Carbon Magazine by Spice Hamster

science meets life (Finally)

Everything is connected 74

updating the Interstate Highway System

the Secret Life of NYC’s Bees

104

google’s Plan to Rescue our Power GriD

Issue 00.01 »

may.2009

ď&#x201A;&#x192;On the cover:

SEM micrograph of carbon nanotube bundles (with false colour added). Magnification was about 7220x; the frame covers about 15 micrometres in the horizontal axis (1 micrometre = 1 millionth of a metre). The nanotubes themselves are roughly 10 nanometres (10 billionths of a metre) in diameter. ÂŠ Photo by Matt XB

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 Hives Among Us Though honeybees are illegal in New York City, several intrepid beekeepers are reaping the rewards of a healthy hive. © By Lenora Todaro

 Google’s Power Play Google intends to use its wallet to help American power companies create a national Smart Grid © By Peter Waldman

Sixth Sense tal i g

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 r ov e sc Di 

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logical Machin Bio es

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 Rethinking the Interstate Transforming our existing highways into something other than car-centric “nonplaces” requires a national initiative. © By Karrie Jacobs

limate-Chang AC eG

ter Bet ut

AD i

naissance, Re b

© Carbon is everywhere This month's table of contents are the molecular shapes of the organic compounds acetamenaphin and ibuprofen. The margins feature a diagram of graphene--one of the strongest known substances. What do they have in common? A 6-sides carbon ring.

think

microElectrodes Implants in the brain control when the beetle's wings start and stop beating., while wing-nerve implants are used to steer the beetle.

How to create a cyborg beetle in 3 easy steps!

microcontroller This microchip controls flight bydelivering pulses of electricity to thebrain and wing implants.

 Step 1. Capture a larval flower beetle. (Eww, gross!)

Biological Machines Michel Maharbiz’s novel interfaces between machines and living systems could give rise to a new generation of cyborg devices. By Emily Singer

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Microbattery This Microbattery allows for 31 hours of operation.

© A giant flower beetle flies about, veering up and down, left and right. But the insect isn't a pest, and it isn't steering its own path. An implanted receiver, microcontroller, microbattery, and six carefully placed electrodes--a payload smaller than a dime and weighing less than a stick of gum--allow an engineer to control the bug wirelessly. By remotely delivering jolts of electricity to its brain and wing muscles, the engineer can make the cyborg beetle take off, turn, or stop midflight. The beetle's creator, Michel Maharbiz, hopes that his bugs will one day carry sensors or other devices to locations not easily accessible to humans or the terrestrial robots used in searchand-rescue missions. The devices are cheap: materials cost as little as five dollars, and the electronics are easy to build with mostly off-

 Step 2. While your beetle is still a helpless larva, bury an elctrode in its brain!

the-shelf components. "They can fly into tiny cracks and could be fitted with heat sensors designed to find injured survivors," says Maharbiz, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "You cannot do that now with completely synthetic systems." Maharbiz's specialty is designing interfaces between machines and living systems, from individual cells to entire organisms. His goal is to create novel "biological machines" that take advantage of living cells' capacity for extremely low-energy yet exquisitely precise movement, communication, and computation. Maharbi z envisions devices that can

Photos BY Gary Meek and Zhong Ling Wang

Zhong Ling Wang holds up a nanogenerator, a device that generates evergy from biomotion. 

Learn more About your new cyborg beetle!

