The news was disappointing for the University of North Carolina, Duke University, N.C. State University and RTI International, which make up the Research Triangle Solar Fuels Institute. That was clear when David Myers, RTI’s vice president of engineering and technology, talked to Science in the Triangle the same day the DoE made the announcement.

RTP-area efforts to develop a liquid fuel from sunlight will continue despite the federal funding setback, Myers said. The solar fuels initiative is one of the most active areas of energy research here and a key ingredient in plans to build the Triangle into an energy research hub.

“The area is vastly underrated in the amount of energy research going on,” Myer said.

Watch more of the videotaped Q&A here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

RTI energy lab (Photo courtesy of RTI)

One of the founding members of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium three years ago, RTI has scientists working on projects that include the capture and reuse of carbon dioxide – the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – production of bio-crude from organic waste and a nanotechnology light bulb that promises to be more energy efficient than a fluorescent light and doesn’t contain harmful mercury.

Stimulus funds the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded in the past year to help the economy recover fueled RTI’s stepped-up energy research. Of the institute’s $750 million in estimated revenue this year, energy research will contribute about $12.5 million, said RTI spokesman Patrick Gibbons.

That’s still a small amount, but as Gibbons pointed out during a tour of the Johnson Building last month, “Energy is growing tremendously.” The Johnson Building, which opened four years ago, is home to most of the environmental and energy research on the sprawling, 50-year-old RTI campus. The tour was organized by SCONC, a Triangle-based group of science writers.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is funneling more than $35 billion into research projects nationwide. North Carolina universities, companies and institutes have been awarded nearly $2 billion – about $1 billion from the National Institutes of Health for medical research and more than $800 million from the DoE for energy research, energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

Federal research funding has long been a lifeblood of North Carolina’s universities, particularly in medical research. Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University garnered nearly 80 percent of North Carolina’s share of the $10 billion in stimulus funds the NIH awarded last year. RTI received about $35 million.

The state and the RTP area are not as well known for research into alternative energy and green technologies. About half of North Carolina’s share of the DoE’s more than $25 billion in stimulus funding so far has gone to the state’s two big utilities, Duke Energy and Progress Energy. RTI is involved in about a dozen energy research projects. Half of them were awarded in the past year with DoE commitments of  about $7 million.

RTI had applied for more DoE funding, including a $120 million solar fuels center and a $20 million pilot plant to convert wood waste into liquid hydrocarbon with the help of high temperatures, high pressure and catalysts. The pilot plant was to be located at the N.C. Biofuels Center. But neither project was approved.

A bottle of bio-crude (Photo courtesy of RTI)

Much of RTI’s approved stimulus projects are also related to next-generation biofuels made by exposing cellulose-rich biomass, such as corn stover, wood chips and switchgrass, and other waste, such as hog manure, to high temperatures. Also known as pyrolysis, the technique is heavily used in the chemical industry and turns the waste into a gas or an oily liquid.

“Everything we do is high pressure, high temperature,” said David Dayton, director of the chemistry and biomass program at RTI’s Center for Energy Technology.

The gasified waste, also known as syngas, and the bio-crude must then be cleaned of impurities before they can be processed into liquid fuel. At RTI, researchers are testing a multitude of chemicals, or catalysts, that scrub contaminants.

In the next decade or so, Congress want to see domestically produced biofuels reduce U.S. oil imports by about 30 million barrels per year and eliminate more than 15 million tons of CO2 per year.

RTI researchers are also working on technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. Lora Toy, for example, oversees a project aimed at developing polymer membranes that capture up to 90 percent of the CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants with the goal of increasing electricity costs by less than 20 percent.

On most of these projects, RTI is working with a corporate partner to develop the technology for commercial use.

Here’s the background. Hog production is one of the cornerstones of North Carolina’s agricultural economy, with more than 10 million hogs produced annually in the state, or roughly one pig per person. In recent years, most of these hogs have been raised in indoor operations known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs.

But consumer demand is driving a movement back to pasture-raised pork, and about 100 farmers in the state are responding to the call for hogs raised in natural conditions that many people consider more humane.

Consumers are driving the market for pasture-raised pork. Photo by Lisa M. Dellwo

There’s no doubt hogs raised outdoors are happy, says Silvana Pietrosemoli-Castagni, research associate at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems’ (CEFS) Alternative Swine Production unit. “Outdoor pigs can express their natural behavior,” including foraging, exploring, wallowing, roaming, and rooting, she says, resulting in less stress and therefore stronger immune systems. “Pigs are social animals and in these kinds of systems, they can interact and establish social relationships,” she says.

