The end of summer is a little depressing, even for 9 to 5ers who have spent much of it inside. There’s a sense that something slipped away--a leisurely sojourn by the beach that never really happened, an outdoors adventure that was postponed indefinitely, or a connection missed.

So I suppose the impending doom of much colder weather--in most of the U.S. anyway--and school-related responsibilities has us feeling a little skeptical about the future. And all this talk of double-dip recessions doesn’t help either.

But there’s definitely something dark in the water, and it’s not oil. On Scientific American’s website, there’s a thoroughly depressing interactive feature packaged as part of their “The End” issue that attempts to catalogue some things that seem likely to disappear in the next 10 or 200 years. Things like copper, water, and most mammals. Almost 18% of mammals look likely to disappear at some point in the near future, for example, which has prompted a comparison between present day species loss and truly catastrophic extinctions like the Permian-Triassic event that obliterated an approximate 90% of species on Earth. Our own species elimination is predicted to be up to 20% by century’s end. Hardly meteoric but deadly nonetheless. Then there’s the limits to our own population. We’re not likely to go away, but the water and food we consume will dip down steadily as resources fade, particularly fresh water.

Then there’s the question of time. An article by George Musser in the same issue of Scientific American discusses a more fundamental eschaton. Einstein, of course, left us with a conundrum. Time draws to a stop at the center of a black hole, or during the collapse of the universe. Yet, according to his theory of general relatively, such singularities cannot occur. As a result, time can’t actually stop, it can only suffer a gradual decay. But this knowledge won’t stop us from speculating on what might happen in the event of an event to end all events.

Scientific American isn’t alone in its doomsday musings. Just last week, Wired Magazine predicted the end of the Internet. The end of oil is a topic touched upon by just about every news major news outlet. 2012 pushed the "doom movie" notch a little higher despite lacking most of the qualities that determine good cinema. Discovery Channel has done its own dramatic analysis of end times by predicting what portions of the planet would perish first once the sun spends all of its fuel and begins expanding. Apparently, we’ll enter the deep freeze shortly before the atmosphere is cooked away, leaving a barren, cold world.

Don’t dwell on it too much, but there’s probably a good reason for this preoccupation. Never mind peak oil: the Earth is already on the downward slide. In 2003, University of Washington researchers noted that the planet is already devolving into a “burned-out cinder” that will be swallowed by the sun. In other words, we’re past middle age, and since we have less than the 4.5 billion years it took use to get this far remaining, it’s best to make good use of our time.

Chances are, however, none of us will see this come to pass as we will have long since used up our natural resources and moved on to greener pastures. And as Thomas Kirkwood points out in yet another feature for “the end” issue at Scientific American, we can’t live forever. So be sure to check your death clock.

A short-lived trend on Twitter was to post an alert of someone’s death, preferably someone well known. For a while this wolf cry worked, shocking folks on the news of David Hasslehoff’s untimely demise and for a brief time vaulting the victim to the top of Google’s Hot Trends.

This time, the victim is a bit of heavyweight: Google itself. According to a widely-read article this week on the virtual pages of Wired Magazine, editor Chris Anderson predicted death of the Web,  the very realm in which Google lives and thrives.

Writers are easily victims of hyperbole, this article is no exception. Anderson himself pointed to a 1996 article that made much the same claim and obviously missed the mark.

This time, the article resonates more fully, as major changes in the cost of certain technologies, most notably telecommunications, memory and lithography, have allowed people to take their data with them on small portable devices.

Unfortunately, interacting with these devices is a bit troublesome without the help of certain, specialized applications. Getting a weather report, for example, is a bit difficult if one uses a mobile browser to access a website built for a widescreen desktop. Better to download a small application for $3.99 that brings Weather.com in a nimble, easy-to-navigate format.

How does this hurt Google? Or, for that matter, anyone else doing business on the web? Well, buying that program sends money to the developer and the vendor, but because it features no Google ads and uses no search engine, Google can’t benefit.

