Long (ago) story short: "... Fossil Fuels Brewing Co. ... ferments a yeast strain ... found in a piece of Burmese amber dating from about 25 to 45 million years ago."

Here's the full Monty — Gabe Oppenheim's front page Style section story from today's Washington Post.

The Beer That Takes You Back . . . Millions of Years

Enterprising Scientist Finds New Use for Ancient Yeast

Raul Cano is the real-life "Jurassic Park" scientist. Yes, there is one.

A day before that movie opened in 1993, Cano announced that he had extracted DNA from an ancient Lebanese weevil entombed in amber, just as the fictional employees of InGen do with a mosquito to create their dino-amusement park. One newspaper account said the "achievement" refuted "the long-held view of many biologists that DNA of so great an age" couldn't be preserved.

But Cano was less interested in extinct reptiles than in Homo sapiens now roaming the earth. He next revivified ancient bacteria from the gut of an amber-encased bee and hoped to turn the strains into new antibiotics. That didn't work, and Cano, who has a doctorate in medical mycology, put his 1,200-specimen organism collection on the back shelf and returned to more fruitful microbial endeavors, like assessment of petroleum-degrading diversity in sand dunes and the bioinformatics of Lactobacillus acidophilus.

And then, last month, a breakthrough.

The product?

Beer.

"I was going through my collection, going, 'Gee whiz — this is pretty nifty. Maybe we could use it to make beer,' " says Cano, 63, now the director of the Environmental Biotechnology Institute at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

The result is Fossil Fuels Brewing Co., which ferments a yeast strain Cano found in a piece of Burmese amber dating from about 25 million to 45 million years ago. The company — in which Cano is a partner, along with another scientist and a lawyer — introduced its pale ale and German wheat beer with a party last month at one of the two Bay Area pubs where Fossil Fuels is made and served.

In April, at the World Beer Cup in San Diego, "we had one judge give us the highest marks, one just below and one who didn't like it," says Chip Lambert, 63, the company's other second microbiologist. "We learned that the issue was that in these competitions, you brew to match the traditional concept of the style, which these yeast just don't do."

William Brand, the Oakland Tribune beer critic, says the ancient yeast provides the wheat beer with a distinctively "clove-y" taste and a "weird spiciness at the finish." (The Washington Post Style section's summer beer critic pronounced it "smooth and spicy, excellent with chicken strips.")

Of the science behind the suds, Cano says, "It's just like the Rip Van Winkle effect. What they are doing, they are remaining dormant — the bacteria or the yeast and generally spores of some sort — and then when you take them out of the amber, they reawaken and continue to reproduce. So they are alive."

You ask, of course, why men able to imbue life would do so ultimately for booze. And Cano drifts back to his childhood in Havana, to the thick air before the revolution. "My dad used to drink," he recalls, a lilt in his voice. "I remember when I was 10, 12 years old, I used to walk over to where he had a mini glass of beer and talk him out of 10 cents, so I could go to a movie and have a hamburger."

At some point back then, Cano began sipping about two ounces a week (the volume would increase as his age did) of Hatuey, a famous Cuban brand that Hemingway mentions in "The Old Man and the Sea."

"It was really refreshing and tasty," Cano recalls with relish. "Drinking two ounces a week in the warmth and the humidity — there's very little better than a cold beer. Nothing better than a cold beer."

The memory of that taste spurred him to create Fossil Fuels even before his medical venture foundered; he figured he could coax a compelling taste out of a strange, primordial ingredient. The first version was made by a home brewer in 1997 and served at both the cast party for "The Lost World" (the second "Jurassic Park" movie) and Cano's daughter's wedding. But without a business plan, the company died out.

In 2006, Cano revived his ancient yeast and his company, with the help of fellow biologist Lambert, whose duplication of Cano's experiments gained them widespread acceptance. Lambert had a refined taste for hooch from his days as a lab director in Saudi Arabia, where the prohibition against alcohol led him to smuggle and culture his own wine and beer yeasts.

