Archives for May 2009

Scottish Power will throw the switch on what promises to be a new era of "clean" coal-fired power generation today. The company's Longannet power station on the Firth of Forth has been fitted with the UK's first carbon capture unit.

The prototype has been developed by the Norwegian firm Aker Clean Carbon. It's a "retro-fit" solution, bolted on to the power station's exhaust pipe, and uses a recyclable amine solution to scrub carbon out of the plume.

Weighing about 30 tonnes, and designed to fit inside a single cargo container, the test unit will initially siphon 1000 cubic meters of exhaust gases from the Longannet stack every hour.

That's less than 1% of Longannet's overall emissions, but Scottish Power has ambitious plans to scale up this demonstration into a fully functioning carbon capture plant by 2014. Eventually the company hope the system will capture 90% of the power station's carbon emissions - the equivalent of taking a million cars off the road. According to Scottish Power's chief executive Nick Horler, "it's about taking the concept of CCS out of the lab and making it a full-scale commercial reality".

With 50,000 coal-fired power stations belching out carbon dioxide around the world, the prize for the first company to develop a working carbon capture system is potentially enormous. But all this carbon has to go somewhere, and Scottish Power are hoping a carbon-free Longannet will help kick-start a new North Sea carbon storage industry.

After 40 years of oil and gas exploration the industry know-how is already there, and a recent study by Edinburgh University suggests the saline aquifers of the North Sea bed are vast, with the potential to hold all of Europe's carbon emissions well into the next century.

Listening to Tom Standage talking about his new book, An Edible History of Humanity this morning I was reminded of a paper written by the anthropologist and author Jared Diamond in the late 1980's.

Diamond described agriculture as, "the worst mistake in the history of the human race".

Farming was, he argued, a catastrophe from which we have never quite recovered. With agriculture came "the social and sexual inequality, disease and despotism, that curse our existence".

It's a revisionist interpretation of history that, at first glance, seems hard to square with reality. Walk into any supermarket today and the sheer abundance and variety on display takes your breath away. When it comes to food we're better off in almost every respect than the people of the middle ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen.

And it's not just food. Agriculture has freed us from the daily grind of subsistence, allowing art - and intellect - to flourish. Without agriculture there would have been no pyramids, no industrial revolution, no internet, and certainly no "One small step...". Life would still be nasty, brutish and short.

So what are Diamond, and now Standage, on about?

In the first place the view from the food court of your local supermarket is a somewhat idiosyncratic, western, perspective. For the average subsistence farmer - the vast majority of the world's population - life is still pretty nasty, brutish and short.

Secondly, while the evidence for the 'progressivist' point of view seems overwhelming, it's surprisingly hard to prove. Studies of the few remaining hunter gatherer societies show these people work less hard than their farming neighbours, and enjoy a much healthier and more varied diet.

When asked why he hadn't adopted agriculture, one Kalahari Bushman quoted by Jared Diamond replied, "why should I, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

The evidence from archaeology supports the idea that hunter gatherer societies were surprisingly healthy. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that average height at the end of the last ice age was around 5'9". With the adoption of agriculture the figure crashed, and by 3000 BC had reached a low of 5'3".

Similar comparative studies of tooth decay, and from the scars left on bones by diseases like tuberculosis, point to a similar conclusion.

So why did hunter gather societies adopt agriculture? In a sense of course the answer is obvious. As Jared Diamond concedes,

"Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly gazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?"

His point, now echoed by Tom Standage, is that farming is not without its down side.

One of the most important missions in the history of European spaceflight has blasted off from French Guiana. The Herschel and Planck space telescopes were launched from the Kourou spaceport on a single Ariane rocket at a little after two o'clock today.

At more than seven metres tall, and with a main mirror that's three and a half metres across, Herschel is the biggest telescope ever launched into space.

From a position some one and a half million kilometres above the earth it will investigate how stars and galaxies form and evolve. It's three main cameras are sensitive to light at infrared and sub-millimetre wavelengths, allowing it to peer through clouds of dust and gas to observe the birth processes of stars.

The Planck observatory will focus on the relic radiation of the Big Bang itself - the Cosmic Microwave Background.

To do that Planck's instruments need to operate at temperatures close to absolute zero, leading scientists working on the project to dub Planck "the coolest satellite ever launched into space".

The "two-for-one" nature of the launch hints at a cost-conscious approach by the European Space Agency. But at nearly two billion euros this is ESA's most expensive project to date, propelling the agency into the astronomical premier league alongside Nasa.

Hailing the launch ESA director general Jean-Jacques Dordain said: "This is the result of many years' hard work by thousands of scientists and engineers across Europe. The technology on board these satellites is unique, and the science these satellites will do is fantastic."

The first of this summer's big blockbuster movies opens across the UK this week. Like the Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons is based on a best selling novel by Dan Brown.

This time Harvard academic Robert Langdon must foil a dastardly plot to blow up the Vatican. The twist is that the "bomb" threatening the Catholic Church is made of anti-matter stolen from CERN - the European Centre for Nuclear Research and home of the Large Hadron Collider.

The film goes to great lengths to lend an air of scientific authenticity to the action: much of the opening sequence is filmed in the underground tunnels and cavernous experimental halls that house the world's biggest particle accelerator.

Sadly, that's where Angels & Demons parts company with scientific reality.

Look a little closer and you'll see most of the hardware featured in the film is actually from the ATLAS experiment - the biggest, and admittedly most visually impressive, of the LHC's four main detectors. Looking something like an immense jet engine, but with all its components and wiring laid bare, ATLAS will search for the origins of mass, dark matter and even microscopic black holes in the high energy particle collisions at CERN.

But not anti-matter, which will actually be created and studied in the much smaller LHC-b, or beauty, experiment.

There's a problem too with the amount of anti-matter generated in the film. It would take billions of years - perhaps longer than the universe has been in existence - for the particle collisions at CERN to generate enough anti-matter to make a bomb. The film also manages to confuse anti-matter with the God particle or Higgs boson, and to imply that anti-matter somehow triggered the big bang.

But does that really matter? After all, Angels & Demons is an action packed thriller not a drama-documentary. Inevitably it takes liberties with the science, but if you're willing to suspend your disbelief it's an engaging way to spend a rainy afternoon.

That was certainly the verdict at a screening of the film laid on for scientists from CERN in Geneva last week. Angels & Demons may not be Oscar material, but it will probably run X-Men close for top spot this summer.