Harnessing Hamster Power Sunlight, wind, and waves aren’t the only sources of renewable energy. For researchers hoping to power nanoscale devices, there’s also muscle power. By Katherine Bourzac

collect, manipulate, store, and act on information from their environments. Tissue for replacing damaged organs might be an example, or tables that can repair themselves or reconfigure their shapes on the basis of environmental cues. In 100 years, Maharbiz says, "I bet this kind of machine will be everywhere, derived from cells but completely engineered." The remotecontrolled beetles are an early success story. Beetles integrate visual, mechanical, and chemical information to control flight, all using a modicum of energy--a feat that's almost impossible to reproduce from scratch. w

Illustration Courtesy of Brienne Jones

ment that a person makes while sitting at a computer carries with it a small amount of energy that could potentially be scavenged. However, harvesting this biomotion is challenging because so much of it is irregular. Now, for the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a nanogenerator can be driven by irregular, low-energy biomotion, including the tapping of a human finger and a hamster’s erratic running and scratching. The researchers’ nanogenerator harnesses the piezoelectric effect--the way some crystalline materials produce an electrical potential when placed under mechanical stress. The team, led by Zhong Lin Wang, a professor of materials science and engineering at Georgia Tech, has been making generators using piezoelectric nanowires since 2005. The latest nanogenerator consists of a series of zinc-oxide nanowires mounted on top of a flexible plastic surface. The wires are connected to one another and to an external electrical circuit by metal electrodes. When the plastic bends, the wires bend too, and this motion creates an electrical potential in the wires that drives current through the external circuit.

In a paper published online this week in the journal Nano Letters, Wang’s group describes using the nanogenerator to harvest different kinds of biomechanical energy. The researchers attached the nanogenerator to a person’s index finger and recorded the power output when it tapped on a surface. They also harvested energy from a hamster wearing a small jacket affixed to the device as the rodent ran on an exercise wheel and scratched itself.. Other researchers have developed piezoelectric cantilevers that can also harvest bio. w

This hamster's jacket is linked to the nanogenerator by several piezoelectric wires. 0

play

Flowers bloom in Climate Change Game What the hell is Flower about? People have been arguing about this gorgeous little tone poem since it was released two weeks ago. By Clive Thompson

stract. You control a flower petal, guiding it with a gust of wind through blighted, brown landscapes. As you touch different flowers, you gradually bring the landscape back to life — and trees and grass burst into color. Later, though, the world that you bring “life” to becomes specifically industrial. For example, when you finish a level, it generates winds that power windmills, creating electricity. Then you’re plunged into a dark, murky landscape, where hissing power lines sear your fragile little petals, and corrodedmetal electrical towers attack you like diving sharks. When you succeed, you clean up these dark, satanic mills. At which point I decided, OK, OK, I get it. Flower is about climate change. What’s more, it may be the first — and only — truly good game about climate change. When I say that Flower is the first game about climate change, I don’t mean that it’s the first game to refer to climate change. Plenty of post-apocalyptic games have been set in a near-future world ravaged by global warming — like last year’s Fracture, where two warring tribes scrap amongst the warming–created tornadoes and floodplains.But in these games, climate change is merely part of the background. You’re not supposed to do anything about it; the damage has alThere are many very big spoilers in this column. Don’t read it if you haven’t played it all the way through. Or unless you, y’know, want to have it spoiled for you! Your life; your call.

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Like The Renaissance, but Better Kyle Gabler is one-half of 2D Boy, the development studio behind World of Goo, which snagged an award for outstanding game design at the Interactive Achievement Awards during the DICE Summit this week.

ready been done. (Indeed, Fuel appears to regard the damage as totally awesome, because it has created such badass racing environments! Woo-hoo!) What makes Flower different is that it is “about” changing or improving the situation — and making you feel wonderful over how you’ve renewed life that was destroyed by industrialization. And what’s most remarkable is that Flower manages to do this without being cloying and preachy. Indeed, the game is amazingly subtle. At first, it doesn’t seem that way. On the contrary, Flower pretty much clobbers you over the head with its metaphors. Flowers, flowering grass and wind blowing through renewable-energy windmills = good. Gray urban blight; angry, weird weather; nasty electricity; and corroded old power line towers = bad. Got it? These allegorical algorithms are about as old as civilization itself. Our literature is full of them: In the Bible, spiritual salvation is regularly characterized as water flowing and trees blooming over dried-up land. T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land — with its vision of a corroded, parched world desperate for life — reads practically like a design document for Flower. If you’ve ever read any fairy tales or belonged to any world religion, you’ve had these dark materials flash-burned into your soul — which is precisely why Flower packs such a kick. You could argue that the game isn’t about climate change at all. It could be merely about the age-old eternal struggle between man.w

