocol for streaming audio and video that has since ceased to exist). By giving the new internet version an address space of 128 bits, the designers pretty well guaranteed that it would not run out of unique identifiers for decades, or even centuries, to come.

Two raised to the 128th power is an astronomical number. In decimal terms, it is roughly 340 billion billion billion billion—or, as Martin Levy of Hurricane Electric likes to say, “more than four quadrillion addresses for every star in the observable universe.”

That will come in handy when the "internet of things" becomes a reality (see “Chattering objects”, August 13th 2010). Already, some two billion people have access to the internet. Add all the televisions, phones, cars and household appliances that are currently being given internet access—plus, eventually, every book, pill case and item of inventory as well—and a world or two of addresses could easily be accounted for.

Apart from providing locators for every person and thing on the planet and beyond, IPv6's huge address space makes routing traffic over the internet a good deal easier. Above all, it eliminates the need for network address translation (NAT), a fudge used to extend the useful life of IPv4. NAT works by allocating a single address to, say, an organisation's gateway computer to the outside world. In turn, this public access computer allocates addresses to all the other devices on the organisation's internal network, allowing them all to share the one IPv4 address.

Dispensing with NAT improves the performance of networks and, in principle, makes them much easier to configure. It also goes some way towards re-establishing the overarching philosophy of “end-to-end connectivity” espoused by the internet's founding fathers. To allow the internet to evolve and meet the needs of unknown future applications, the designers wisely decided that all packets of data travelling over the internet should be treated equally, and delivered from a computer at one end to a computer at the other end without prejudice or interference. Over the years, things like NAT and firewalls—plus attempts to provide some form of "quality-of-service" preferences for speech and video—have eroded the internet's end-to-end principle considerably.
Though a vast improvement, IPv6 is not without its problems. The biggest is that it is simply not backwardly compatible with IPv4. To reduce the amount of processing the routing computers have to do as they direct packets of data over the internet, IPv6 was given a far simpler packet format. That speeds things up no end. Unfortunately, while the two internet versions can coexist on a single device, they have to function independently of one another as two separate networks. When a device on one needs to communicate with a device on the other, various relay services and tunnelling tricks have to be employed, with IPv6 packets getting wrapped inside IPv4 packets or vice versa.
By all accounts, the two separate internets will have to live side by side for the foreseeable future. That could mean putting up with interoperability hassles for decades—at least, in the United States. One reason is that network operators in America have invested heavily in NAT boxes and other address-saving technologies. Also, being the inventor and earliest user of the internet, America received the lion’s share of addresses before today’s rules were put in place. As a result, many large companies, universities and government agencies in the United States still have plenty of spare IPv4 addresses lying around unused. The pressure to upgrade has therefore been minimal.

That is not the case elsewhere. The biggest single demonstration of IPv6 to date was during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, when everything from live television and data feeds to security and traffic information was streamed over a vast IPv6 network. Being one of the last to embrace the internet, China has only one address for every four people. Hence the urgency in Beijing to adopt IPv6 as rapidly as possible. The same goes for Russia, South Korea and Japan. NTT, Japan’s largest telecoms firm, has been offering IPv6 services to the public since 2000.

The next showcase for the new internet technology is to be “World IPv6 Day” on June 8th. While doing all he can to help, Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet and today chief internet evangelist at Google, warns that the day could be marred by huge configuration difficulties. But the main purpose of the event is to air precisely such difficulties and get their fixes circulated.

And not before time, too. The American Registry for Internet Numbers, which allocates blocks of IP addresses to internet service providers and other network operators throughout North America, has suggested that all websites that face the public in its region be ready to support IPv6 by January 1st 2012. The aim, as The Economist has noted before, is to turn today's few islands of IPv6 computers in a sea of IPv4 into a world with a few remaining islands of IPv4 machines in a vast ocean of IPv6.

Top 20 Green Tech Ideas

Despite Setbacks, Moving Forward in Clean Tech

eSolar

When environmental history is written, 2010 could be seen a disaster for the clean technology industry. The year dawned just after the disappointment that was December's U.N. global warming summit in Copenhagen, where the nations of the world failed to produce a comprehensive treaty to cut carbon emissions — the sort of agreement that could have given business the long-term confidence to invest in clean tech. It didn't help that the overblown controversy known as "climategate" — which involved allegations of fraud by climate scientists — undermined trust in global warming science, letting skeptics back into the debate. Worst of all, the Senate failed even to vote on a bill that would have capped U.S. carbon emissions and produce a market designed to kick start clean tech. In America, at least, green tech seems to have gone backwards.

