Washington State University is working to research the viability and impacts of growing, refining, transporting and using plant based aircraft fuel in the Pacific Northwest through a new partnership called the "Sustainable Aviation Fuels Northwest" project. The six-month project is intended to address issues related to commercial viability and the full environmental impacts involved with using biomass sources indigenous to the Pacific Northwest. Joining WSU in the project is Alaska Airlines, Boeing, Portland International Airport, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and Spokane International Airport.

In a similar announcement, The University of Queensland in Australia is also working with Boeing and other companies to develop a major aviation biofuel project in Brisbane. The project is also called the “Sustainable Aviation Fuel Initiative” and includes over 2 million in funding.

Do you think this research will lead to breakthroughs that will help reduce those elusive scope 3 emissions from air travel or, will it only lessen the ultimate impacts of flying marginally? Will this help to strengthen local communities and agriculture? I am interested to hear what you think! Do you know of any other relevant initiatives and research happening in this area? Post up!

Additional resources:
US research:
Northwest aviation leaders aim to develop a regional biofuel industry (Oregon Live.com)
Transportation And Aviation Leaders Launch Sustainable Biofuels Initiative (Alaska Airways press release)
WSU’s website on Clean Technologies has more information regarding the research.
Also of interest may be this brief audio news report available from KPLU in Seattle.

Australia:
Biofuels research looks to the future of flying (University of Queensland press release)
Australian Biofuels research looks to the future of flying (Nanotechnology News)

• $3.80 in change, mostly quarters from the late 1970s

• One vial with gold dust from the “pan for gold” attraction at Knotts Berry Farm, an amusement park in Buena Park, California

• A small folded booklet with the Los Angeles Dodgers schedule for the 1980 season

• 68 baseball cards from 1978-1980, mostly of players who were already famous in 1980 (Reggie Jackson, Steve Garvey, Mike Schmidt, etc.)

• The Haunted Fort, book #54 in The Hardy Boys series by Franklin W. Dixon

• A copy of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson that was undoubtedly already starting to decay before I put it in the time capsule, taken from my parents’ shelf; my Great Aunt Janet’s maiden name is scrawled inside

• The sports section of the Los Angeles Times from May 17, 1980, with a lead story highlighting the heroics of the Lakers rookie Magic Johnson in a playoff game against Julius “Dr. J” Erving and the Philadelphia 76’ers.  The story begins like this:

“When they erect a statue of Magic Johnson in some prominent location in L.A., as they surely will soon, chiseled on the pedestal will be Magic’s favorite saying: ‘It’s winnin’ time.’  That’s what time it was Friday night in the Spectrum when Magic, a 20-year-old rookie, led the Lakers to one of the true upsets in National Basketball Assn. playoff history, a 123-107 win over the 76ers.”

• 40 issues of Sports Illustrated from 1979-1980, including this one (Orioles manager Earl Weaver on the cover), this one (Willie Stargell and Terry Bradshaw), this one (Larry Bird as an Indiana State student) and this one (Earvin “Magic” Johnson as a Michigan State student)

• 20 comic books featuring The Incredible Hulk (5), Captain America (4), Superman (2), Howard the Duck (2), John Carter, Warlord of Mars (2), Batman, Red Sonja, The Flash, Doctor Strange, and Dracula

• A note signed by me, dated Saturday, July 12, 1980:  “Tonight I seal the time capsule I have spent a month preparing.  The Presidential election is 4 months away.  Hostages have been held in Iran for 251 days.  Enjoy the contents of this time capsule.  They have monetary value, and value to those who read—and remember.”

Google’s Open Spot Android app lets people leaving parking spots share the information with others searching for parking nearby. Running the app shows you parking spots within a 1.5km. New parking spots are assumed to be gone after 20 minutes and removed from the system.

People who announce open spots gain karma points, while those who report false spots, known as griefers, are on notice:

“We’re watching for behavior that looks like a griefer spoofing parking spots. We have a couple of mechanisms available to make sure someone can’t leave a bunch of fake parking spots. If we see this happening we will take steps to fix it.

This is a simple example of a context-aware mobile app that can further benefit from also knowing that you are driving, as opposed to riding, in your car and likely to want to find a parking spot, as opposed to doing 70mph on I-95 as it goes through Baltimore.

AASHE is preparing to publish the third edition of its semi-annual Global Edition. From harvesting rainwater in India to the development of a sustainability office in Switzerland, the AASHE Bulletin: Global Edition covers the continued strides made by college and university campuses around the globe toward sustainability. Institutions from more than 15 countries were represented in the February 2010 issue and AASHE would like to hear what your institution has been up to since then.

We invite press releases and news article suggestions for inclusion in the upcoming issue, slated for a mid-August release. Topics include green buildings, climate and energy initiatives, new educational programs, waste reduction efforts and more. To submit an item for consideration, email a hyperlink to the news story or press release that is posted online to bulletin@aashe.org with the subject line, “global edition.” The deadline for submissions isAugust 1, 2010.

Please review the Global Edition Submission Guidelines before sending articles.
 

The secret message included in the USCYBERCOM logo

     9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a

is what the md5sum function returns when applied to the string that is USCYBERCOM’s official mission statement. Here’s a demonstration of this fact done on a Mac. On linux, use the md5sum command instead of md5.

~> echo -n "USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, \
    synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the \
    operations and defense of specified Department of \
    Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when \
    directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace \
    operations in order to enable actions in all domains, \
    ensure US/Allied \ freedom of action in cyberspace and \
    deny the same to our adversaries." | md5
    9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a
    ~>
    

md5sum is a standard Unix command that computes a 128 bit “fingerprint” of a string of any length. It is a well designed hashing function that has the property that its very unlikely that any two non-identical strings in the real world will have the same md5sum value. Such functions have many uses in cryptography.

Thanks to Ian Soboroff for spotting the answer on Slashdot and forwarding it.

Someone familiar with md5 would recognize that the secret string has the same length and character mix as an md5 value — 32 hexadecimal characters. Each of the possible hex characters (0123456789abcdef) represents four bits, so 32 of them is a way to represent 128 bits.

We’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to compute the 128 bit sequence that our secret code corresponds to.