The plant, which will have the capacity to process about 10 tons of biomass a day—enough for about 800 gallons (3,000 liters) of fuel per day, will be built by Mercurius Biofuels of Ferndale, Washington, with the help of a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy of up to $4.3 million.

Cellulosic biomass—corn stalks and other matter like wood chips and grass—are abundant and require less energy and fertilizer to produce than sugar or corn grain, the main sources of biofuel now. Because of this, the production of cellulosic biomass is cheaper and results in less carbon dioxide emissions.

But so far it’s proved difficult to make fuel economically from these sources (see “Cellulosic Ethanol Inches Forward”). One big problem has been the cost of transporting raw biomass. A solution is to build small biorefineries that are close to the needed feedstocks, but smaller facilities tend to be more expensive per liter of fuel produced.

In Mercurius’s new process, biomass can be converted into a liquid intermediate chemical at small plants located close to sources. That liquid takes up much less volume than the original biomass, making it more economical to ship to a large centralized facility to be converted to fuel.

Mercurius uses acids to break down cellulose and make a chemical called chloromethylfurfural; the process is based on an approach developed by Mark Mascal, a professor of chemistry at the University of California at Davis.

Converting cellulose to this chemical makes more efficient use of the carbon in cellulose than one of the most common approaches to making fuel from cellulose: converting cellulose into sugar and fermenting it to make ethanol. “Fermentation blows out one-third of the carbon as carbon dioxide,” Mascal says. “[Our process] captures all of the available carbon in biomass.”

The chloromethylfurfural, in turn, can be converted into diesel or jet fuel with industrial processes similar to those used in the chemicals industry and at oil refineries. “We have processes that are a lot like petroleum refining processes, so it’s scalable and potentially faster to bring to market,” says CEO Karl Seck.

Using acids can be expensive, so one key to the process is the fact that it will be easy to recycle the acids used. Unlike sugar, the chloromethylfurfural isn’t soluble in water, so it is easy to separate it from the acid so the acid can be used again, Seck says (see “Reinventing Cellulosic Ethanol Production”). He says the process will also be cheaper than using enzymes to break down cellulose, a common approach being developed now.

Other companies and academic groups are developing processes for making biofuels from cellulose. Many of these turn biomass into gases before converting those gases into fuels. In contrast, Mercurius’s approach makes liquids that are cheaper to handle, requiring smaller and cheaper equipment.

The new technology is at an early stage. Each part of the process has been demonstrated, including the final steps of producing diesel and jet fuel that meet specifications for use in vehicles. But everything has only been done at a small scale, and the entire process hasn’t yet been linked together. Some other alternatives are further along.

Kior, for example, uses a catalytic process to break up cellulose to make a sort of crude oil that, as with Mercurius’s technology, can be processed into diesel and other fuels (see “Kior ‘Biocrude’ Plant a Step Toward Advanced Biofuels”).

According to the report, solar power capacity increased by 42 percent, and wind increased 19 percent during 2012. In comparison, coal only grew by 6 percent over the last two years. But because the total installed capacity of coal power was already huge, the amount of coal capacity added was much larger than that of solar and wind power. Even the increase in natural gas consumption hasn’t decreased the use of coal worldwide (see “Coal Demand Falls in the U.S., Rises Everywhere Else”).

Renewable energy can’t keep up with coal, let alone decrease its use. From 2001 to 2010, the amount of electricity generated with coal increased by 2,700 terawatt hours. Over the same period, electricity from non-fossil sources—including wind, solar, biomass, hydropower, and nuclear—increased by less than half that amount: or 1,300 terawatt hours.

Worldwide, more coal power is being installed because it’s inexpensive, reliable, and easy to incorporate into the grid. Before countries decide to stop building new coal plants, wind and solar and other low-carbon alternatives need to get cheaper, says Matthew Stepp, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

“In 2011, the last year data has been published, China built as many coal plants as there are in Texas and Ohio combined, even as it led the world in wind deployment,” says Stepp. “Even China, with its seemingly endless government budgets is still implementing fossil fuels because it’s cheap and high-performing.”

 “The situation is actually worse than the IEA portrays,” adds David Victor, co-director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of California at San Diego. Data from the agency shows that the world actually emits more carbon per unit of energy than it did a decade ago because of the growth in coal, he says.

The lack of progress on developing and implementing technology for capturing carbon dioxide from power plants is also noteworthy, Victor says. “This is a good case study because a decade ago there were high hopes for [carbon capture and sequestration (CCS)], but in the last decade basically nowhere on the planet has there emerged a viable business model for electric power CCS,” he says.