But that's a myopic view. In Europe, which already has a carbon market, investment in clean energy — including wind and solar — isn't going away. China has emerged as a major player in clean tech, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in renewable energy and energy efficiency. In doing so, it's positioning itself to lead the world in the industry of tomorrow. And even the U.S., for all its political problems, hasn't stood still: the Department of Energy, under Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, has begun directly supporting innovative clean tech companies and pumping more money into basic research and development. Most important, the U.S. — and especially Silicon Valley — is still home to what might be the world's most innovative entrepreneurs in clean tech. These folks are not short of smart ideas, as you'll see here.

Recycling e-Waste

Pascal Preti / Getty Images

High-tech may have a clean image — all smooth-edged iPhones and liquid crystal displays — but the elements that go into mobile phones, computers and TVs can be polluting to the environment and dangerous to human health if incorrectly disposed of. And that's exactly what happens in parts of the developing world, where the poor take apart your phone with little protection, exposing themselves to mercury, lead, cadmium and other dangerous metals so that they can get to the gold, copper and other valuable materials within. So-called e-waste is the fastest growing part of the solid waste stream, and some 20 to 50 million metric tons of it are thrown out every year.

But there are ways to recycle e-waste, reducing the need to mine more of the metals that go into high-tech items, and preventing the environmental consequences of poorly processed electronics. CloudBlue, based in New Jersey, helps tech companies take care of their e-waste, arranging for direct pickup and processing, ensuring that valuable metals can be reused and recycled for future electronics. For customers like banks that have to worry about sensitive data that might be encoded on old computers, CloudBlue can also process the waste onsite. With all this, the company can ensure that no e-waste will ever end up in a landfill — or worse, poisoning a child in Africa or China.

Algae Biofuel

Solazyme

It's a dirty secret: the biggest renewable energy business in the U.S. isn't solar or wind or electric cars. It's plain old corn ethanol. Thanks largely to generous government subsidies, the U.S. produced 10.6 billion gallons of ethanol in 2009. That was enough to displace the need for 364 million barrels of oil, but study after study has shown that high levels of corn ethanol production simply aren't sustainable. Corn that could go to feed the world instead feeds our cars — and not very efficiently. The growth of corn ethanol has more to do with political realities in the U.S. (think Iowa, home of both corn and the first Presidential caucus) than it does with environmental ones.

But that doesn't mean biofuels can't play a major role in a greener U.S. energy policy — they just have to be the right kind. One of the best options on the horizon is biofuel made from algae, which counters a lot of the problems with corn ethanol. (The right strains of algae secrete oils that can be used to make fuel.) Algae do not need farmland to grow: tanks will do the job just fine anywhere there is spare land and a decent amount of sunshine. Algae also grow much faster than traditional crops, and the micro-organisms may be able to use to use wastewater or even saline water during their development, rather than fresh water. Startups like Sapphire Energy and Algenol in California and Florida are passing the pilot phase and nearing commercial development; they just need a little government help.

Algae food

By Bryan Walsh Monday, Dec. 06, 2010

Solazyme

For something that looks like pond scum — actually, it pretty much is pond scum — algae are extremely useful. Just ask the San Francisco startup Solazyme. Like countless other companies, Solazyme is working to create algae biofuel for cars, trucks and planes. Unfortunately, that market has yet to materialize, and because fuel is such a low-margin business, companies like Solazyme will need to sell a lot of their product before they can begin making a profit. It's classic chicken-and-egg economics.

But Solazyme's chemists stumbled on another use for their algae: food. The company's living products can be used to replace the eggs, butter and oil in cakes, cookies and more — except that the algae flour has a lipid profile that is much closer to healthy olive oil. It might sound gross, but the results are excellent — snacks that taste like snacks, but lower in fat calories and higher in protein. It's a perfect combination — as long as you can convince consumers to eat pond scum.

Thin-film Solar

By Bryan Walsh Monday, Dec. 06, 2010

First Solar

Two factors will make solar power more competitive on the energy market. One is efficiency — the percentage of the sun's energy that a solar panel can convert into electricity. The other is price: how cheap are the panels to produce? Many solar panels in use today — the crystalline silicon arrays you'll see on rooftops — focus on efficiency while costing more.