According to Anderson, these apps, which include everything from the Apple store, as well as other services like Netflix, Skype, and old-school TCP/IP protocols like FTP, are on the rise and will dominate the Internet.
I can’t subscribe to this prognosis, however. No other tool takes better advantage of the network started by DARPA in the 1970s than a web browser. Tim Berners-Lee, the R&D Magazine’s 1996 Scientist of the Year, is often credited with the invention of the Internet, but in reality he helped create the World Wide Web, which is also the name he gave to the very first Web browser. He and his team also developed HTTP to serve as an easy way to access information that was posted to networked servers. Of course, there was soon a push to develop the new HTML language so that the content could be presented in a more attractive and easy-to-use fashion. The Web as we know it was born.

As any who have dealt with the command line are aware, the Internet is so much more than what Internet Explorer (or Safari, or Firefox, etc.) can show us. There are a number of other  TCP/IP protocols at work, and machine-level communication is the ocean of while us humans skitter about on the surface. But nothing matches a browser for the ability to easily consume multimedia, and the future will many shapes

The biggest with the Web is that it is a poor place to generate content. The applications we use to create stuff, from Microsoft Word to MapleSim 4, require us to access our personal computers in a generally offline fashion. The browser--via Google, Bing, SaaS, and other cloud solutions--is helping transform this situation, but it’s a clunky solution that’s generally a disservice to users. The Web needs to operate as a virtual operating system, where we can access our files in an instant-on fashion, no matter where we are or what device we are using. The Web doesn’t need to die off. It just needs to adapt.

Late last week, a leaner, if not greener, FutureGen project was approved to the tune of $1 billion, pulled from unallocated Recovery Act spending. Now billed as 2.0, the project adopts a new method, oxy-combustion, and a new top priority.

The original FutureGen, which appeared in 2003 and gobbled $1.8 billion before being cancelled in 2008, focused on a better way to burn coal. But the hurdles were too high and since 2008 the future coal technology in the U.S. had been muddled. The sudden by the U.S. Dept. of Energy announcement reflects how difficult it is to know how to deploy a carbon sequestration scheme correctly. The DOE wants a successful demonstration project, but it also knows that unlike many other projects this one will inevitably come under government scrutiny if things don’t progress quickly. They are going to want some some results by 2015 rolls around.

They’ll probably get them. The DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory recognizes that cost is a driving factor for this project, and have adopted an approach that’s less intensive, involving the retrofit of a 700 MW coal plant Meredosia, Ill., and the addition of a carbon capture unit.

The goals are different now, too. The hope with advanced coal gasification was that we would drastically reduce initial emissions from burning coal. Now, however, the priority to find a method to separate the coal from exhaust gas and pump it underground. For this reason, we can feel good about FutureGen 2.0’s chance, because sequestration is a proven technology that already works in some energy plants. But the expense of separating carbon dioxide from other components is high. Currently, we use amine-based solvents, but FutureGen 2.0 plans to transform coal into flue gas, from which hydrogen can be burned, leaving carbon dioxide.

But it’s still a very expensive process. Compared to conventional coal burning it’s about twice as expensive. The approach reminds me of the hoops that companies who operate in the tar sands of Alberta jump through to pull oil from the ground. In the least invasive method, natural gas is injected underground and burned, liquifying the solution and making it easier to pull the oil out. They get the oil, but they burn enough natural gas each day to supply a day’s electricity needs of millions of homes. Even the oil company executives admit that it’s a wasteful process. But with barrels of oil north of $50 a barrel it’s economically feasible.

The best return on our investment is still clearly nuclear energy, even when considering the associated costs. Wind and solar energy exist only because tax breaks encourage them, and it will be many years before they climb out of the 1% of generation bracket.

The U.S. is a coal-dependent country still, and that infrastructure will not be changed overnight. The best way forward is probably to retrofit existing plants with carbon capture devices. Now that carbon emissions have been tied to a cost structure and climate goals it’s inevitable. But it’s too bad we can’t continue to research a better way to burn the stuff instead of simply trying to get rid of the waste. That’s the approach that helped put the U.S. so far behind other countries in nuclear reactor technology.

Somewhere deep inside U2’s late 1980s album Rattle & Hum a preaching Bono apologizes to the crowd for lecturing them on the evils of apartheid. “Am I buggin’ you? Don’t mean ta bug ya. Okay, Edge, play the blues.”

In a welcome change for the next album, Bono became “The Fly”.