Silvana Pietrosemoli-Castagni researches ways of mitigating the environmental impact of raising hogs outdoors. Photo by Jennifer Curtis

Raising pigs in pastures also avoids some of the environmental hazards that indoor facilities are notorious for—noxious odors, air pollution, and risks of spills from waste lagoons.

But those happy hogs have the potential to damage the environment, too. The biggest danger is that nutrients from hog waste will reach waterways, causing water quality problems and changing aquatic habitats. This can happen when excessive nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen leach through the soil into the ground water or when the hogs’ natural rooting behavior causes erosion.

According to Jennifer Curtis, who heads NC Choices, a CEFS initiative that promotes sustainable food systems, there is no legal definition of “pasture,” and consumers might be shocked to see the moonscape left behind when mature hogs are removed from a field. Hogs will dig up plants by their roots, while grazing cows would merely mow them.

So how can farmers respond to consumers’ demand for hogs raised humanely while still protecting the environment and remaining profitable? Responding to requests from farmers for better management practices, Pietrosemoli-Castagni and her colleagues are exploring several alternatives:

• reducing stocking density, or the number of pigs raised in a particular paddock.
• using pigs as part of a rotation system in which crops are grown on fields formerly occupied by hogs, to trap and utilize the nutrients in the soil.
• creating buffers between hogs and waterways to protect against runoff.
• moving water and food stations to reduce soil compaction and distribute nutrients from hog waste more evenly.

With their natural rooting behavior, hogs will eventually denude a pasture. Photo by Jennifer Curtis

Rotating hogs with crops helps freshen pastures, keeping hog waste from waterways. Photo by Jennifer Curtis

The research is being conducted at CEFS’s 2000-acre Cherry Research Farm facility near Goldsboro. The farm and CEFS are jointly operated by N.C. State University, N.C. A&T University, and the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. CEFS researchers include soil scientists and veterinarians as well as agricultural specialists studying organic cropping, best practices for small farms, pasture-based dairy farming, and even alternative energy sources for farmers.

The swine unit has been operating since 2004 and also conducts research on raising pigs in hoop houses, a common practice in Europe and in Iowa, the largest hog-producing state. In addition to research, they provide extension services, educating farmers on the best practices they’ve discovered.

So the next time you buy pork, ask your farmer: what steps are you taking to be a good steward of the land?

NCSU's EcoCAR

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption, the NCSU team installed a large lithium-ion battery pack behind the front seats of the crossover SUV. Up front is a diesel engine from an Opel Corsa, a European fuel-sipper, to power the wheels on longer-distance drives.

The NCSU team had less than six months to take the vehicle apart to where only a blue shell remained and rebuild it to specifications they had determined the previous school year.

On May 8, a carrier will pick up the car and take it to the General Motors Desert Proving Ground in Yuma, Ariz., where less than two weeks later it will be judged in more than a dozen technical events against entries of 15 other teams from Canadian and U.S. universities.

Ali Seyam, student team leader

“We lost so many nights together,” said Ali Seyam, one of three graduate student leaders on the NCSU team. To get the car ready, team members sacrificed spring break, he said, and worked until 6 a.m. Saturday.

The EcoCAR Challenge is a three-year competition that was established by the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors. Argonne National Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center for science and engineering near Chicago, manages the competition.

Teams spent the first year designing the technology to build their EcoCAR. The second year was dedicated to rebuilding a GM-donated Saturn View. Following a week of tests in the Arizona desert and three days of presentations in San Diego, Calif., students then optimize and promote their entries during the third year.

The lithium-ion battery pack

At the end of the competition, which is broken down into multiple milestones and deadlines, teams with the best scores in the different categories can win hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

But not just the winners benefit. Participating students interact with mentors in the industry and learn cutting-edge skills. Sponsorships and donations to complete an entry, including the car, parts and software, are worth more than $1 million per team, Terry Gilbert, the faculty advisor for the NCSU EcoCAR team, estimated.

Once the competition is over, the NCSU EcoCAR will become part of the university’s pool of vehicles.

More information about the NCSU EcoCAR team is here and here.

R&D spending as percentage of federal budget, FY 1962-2009

Sure, federal spending on R&D more than tripled in the past 50 years to about $147 billion in fiscal year 2009, as Lane pointed out Saturday in a talk at N.C. State University. But R&D’s share of all federal spending has been shrinking from nearly 12 percent during the height of the Apollo program in the late 1960s to about 5 percent in 2009, according to numbers from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Lane, a professor at Rice University and a senior fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, is particularly concerned about federal funding for research in physics, mathematics and engineering, the disciplines that brought forth computers, the Internet and mobile devices such as the cell phone.