But there's another way to make solar panels: thin-film. The technology uses much less silicon, which means that the average efficiency of those panels is less than arrays using crystalline silicon. But the very fact that thin-film panels use less silicon makes them much cheaper and faster to produce. That combination has helped thin-film companies like first Solar of Tempe, Arizona, and Nanosolar of San Jose emerge as early clean tech titans. Publicly traded First Solar is one of the most successful renewable energy firms in the world today. The future of solar looks thin.

Molten Salt Storage

Martin Hospach / fstop / Corbis

Renewable energy has many advantages, as environmentalists won't hesitate to tell you. There's no need to pay for fuel since the wind and the sun are free, and that saves utilities from the price spikes seen in coal, natural gas, oil and nuclear. But wind and solar face one major problem: intermittency. When the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, turbines and silicon panels aren't producing electricity, and there's no way to store the electricity they do produce during peak times if it's not being used. That's a serious obstacles since utilities, often by law, need to provide enough electricity to meet demand at all times.

But utility-scale solar companies are working on ways to store the energy they produce during the brightest days. One option: molten salt. It can be used in solar thermal, which employs powerful mirrors to focus the sun's heat to create steam, driving an electric turbine. The surplus heat produced during the day can be used to warm up massive amounts of salt, which can absorb significant amounts of heat. When the sun goes down — or when it's simply cloudy — that heat can be used to generate steam and run an electric turbine. It's not perfect, but it's the best battery that's been developed yet for utility-scale solar.

Solar Tower

eSolar

There are two ways to harness energy from the sun. One is through photovoltaic panels, which transform sunlight directly to electricity. But — news flash — the sunlight also produces heat, which can be concentrated using mirrors to produce steam, which then drives electric turbines. It's this second form — called solar thermal or concentrated solar power — that has the most potential for utility-scale power generation. In fact, there are already solar thermal plants operating in the deserts of Nevada and California, using low rows of curved mirrors to concentrate sunlight.

But Bill Gross at eSolar thinks that he can improve on that fairly basic technology. Instead of rows of mirrors, eSolar uses vertical mirrored towers of that perfectly concentrate sunlight on a ground target. Using sophisticated software that Gross helped write himself — he was an Internet entrepreneur before breaking into alternative power — the mirrors perfectly track the sun as it crosses the sky, maximizing the amount of electricity that can be produced. The result is a relatively compact but power utility-scale plant that gets the most out of that free source of energy called the sun.

Custom Biofuels

James Hardy / PhotoAlto / Getty Images

Before alternative energy, biotech was the next big thing in California's Silicon Valley, with PhD-stocked startups racing to decode the genome and create new and better drugs. But innovators are discovering that the two fields have a lot in common — especially when it comes to biofuels. First-generation biofuels are limited: corn ethanol packs less energy per gallon than petroleum, and new fuels like biodiesel often can't be used in car engines without expensive technical conversions. That's a hidden obstacle to wider adoption; there is a trillion-dollar infrastructure already in place around petroleum, and changing it won't be easy or cheap.

But what if you could adapt biofuels to use our current infrastructure, not the other way around? That's what a handful of biotech companies are doing right now. Startups like Amyris and LS9 are using the tools of biotechnology to produce new biofuels that are sustainable and ready for use in our cars and trucks right now. The companies create custom microbes in the lab that can produce biofuels to order — even "green crude" that has most of the benefits of petroleum without the drawbacks. The technology is still a long way from commercial scale, but it provides some of the best hopes for a biofuelled future.

Electric Cars

Fred Prouser / Reuters

It's an article of faith among many environmentalists: the future will be electric. But how long is it going to take? Electric cars have been around since the dawn of the automobile — in fact, the technology hasn't changed all that much since Henry Ford's own electric Model-Ts. But the electric car lost out to gasoline-powered ones for good reasons: gasoline carries a lot of power per gallon, while batteries never had the capacity to move cars very far. Even in the 1990s, with the introduction of improved electrics like GM's lamentedly discontinued EV1, battery-powered cars remained a fetish for those who value their carbon footprint over convenience.