It’s funny beczause a few years ago Gabler volunteered at DICE--handing out T-shirts and making sure people didn’t sneak into the show--and now he’s taking the podium to talk about the indie spirit in front of an audience comprised of the likes of Todd Howard, Cliff Bleszinski and Rob Pardo. 2D Boy’s goo-based physics puzzler is the third highest rated game on the Wii, according to Metacritic.com. It cost $10,000. One month, says Gabler, he ran out of soap and was forced to wash his body with his cat’s flea shampoo. Gabler jokes that World of Goo was such a success because of 2D Boy’s desperation. In 2005, the heads of two major studios told Gabler not to start an indie game company. The future, they said was big blockbuster games. Now the industry is on the cusp of a renaissance thanks to the “indie explosion.” The reason: Independent developers can’t make a first-person shooter and compete with big studios. So instead, they avoid competition by creating different kinds of games that never existed before. “We’re playing the same games we were playing 17 years ago,” says Gabler, pointing to first-person shooters. Thankfully, an amazing thing is happening. Technology is no longer the bottle neck. “We are entering a new area of art.” The Internet, he says, is the new Florence. “It’s becoming easier and easier for anyone with a small team and no money to make stuff,” says Gabler. “It’s just a little indicator signaling a really fun time ahead.” —Mary Jane Irwin

dis cover

ď ş SixthSense Creator Pranav Mistry uses his fingrs to operate a virtual interface, a la Minority Report.

a digital sixth sense 'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with digital information. By Kim Zetter

ÂŠ Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they're done. Pattie Maes of the lab's Fluid Interfaces group said the research is aimed at creating a new digital "sixth sense" for humans. In the tactile world, we use our five senses to take in information about our environment and respond to it, Maes explained. But a lot of the information that helps us understand and respond to the world doesn't come from these senses. In-

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stead, it comes from computers and the internet. Maes' goal is to harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses. The prototype was built from an ordinary webcam and a battery-powered 3M projector, with an attached mirror -- all connected to an internet-enabled mobile phone. The setup, which costs less than $350, allows the user to project information from the phone onto any surface -- walls, the body of another person or even your hand. Maes showed a video of her student Pranav Mistry who she describes as the brains behind

Photos Courtesy of Sam Ogden

the sixthsense system: applications

 Video The user can project a video onto a newspaper page to see more information about a topic.

Watch When theuser draws a circle on their wrist; the projector displays a clock right on theur arm.

 draw The user can draw on any surface as the system tracks fingertip movements.

 map The user can navigate a map displayed on a nearby surface using hand gestures.

 Calculator The user can do quick math on any surface.

The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user's hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques.

the project. Mistry wore the device on a lanyard around his neck, and colored Magic Marker caps on four fingers (red, blue, green and yellow) helped the camera distinguish the four fingers and recognize his hand gestures with software that Mistry created. The gestures can be as simple as using his fingers and thumbs to create a picture frame that tells the camera to snap a photo, which is saved to his mobile phone. When he gets back to an office, he projects the images onto a wall and begins to size them.. When he encounters someone at a party, the system projects a cloud of words on the person's body to provide more information about him -- his blog URL, the name of his company, his likes and interests. "This is a more controversial [feature]," Maes said over the audience's laughter. In another frame, Mistry picks up a boarding pass while he's sitting in a car. He projects the current status of his flight and gate number he's retrieved from the flightstatus page of the airline onto the card. "If you need to know what time it is, it's as simple as drawing a watch on your arm," Maes said, while Mistry used his right finger to draw a circle on his left wrist. The face of a watch popped up on his hand, which the audience liked. When Mistry folds his hands in "namaste" fashion, the system opens a menu to allow him