AAAS numbers show that much of the increase in federal R&D spending over the past 30 years has gone to biomedical disciplines. Last year, funding for the National Institutes of Health made up about half of all federal spending for basic research and for R&D that was not aimed at defending the U.S.

Neal Lane

“We do have a president who cares about science,” Lane said. He called the scientists whom President Obama appointed as scientific advisors and government administrators a “terrific team.” But considering the rising federal deficit, budget shortfalls and polarized political leadership, Lane added, “I’m worried that federal research spending will get squeezed.”

Lane visited NCSU on invitation of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, or PAMS, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. But his talk had significance beyond PAMS, even beyond NCSU, one of many U.S. universities tasked with educating tomorrow’s scientists, furthering technological development and feeding the U.S. knowledge economy.

Federal R&D spending is the lifeblood of the entire Research Triangle area, a state economic engine and national R&D hot spot that is known around the world.

Research Triangle Park, which has NCSU, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as its corners, reflects the federal R&D funding evolution that began during World War II. Work to establish RTP began in 1957, the same year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite. The science park opened in 1959, just as the space race between the Soviet Union and the U.S. got under way.

In the past 30 years, RTP’s development has mirrored the shift in federal R&D funding priorities from the space age with its focus on national security to the age of medicine and a new focus on health. Today, first signs are emerging that RTP, which employs more than 40,000, is tapping into the next phase in federal R&D funding, a phase that focuses on renewable energy, reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and technologies that reduce the U.S. dependence on oil.

This phase rests on climate changes that remain controversial even though scientists have tracked them for years.

“The threat of climate change is out there,”  Lane said. “But it’s less urgent than the economy, jobs and health. The message is muddled. There’s some work for us to do out there.”

About 60 percent of all Americans consider public funding for R&D essential, according to a 2009 survey report from the Pew Research Center. More than 70 percent say that government investments in basic research and engineering and technology pay off in the long run.

Despite the broad support, Lane said, “science has never really emerged to be important at the ballot box.”

Scientists have to do a better job conveying this public support to the politicians, he added. “We have to figure out how to be more helpful, how to interact better with the public.”

Where are the scientists and engineers?

Why? Because it could help the U.S. remain a technology exporter in a world where emerging countries such as China and India are gaining ground.

“China is a rising player,” Lane said, pointing to AAAS numbers that show about one-quarter of the world’s 5.8 million scientists and engineers were in the U.S. in 2006. China had about 21 percent and the number was rising, Lane said.

A similar picture is emerging in R&D spending. The U.S. still spends more on R&D than any other country, but Asian countries are turning up the heat.

To bolster his argument that the U.S. is in danger of falling behind, Lane referred to writings by Norman Augustine, retired chairman of Lockheed Martin. In a 2007 essay called “Is America falling off the flat earth?” Augustine quotes UNC President Erskine Bowles:“Think about this: in the past four years, our 15 schools of education at the University of North Carolina turned out a grand total of three physics teachers. Three. And we’re going to compete with those guys in Asia? Come on – not that way.”

Like the other attendees, O’Driscoll and Ward didn’t travel to VWBPE in person. They sat in front of a computer and had their voice-activated avatars teleport to one of 20 specially constructed virtual islands, where the conference took place over 48 continuous hours. Some of the islands resembled the Guilin mountains in China, an Irish seaside cottage and Stonehenge, the famous English prehistoric monument.

Brent Werber

Wada Tripp, O’Driscoll’s avatar, gave a presentation on 3-D learning, which requires students to interact in simulated, or virtual, environments. Brent Werber, Ward’s avatar, moderated a panel at the conference.

O’Driscoll is a professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and Ward provides RTI researchers technical assistance as the research institute’s director of commercialization. Both are professionals holding positions of responsibility, but neither thinks twice about slipping into his “digital sockpuppet,” a computer-generated persona that lives in Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world maintained by Linden Lab of San Francisco.

Wada Tripp

“We’re members of a community who is waiting for the rest of the world to commit to the obvious,” Wada Tripp, a younger looking version of O’Driscoll that speaks with his voice, said at the beginning of the VWBPE presentation. “The immersive Internet is the next wave of the Net,” O’Driscoll himself later added in a phone interview.

How much life is there in virtual worlds?

More and more people around the world are committing to the obvious. The population in virtual worlds such as Second Life has grown to tens of millions in the past decade, which should come as no surprise to those 35 or younger, technology nerds of all ages and anybody who can no longer imagine making a living without the Internet.

Virtual worlds are the product of the same advances in computer technology that brought us Google, eBay and Craigslist. They offer similar benefits: Fast and convenient access to ever more sophisticated information. They come with similar, built-in hurdles: You have to have a computer powerful enough to run the software and you need to adapt to new rules. And they raise similar questions: What should be public and free? What is proprietary and needs to be private and secured behind a firewall?