It's been on tap for two years at Stumptown in Guerneville, Calif., where the brew pub's manager, Deanna DeLeon, called it "yummy," then added: "I don't know — I'm not a big beer connoisseur."

"I was impressed with the flavor that the yeast brought out," said Orvil Kirby, a patron who tried the wheat beer at Kelley Bros. Brewery, where it's made. "My first taste of it, I thought they might've added some cloves to the beer."

If Fossil Fuels enters the mainstream market, which it hopes to do soon, the beers won't carry funky names like other microbrews. The scientists went that route back in '97 with Stegosaurus Stout and Jurassic Amber Ale.

But "one thing people are skeptical about," Lambert says, is whether they're "gonna grow long scales if they drink the beer. Tyrannosaurus Pale Ale — that was so intimidating and so dangerous as far as marketing that we decided to get rid of any association with 'Jurassic Park.' "

So the real-life scientists are crafting a new legacy, in what may be the first "Jurassic Park" sequel you'll actually be able to swallow.

"Smooth and spicy, excellent with chicken strips" — I'll drink to that.

There are those who think estimates of oil reserves miss the point.

These individuals believe that most of the world's oil will never leave the ground but instead will lie untouched and unwanted as better, cheaper and cleaner sources of energy come to the fore.

Peter Applebome's August 3, 2008 New York Times story about a visit to the Sag Harbor (New York) Whaling and Historical Museum (above) explored what happened when whaling, "... one of the world's first great multinational businesses, a global enterprise of audacious reach and import," rapidly collapsed as the American petroleum industry began its rise in 1859 with the discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

Here's the article.

They Used to Say Whale Oil Was Indispensable, Too

Call us Ishmael.

Of course they would have arrived on the Hampton Jitney, not the Pequod, and it’s not likely that any of the characters in “Moby-Dick” would have known what to make of the exhibit at the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum.

But in this dour summer defined by the racing digital readouts at the gas pump, there’s a meditation worthy of Melville in the question raised by the modest exhibition being displayed here, in a frayed Greek Revival building constructed around 1845 by a local whaling magnate: Is the oil business the new whaling business? And, if so, is that a good sign or a troubling one?

Bear with us. Whaling, after all, was one of the world’s first great multinational businesses, a global enterprise of audacious reach and import. From the 1700s through the mid-1800s, oil extracted from the blubber of whales and boiled in giant pots gave light to America and much of the Western world. The United States whaling fleet peaked in 1846 with 735 ships out of 900 in the world. Whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the United States; in 1853 alone, 8,000 whales were slaughtered for whale oil shipped to light lamps around the world, plus sundry other parts used in hoop skirts, perfume, lubricants and candles.

Like oil, particularly in its early days, whaling spawned dazzling fortunes, depending on the brute labor of tens of thousands of men doing dirty, sweaty, dangerous work. Like oil, it began with the prizes closest to home and then found itself exploring every corner of the globe. And like oil, whaling at its peak seemed impregnable, its product so far superior to its trifling rivals, like smelly lard oil or volatile camphene, that whaling interests mocked their competitors.

“Great noise is made by many of the newspapers and thousands of the traders in the country about lard oil, chemical oil, camphene oil, and a half-dozen other luminous humbugs,” The Nantucket Inquirer snorted derisively in 1843. It went on: “But let not our envious and — in view of the lard oil mania — we had well nigh said, hog-gish opponents, indulge themselves in any such dreams.”

But, in fact, whaling was already just about done, said Eric Jay Dolin, who wrote some of the text for the exhibit and is the author of “Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America.” Whales near North America were becoming scarce, and the birth of the American petroleum industry in 1859 in Titusville, Pa., allowed kerosene to supplant whale oil before the electric light replaced both of them and oil found other uses.

By 1861, whaling was in such decline that the federal government bought 38 old whaling ships, loaded them with stones and sunk them in Charleston Harbor in what turned out to be an unsuccessful attempt to blockade the Confederate port.

Mr. Dolin said the message for today was that one era’s irreplaceable energy source could be the next one’s relic. Like whaling, he said, big oil is ripe to be replaced by something newer, cleaner, more appropriate for its moment.