Times really have changed, though — and 2010 could finally mark the tipping point for electric cars. GM's long-awaited Volt — not a pure electric but a plug-in hybrid — is finally set to go on sale at the end of this year. The Japanese car company Nissan is going one better with its all-electric Leaf — the one with the polar bear ads — and Ford and Toyota have electrics in the works as well. Smaller startups are experimenting with ultra-efficient electric cars, while the innovative company Better Place is installing networks of battery-charging stations in Israel for its own electric transportation system, with a subscription payment system modeled on the wireless industry. Electric cars still have a number of obstacles to overcome, and they won't make a huge dent in carbon emissions unless the grid itself is steadily cleaned up, but they are closing in on the mainstream.

Smart Meters

Silver Spring Networks

Our electrical devices may be 21st century, but the electrical grid we plug them into is strictly 20th. The grid is inefficient and prone to breakdowns — as anyone who remembers the great East Coast blackout of 2003 would know. Improving the grid is going to be a vital part of helping clean energy scale up: better transmission lines are needed to carry wind-generated electricity from the middle of the U.S. to the more heavily populated coasts, for example, while a more flexible grid can better handle the intermittency of renewable power sources.

But the first installment on a smarter gird will be smarter meters. Right now the electric meter in your home tells you — and the electric company — only the most basic information. The majority of utilities won't even know that homes have lost power in a blackout until enough annoyed customers call them. But smart meters connected to a network can relay that sort of information instantly, giving utilities and customers alike a real-time picture of how much power is being used at any given moment. And as new appliances are networked into smart meters, we'll be able to use them much more efficiently — programming our washing machines to run only during times of low power demand, say. By smoothing out the electricity demand curves, smart meters can help utilities get more out of the power plants they already have — and avoid building more.

Lithium-ion Batteries

CJ Benninger for TIME

It's not just electricity generation that will make a difference in the future, it's also energy storage. And that's especially true for mobile devices — whether that means iPhones or especially, electric cars. Low-capacity batteries have held back electric cars for decades, but that's beginning to change thanks to a new(ish) technology. The electronics of the 1990s — and most hybrid cars today — used nickel-ion batteries for power. They were an upgrade over the lead batteries used in the past, but they weren't strong enough to power electric cars for long distances.

Lithium-ion batteries, however, are a potential game-changer. If you use a laptop or a mobile phone, chances are you already own a lithium-ion battery. (Without them, your iPhone wouldn't even have the less-than-great operating life it does today.) Lithium-ion batteries can pack more power in a smaller case, so the battery for GM's plug-in hybrid Volt is tiny compared to the gigantic power pack that had been used on its EV1. A smaller battery is also lighter, which reduces the weight of the electric car and the power needed to drive it. The price on lithium-ion batteries still needs to come down — a battery for a new electric car can cost more than $10,000. But battery-making companies like A123 Systems in Massachusetts are already emerging as the future titans of a clean energy economy.

Fuel Cells

Bloom Energy

Sometimes high tech can start out low tech. Fuel cells are an old and basic technology; they generate electricity within a cell through the reaction of a fuel and an oxidant. Essentially they're a kind of chemical battery, and your average high school chemistry class can make one. Unlike batteries, however, they can't store electricity; you need an outside fuel source that has to be replenished over time. But their simplicity has also made them useful for certain purposes; NASA has long used hydrogen fuel cells to power its spacecraft.

Inventors have tried to use hydrogen fuel cells as a cleaner way to create electricity commercially. Honda and other car companies have made hydrogen fuel cell-powered cars, for example, but they've always been limited by the cost. That's beginning to change, however, thanks to a California startup called Bloom Energy. The company exploded onto the public scene earlier this year with the release of its Bloom Box, a system that uses fuel cell technology to provide off-the-grid power. The Bloom Boxes — about half the size of a shipping container — use solid oxide fuel cells, which generate electricity by oxidizing natural gas. The technology has existed for awhile, but Bloom figured out how to carry out the reaction at a relatively low temperature, making the Bloom Boxes safe to use in corporate offices — which is exactly where they're being put to work now, by companies like Google and eBay that can use the lower carbon power as an off-the-grid back up to conventional grid electricity and as a way to reduce their own carbon footprint.

Rooftop Wind Power

Honeywell

If you want to provide off-the-grid power for your own home, there's only been one solution: solar panels. Wind power is usually deployed on a utility-scale, in vast farms of mighty turbines that feed directly into the grid. That's a scale that helps explains why more than 10,000 MW of wind power were installed in the U.S. in 2009. Solar has always been the choice for homeowners who want to stop paying electricity bills and start generating their own juice.

