Melissa asks: > This sounds interesting, but I'm having trouble fact-checking it. Who knows > about it? > > http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4133668.ece
Here's a slightly more technical article from a year ago that appeared in Technology Review, an engineering periodical published by MIT: http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=biofuels&id=19128&a= Regardless of the increased prestige of the magazine, you need to be aware of the standard pattern inherent to commercial research. It is simply the nature of commercial innovation that far more projects fail than succeed, and that there is a phase in development where the product under discussion can only be described as "vaporware," a really cool idea, but nothing that you could plug into your computer or your gas tank for years yet. The "vaporware" phase however is a necessary step that occurs once sufficient development has occurred to achieve proof-of-concept, but where investors are now necessary to be attracted. It's at this stage that articles such as these begin to appear in technical and public publications, but whether the discussed product ever actually comes to fruition depends on a great host of things all working well, in essentially the right order. But the most important question that will asked at every stage of development will be: Can this process be ultimately profitable? If the answer appears to be no, it will be abandoned, regardless of how much investment has been put into up to this point, or how much "good" it appears that it might do. Wirt Atmar