to choose an application. If he wants to read email on his phone, he draws an @ symbol in the air with his finger. He can project a phone pad onto his palm and dial a number without removing the phone from his pocket. As he reads the newspaper on the subway he can project a video onto the page that provides more information about the topic he's reading. Maes and Mistry told Wired they've been working on the project for four months, day and night, and have filed a patent for it. Maes' MIT group, which includes seven graduate students, were thinking about how a person could be more integrated into the world around them and access information without having to do something like take out a phone. They initially produced a wristband that would read an RFID tag to know, for example, which book a user is holding in a store. They also had a ring that used infrared to communicate by beacon to supermarket smart shelves to give you information about products. As you grab a package of macaroni, the ring would glow red or green to tell you if the product was organic or free of peanut traces -whatever criteria you program into the system. "We wanted to make information more useful to people in real time with minimal effort in a way that doesn't require any behavior. w

PH oto C ourtesy of F ranc i ne D

“Beekeeping is a completely sensuous experience,” says Roger Repohl, a beekeeper at the Genesis Community Garden behind St. Augustine’s Catholic Church in the South Bronx, in New York. “You touch and taste the honey, listen to the bees hum, smell the smoke.” Clad in his “vestments”—a white beekeeper suit, veiled hat, thick canvas gloves —he squeezes a “smoker,” a bellows attached to a can that he’s filled with pine needles and lighted with a match. The smoke warns the bees that the keeper is approaching to inspect the hive, but the aroma evokes Christmas. “I use pine needles,” he says, “because they smell good and you might as well be an aesthete about the experience.” Repohl’s hives are not the natural conical ones that inspired 1960s hairstyles, but square wood boxes stacked five high, like file cabinets, or dresser drawers. He harvests about 300 pounds of honey a year at this peaceful outpost in the middle of auto repair shops, hardware stores and a mom-and-pop slaughterhouse. Beekeeping is illegal in New York City. The law lumps honeybees together with alligators, lions and ferrets as “wild and ferocious animals.” The city’s urban beekeepers, then, form an unofficial secret society of asphalt naturalists — romantics drawn to the beauty of a beehive’s intelligent design, epicureans seeking the delectable taste of locally procured honey, and off-the-grid types keeping nature alive in the city. Restrictions on beekeeping like those

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in New York City are uncommon, however. “Chicago has beehives on top of City Hall,” says Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture magazine. “Chicago, along with Dallas, Boston, San Francisco and Portland, actively promote beekeeping for pollinator health.” After years in which they seemed like charming throwbacks — rooftop denizens and community gardeners procuring raw honey and making beeswax candles, tending to insects that inspire fear and awe and irritation — beekeepers and their bees are having a moment. The current national interest in locally grown and organic food and low-impact city living is inspiring people to look into ways to have their hands in their own food production, whether by joining CSAs (community-supported agriculture), raising chickens, or keeping bees. There are 513 beekeeping associations across the United States, according to Bee Culture magazine. Of its 12,000 readers, Flottum says, “Fifteen percent live in cities with more than 100,000 people.” However, trying to put a number on how many hobbyist beekeepers there are “is like asking how many people garden,” he laughs. “From our surveys, we es-

timate about 75,000.” Troy Fore, executive director of the American Beekeeping Federation, which provides educational programs about bees for children and scholarships for graduate students of apiculture, says he feels the increased interest in beekeeping. “The further people get from the agrarian life and the more media attention to bee losses there is, the more people say, ‘Well, maybe I’ll get into beekeeping.’” This interest, coincidentally, puts urban and backyard beekeepers on the cutting edge of one of agriculture’s biggest dilemmas: colony collapse disorder — the “AIDS of bees,” as Dennis vanEngelsdorp, acting state apiarist for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, puts it. VanEngelsdorp is part of the CCD research team at the University of Pennsylvania. With CCD, the honeybees, highly organized, predictable creatures with finely tuned homing instincts, leave their hives to gather pollen and never return, like sailors drifting into the Bermuda Triangle. Bees and Disease. More than a quarter of the country’s 2 million commercial bee colonies have been wiped out, according to the Apiary Inspectors of America, and the hobby-