But if wind can do big, it can also do small — and it does rooftops as well. The startup Windtronics is developing mini-wind turbines that can be installed on any flat root, either alone or in larger arrays. Each turbine measures about 6 ft. in diameter and looks like a large, circular window fan, but it can generate an average of 1,500 KW/h a year, with more or less depending on wind strength. And unlike utility-scale turbines, the Windtronic turbine contains no rotating gearbox to generate electricity, and is thus much quieter. In an ordinary wind turbine, the blades moves the gears, the gears turn a generator, and the generator creates electricity. With a Windtronics model, the blades are equipped with magnets at the tips and are enclosed in a wheel that contains coiled copper, so the entire turbine is an electric generator. That makes the Windtronics turbine silent — something your neighbors will appreciate.

Tidal Power

First Solar

Tides are the winds of the oceans, generating a tremendous amount of kinetic energy that can be tapped with the right kind of technology. In fact, tides might be better than wind, since they're much more predictable. And while the best wind resources tend to be located far from major population centers, most of the big cities around the world are located right next to the water. The problem has always been that building turbines and other infrastructure is significantly more expensive underwater than on land, since salts can erode equipment and maintenance is a challenge.

That's still the case, but tidal power is slowly beginning to gain acceptance. The technology works the same way a wind turbine does: the steady movement in and out of the tides turns an underwater turbine, which generates electricity. And as with wind, there are some parts of the world that are particularly rich in tidal potential, like the Bay of Fundy in Canada, home to some of the most intense tides on the planet. New York City's tides are a lot calmer, but the city does have potential for tidal power, and companies like Verdant are tapping it.

Green IT

sot / Getty Images

Computers seem so clean, don't they, just sitting there and humming, without any noxious emissions? But of course computers need power, and right now most of our power comes from fossil fuels. Computers and IT are now a small but rapidly growing source of carbon — about 2% of global emissions, a figure that could easily double within a decade.

That's where green IT comes in. Whether it's more energy-efficient laptops and server farms, or software that automatically powers down our desktops when they're not being used, there are ways to curb the IT sector's energy hunger ways without losing performance. Software like Granola, for example, can run in the background of your operating system and tune up your computer's own energy-saving hardware, ensuring you're not wasting volts unnecessarily. There's no reason you can't get all the computing power you need without wasting power.

Green Concrete

Nick Norman / National Geographic RF / Getty Images

Making cement for concrete is energy-intensive. Extremely energy-intensive. Here's how it works: you heat pulverized limestone clay — which is heavy in carbon — along with sand to 1,450°C (2,600°F), usually with a fossil fuel like coal or natural gas. Unsurprisingly, that process generates a lot of carbon dioxide: manufacturing one metric ton of cement releases 650 to 920 kilograms of CO2. The nearly 3 billion metric tons of cement that were produced worldwide last year accounted for about 5% of all CO2 emissions.

The good news is that there are enormous carbon savings that could be realized by making cement production more energy efficient. For example, the company Hycrete had reformulated the products used to waterproof concrete in a way that allows for recycling in the future, reducing the lifetime energy footprint of a building. The London-based startup Novacem is going further, working on a new cement production method that would actually absorb more CO2 than it releases, by substituting cabon-rich limestone with magnesium silicates that contain no stored carbon. As the cement hardens, CO2 in the air actually reacts to make solid carbonates that strengthen the cement while holding onto the gas. Novacem can't yet use its process on a commercial scale, but if it can, concrete could become carbon negative.

Green Building Materials

James Hardy / PhotoAlto / Getty Images

Want your new building to stand out? Make it green. Green architecture has gone from a niche interest to a major design industry. Massive skyscrapers like the new Bank of America headquarters in midtown Manhattan advertise their energy efficiency, particularly their score on the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) scale. What MPG is for cars, LEED is for buildings. Sustainability has even become a point of competition among mega-mansion owners, with multi-millionaires in California jostling to build the greenest house in America.

Much of green architecture comes from design — making use of natural light and other features to cut down on energy waste; but smarter building materials can make a difference as well. Companies like Serious Materials produce highly efficient windows, insulation and other building features that reduce the amount of heat lost to the outside. Built right, "passive houses" can even be so energy efficient that they require no outside heat at all, bringing energy bills close to zero.

