Swiss researchers have successfully used laser pulses to create small clouds in the laboratory, a technology they say could possibly be used to create rain on demand.

After firing short pulses of infrared laser light into a chamber filled with water-saturated air at -24 degrees C, scientists observed linear clouds in the laser’s wake — similar to the jet contrails created by airplanes.

In addition, they found the volume of condensed water droplets inside the chamber increased by half. (more…)

In Africa and elsewhere, burgeoning population growth threatens to overwhelm already over-stretched food supply systems. But the next agricultural revolution needs to get local — and must start to see rising populations as potentially part of the solution.

I bring good news from Machakos, a rural district of Kenya, a couple of hours drive from Nairobi. Seventy years ago, British colonial scientists dismissed the treeless eroding hillsides of Machakos as “an appalling example” of environmental degradation that they blamed on the “multiplication” of the “natives.” The Akamba had exceeded the carrying capacity of their land and were “rapidly drifting to a state of hopeless and miserable poverty and their land to a parched desert of rocks, stones and sand.”

Since independence in 1963, the Akamba’s population has more than doubled. Meanwhile, farm output has risen tenfold. Yet there are also more trees, and soil erosion is much reduced. The Akamba still use simple farming techniques on their small family plots. But today they are producing so much food that when I visited, they were selling vegetables and milk in Nairobi, mangoes and oranges to the Middle East, avocados to France, and green beans to Britain.

What made the difference? People. (more…)

As surely as last year’s Paris fashions make their way west to New York, U.S. utilities are beginning to embrace European-style programs like feed-in tariffs and green power premiums.

State-level decoupling regulations are easing that transition to some extent. But many utilities are still reluctant to embrace the change fully, especially as prices for conventional energy have come back down and utilities are finding that available capacity in voluntary green power is going unsubscribed.

Utilities do not like the financial uncertainty posed by long-term contracting for renewable power to supply the programs if they are not going to be able to move the power. It inevitably puts the utility’s shareholder obligations at odds with its ratepayer obligations and results in one of two solutions: green premiums go up and make the company look bad on green; or, everyone on the system pays to cover the nut, and no one is happy. (more…)

As the climate crisis accelerates, farmers are placed in the ever more precarious position of growing food for an increasing population in the face of increasingly bizarre weather patterns. Weather patterns are shifting due to the increasing amount of energy trapped in our atmosphere by greenhouse gases.

And yet, farming offers the fastest way to slowthe  climate crisis. This is because farmers manage photosynthesis, the biological process within green plants that pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stores it in a stable, useful form: organic carbon. Organic carbon is the chemical basis of leaves, shoots, roots, fungi and all the other living things that make up healthy soils.

Good farmers can accelerate this process and pull huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the air into soil organic matter. Increased soil organic carbon can help us manage dry and wet years better by storing water. And the practices that build soil organic carbon require more diverse cropping systems, making farmers (and us) less reliant in any one crop. (more…)

The drive to extract and store CO2 from coal-fired power plants is gaining momentum, with the Obama administration backing the technology and the world’s first capture and sequestration project now operating in the U.S. Two questions loom: Will carbon capture and storage be affordable? And will it be safe?

On a placid bend of the Ohio River in West Virginia sit two coal-fired power plants. The Philip Sporn Plant boasts four boilers from the 1950s, surrounded by mountains of coal and a series of man-made lakes to contain the toxic residue of its coal-burning.

A faint haze emanates from its main smokestack, the only visible sign of the thousands of tons of acid-rain-forming sulfur dioxide, smog-forming nitrogen oxides, and climate-warming carbon dioxide it emits each day, a consequence of the plant’s complete lack of pollution-control technologies. The 1,100 megawatts of electricity it produces will never benefit from such controls, as they are too expensive to install on the multiple small boilers, according to the plant’s owner, American Electric Power.

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A nanorobot which defends a single cell against dangers such as the AIDS virus or H1N1 is the main character of a video game about molecular biology that is being developed by the Universidad Santo Tomas, in Chile.

Kokori, which means “collective game” in Rapanui (the language spoken in Easter Island), is one of six projects that won 2.3 million dollars in a contest about applying informative technology for educational purposes, organized by the National Commission of Scientific and Technological Research.

Of the six projects, Kokori, which uses information taught at the high school level biology, won $424,000.

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I am happy to announce a new information service that we added to our site: You can now submit green & clean technology articles, blog posts and press releases in the CleanTechies Community News.

This is a great way to share and discuss interesting news with the large network of CleanTechies around the world. You can also vote for your favorite articles, and search for news in different categories.

We will feature the most interesting & popular news in the CleanTechies Newsletter – sign up now to make sure you receive the next issue with the latest CleanTech updates, career advice, and exclusive offers only for subscribers!

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	Today, CleanTechies was awarded as “Best Blog of the Day” by the Blog of the Day Awards. The award comes only two months after CleanTechies was awarded 2nd place for “Best Business Blog” by the Weblog Awards.
“We are psyched to receive this award,” says Ian Thomson, CEO and Co-founder of CleanTechies. “It shows that CleanTechies is on the right way to becoming the leading career services forum providing insight, orientation, and opportunities for the CleanTech community.”

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Recently I had the opportunity to speak with Gwynne Rogers of the Natural Marketing Institute (NMI).  NMI is a market research and strategic consulting firm with expertise in health, wellness & sustainability.   Gwynne is the LOHAS Business Director at NMI.  She focuses on strategic analysis and planning for LOHAS related companies.  She holds a Masters in Environmental Management and an MBA from Duke University. She brings five years of specific experience in environmental marketing where she served various companies such as Pitney Bowes, Advanced Coal Technologies, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

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One of the more common green stories over the last month has focused on the question of whether the poor economic conditions are going to dampen the clean tech industry.  Other stories revolve around the new US administration’s policies.

There seem to be four main story lines:

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