Image C ourtesy of R oger R epohl

ists are not necessarily immune. At stake, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is onethird, or $15 billion annually, of the food we eat — everything from almonds and apples to cherries and pears. Explanatory theories abound, from pesticide and pathogen to radiation from cellphone towers and the onset of the Rapture. Losses by backyard beekeepers have been estimated only anecdotally, but the beekeepers are fearful of the implications. VanEngelsdorp says “pollinators are canaries in the coal mine,” and their disappearance is a referendum on the state of our environment — a reminder of the brilliant and frightening interdependence of our ecosystem. Bees stroll along Repohl’s neck like parrots on a friendly pirate’s shoulder. He has an intimate knowledge of their ways and a knack for reading their moods. Still, he says, “Sometimes I stand there looking at them just paralyzed and I don’t know what to do. It’s like looking into the mind of God.” Repohl is a choir director who lives in the St. Augustine rectory in the South Bronx, providing an ecological education to local kids and

No Pets Allowed Of all the email I receive, some of the most heartbreaking are those from people who are forced to give up their cats because of housing problems. Landlords will not allow pets or homeowner associations enforce rules limiting or disallowing pets, and someone is now forced to make a decision, often with little warning: give up their cat or try to find

sweet honey to those in the know. Each month vive,” he says, “but bees also eat their broththe honey he procures takes on the flavor of the ers.” Repohl grew up in the San Fernando Valflowers in bloom: In June, linden flower; in July, ley, “halfway between L.A. and Disneyland.” clover. No bland-tasting honey pumped into He came to the Bronx to do a Ph.D. in theolsupermarket plastic bears here. He’s dealt with ogy at Fordham University and befriended a mites, but thus far has been spared CCD. Durformer Trappist monk and master beekeeper ing a hive inspection, Repohl uses a tool simiwho ran St. Augustine’s Church at the time. lar to a chisel to pry open the top Now, Repohl, through his workand assess the health of his hive. shops at Wave Hill in the North In a hive of some 60,000 bees, Bronx and in garden conworkers and drones, only versation, baptizes many “Sometimes I stand one queen rules. Inside a soul into beekeeping. there looking at them the honeycomb’s hexagDuring my visit, we just paralyzed and I onal shapes, connectworked while we talked like so many votive ed, scraping propolis don’t know what to candles, worker bees (a type of glue the bees do. It’s like looking deposit pollen for making create to seal the hive) into the mind of God.” from the hive frames before bee bread and nectar for curing honey. Deeper down in the checking to see if the queen hive we see the brood: brownishhe’d ordered from Texas had tan in color, capped with wax from been accepted by the hive. She side to side indicating a strong colony. Repohl hadn’t. The bees were busily preparing the peabreaks open a drone pupa and the bees go to nut-shaped cell for a queen of their own. In anwork removing the carcass, which he says they other hive, bee babies were being born, squirmwill eat. “Bees live so that the hive may suring in circles to push out of their eggs, arms up

Honey Bees [ + ] Delicious honey [ - ] Occasional Stinging

Ferrets [ + ] Extremely cute [ - ] Smelly poop?

