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Recently here in Juneau we went through a spell where our hydro-electric power supply was interrupted by avalanche. The subsequent costs for switching over to diesel made our power bill increase about 5X. This caused quite the uproar in Juneau, and while the town was on diesel for half the length of time originally proposed, it threw the energy/oil issue straight into the limelight.

In Alaska, we produce a lot of oil. It gets piped out of the fields up north down to Valdez, loaded onto tankers, shipped off for refining, turned into heating oil or gasoline, shipped back to Alaska, and put in our tanks. From what I've seen, we pay more for Alaskan gas in Alaska than others in the "lower 48" due to the extended shipping costs.

Alaska is a rich state because of the oil field rights. Every Alaskan receives a check each year for around $1000 from the Permanent Fund because of this. Even still, our villages are drowning in fuel costs. Juneau is lucky to have hydro power, but most villages in Alaska run their electricity off diesel generators. The costs are astounding. This article in the Anchorage Daily News states that a gallon of unleaded gasoline in Barrow costs $10. Diesel for heating houses is only slightly less expensive. And the situation is getting worse. The irony is Barrow is only a few hundred miles from some of the richest oil fields in the world.

"I'm tired of everyone else harping on $4 a gallon for gas," said longtime Barrow resident Marvin Olson. "We've been paying that for four years when everybody else was paying $2 a gallon."

The governor is working on a plan to give every Alaskan a $1200 supplemental to offset the costs of energy, but is that enough, and can the state keep it up?

For more on this topic, subscribe to this Google News feed.

These "totally rad" pics have been making the rounds on the web today, so I thought I'd contribute to the over-saturation of something really cool! These are from the Chaitin volcano eruption in early May of this year.

Here's a handy timeline of the universe, counting in milliseconds what happened during the Big Bang. It still doesn't answer the question of how did all that matter get there in first place?

Yesterday the Department of Defense announced the creation of the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine. This means they have a department specifically devoted to growing new human tissue.

If you read Scientific American, or are tuned in to the wild world of modern science to any degree, you'll already know that thanks to the wonders of stem cell research and other techniques, scientists are able to grow living tissue. But not just tissue, actual organs: "...blood vessels, livers, bladders, breast implants... [and] beating, disembodied rat hearts" (source).

Here's a fairly comprehensive article on the whole thing: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=regrowing-human-limbs

"We just took nature’s own building blocks to build a new organ" -- Being a Lego guy myself, this makes perfect sense to me. Scientists have basically grown a heart that not only beats but "seem[s] to know how to behave like heart tissue". The source of the article is here: Researchers create beating heart in lab. This is just another ongoing step towards who-knows-what, driven by the natural progression of a species to learn. And, like my earlier post on the grander subject, begs the question: What is nature?

Scientists have been able to create DNA in a test tube for 50 years or so, but only in small amounts (IE: one or two genes). Now that is changing. Thanks to computers and other magnificent (and/or scary) technologies we are able to compose entire strands of DNA much like we would a computer program:

"Today a scientist can write a long genetic program on a computer just as a maestro might compose a musical score, then use a synthesizer to convert that digital code into actual DNA. Experiments with "natural" DNA indicate that when a faux chromosome gets plopped into a cell, it will be able to direct the destruction of the cell's old DNA and become its new "brain" -- telling the cell to start making a valuable chemical, for example, or a medicine or a toxin, or a bio-based gasoline substitute." (Source: WA Post, Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms)

The ramifications of this are quite huge in many aspects of society: medicine, disease, performance, comprehension, growth, energy, and not to mention the capability of basically being able to engineer a being. This raises a lot of questions for me, the main one being: What is nature?

For further reading on synthetic DNA, here's a Google news search.

More in my ongoing watch of the effects of global warming and climate change.

Walrus can't swim for long periods of time and they depend on the ice along the water's edge to hang out. With the gradual decline of Arctic ice, thanks to the warming of earth's oceans, this creates an over-crowding problem. When something spooks the herd a stampede ensues and invariably the young/weak pay the price.

"As a result, walruses came ashore earlier and stayed longer, congregating in extremely high numbers, with herds as big as 40,000 at Point Shmidt, a spot that had not been used by walruses as a "haulout" for a century, scientists said." (source)

This year, out of 200,000 walrus an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 were killed from stampede. :(