Modular Nuclear Power

By Bryan Walsh Monday, Dec. 06, 2010

The Babcock & Wilcox Company

Nukes have long been the third rail to the environmental movement; Greenpeace, after all, got its start as an anti-nuke organization. But while radioactive waste and the risk of major accidents still leave many greens wary of nuclear power, there's no ignoring the fact that nuclear is the only utility-scale, non-intermittent electricity source that doesn't emit carbon. If you replaced all of the U.S.'s nuclear plants — which supply about a fifth of the the nation's electricity — with coal plants, carbon emissions would skyrocket.

But there's still a reluctance to build nuclear plants — no new one has been constructed in the U.S. in decades — and it goes beyond environmental concerns. Nuclear power plants are incredibly expensive investments, and right now few utilities would take on the financial risk of building one, or get banks to lend them the necessary capital, even with additional government aid. But what if you could shrink the size of a nuclear plant? That's what companies like NuScale Power and Babcock & Wilcox are trying to do. By building a modular plant that might be a quarter the size of a the current multi-gigawatt operations, it's possible to reduce the capital expenditures needed to start construction and cut the risk that would be associated with an accident. We may at last be approaching a time that nuclear goes nimble.

Artificial Photosynthesis

Joule Unlimited

As smart as human beings can be, nature almost always does it better — possibly because nature has had hundreds of millions of years to get it right. Take photosynthesis for example. Plants with green leaves are able to capture the sun's energy and turn it into useful chemical fuel in a process that is much, much more efficient than our best photovoltaic solar panels.

That's why there are a number of scientists working on creating artificial photosynthesis; it was even a major plot point in Solar, the English writer Ian McEwan's global warming-themed novel. Daniel Nocera, an energy expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is pushing a form of artificial photosynthesis that would create electricity that would then be harnessed to produce hydrogen for use in fuel cells. That's only one way to harness photosynthesis, but already startups like Joule Biotechnologies are looking for ways to take it commercial. The future has to be solar-powered; the question will be how best to harness that free source of energy. The trees might have the best idea.

Waste to Energy

By Bryan Walsh Monday, Dec. 06, 2010

Stephen Wilkes / The Image Bank / Getty Images

It's the perfect form of recycling: taking our trash and using it to create electricity. Given the amount of garbage the average American puts on the curb every pickup day, that could add up to a whole lot of power. One simple way is to burn trash, and use the heat to generate steam that can run an electric turbine. But that method has significant drawbacks; not all garbage burns, of course, and the waste that does will often produce heavy emissions, including dangerous and sometimes carcinogenic dioxins. So right now most of our non-recyclable waste — and a lot of waste that is recyclable — ends up buried beneath the ground.

But there are companies working on smarter ways to recycle our trash. Costaka has pioneered technology that can turn biomass waste such as grass or woodchips into gas and eventually into ethanol. Their process uses less water and has a smaller carbon footprint than traditional ethanol. The Canadian company Enerkem has a similar process, but the firm has gone further, able to build standardized, easy-to-install plants that allow any municipality to begin turning garbage into cleaner biofuel.

Biochar

By Bryan Walsh Monday, Dec. 06, 2010

Biochar Engineering Corp

Given the scale of the climate challenge, everyone wants to find a silver bullet, a way to cut carbon emissions quickly and cheaply. Until someone perfects cold fusion, however, a cleaner economy will require a portfolio of new and innovative technologies, each playing its part. But that doesn't mean there aren't shortcuts on the road to zero carbon. Here's a deceptively simple one: biochar.

Plants absorb carbon dioxide as long as they're alive, but once they're cut down or burned, that carbon is released back into the atmosphere. Keeping trees standing — especially in tropical areas — is one way to save that carbon. But if plants are cut down, perhaps for agriculture, and you burn the residue in a controlled, low-oxygen atmosphere — a simple process called pyrolysis — you can create charcoal, a stable and solid form of carbon. If you then mix the biochar with certain soils, you can also reduce the amount of methane and nitrous oxide, both of them greenhouse gases, that the soil would naturally release. The result is a two-for-one carbon cutting special, and the potential is tremendous. A recent study in Nature Geoscience found that biochar could offset 12% of global carbon emissions. The challenge is that biochar has relatively little value on its own, so there's not much business case for making the product right now. That's one more reason a carbon price would be so useful.

Some of Apple's other best-known products

Image Courtesy: AP

Apple's iPad tablet computer which hit the US market on April 03, 2010 marks the latest iconic product from the Cupertino, California-based company.

