SOLAR HOMES COMPETE IN WASHINGTON

       For the past week on the National Mall in Washington, international crews have been dusy putting up structures for an event showcasing a radiant source of energy that some once revered as a god.
       The Solar Decathlon, a biennial event that began last Thursday, puts modular, solar-powered homes through 10 tests to determine which is the new sun king.
       Over the course of a week, teams of students from Canada, Germany, Spain and the United States will take part in competitions judging the houses they designed and built for everything from aesthetics to engineering to whether the water heating system can meet a couple's hot water needs.
       Judges will determine whether the houses are properly fitted out with the modern conveniences most Westerners cannot live without, and whether the appliances consume less energy than those in the average US home.
       The houses displayed on the Mall, the sprawling grassy esplanade between the US Capitol and the Washington Monument, are restricted to a footprint of 800 square feet or 74.3 square metres and are supposed to target a specific market.
       Scores of teams applied to compete in this year's decathlon, but only 20 were accepted, including Team Beausoleil from the University of Louisiana which built a house inspired by Cajun culture and facts of life in the southern US state, such as hurricanes. The 14-centimetre insulated walls can resist winds of 209 kilometres per hour, and the insulation would also "cut your energy rate by about half if the house's solar panels were not producing for the home," said Catherine Guidry, one of the sutdents working on the home.
       The house featured a porch - almost a requirement in laid-back Louisiana - with moveable doors so it can be closed off on all sides or open on two sides. Plants indigenous to Louisiana thrived in planters in the small garden.
       "We wanted it to feel like Louisiana from the inside and outside," Guidry said.
       Team Germany, winner of the 2007 decathlon, has reconstructed a house whose exterior walls and louvered windows are covered with small integrated solar panels.
       Like the Spanish team's abode, which features a large, raised moveable solar panel on the roof, the house was shipped across the Atlantic Ocean for the competition.
       The entry from Cornell University students in New York state features three corrugated steel cylinders and walls insulated with five inches of soy-based foam and sy-lights in all three cylindrical rooms.
       The house is visually striking and, according to Cornell architecture student Chris Werner, can hold its own in a new category in this year's decathlon - the "net metering" contest, which measures the energy a house produces for or takes from the electricity grid during the competition.
       Even the heat that gets trapped in the structure's steel exterior is used to heat water, said Werner.
       And when Cornell put its house through its paces at last month's New York state fair, it achieved "net-zero or better the entire time", meaning it is efficient enough to not require energy from the grid, according to Werner.
       After two years of work on their houses plus nearly two weeks of constructing and competing, the winners will take home "bragging rights and lots of good feelings about the last two years of our lives", he said.
       They will also take home a little culinary insight into the regions represented by other competitors because the "home entertainment" category of the decathlon requires teams to cook dinner for members of rival line-ups.
       The German team's menu will feature dumplings known as knoedeln, but no sauerkraut, said Sardika Meyer, a spokeswoman for the team.
       No German beer either - alcohol is banned at the competition.
       The University of Arizona team, whose house is made up of four modules that look like glass-domed funicular railway cars, plans to treat guests to tamales - the Mexican answer to chapatis - filled with dried, sharedded beef known as "machaca" and a cactus salsa.
       Team Beausoleil will serve up Louisiana specialities, including gumbo and bread pudding - but has ditched the idea of serving fried alligator.
       "We thought it might scare away the neighbours," said Geoff Gjertson, the team's faculty advisor.

"Alien" star promotes gorilla rescue project in DR Congo

       Actress Sigourney Weaver said on Saturday that orphaned gorillas desperately need a permanent rescue and rehabilitation centre that's currently being built in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
       The Gorilla Rehabilitation and Conservation Education Center (Grace) is set to open in March, about a year after construction began. It's a joint project of the Atlanta-based Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and several other organisations.
       Fossey, a Californian who was killed in 1985, made researching and rescuing the African gorilla population her life's mission. She lived among the rare mountain gorillas and observed their behaviour over roughly 10 years at Karisoke, a research camp she established in Rwanda.
       Ms Weaver played Fossey in the 1988 movie Gorillas in the Mist and is honorary chair of the fund. While filming, Ms Weaver said she spent many days with gorillas.
       "These little gorillas just steal your heart. They're very sensitive creatures,"she said."So it's no surprise that this is a very demanding and ambitious project,the Grace Center, but we need it."
       Ms Weaver was at Atlanta's Woodruff Arts Center Saturday to talk about the project.Gorilla's in the Mist will be shown on a big screen for the first time in about 20 years at Woodruff on Oct 17 as part of fundraising efforts.
       The centre will house orphaned gorillas who may have behavioural, develop mental, physical or psychological problems after being rescued from poachers.
       Ms Weaver said the centre aims to care for and rehabilitate the gorillas to the point that they may be able to survive in the wild, instead of living out their lives in captivity.
       The other organisations partnering with the gorilla fund in this project are the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance, Disney's Animal Kingdom, the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the national park authorities of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.