What’s different about virtual worlds is the out-of-body experience that defies the laws of nature.

Avatars walk, talk, fly and teleport. Some are lookalikes of their real-life counterparts, others are plants, animals or fantasy creatures. They socialize and drink virtual beer, ski on virtual snow and relax on a virtual beach. They meet in virtual conference centers that may look like castles or a moon base. They spend and earn virtual money in virtual economies.

Their virtual worlds are called There, World of Warcraft, Vivaty and Entropia Universe. They use virtual currency such as Therebucks, World of Warcraft gold and Linden dollars that can be converted to real-life currencies like U.S. dollars or euros. Some of the virtual worlds are more game, with guidelines set for role playing. Others are more social world, where avatars are free to be what they want to be.

Launched in 2003, Second Life is one of the most popular virtual worlds.

User-to-user transactions in Second Life topped $500 million in 2009. Its virtual real estate totals about 500,000 acres. Real-life people have full-time jobs in Second Life and some have even become real-life millionaires.

Last month, the Second Life community counted more than 1 million residents – that’s what Linden Lab calls real-life people who go inworld, which means they log in to activate their avatars. More than 1,400 corporations, universities, government agencies and the U.S. military own virtual property in Second Life.

“They’ve got the best game in town right now, if you care about innovation, collaboration, education and community,” Ward said.

Global Research Park

What sets Second Life apart is the ability to build and create content.

RTP goes virtual

Half a year ago, RTI bought some land from Linden Lab and built an island called Global Research Park. The shape of the island mirrors the real-life shape of RTP. Towers rise up in three points of the island to represent Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and N.C. State University. Other structures on the island include buildings for RTI and the Research Triangle Foundation.

Avatars can take a lofty ride in the Wright flyer, complete a real-life survey in the RTI building or teleport to the Story Quest, an island dedicated to HIV/AIDS education.

Marty Snowpaw

Story Quest takes you into the house of Uncle D, where you can listen to his phone messages, read his journal or watch his videos. You can record your reactions and use Facebook, Twitter or Flickr to make these recordings part of the story. Story Quest is the brainchild of Jena Ball, a Los Angeles-based storyteller better known as her avatar, Jenaia Moraine, and Marty Keltz, a former English teacher who co-founded the company that produces the Magic School Bus.

In Second Life, Keltz becomes Marty Snowpaw.

Entering a virtual world as an avatar “sounds so alien,” Keltz said. “But when you do it the worlds become porous. You get a sense of participation. You’re co-creating.”

Lynda Aiman-Smith, an associate professor in NCSU’s College of Management, holds office hours and discusses projects with her MBA students in Second Life. In her management and technology class, she has used it as an educational tool for three years.

DrLAS Emmons

DrLAS Emmons, her avatar, recently took the class on a field trip to the virtual IBM Green Data Center, which sits on one of the Second Life islands in the IBM archipelago. The center is open to the public and staffed 24 hours a day, five days a week. Visiting avatars can learn about energy efficient technologies, solve problems and design solutions for energy and cooling challenges in a data center.

“This wasn’t a computer game,” Aiman-Smith said about the Second Life field trip to the data center. “They were conducting business.”

Duke’s School of Nursing has a presence in Second Life, where students who don’t live in the RTP area can attend class with the help of their avatars. The UNC Center for AIDS Research records HIV 101, a spring course that attracts 400 to 500 students, and provides access to the recordings on Second Life.

Vanie MacBeth

“My hope was to reach a population I wasn’t able to reach otherwise,” said Vanessa White, who manages the community outreach for the UNC Center for AIDS Research. “Second Life was the perfect medium to erase the stigma associated with learning more about HIV/AIDS, because it provides a platform for anonymity.”

White, who is Vanie MacBeth in Second Life, wants to send all HIV 101 students on the Story Quest next year, but the UNC information technology department has to first unblock access to Second Life on campus.

Virtual bothers

Access limitations can be justified despite the rules of conduct that exist in Second Life. There’s a red-light district and even Main Street can be a bit trashy in appearance sometimes.

Also, Second Life isn’t free from bothers, some of them virtual. Just ask Michael Rowe, a gamer who works for IBM Software in RTP.

Big Blue, which has one of the largest corporate presences inworld, got into Second Life in 2006. Rowe was part of a now-dissolved group that tested how well virtual worlds are suited for business and collaboration. One of the projects he worked on was to establish a virtual store for retailer Sears in Second Life.