No worries, Bono. At least you are a not a bed bug. Supposedly, 1 in 15 people in America’s largest city, New York, have had to deal with the microscopic pests, which are enjoying a renaissance of sorts. They have claimed the couches and bedding of tens of thousands of people in the NYC area, and are spreading throughout the country. Perhaps they are attracted to all the jobs?

Not likely. They’re just moving back after a long vacation. Remember DDT? Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller was given a Nobel prize in 1948 for figuring out that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane was good for killing arthropods. First synthesized in the 19th century, it and another chemical, chlordane, were largely responsible for kicking the bugs out of bed for good.

In 1962, Rachel Carson released her book Silent Spring. She was to pesticides what Ralph Nader was to cars. Both DDT and chlordane were swiftly removed from use after it was shown to directly harm bird populations as the chemical had the side-effect of thinning eggshells. The likely clincher for its ban in 1972 was the decline in bald eagle populations. Further research suggested that organochlorine compounds, which are toxins, can have potentially serious health effects to humans, possibly causing cancer, diabetes, and endocrine disruption.

Unfortunately, because bed bugs feed on blood and aren’t attracted to bait, they are extremely difficult to eradicate. They can jump aboard clothing or luggage and hitch a ride across town, or across the ocean. The proliferation of international air travel has helped spread them throughout the U.S., and over time bed bugs have also evolved: New York City bugs are 264 times as resistant to a common treatment, deltramethran, than the bugs in, say, Florida.

Before DDT, bed bugs were common throughout the U.S. It’s part of their natural habitat. Aside from some icky bleeding and itchy bites, bed bugs don’t often cause serious disease. But there’s another parasite that hasn’t yet returned to it’s native habitat that does. Malaria is making its own long comeback after being nearly wiped out after World War II. The same DDT that knocked down bed bugs also went a long way to eradicating the parasites that now kill and plague millions in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere with a laundry list of suffering that includes fever, shivering, joint pain, vomiting convulsions, brain damage, vomiting, and anemia.

It was rampant in the U.S., and helps explain why people were fond of vacating Washington, D.C. in the summer because of the heat and the malarial waters of the Potomac.

Wetland draining and vast improvements in sanitation helped tamp down malaria as much as DDT did in many parts of the country. But DDT was largely the reason for the disappearance of malaria in the South by 1951.

Even in Africa, sanitation and containment efforts were working in the early 20th century. Now, the continent is stumbling backward and only investment from outside is keeping casualties down. Treatment has gotten better as drugs containing ancient anti-malarial compounds are administered more effectively. These include the herb Artemisia and quinine (British colonists liked their gin-and-tonics for a good reason). Artemisinin alone can sweep the body clear of malaria, but concern about the potential catastrophe from malaria building resistance to this chemical has prompted the use of partner drugs that finish the treatment started by artemisinin-based compounds.

Experts are worried for good reason. Chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine are no longer effective on common malarial parasites, and in 2009, researchers published the first distinct evidence that malaria is becoming more resistant to the most common treatment: artesunate, which is derived from artemisinin, and mefloquine, a quinine analogue. Their findings, centered on lengthening treatment timelines in Southeast Asia, could spell disaster if resistant strains make their way to Africa.

Worse, we still don’t know how artemisinin works, which complicates efforts to modify the chemical and stay ahead of malarial mutation.

The most unfortunate thing, however, is that when properly used, DDT is effective against malaria. It caused such havoc in the 1950s because, in addition to government use to control disease vectors, farmers were indiscriminately using tremendous amounts of the toxin for agricultural pest control. DDT is apparently still used for agriculture in North Korea, and about 5,000 tons are still legally used worldwide to help control mosquito populations.

Alternative methods should still be aggressively pursued, however. DDT and other organochlorine compounds are still harmful to the environment and because they are hydrophobic, can last up to 30 years. This insolubility means they are prone to concentrating throughout the food chain, showing up on top tier predators.

As our genetic expertise improves, we will someday be able to attack the core of Plasmodium strains and control malaria at the source. Until then, we'll either have to invent a better DDT or simply grin and bear the incursion of the bed bugs. Harmless, they may be, but few critters bug me as much these nasty little things.

Predictably, The Fly is now buggin’ us about malaria. But it’s only a matter of time before bed bugs bug him, too.