PRESERVING THREE NATURAL LEGACIES

       Vichit Phanumphai, a traffic/highway engineer specialising in safety, wrote to ask my opinion concerning the 100-year-old trees in the Sanam Chandra Palace compound in Nakhon Pathom.of proper care," he wrote."According to the gardeners I talked to a few weeks ago,the trees are not allowed to be pruned.
       "One large tree in particular near the dog sta
tue needs some urgent remedial care."
       Sanam Chandra Palace is about one kilometre from Nakhon Pathom's majestic golden pagoda, the Phra Pathom Chedi.King Rama VI had the palace built so he could have a place to stay when he visited the pagoda and watch the combat practice of his elite Wild Tigers Corps, a paramilitary troop.
       The palace comprises five buildings and a shrine for the Hindu god, Ganesh. In front of King Rama VI's Chaleemongkolasana residence, a tiny castle built in combined French and English styles, is a statue of the king's loyal dog, Yalae. Silpakorn University now uses part of the 136-hectare compound as its campus, but the palace grounds and its buildings, which have been turned into museums, are open to the public.
       To have an idea of what Mr Vichit was talking about, my son drove me down to Nakhon Pathom, some 56km south of Bangkok, last Sunday. The Sanam Chandra Palace compound is shaded by many trees,mostly rain trees and mahoganies, several of which were planted when the palace was built 100 years ago. Many showed signs of proper pruning, but as I went deeper into the compound I saw huge, old trees that had been taken over by strangler figs, or had dead branches or trunks that needed urgent surgery work. One tree was still standing but already dead.
       The palace compound has 35 gardeners,and four of them were pruning a mediumsize Lagerstroemia tree. When asked why the Lagerstroemia was being pruned while the old rain trees which needed proper attention seemed to be neglected, they said they were allowed to prune the young trees, but not the old ones.
       "We are waiting for the go-ahead from our boss. He has already asked for permission from Bangkok, but so far hasn't received any reply," one of them answered."We dare not cut down even that dead tree without permission."
       The tree that Mr Vichit was most con-cerned about is a huge rain tree, one of three that flank the Chaleemongkolasana residence. But it is not alone, as two, and possibly all three, need urgent remedial care.
       Two of the trees have been eaten to the core by termites, which have built anthills inside the trees' cavities. A more concerned caretaker would not have allowed the trees to deteriorate this far, and when asked what they thought about it, the gardeners said they had no choice but to let the trees die.
       Not many people in Thailand see the aesthetic if not the historical value of old trees. The palace grounds, and certainly the Chaleemongkolasana residence, would not be the same without the trees, which have provided them shade for more than 100 years.
       The rain trees heralded a different era,when Thailand was still called Siam, and without the trees the old atmosphere of the palace grounds would be gone; it would be akin to an old palace museum showing modern things that do not have a historical meaning.
       In fact, the trees are still holding out and need not die if they are given proper care and maintenance now. First, the termites must be eradicated. There are a number of do-it-yourself termite control products -termiticides, baits, aerosols,insecticides, dusts - but it might be better to seek the services of a termite control professional.
       After the termites have been eradicated,scrub out the termite mound and dead wood from the trees' cavities before applying a fungicide such as copper sulphate on the wound. Fill up the hollow cavity with brick and mortar; it might be necessary to use a piece of chicken wire mesh to strengthen the structure. Fill up the mesh's holes with cement until the tree's cavity is fully covered and then apply paint, if desired, to make the cemented part blend with the colour of the bark.
       The trunks of old trees sometimes have fissures where rainwater and old leaves collect until they rot, killing the surrounding wood and forming a hollow cavity. These should be treated the same way, whether they contain termites or not.
       The work does not stop there. The trees must be monitored regularly to make sure the termites have not come back and invaded the roots instead.
       Actually, termites feed on dead wood and for them to establish clay mounds in the cavities of trees means that the old trees at the palace compound have been neglected for a long time. To be fair, one of the trees beside the Chaleemongkolasana residence showed signs of surgery, but the mortar had been pushed out by the clay mound or anthill.
       It's as if there had been a change of caretaker; one looked after the trees well,but after he left he was replaced by someone who couldn't care less, or who needed someone else's permission before he did anything, to the detriment of the trees.