Ultravox Freeman

As a manager in the group, Rowe made presentations to customers and IBM colleagues in Second Life. During one such virtual presentation a nude avatar suddenly appeared next to Rowe’s avatar, Ultravox Freeman, greeted him and stayed for a while.

“Can you imagine this happening while you’re meeting with a customer?” Rowe said. Luckily, only IBM colleagues attended his presentation, he remembered.

Second Life offered corporations private spaces, sort of like gated communities, in an otherwise public virtual world. Many companies used those private spaces to build virtual prototypes of products. But the privacy didn’t always keep prying eyes away, Rowe said. In a world where the possibilities are only matched by the residents’ creativity, avatars that are locked out of a gated community can detach their eyes and use them as hovering cameras.

“There’s a lot of stuff that still has to be worked on to make virtual worlds Fortune 500 friendly,” Rowe said.

In November, Linden Lab came up with a solution to privacy problems. It launched SL Enterprise, a behind-the-firewall world that cannot be accessed from Second Life. Pricing starts at $55,000, compared to an initial set-up cost of $1,000 to establish a presence in Second Life.

At the launch of SL Enterprise, 14 companies had signed up, including IBM, Case Western Reserve University and The New Media Consortium, an international consortium of universities, museums and companies that are exploring new media as learning tools.

At least one Linden Lab competitor has had a similar idea.

The American Research Institute, a Morrisville software company that employs about 30, came out with its own virtual world learning tool six months ago. It’s secure, custom-built, scenario-based and can be used for meetings and training. The customer determines the ratio of game to social interaction, said Richard Kristoff, chief executive of the American Research Institute.

“It’s not an open, wild Wild West,” Kristoff said. “I didn’t want to create another situation where you had thousands of users and you had out-of-control behavior.”

When the product launched, the American Research Institute didn’t have to explain much. Potential customers had already gained an understanding of virtual worlds from Second Life.

Dan Ariely

To better understand stock markets or economic recessions, Dan Ariely likes to go where push comes to shove.

The Duke University professor is a behavioral economist who’s been in demand since the economy tanked nearly two years ago. The reason for his popularity is in his research.

Ariely looks at things that make no sense: Why does the price of an energy drink determine how many puzzles we solve? Taking a cue from his mother’s job as a parole officer, he also looks at behavior we know can get us into trouble, such as procrastinating and cheating.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether Ariely has an experiment going.

Case in point: At a lecture Wednesday at N.C. State University, Ariely gave me a matchbook, promotional material for his book “Predictably Irrational,” which became a New York Times bestseller when it was published last year.

Inside was a bright orange condom and instructions on how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS. On the back were nice things that George Akerlof and Daniel McFadden, two University of California economics professors, had to say about Ariely’s book.

“It’s the only condom endorsed by two Nobel laureates,” Ariely said without cracking a smile.

His lecture in front of a standing-room-only crowd of about 200 at NCSU was related to the book, which deals with “The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions,” as the subtitle on the cover says. Ariely talked about cheating, another difficult to understand behavior considering it undermines tenets kindergarteners understand, such as fairness and honesty.

Cheating comes in many flavors, including lying, corruption and fraud, and is a big deal in the U.S. Forensic accountants estimate on-the-job fraud costs U.S. businesses more than $600 billion per year. Cheating on tax returns costs the U.S. Treasury at least $250 billion per year. Insurance fraud adds another $24 billion in annual costs.

Ariely said he became curious about cheating in 2001, when the Enron scandal erupted. Lies, shady deals and deception forced the Houston-based energy company into bankruptcy, brought down one of the five largest auditing and accounting firms and cost investors nearly $11 billion.

Since then, more than 15,000 people across the world have participated in experiments Ariely and collaborators conducted to figure out how people cheat. Here are some of the findings:

• The size of the reward and the risk of getting caught don’t influence cheating. “We cheat a little bit, but we can still feel good about ourselves,” Ariely said. He called stretching the limit to where we’re still comfortable with our actions the “fudge factor.”
• Reminding people of their own morality at the time of temptation – before they fill out the tax return or take the exam -reduces cheating. Removing morality – backdating stock options is OK, but taking $100 from petty cash isn’t – increases cheating.
• Bankers cheat more than budding politicians, teen-age boys cheat more than teen-age girls, good storytellers cheat more than people who are less creative and in groups, people cheat more for group members than for themselves.
• Conflicts of interest, created through payments or other forces, make a difference in how people see the world.

Ariely blamed much of the financial meltdown on conflicts of interest, such as debt rating agencies getting paid by banks to assess risks the banks were taking.

“The biggest failure in the market is conflict of interest,” he said.

More on that in a talk Ariely gave in December 2008:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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