Consider the lilies, not the anti-speedboat bazooka

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.

Matthew 6:28

Continuing busyness = light blogging. An odd couple of reports in the news did catch my attention in the past week, though. The first was about researchers at Imperial College, London, who have been given £1 million to study photosynthesis in plants, and work out how humans might mimic the process in order to generate renewable, carbon neutral fuels. The Guardian says:

According to James Barber, a biologist at Imperial College London and leader of the artificial leaf project, if artificial photosynthesis systems could use around 10% of the sunlight falling on them, they would only need to cover 0.16% of the Earth's surface to satisfy a global energy consumption rate of 20 terawatts, the amount it is predicted that the world will need in 2030. And unlike a biological leaf, the artificial equivalent could be placed in the arid desert areas of the world, where it would not compete for space agricultural land...

For domestic purposes, Dan Nocera, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has calculated that using artificial leaf to split a few litres of water a day into hydrogen and oxygen would be enough to supply all a home's energy needs.

It's real blue skies research, with any benefits decades away and no guarantee of success. I originally saw the article on Slashdot Science and some of the comments at Geek Central hint at the sort of complexities and difficulties which don't get into science reporting in the mainstream press:

This is not an announcement of an advance, it is an announcement of intention to BEGIN research. Not new.


Photosynthesis has traditionally been one of the "hard" problems to solve. These guys are going to figure it out for 1 million pounds and then use it to produce fuel? I'll put my money on cold fusion first.


Certain steps in the photosynthetic process are very efficient, but the fact that only part of sunlight is photosynthetically active, the fact that plants don't process all light that hits them, and that not all energy they produce goes into biomass, generally limits the total biomass yield to 3-6%. Food crops generally yield between a fraction of a percent and a couple percent of the solar energy that hits them as food, but practical growth limitations make that even lower (by a good margin). To give an example of how that comes into play, sugarcane is a rare photosynthesis exception, at about 8% efficiency turning sunlight to biomass, but only 0.13% solar efficiency [wikipedia.org] to ethanol. That's 4000 liters per hectare of 225W/m^2 insolation land. That's 7.1e13 joules of solar energy to prduce 9.36e10 joules of ethanol. Awful efficiency, no?

Still, they are making a stab at answering a big, hard question about how the humble lilies, (not to mention blades of grass, dandelions, oak trees, aspidistras and any other green plant you care to mention) produce energy at ambient temperatures from sunlight, water and dirt. If and when humans are able to produce useful amounts of energy in an analogous way, I'd be highly impressed. One comment I wholeheartedly agree with is:

Photosynthesis has traditionally been one of the "hard" problems to solve. These guys are going to figure it out for 1 million pounds and then use it to produce fuel?

A big, fundamental problem and the resources thrown at it are chickenfeed. Never mind fundamental research and thinking big, though - it seems that if you want the people who hold the purse strings to start writing you blank cheques in these recessionary times, you need to be in the scaremongering industry. Oh yes, the War On Terror - surely nobody could be so unpatriotic as to question the wisdom of any money spent on protecting Her Majesty's subjects against this horrific (if remote) threat:

Security Minister Lord West said: "The UK currently faces a real and serious threat from terrorism and we need to utilise our position as a world leader in science and technology to counter this.

Be afraid - be very afraid. Cheque books at the ready, chaps:

A real-life "Dragon's Den" for inventors with ideas for anti-terror gadgets has been launched by the Government.

Ministers want scientists who think their latest invention could be turned against alQaida to come forward.

The experts could act like fictional boffin "Q" from the James Bond films and millions of pounds could be available to fund the right product [my italics].

Ideas already made real include a maritime "stinger" able to stop a terrorist speedboat.

Police in pursuit will fire the rocket-propelled net to disable the terrorists' boat's propeller.

I love the James Bond reference - I strongly suspect that these devices, if they actually come into service after the inevitable time and cost over-runs will be all too James Bond-like. And that's a problem because James Bond isn't real. The films are entertainment and not even remotely similar to real life. In a film, there's nothing wrong with a little willing suspension of disbelief. Take the ejector-seat-equipped Aston Martin in Goldfinger (probably the best ever Bond film). It provides an entertaining bit of action in a film which you're not meant to take seriously or think about too deeply. In real life, the cost, impractiality and limited usefulness of such a piece of kit would become apparent before it even reached the back of the envelope stage of development.

The rocket-launched anti-speedboat net isn't quite as daft, but it's getting there. It's bad enough governments using the threat of terror to scare everyone silly and keep them in line, but when they're ready to start flinging scarce money at elaborate fantasy gimmicks like this, it really seems as if they take the rest of us for idiots. I hope it's just another silly season story. Silly season or not Admiral Lord West, appointed to scare us all witless about the terror menace, appears to have taken his James Bond fantasy to a new level, adding the girls to his guns and gadgets wet-dream:

Listeners to the BBC's Today programme this morning had the pleasure of a report from Horsea Island in Portsmouth harbour, where the admiral was overseeing tests of a "futuristic bazooka" intended to stop speedboats without harming their occupants. The idea is that such technology might be used to tackle kamikaze boat-bomb attackers like those who struck the USS Cole nearly nine years ago in Yemen.

Asked whether it might not, in such a situation, be appropriate to open fire with lethal weapons on a boat refusing orders to stop, Lord West said this wasn't always appropriate.

"Lets say now we're off Weymouth in 2012 and we're doing the Olympic games, and we suddenly find a boat," he told the Beeb, adding that there were "stupid individuals" about at such times - offering as an example "a bunch of topless lovelies heading around having had too much to drink".

In your dreams, you silly man.