Macintosh computers

Image Courtesy: Apple.com

The first Macintosh computer was launched in 1984 and the line has grown to include iMac all-in-one desktop machines as well as stylishly sophisticated MacBook laptops.

The iPod

Introduced in 2001, the hip personal music player revolutionized portable digital entertainment, culminating with its touchscreen iPod Touch MP3 player.

The iTunes Store

Launched as the iTunes Music Store in 2003, Apple's online shop sells music, movies, and television shows for computers and its mobile devices.

The iPhone

Apple introduced its first iPhone in 2007, combining iPod features and Internet connectivity in a touchscreen smartphone that swiftly became the mobile device of choice.

The App Store

Apple began letting outside developers customize applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch in 2008, opening an online App Store now stocked with more than 150,000 fun, functional and hip mini-programs.

Can Microsoft Give Apple A Run For The Money In Touch Computing?

crosoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off the company’s touch-screen based “Surface” computer in May 2007, just a month before the launch of the iPhone. But since then, Apple has dominated the touch revolution so thoroughly that it might as well have copyrighted it (or patented it—but that’s another story).

That’s certainly the case when it comes to the critical question of application support. So far, there are well over 10,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod touch that use Apple’s multi-touch technology. According to CNET’s Dawn Kawamoto, just 120 companies have created apps for the Surface.

No doubt, this isn’t a totally fair comparison, given that the iPhone is a mass market mobile device, while the Surface is a $12,500, 30-inch table-top style device that’s available only for commercial purposes. According to Microsoft, it’s available only “in the areas of financial services, retail, hospitality, health care and automotive.”

Nonetheless, Microsoft is keeping at it. It just expanded distribution to twelve countries. And real estate giant Coldwell Banker just introduced a new app for the platform. Here it is.

And going forward, Microsoft is pushing touch as one of the marquee new capabilities in Windows 7, the next big release of its flagship operating system.

Clearly, both companies have the capability to bring touch to the large form factor device—the laptop PC, the desktop PC, even the TV. They have very different advantages, as usual. Microsoft has scale, a massive distribution network of retailers and other partners, and a head-start. But Apple brings consumer marketing and product panache, great interface design, and pure momentum. Indeed, a major reason Apple lost the PC wars for all those years was lack of developer support. I don’t think that will happen this time around.

The journey of the internet as it turns 40

1969

On September 2, two computers at University of California, Los Angeles, exchange meaningless data in first test of Arpanet, an experimental military network. 1972 Ray Tomlinson brings email to the network, choosing @ as a way to specify email addresses belonging to other systems. 1973 Arpanet gets first international nodes, in England and Norway. 1974 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn develop communications technique called TCP, allowing multiple networks to understand one another, creating a true internet. 1983 Domain name system is proposed. Creation of suffixes such as '.com' , '.gov' and '.edu' comes a year later. 1988 One of the first internet worms, Morris, cripples thousands of computers. 1990 Tim Berners- Lee creates the World Wide Web while developing ways to control computers remotely. 1993 Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois create Mosaic, the first web browser to combine graphics and text on a single page. 1994 Andreessen and others on the Mosaic team form a company to develop the first commercial web browser, Netscape. Two immigration lawyers introduce the world to spam, advertising their green card lottery services. 1998 Google forms out of a project that began in Stanford dorm rooms. US government delegates oversight of domain name policies to Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. 1999 Napster popularizes music file-sharing and spawns successors that have permanently changed the recording industry. 2000 The dot-com boom of the 1990s becomes a bust as technology companies slide. 2004 Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook at Harvard University. 2005 Launch of YouTube video-sharing site. 2007 Apple releases iPhone, introducing millions more to wireless internet access. 19

Top 10 nations using internet

China

Population using Internet: 298 million (22.4%)  (Figures in bracket denote percentage of nations' population who use internet) USA Population using Internet: 227 million (74.7%)  (Figures in bracket denote percentage of nations' population who use internet) JAPAN Population using Internet: 94 million (73.8%)  INDIA Population using Internet: 81 million (7.1%)  BRAZIL Population using Internet: 68 million (34.3%)  Germany Population using Internet: 55 million (67%)  UK Population using Internet: 48 million (72%)  FRANCE Population using Internet: 41 million (66%)  Russia Population using Internet: 38 million (27%)  S Korea Population using Internet: 37 million (76%)