Alligators Lions [ + ] Will eat anything! [ + ] Cooler than pugs [ - ] Will eat anything... [ - ] Who cares?!

hristmas comes 11 months early this year: January 20. And I’ve been making lists. Granted, President Obama isn’t St. Nick, and given the hundreds of billions that we’ve been throwing at Wall Street, it’s unlikely that we’re going to get most of the things we want. But the incoming president has been talking up a huge economic-stimulus package and saying he’ll “rebuild our crumbling roads and bridges.” Infrastructure is suddenly a buzzword, so alluring that it could be the name of a new men’s cologne. People keep talking about the WPA as if it were the latest gizmo from Steve Jobs instead of an old program from Franklin Roosevelt. It has been so long since we could expect anything at all from our federal government that it’s hard not to want a lot. So let me tell you about the things I want. Have you ever looked at the artist Catherine Opie’s freeway-overpass photos? Her long, narrow, sepia-toned images reveal the beauty of this network of roads. We’ve lived with superhighways for more than 50 years and don’t

even see them anymore. We certainly don’t think of them as aesthetic objects. In fact, we don’t think about the interstate system at all, except when a significant chunk of it plunges into a river. But the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, created when Ike signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, was a symbol of everything that was both right and wrong about this country. That we were able to plan and execute something so ambitious—more than 46,000 miles of highway—seems, at this juncture, wondrous. Of course, the system undermined our cities, encouraged suburbanization and sprawl, and solidified our dependence on the automobile. This tends to undercut the glory of the achievement. But it’s time for us to look at the interstate system not as an aging network of highways in need of repair or replacement but instead as we might look at a navigable river. Congressman Earl Blumenauer, of Portland, Oregon, a noted infrastructure advocate, says the system represents “a tremendous national untapped resource.” It encompasses a lot of

land. Funds were appropriated at the outset for the purchase of two million acres; according to one estimate, the system actually takes up 40 acres per mile, or 1.87 million acres. But what if we could make those highways beautiful, not by removing bill boards, as Lady Bird Johnson did in the 1960s, but by using the corridors for more than moving cars and trucks? What if we thought of them as the backbone of a new, more diverse 21st-century transportation system? “It’s time for a different vision,” Blumenauer says. “And a principle for that is how we coax more out of existing resources.” This is not a radical idea. Obviously, the interstate, with its generous rights-of-way, is a prime spot for new rail lines, both high-speed intercity trains and commuter rail. In the Bay Area, BART trains to outlying suburbs often run in the median strip. The same is true in Chicago and Blumenauer’s Portland. There are similar plans all over the country, including one for a Midwest system that would use highspeed trains and commuter rail to link major cities in nine states; and a scheme in Colorado to run high-speed rail along I-25 and I-70. The

“But it’s time for us to look at the interstate system not as an aging network of highways in need

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instead as we might look at a navigable river.”

Illustration by Chris Dent

of repair or replacement but

recently opened New Mexico Rail Runner connects Santa Fe and Albuquerque along an interstate corridor. It makes sense that rail would go where the people are, and over the last half century, people have settled along highways. But while there are many regional rail projects around the country, there is no national plan. As Shelley Poticha, president and CEO of Reconnecting America, a transit-advocacy group, points out, “One thing that would need to change is we would have to ask the federal government to think in an integrated, interdisciplinary way.” In layman’s terms: the highway planners and the rail planners would have to be in the same room. Maybe the interstate system has a role to play in remaking our energy infrastructure. On RepowerAmerica.org, an offshoot of the Al Gore–inspired We Campaign, you can find the argument for building a “smart grid,” a new, unified national system for distributing electricity that would incorporate far-flung power sources, such as wind farms and individual rooftop solar arrays, and apportion them efficiently. It’s described as “[a]n interstate highway system for electricity.” I initially assumed that that was a metaphor, just as the Internet used to be thought of as the information superhighway. Then I read a bit further and came across this: “These power lines can be above

ground, buried underground, under freeway medians—there are many options.” Again, the real interstate is a network linking our population centers, and if a new grid needs to be built, it might make sense to piggyback on those well-defined corridors. The proposed smart grid presumes that we’ll soon have “a massive national fleet of clean plug-in cars.” Plug-in hybrids will be capable of twoway “vehicle to grid” exchanges. You’ll plug them in to charge them, but they will also store power that the grid can draw on dur ing the day, when you’re not driving. A park-and-ride lot then becomes a de facto electrical substation. New rail lines will require electricity and could, if hybrid technology is put to work, conceivably generate electricity and participate in a novel give-and-take approach to power. Additionally, Blumenauer suggests “using the right-of-way for a solar array, which can allow the electrical needs of the highways to be selfgenerating.” Now you would need the highway planners, rail planners, and energy planners sitting at the same table. And one more thing: say we reimagine the interstate system so that it becomes not just a route for cars and trucks but an intermodal-transportation-and-energy corridor. That should be incentive enough to rethink the nature of development around highway inter-

Al Gore, Nobel what?

