Keeping up with unrest in Nigeria’s oil region:

One navy officer was killed and four other naval personnel injured in an overnight attack on a vessel protecting a Shell oilfield off southern Nigeria, industry and security sources said Wednesday.

[snip]

The State Security Service (SSS) also confirmed the attack, but said no hostages were taken from the Anglo-Dutch oil facility. Article

It is a commodity. That it is a cital commodity in terms of the infrastructural set-up of both societies and economies doesn’t make it any less a commodity. Economic gobbledygook pooh-poohing the eternal scales of supply and demand as expressed in this piece wouldn’t be acceptable froma freshman. That it emanates from a senior editor at Fortune magazine speaks volumes.

Racing headlong to the making of a new world in the detrimental likeness of the old.

The rush for biofuels could harm the world’s poorest people, Oxfam has said.

In a new report, the UK aid charity appears to be joining a growing chorus of concern about the side-effects of Europe’s drive to get fuel from plants.

The European Union wants to cut the CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels and has demanded that 10% of all transport fuels should come from plants by 2020.

[snip]

The BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin said there were also fears over the environmental cost of making fuel from crops like maize.

Scientists have said it takes so much energy to produce some biofuels that it would be cleaner overall to burn petrol in our cars, he said.

To make it worse, he added, valuable rainforest is still being cleared to make way for fuel crops like palm oil.

Robert Bailey, a policy advisor at Oxfam, said: “In the scramble to supply the EU and the rest of the world with biofuels, poor people are getting trampled. Article

Still too slow in building, but the wider realization that putting the cart before the horse get no one anywhere, that privacy once lost or surrendered is gone and the dissemination of the data undeterminable is taking hold.

As the body of the latest Australian soldier to be killed in Afghanistan arrives in Perth today, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) has announced it will set up a DNA database to help in identifying soldiers who are killed in action.

But Defence Minister Brendan Nelson has ruled out making it compulsory for troops to provide DNA samples.

The ADF expects around two-thirds of its 90,000-strong force will submit to voluntary blood tests.

Although defence experts have welcomed the initiative, privacy campaigners say it raises serious ethical concerns.

[snip]

Defence Minister Brendan Nelson was unavailable to speak to ABC’s The World Today program, but his spokesman says the Minister has ruled out changing the law to make the scheme compulsory.

That raises ethical difficulties for the ADF’s DNA database. The ADF has promised troops that their DNA will not be used for other purposes such as criminal cases.

But Brigadier Nikolic says the Defence Act will need to be altered to make sure of that.

[snip]

A spokesman for Defence Minister Nelson says the Minister will change the Act to ensure the DNA samples are protected from being used for purposes other than identification.

Roger Clarke, chair of the Australian Privacy Foundation and a sometimes commissioned officer in the Army Reserve, urges troops not to provide any DNA to the database until those legislative changes have been made.

“Unfortunately those assurances are very probably false assurances because all manner of agencies have got all manner of uncontrolled powers to get access to data and to get access to samples,” he said.

“Unless there is explicit and overriding legislation passed, I think those assurances should be treated as intentional misinformation or downright lies, because it is simply not how the Australian legal system works.” Article

Any smaller and it wouldn’t be there. Incredible (and implantable).

Make way for the real nanopod and make room in the Guinness World Records. A team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley have created the first fully functional radio from a single carbon nanotube, which makes it by several orders of magnitude the smallest radio ever made.

“A single carbon nanotube molecule serves simultaneously as all essential components of a radio — antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier, and demodulator,” said physicist Alex Zettl, who led the invention of the nanotube radio. “Using carrier waves in the commercially relevant 40-400 MHz range and both frequency and amplitude modulation (FM and AM), we were able to demonstrate successful music and voice reception.”

Given that the nanotube radio essentially assembles itself and can be easily tuned to a desired frequency band after fabrication, Zettl believes that nanoradios will be relatively easy to mass-produce. Potential applications, in addition to incredibly tiny radio receivers, include a new generation of wireless communication devices and monitors. Nanotube radio technology could prove especially valuable for biological and medical applications.

“The entire radio would easily fit inside a living cell, and this small size allows it to safely interact with biological systems,” Zettl said. “One can envision interfaces with brain or muscle functions, or radio-controlled devices moving through the bloodstream.”

It is also possible that the nanotube radio could be implanted in the inner ear as an entirely new and discrete way of transmitting information, or as a radically new method of correcting impaired hearing.

[snip]

“To correlate the mechanical motions of the nanotube to an actual radio receiver operation, we launched an FM radio transmission of the song Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys,” said Zettl. “After being received, filtered, amplified, and demodulated all by the nanotube radio, the emerging signal was further amplified by a current preamplifier, sent to an audio loudspeaker and recorded. The nanotube radio faithfully reproduced the audio signal, and the song was easily recognizable by ear.”

When the researchers deliberately detuned the nanotube radio from the carrier frequency, mechanical vibrations faded and radio reception was lost. A “lock” on a given radio transmission channel could be maintained for many minutes at a time, and it was not necessary to operate the nanotube radio inside a TEM. Using a slightly different configuration, the researchers successfully transmitted and received signals across a distance of several meters. Article