Every week, the small plastic bag filled with our collected plastic and metal tidbits—a partial fossil record of the consuming habits two American adults—hits the curb beside the cardboard. In my neighborhood, collection takes place at night to alleviate traffic and ostensibly tamp down crime. It hasn’t prevented anyone from stealing my recycling bin, but at least most of the refuse is gone in the morning, never to be seen again. I imagine it streaming down a conveyor belt at the recycling facility, getting a quick sort with human hands to separate out the metal, then to a giant crusher where its packed for shipping to the post-processing facility.

Unfortunately, my efforts to guide the future of anything stamped with an “arrow triangle” often comes to naught. Plastics, for the most part, don’t recycle well. Constructed as they are from long chains of large polymer molecules, are the red-headed stepchild of recycling efforts. Paper? No problem, just re-pulp. Metal and glass? Add heat. Plastic? Forget it. Big molecules are harder to mix, and melting the stuff causes it to separate into various material phases that are difficult to use.

Most plastic is simply sorted by type, heated to remove impurities and processed as pellets for limited uses (plastic lumber anyone?). Polyolefin materials (HDPE, LDPE, PP) are the best because they are less expensive to reprocess, but chemists are starting to getting a handle on much more difficult types such as PVC. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is, of course, the big culprit for waste, and often the best solution is to simply shred it and find a way to place it into the biggest product stream for PET: fabrics. Clothing made from old PET soda bottles is not so unusual anymore.

That’s not to say plastic isn’t great. It saves effort, time, and untold quantities of paper, wood, and glass. But too much PET is still making its way into landfills, especially after the last recession made an early victim of the recycled plastic market. Recycling programs—while invaluable in keeping plastic out of the conventional waste stream and off the roadside—fool the public into thinking plastic is a zero-sum consumer product. It isn’t. A one-liter bottle of water requires several mega-Joules of energy to manufacture, not to mention three times its volume in water.

One interesting solution is to burn it. Unlike many other plastics, PET is mostly composed of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. Containing the energy equivalent of soft coal it’s probably no worse to burn if done with the proper environmental checks. A stopgap solution at best, I suppose. Plant-based plastics will probably be the future of the industry, and if researchers are successful, we may be able to extend the life of PET and other plastics indefinitely.

For now, plastics manufacturers can help out by improving the labeling system. That familiar “arrow triangle” with the tiny number is well-nigh useless to the general public. If I knew which plastics would go straight to the trash mountain, I could save everyone some time by pre-sorting it.

Talk about conviction. Now that the flow of oil in the Gulf of Mexico is growing and containment efforts are proceeding at a snail's pace, the talk of shutting down the leak through brute force—the nuclear option—has intensified among outspoken pundits, energy experts, and some scientists.

But top officials say “no way”, go so far as to call the proposal “crazy”. As a workable option, though, it’s not all that radical. The force of an explosion of a several kiloton nuclear device, if positioned properly, should snap the well shut.

The logistical problem, discounting the certain public outcry, is where to touch off the device to make sure it works as advertised. According to the few successful efforts by the Russians in the 1960s to extinguish gas-well fires, the detonations were positioned around 1,000 feet underground just meters from the well bore. In the case of BP’s leaking well, the bore is at 6,000 feet. Detonating the device beneath 1,000 feet of rock would theoretically turn the rock to glass, plugging the hole permanently. Is there a risk the blast could simply create a radioactive oil leak, or make the leak even worse? Yes. But even Tony Hayward concedes in his testimony before Congress today that his company has been more successful in rounding up the oil than in stopping the flow. Which is to say, not at all.

BP, of course, has little other choice. The U.S. government would have to be willing to take over the effort for the nukes to appear on the table, and BP would probably go bankrupt before then. But what if it were to come to that? For brief time in the early 1960s Project Plowshare explored the use of nuclear bombs for peacetime activities. At the time, the deleterious effects of airborne radiation were not widely appreciated, and it was thought that, like dynamite, fissile explosions could revolutionize large-scale engineering projects. There were plans in the U.S. to use Peaceful Nuclear Explosions—the name for the official program which had several restrictions, including yields under 150 kT—to accomplish major tasks, like widening the Panama Canal and creating an artificial harbor in Alaska, in the blink of an eye. The Russians, with their transparently named “Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy” program, went further by actually conducting projects like diamond mining (few diamonds, but lots of radiation), river damming (the infamous 140-kT Chagan test that mostly served to anger the U.S.), and seismological shifting for the oil and gas industry (a near calamity when the Volga threatened to flood the explosion chamber).