Borlaug, who saved millions from hunger, dies

       Scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug rose from his childhood on an Iowa farm to develop a type of wheat that helped feed the world, fostering a movement that is credited with saving up to 1 billion people from starvation.
       Borlaug, 95, died last week from complications of cancer at his Dallas home, said Kathleen Phillips, a spokesman for Texas A&M University where Borlaug was a distinguished professor.
       "Norman E. Borlaug saved more lives than any man in human history," said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN World Food Programme."His heart was as big as his brilliant mind, but it was his passion and compassion that moved the world."
       He was known as the father of the "green revolution", which transformed agriculture through high-yield crop varieties and other innovations,helping to more than double world food production between 1960 and 1990.Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.
       "He has probably done more and is known by fewer people than anybody that has done that much," said Dr Ed Runge, retired head of Texas A&M University's Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and a close friend who persuaded Borlaug teach at the school."He made the world a better place - a much better place."
       Borlaug began the work that led to his Nobel in Mexico at the end of World War II. There he developed diseaseresistant varieties of wheat that produced much more grain than traditional strains.
       He and others later took those varieties and similarly improved strains of rice and corn to Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa. In Pakistan and India,two of the nations that benefited most from the new crop varieties, grain yields more than quadrupled.
       His successes in the 1960s came just as experts warned that mass starvation was inevitable as the world's population boomed.
       "More than any other single person of his age, he has helped to provide bread for a hungry world," Nobel Peace Prize committee chairman Aase Lionaes said in presenting the award to Borlaug in 1970."We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace."
       But Borlaug and the Green Revolution were also criticised in later decades for promoting practices that used fertiliser and pesticides, and focusing on a few high-yield crops that benefited large landowners.
       Borlaug often said wheat was only a vehicle for his real interest, which was to improve people's lives.
       "We must recognise the fact that adequate food is only the first requisite for life," he said in his Nobel acceptance speech."For a decent and humane life we must also provide an opportunity for good education, remunerative employment, comfortable housing, good clothing and effective and compassionate medical care."
       Borlaug also pressed governments for farmer-friendly economic policies and improved infrastructure to make markets accessible. A 2006 book about Borlaug
       is titled The Man Who Fed the World .Norman Ernest Borlaug was born March 25,1914, on a farm near Cresco, Iowa, and educated through the eighth grade in a one-room schoolhouse.
       He left home during the Great Depression to study forestry at the University of Minnesota.While there he earned himself a place in the university's wrestling hall of fame and met his future wife, whom he married in 1937. Margaret Borlaug died in 2007 at the age of 95.
       After a brief stint with the US Forest Service, Norman Borlaug returned to the University of Minnesota for a doctoral degree in plant pathology. He then worked as a microbiologist for DuPont, but soon left for a job with the Rockefeller Foundation. Between 1944 and 1960,Borlaug dedicated himself to increasing Mexico's wheat production.
       In 1963, Borlaug was named head of the newly formed International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre in Mexico, where he trained thousands of young scientists.
       Borlaug retired as head of the centre in 1979 and turned to university teaching,first at Cornell University and then at Texas A&M, which presented him with an honorary doctorate in December 2007.
       He remained active well into his nineties, campaigning for the use of biotechnology to fight hunger. He also helped found and served as president of the Sasakawa Africa Foundation, an organisation funded by Japanese billionaire Ryoichi Sasakawa to introduce the green revolution to sub-Saharan Africa.
       In 1986, Borlaug established the Des Moines, Iowa-based World Food Prize,a $250,000 award given each year to a person whose work improves the world's food supply.
       He received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honour given by Congress, in 2007.
       He is survived by daughter Jeanie Borlaug Laube and her husband Rex; son William Gibson Borlaug and his wife Barbie; five grandchildren and six greatgrandchildren.