“What you think you can’t live with today, tomorrow can become just a memory,” he said. “That’s what happened with whale oil, and eventually it’s going to happen to oil, but you don’t just turn off one switch and flip on a new one. It’s the product of a long, wrenching process that I hope leads us to a more sustainable path than the one we’re on now.”

And so both the whaling artifacts and the exhibit’s messages about the future, Thomas A. Edison rhapsodizing about solar power, Henry David Thoreau about wind, leave a message that’s at least potentially upbeat. Just because we do not see an easy way out of today’s energy morass doesn’t mean one isn’t taking shape right before our eyes.

There is another way to look at it. The museum exhibit, with its antique vials of whale oil, its primitive display of harpoons, eel spears, breast augers and circle cutters, speaks to a world of the most rudimentary technology. Still, even then, men in wooden boats could slaughter tens of thousands of whales and eventually drive some species to the brink of extinction.

We’re still relentlessly hacking, clawing and drilling away at whatever we can extract from the planet, more driven Ahab than curious Ishmael, but with infinitely more technological sophistication and impact. The whalers back then were surely no match for the global reach of oil. Now we do it in a world of almost 7 billion people all wanting their own cars and computers instead of the 700 million in 1750 content with whale oil in lanterns. Rather than the pygmies chasing the leviathans of the sea, no one can doubt who’s the leviathan today.

Maybe, in fact, the next chapter will be more benign with fewer unintended consequences than the shift from whale oil to fossil fuel. Maybe, there really is a green miracle on the horizon that will allow that same exponential growth of our Ahabs and Ishmaels at much less environmental cost. Maybe turning the page to something better is the right lesson to take away.

We’d better hope so.

[WMD London via Born Rich]

They're living in Geos, the first fossil fuel free community in the USA. Coming soon to Arvada, Colorado, the development will feature 250 homes that use solar energy and efficient building technologies to make them completely carbon neutral. An underground geothermal exchange system will provide heat and hot water during the winter and cool air during the summer. It's an ambitious, awesome project, one we hope to see replicated all over the country.

Geos, via Geos

Nocera and Matthew Kanan developed a catalyst which produces oxygen and hydrogen from water when electricity is run through an electrode, mimicking photosynthesis at room temperature with common materials. Though it works with any power source, its application is perfect for converting the sun's energy to fuel. From Physorg:

"This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind," said Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London. "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem."

Although similar technologies already exist, they are expensive and require lab-like conditions to operate.

Photo: MIT/NSF

Scientists mimic essence of plants' energy storage system [PhysOrg]

Continue reading Video: MIT develops solar storage "nirvana": energy crisis solved?

Create little dino fossils to "find" in your cup with the Fossiliced fossil ice moulds from Fred. Sadly, there are only two dino versions available. But still fun!

Via nerd approved Tags: fossiliced, fossil ice, dino, dinosaur, ice, ice mould, ice maker

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I surely can't be the only one sweltering on a 90 degree day and thinking to myself that I really wish the crystalized fossils of some miniature velociraptors were crackling in my gin and tonic. $14.99? Oh, fine, if you insist. But you'd better throw in some frozen cavemen for free.

Fossiliced [Perpetual Kid via Nerd Approved]

I’ve always wanted to be a bike messenger. It seems so cool - riding around fast in the city, dropping stuff off, getting fit, making a little money, going to special bars where you sit with other messengers and talk about gears and stuff. Well, it looks like my dream will never be realized simply because the Internet is forcing many companies to shut down simply because it’s easier to send a PDF than to hire a sweaty guy to carry it across town for you.

“There is really not much left. It’s dying,” says Matt Flores, co-owner of Wheels of Justice, a San Francisco courier service. Flores recently halved his full-time bikers — “document clerks,” as he calls them — from eight to four. His top runner earns $50,000 a year, he says.

I know that messengers still ply the streets of New York but bike messengers specifically are a dying breed. The last few services I’ve seen have either driven vans or motorcycles, proving that pedal power is no match for fossil fuels and the “Send” button.