In the U.S., aboveground tests quickly soured on a public that by then was well aware of the hazards of radiation poisoning, so the tests were realigned to help the energy industry by stimulating the flow of natural gas in difficult deposits. The first such test, Project Gnome, was a failure after the desired flow didn’t appear and the public expressed some understandable reservations over being supplied with radionuclide-laced gas. There were subsidiary experiments. The effort to pipe water through the superhot cavity to generate steam for electricity was inspired by the finding that 30% of the energy released by the bomb was converted to heat in the rock, but rapid cooling would kill the steam generation quickly. Another aim to recover useful radionuclides at the explosion source was also impracticable.

But the seismological portion of the experiment was considered a success, and Project Gnome, believe it or not, pointed the way to a theory that a bomb could be used to reduce the viscosity of oil in the Athabascan Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada, and aid recovery. Obviously, that theory was never explored as Project Plowshare fizzled. This was probably fortunate as the Russians met with calamity after calamity. Even now, natural gas wells near the Nevada Test Site have to skirt around radioactive cavities created by hundreds of nuclear tests.

If we want to plug the well tomorrow, a nuclear blast is the best way to get it done. But peacetime nukes have too much liability. The U.S. has signed numerous treaties that would stay its hand, even if it were in charge of the oil recovery and leak stoppage effort, which it isn’t. And we must consider the 3.1-kT Project Gnome, which created radioactive leaks despite being detonated more than 1,100 feet underground. We can’t discount the fact that nobody has ever bothered trying to detonate a nuke under nearly a mile of ocean.

The option of using a Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb—a conventional explosive—to collapse the well pipe has also recently been floated. But again, the risk of worsening the leak and destroying the borehole is high. Higher, perhaps, than with a nuclear bomb.

This much is clear, however. If the relief well and cap strategy works—and some say a relief well has a 95% chance of neutralizing a leaky well—we will have a dodged a bullet. And a potential nuclear calamity on top of an oily one. Just give it some time.

Space tourism has already enjoyed a nearly 10-year run with steady business (only seven customers, but at $20-35 million apiece). Most of us will never get the opportunity, but we might be able to soon own a piece of the action if space entrepreneur Elon Musk is ready for shareholder meetings. Camille Ricketts of the blog Green Beat thinks it’s one way for the entrepreneur to keep the wheels turning and the rockets burning on his high-flying SpaceX and Tesla ventures.

According to Musk, SpaceX is profitable with more than $2.5 billion in orders for satellite launches and a strengthening relationship with NASA. Tesla has been selling steadily, too, and the Model S 4-door electric luxury car is taking shape.

The problem, however, is that one-time billionaire Musk needs $1 billion to complete his launching system for manned LEO flight. He is claiming his companies are not looking for additional investors, nor are they liable to get cash from a government not yet willing to directly support privatize space ventures. Given the current political climate, it’s probably unwise for Musk to even think about going after more government funding. Unfortunately, Musk is running out of his own cash and development costs on cars and rockets probably burn cash faster than his Merlin engines burn liquid hydrogen.

With the biggest pieces of the puzzle still waiting to fall in place, Musk’s companies are in a delicate situation. Now that PR is generally positive on both Tesla and SpaceX (especially after a successful recent Falcon 9 flight), the time could be right for an IPO.

Musk is used to being in control. Being harnessed to stock prices (perhaps exacerbated by the volatility of his own business) could hamper the quick movements that have brought him success. Clearly, his instinct is to pursue partnerships. In addition to NASA, he has sought to purchase the NUMMI plant from GM and Toyota to accelerate Tesla production, and has doubtless pursued many collaborations with aerospace leaders for SpaceX (rumor has it Lockheed Martin).

Unlike PayPal, Musk is in SpaceX (his dream company) and Tesla for the long haul. He’ll need to radically alter his own business methods, or entrust company leadership to others more in tune with a public firm.

If only the launch platform were ready, he could start raising money tomorrow with regular trips for tourism to the International Space Station.