Jeff Immelt, GE CEO

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Eric Schmidt, Google CEO

Jeff Immelt, The Energy Czar

Every year, Google Inc. invites a group of global A-listers to its own Davos-style conference to think big thoughts. The event, called Zeitgeist, tends to be as pretentious as its nameâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;captains of industry, finance, and government chattering onstage in front of about 400 of Googleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s friends and customers about the fate of the internet and the world.

 Our power grid is a vast web of aging powerlines that connect disparate regions.

will become the steam engine of the Obama age—the driver of a new industrial revolution that can generate untold amounts of jobs and economic growth while rescuing the earth from global warming. For GE, with its massive energy division, including investments in windmills, air conditioners, and power plants, an interest in grabbing part of the renewable-energy business is a no-brainer. As Immelt tells me in an interview, GE doesn’t need Google’s technolo-

gy so much as it needs its cachet. “Google has a special brand around consumer-user interface, around software and the internet,” he says. “I think that there’s clearly a halo about two great brands when they get together.” It is Google—with a thinner résumé but an enormous bank account—that is the curiosity. Schmidt’s ambition is to turn Google into the, well, Google of the renewable-energy economy. Just as it imposed order on an unruly Web, Illustration courtesy of Urban Ecoist

The 2008 version bordered on the surreal. The stock market was tanking, the bond market had flatlined, and the price of gold was surging to its biggest one-day jump in nearly a decade, an indication that investors everywhere thought the global economy was going to hell. Yet here was Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and CEO, on a sparse stage at the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters, in a green-energy love-in with his counterpart at General Electric Co., Jeff Immelt. The pair bathed in the glow of each other’s affirmation, convinced that the two companies, working together, can save the planet. ( View a graphic showing how much energy Google’s own data centers use.) “I don’t think this is hard,” Immelt said in response to a question from Al Gore, a Google groupie. “I’d say health care is hard. Solving the U.S.’s health-care system is actually quite difficult. Energy actually isn’t hard. The technology exists; it doesn’t have to be invented. It needs to be applied.… We make the gadgets—smart electric meters, things like that. People like Google can make the software, which makes the system. That’s the key to renewable energy.” Schmidt and Immelt are betting big that green energy

cap

Our Greener Future

ÂŠ Recompute is a new way of thinking about computers that layers sustainable ideas throughout its lifecycle to make an overall sustainable product that can be easily replicated. Recompute address sustainability along three main points during its life. Manufacturing: Rather than making a large tower constructed from numerous materials (ABS plastic, aluminum, steel, etc.), hundreds of manufacturing processes, and dozens of individual components, the Recompute case is made of corrugated cardboard (recyclable and renewable). There are four low-impact manufacturing processes to assemble Recompute: Die cutting, gluing (with non-toxic white glue), printing and electronic assembly. Recompute uses only three major electronic components: A motherboard with processor & memory, power supply, and a hard drive. Use: Recompute is designed to allow the user to take advantage of existing hardware. For example; use the keyboard from a previous computer. For additional flexibility, external hardware customization is easy via 8 USB ports. Disposal: Electronic components need to be properly recycled as they contain toxic heavy metals. However, this is often skipped because dismantling of computers is difficult. Recompute can be disassembled without tools, so the electronics and case can be easily recycled individually. Oh yes, Recompute is a real working computer. w

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Carbon Magazine ÂŠ 2009 Brienne Jones. Images ÂŠ their respective owners