The IEA report says that while funding should be tripled to provide the kind of technology needed to replace fossil fuels, the actual share of spending on energy R&D is going down. It also calls for a reduction in subsidies for fossil fuels, which at $523 billion are six times higher than subsidies for renewable energy.

The results demonstrate that the nanoparticles could be used to neutralize toxins produced by many bacteria, including some that are antibiotic-resistant, and could counteract the toxicity of venom from a snake or scorpion attack, says Liangfang Zhang, a professor of nanoengineering at the University of California, San Diego. Zhang led the research.

The “nanosponges” work by targeting so-called pore-forming toxins, which kill cells by poking holes in them. One of the most common classes of protein toxins in nature, pore-forming toxins are secreted by many types of bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus, of which antibiotic-resistant strains, called MRSA, are endemic in hospitals worldwide and cause tens of thousands of deaths annually. They are also present in many types of animal venom.

There are a range of existing therapies designed to target the molecular structure of pore-forming toxins and disable their cell-killing functions. But they must be customized for different diseases and conditions, and there are over 80 families of these harmful proteins, each with a different structure. Using the new nanosponge therapy, says Zhang, “we can neutralize every single one, regardless of their molecular structure.”

In animal tests, the researchers showed that the new therapy greatly increased the survival rate of mice given a lethal dose of one of the most potent pore-forming toxins. Liver biopsies several days following the injection revealed no damage, indicating that the nanosponges, along with the sequestered toxins, were safely digested after accumulating in the liver.

If the drug can achieve regulatory approval, says Zhang, the major application would be the treatment of bacterial infections, especially those involving antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Neutralizing bacterially produced toxins not only protects the body, but can also weaken the bacteria against the immune system, since the bacteria can no longer rely on the toxins for protection, says Zhang. This is one of the ideas behind a relatively new approach to treating antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, called anti-virulence therapy.

Zhang says his group hopes to pursue clinical trials of the nanosponge therapy soon, and he’s optimistic about its prospects. The polymer that makes up its core is already FDA-approved, and the red blood cell membrane is safe since it is taken from the body, he says. Compared to other types of drugs, says Zhang, “I envision much less hurdles for clinical trials and approval.”

The two men, now identified as Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, brothers originally from Chechnya, were involved in a dramatic shootout with police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Thursday night. The pair robbed a 7/11 and killed an MIT police officer before hijacking a car and engaging police in pitched battles in the suburb of Watertown. The older of the two men, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed during a shootout with police while his younger brother, Dzhokhar, remains on the run as of Friday morning.

Experts say the FBI could have used images from the scene of Monday’s bombing—together with facial recognition software—to search through identity databases. The approach is likely to become more common in the future as new technology makes using facial recognition on surveillance and bystander imagery more reliable.

Deploying facial recognition software in the Boston investigation isn’t straightforward because the images available are very different from the evenly lit, frontal, passport-style photos stored in law enforcement databases. Such mug shots can be matched with about 99 percent accuracy, says Anil Jain, a professor at Michigan State expert who works on facial recognition, a figure that falls to about 50 percent for images of good quality but with added complications such as a person wearing a hat or glasses.

Attempting facial recognition on images like those released by the FBI Thursday is out of the question, Jain says. However, there may be other images and videos available that contain a better view that could be high quality enough, he says. “You could search all the other images based on clothing,” he says, “[and then] you could locate the same person and collect multiple images.”

Such a search could be done manually, but the FBI also likely has access to software that could speed the process by matching images and video footage that show the same scene or area, says Brian Martin, director of biometric research at MorphoTrust, a company that provides facial recognition technology to the FBI and the U.S. Department of Defense.

An image found amongst the many provided by witnesses and surveillance cameras wouldn’t have to be a perfect mug shot, either, says Martin. “There are numerous techniques to clean up an image,” he says. “You could improve the resolution, correct shadows, or rotate the pose of the face.”

Facial recognition algorithms struggle once a person’s face is turned by more than about 20 degrees, says Martin, but software from his company can correct turns of up to 45 degrees. It does this using built-in knowledge of facial geometry and by filling in the hidden side of a face by copying from the visible side.

Still, even if the FBI is able to find a photo to submit to its facial recognition search system, it won’t return just a single name, even if the person is on file. “With this type of situation you’re trying to generate leads,” says Martin, and agents would expect to manually screen a list of tens or hundreds of possible matches.

The FBI and other law enforcement and security agencies will see a growing opportunity to use facial recognition, as the volume and quality of surveillance camera and bystander imagery from cell phones grows. That trend is encouraging, and sometimes directly funding, companies like MorphoTrust and academics like Jain to work on technologies that could see facial recognition used routinely in criminal investigations both major and minor.

