So let's try this blog thing again- Stress Relief

Starting the 4th year of grad school, the pressure is mounting. My friends all have papers out and I feel like I'm so behind. Reminding myself that all projects are different is only a certain about of conciliation. My "to-do" and "to-read" list are endless, experiments have weird timing so I've been sleeping crazy hours some weeks, etc. All this adds up to mountains of stress.

Today, I talked to a professor in the medical science department about the fact that they have stress relief programs for medical students to teach them meditation, imagery, yoga and other forms of relaxation. Right now, my stress relief is baking cookies. Maybe those other methods of calming would be better for me, but then again my lab mates seem to enjoy cookies and that always cheers me up.

The latest in tasty cookies.

http://www.cookiemadness.net/2008/02/white-chocolate-chunk-lemon-cookies/

http://homesicktexan.blogspot.com/2009/09/moms-oatmeal-cookies.html

This Podcast is aweseome!

#1 party school - Penn State
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1330

Complaints and interviews with drunk college students, their neighbors, the police and the administration.

To be fair, they say this is representative of many big state schools, so its definitely not just Penn State.

Biodiesel

So what really is the best fatty acid blend for biodiesel?

Short chain means better cold weather performance, while longer chains have more bonds and therefore more energy.


Companies doing Microbial Synthesis of things I currently care about: Gevo, Amyris & LS9

LS9:Microbial hydrocarbon synthesis (Khosla?)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8220278.stm - VIDEO
http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20080293060 - PATENT

Amyris: Has a drop-in diesel fuel. No details. (Keasling)

Gevo: retrofitted a ethanol refinery to make biobutantol (Liao)

Krebs Cycle discoverer dies at 91

http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=54500

Biomass for electricity or liquid fuel

I found this article during my weekly read literature hour.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/324/5930/1019.pdf

It concludes that using biomass to produce electricity and utilizing that electricity to power a car gives more miles/quantity of biomass compared to making a biomass into a liquid fuel. With this result, should we be focusing on electric cars? Also, we already have the infrastructure to deal with electricity. Wouldn't this be a better solution than having to install infrastructure for ethanol (some of the other biofuels function in the existing gasoline infrastructure for the most part)? How is electric car technology to date?

End of Quarter!

Now that the quarter is over, I realize I need to devote more time to researching many of the topics that may come up during the IGERT project next year.

Here's a partial list of things I need to investigate more thoroughly:

1. WA State Policy about renewable electricity
2. NW cap and trade
3. Kettle Falls Power Plant
4. Colville Tribe
   

It is now clearly summer in Seattle. Hopefully everyone is getting a good deal of Vitamin D to compensate for its winter dearth.

So I can't actually keep a blog going...

but it doesn't matter since no one really reads this.

Right now, I'm doing the current mass of biofuel reading for CFR 521 and in combination with the amount of Biofuel LCAs that I read for LCA seminar, I feel like biofuels have overtaken my life.

What interesting is that while we've been talking about the promise of second-generation fuels, the plants financed in 2005 still haven't been built. http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/87/8717cover.html

Here are a few other biofuel related websites I've been browsing.

ZeaChem - Just got some major VC action. Check out their process --> it has a bit of everything.
Dynamotive - I was a bit skeptical on biochar at first (I blame the crummy SeaChar brochure), but it's actually starting to seem legit. Especially looking at the Amazonian soils as a case study.
IGCC in Sweden - demonstration is over, so its been "mothballed" but here's the summary of the projects 6 yrs.