Martin’s team at MorphoTrust is working on making software better able to handle the kind of images that appear in surveillance and bystander data. “In a case like this you don’t typically get a good frontal view that’s well-lit,” says Martin. “We’re trying to push the boundaries so you can compensate for things like a face more than 45 degrees off to the side.”

With funding from the FBI, Jain at Michigan State is working on software for matching faces from low quality surveillance video against existing image databases. Another project is developing a system that can search a database of faces for a match with a sketch drawn by a forensic artist or a partial or outdated photo.

Other researchers are testing more fundamental rethinks of facial recognition algorithms. Marios Savvides, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon and director of its Cylab Biometrics Center, has developed technology that can create an accurate high-resolution image of a face from a poor resolution one, and which can correct for faces turned partly away from the camera.

Savvide’s software matches faces turned to the side by working out what the faces on file would look like when turned by the same angle, and also by tracking features that are still visible. That avoids having to assume the hidden side of a face matches the visible one, as with in MorphoTrust’s technology, says Saviddes.

“Many cases today, like in Boston and other crimes, law enforcement have low-resolution, off-angle images they can’t do anything with,” says Saviddes, “but we can change that.”

In collaboration with Roozbeh Jafari, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas, Dallas, Samsung researchers are testing how people can use their thoughts to launch an application, select a contact, select a song from a playlist, or power up or down a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. While Samsung has no immediate plans to offer a brain-controlled phone, the early-stage research, which involves a cap studded with EEG-monitoring electrodes, shows how a brain-computer interface could help people with mobility issues complete tasks that would otherwise be impossible.

Brain-computer interfaces that monitor brainwaves through EEG have already made their way to the market. NeuroSky’s headset uses EEG readings as well as electromyography to pick up signals about a person’s level of concentration to control toys and games (see “Next-Generation Toys Read Brain Waves, May Help Kids Focus”). Emotiv Systems sells a headset that reads EEG and facial expression to enhance the experience of gaming (see “Mind-Reading Game Controller”).

To use EEG-detected brain signals to control a smartphone, the Samsung and UT Dallas researchers monitored well-known brain activity patterns that occur when people are shown repetitive visual patterns. In their demonstration, the researchers found that people could launch an application and make selections within it by concentrating on an icon that was blinking at a distinctive frequency.

Robert Jacob, a human-computer interaction researcher at Tufts University, says the project fits into a broader effort by researchers to find more ways for communicating with small devices like smartphones. “This is one of the ways to expand the type of input you can have and still stick the phone in the pocket,” he says.

Finding new ways to interact with mobile devices has driven the project, says Insoo Kim, Samsung’s lead researcher. “Several years ago, a small keypad was the only input modality to control the phone, but nowadays the user can use voice, touch, gesture, and eye movement to control and interact with mobile devices,” says Kim. “Adding more input modalities will provide us with more convenient and richer ways of interacting with mobile devices.”

Still, it will take considerable research for a brain-computer interface to become a new way of interacting with smartphones, says Kim. The initial focus for the team was to develop signal processing methods that could extract the right information to control a device from weak and noisy EEG signals, and to get those methods to work on a mobile device.

Jafari’s research is addressing another challenge—developing more convenient EEG sensors. Classic EEG systems have gel or wet contact electrodes, which means a bit of liquid material has to come between a person’s scalp and the sensor. “Depending on how many electrodes you have, this can take up to 45 minutes to set up, and the system is uncomfortable,” says Jafari. His sensors, however, do not require a liquid bridge and take about 10 seconds to set up, he says. But they still require the user to wear a cap covered with wires.

The concept of a dry EEG is not new, and it can carry the drawback of lower signal quality, but Jafari says his group is improving the system’s processing of brain signals. Ultimately, if reliable EEG contacts were convenient to use and slimmed down, a brain-controlled device could look like “a cap that people wear all day long,” says Jafari.

Kim says the speed with which a user of the EEG-control system can control the tablet depends on the user. In the team’s limited experiments, users could, on average, make a selection once every five seconds with an accuracy ranging from 80 to 95 percent.

“It is nearly impossible to accurately predict what the future might bring,” says Kim, “but given the broad support for initiatives such as the U.S. BRAIN initiative, improvements in man-machine interfaces seem inevitable” (see “Interview with BRAIN Project Pioneer: Miyoung Chun”).

The advance is the result of a 10-year odyssey in synthetic biology, the wholesale engineering of an organism’s genetic and metabolic system for practical purposes (see “Biology’s Master Programmers”). Amyris, the biotech startup that engineered the yeast strain, is also developing microbes to produce fragrances and other high-value chemicals.

“This is the first synthetic biology project that has been scaled up to industrial manufacturing and will have a real impact in the world,” says Jack Newman, chief scientific officer at Amyris. “There should never been a shortage of artemisinin ever again.”

Amyris had already engineered yeast capable of producing artemisinic acid, the precursor to the drug (see “Cheaper Malaria Drugs”). But the most recent advance, published today in Nature, dramatically improved the yield from 1.6 grams per liter to 25 grams per liter.

The improvement primarily comes from the discovery of three key enzymes in sweet wormwood, the plant that naturally produces artemisinin, which researchers then introduced to yeast.

Artemisinin is the primary ingredient in artemisinin combination therapies, the World Health Organization’s preferred malaria treatment. But because the drug is primarily derived from plants, its costs can vary from $350 to $1200 per kilogram of the active ingredient.

“The botanical supply is inconsistent for various reasons, including weather and incentives for farmers,” says Ponni Subbiah, global program leader for drug development at OneWorld Health, a nonprofit drug development organization that funded the research through a grant from the Gates Foundation.

The synthetic process can run year round and takes about three months, compared to 15 months for plant-based methods. “Our aim is to stabilize the supply independent of the plant supply,” says Chris Paddon, who leads the artemisinin project at Amyris.

OneWorldHealth has licensed the technology to Sanofi, which has already produced nearly 40 tons of the artemisinic acid. (The acid is then chemically converted into artemisinin.) Sanofi aims to produce 60 tons of the material next year —approximately 120 million courses of treatment — and has pledged to sell it without profit.

Some are concerned that introducing the synthetic version to the market too quickly might actually be disruptive, discouraging plant-based production. However, at a malaria conference in Nairobi in January, Sanofi said it will introduce its product at the lower end of the market range, with the goal of smoothing out price fluctuations rather than elbowing out other producers. Sixty tons of the drug would meet about a third of the world’s supply, says Subbiah.

Malaria sickens millions of people each year, killing at least 650,000 annually, mostly children.

The results demonstrate that the nanoparticles could be used to neutralize toxins produced by many bacteria, including some that are antibiotic-resistant, and could counteract the toxicity of venom from a snake or scorpion attack, says Liangfang Zhang, a professor of nanoengineering at the University of California, San Diego. Zhang led the research.

The “nanosponges” work by targeting so-called pore-forming toxins, which kill cells by poking holes in them. One of the most common classes of protein toxins in nature, pore-forming toxins are secreted by many types of bacteria, includingStaphylococcus aureus, of which antibiotic-resistant strains, called MRSA, are endemic in hospitals worldwide and cause tens of thousands of deaths annually. They are also present in many types of animal venom.

There are a range of existing therapies designed to target the molecular structure of pore-forming toxins and disable their cell-killing functions. But they must be customized for different diseases and conditions, and there are over 80 families of these harmful proteins, each with a different structure. Using the new nanosponge therapy, says Zhang, “we can neutralize every single one, regardless of their molecular structure.”

Zhang and his colleagues wrapped real red blood cell membranes around biocompatible polymeric nanoparticles. A single red blood cell supplies enough membrane material to produce over 3,000 nanosponges, each around 85 nanometers (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter) in diameter. Since red blood cells are a primary target of pore-forming toxins, the nanosponges act as decoys once in the bloodstream, absorbing the damaging proteins and neutralizing their toxicity. And because they are so small, the nanosponges will vastly outnumber the real red blood cells in the system, says Zhang. This means they have a much higher chance of interacting with and absorbing toxins, and thus can divert the toxins away from their natural targets.

In animal tests, the researchers showed that the new therapy greatly increased the survival rate of mice given a lethal dose of one of the most potent pore-forming toxins. Liver biopsies several days following the injection revealed no damage, indicating that the nanosponges, along with the sequestered toxins, were safely digested after accumulating in the liver.

If the drug can achieve regulatory approval, says Zhang, the major application would be the treatment of bacterial infections, especially those involving antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Neutralizing bacterially produced toxins not only protects the body, but can also weaken the bacteria against the immune system, since the bacteria can no longer rely on the toxins for protection, says Zhang. This is one of the ideas behind a relatively new approach to treating antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, called anti-virulence therapy.

Zhang says his group hopes to pursue clinical trials of the nanosponge therapy soon, and he’s optimistic about its prospects. The polymer that makes up its core is already FDA-approved, and the red blood cell membrane is safe since it is taken from the body, he says. Compared to other types of drugs, says Zhang, “I envision much less hurdles for clinical trials and approval.”