Wetlands once more

       Project temporarily floods agricultural fields to restore declining shorebird habitat and boost crops
       The request struck Dave Hedlin,a farmer in Washington's fertile Skagit Valley, as particularly odd - conservationists wanted him to voluntarily flood his fields.
       Most of us have spent our entire lifetimes trying to keep water off the land,said Hedlin, whose farmlands are nestled among inlets, bays and estuaries in the shadow of the snow-capped Mount Baker Volcano.
       But he decided to take part in a pilot project run by the Nature Conservancy,which temporarily floods agricultural fields to restore shorebird habitat.
       The flooding would be part of his farms regular crop rotation, and in theory would pay for itself by filling the fields with natural fertiliser, drowning diseasecausing bacteria in soil and boosting crop yields.
       In turn, the wetlands would again become a rest and refuelling station for migratory shorebirds between their Arctic breeding grounds and southern winter retreats.
       Of the 53 shorebirds that breed in North America, more than half are at grave risk, according to the US Shorebird Conservation Plan, a programme run by a coalition of public and private organisations.
       After three years, early results suggest that the project is working: fifteen shorebird species have returned to the restored wetlands.
       So far, three participating farmers have been happy with the experiment,including Hedlin, who said that he has not suffered financially.
       Before the valley was converted to agriculture at the beginning of the 20th century, its wetlands had teemed with crustaceans, fish and bugs.
       But since the wetlands became farmlands, most of the 50,000-some birds that visit each year feed in the nearby estuaries instead.
       "We've totally changed this landscape," said Julie Morse, an ecologist with the Nature Conservancy in Mount Vernon, also in the Skagit Valley.
       "It used to be tidally influenced, but now it is very much a dyked system."
       The Skagit Valley project is modelled after a 10-year-old walking wetlands concept in the Klamath Basin of southern Oregon and northern California, where farmland within a wildlife refuge is placed on a wetland rotation.
       Laura Payne, a wildlife ecologist based at the University of Washington in Seattle,called the project an innovative collaboration between farmers and conservationists.
       "This idea has the potential for wide application, and I think it is absolutely relevant," Payne said.
       If the project is successful, the Nature Conservancy plans to replicate the walking wetlands concept on farms throughout migratory-shorebird flyways, which extend from the Arctic to Central and South America.
       "Loss of wetlands in coastal areas for farming has happened all around the world, so it could be implemented anywhere," the Nature Conservancy's Morse said.
       The three Skagit Valley farmers,including Hedlin, who signed up to participate in the project have also helped shape it.
       "They asked for advice first off, instead of telling us what they wanted to do,"Hedlin said.
       The team hatched a plan to flood select fields with a thin sheet of water no more than 4in.(10cm) deep - an ideal level for shorebirds for three years.The plots stayed flooded for the entire experiment.
       Doing so required the farmers to build berms to prevent water from flooding their neighbours land.
       Preliminary results of the first three years suggest a partial success.
       In the first year,15 species of shorebirds used the flooded fields, and only two shorebird species used the grazed and green-chop fields pointing to a possible ecological benefit of the flooded parcels.
       "The Nature Conservancy team has no data on how many shorebird species historically visited the wetlands, and only about three species had been spotted after the conversion to agriculture. So the team was pleased to see 15 species return," Morse said.
       But by the second year, cat's tail in the flooded fields were more than 15 feet (5m) tall, which proved too difficult for the shorebirds to navigate. That year only eight shorebird species visited the fields.
       "It is pretty amazing that you let nature go and it [returns to a native state] that quickly," the Nature Conservancy's Morse said.
       The conservationists are now considering plans to actively manage the flooded fields to keep them primed for shorebirds.
       Farmers also saw a financial benefit:Nitrogen levels in the flooded fields increased on average by 50 pounds (23kg)per acre (0.4 hectare), which means that farmers may have spent less money on fertiliser.
       Hedlin, the farmer, said he used the three-year flood to transition his field to organic, as fields have to sit fallow for three years for organic certification.
       "We had a positive experience and didn't go backward financially," Hedlin said. The Nature Conservancy's Morse is now comparing how much money is gained on a grazed field versus a green chop field versus a flooded field.
       "The big thing that we are doing that they haven't done in the Klamath is really trying to quantify how much value it provides to the farmers and how much [shorebird] habitat it provides," Morse said.
       "And were comparing the ecological benefits of those three habitats as well,"she added.
       Mark Colwell, a wildlife biologist at Humboldt State University in Arcata,California, praised the projects innovation.
       "But helping migratory shorebirds bounce back is not easy," Colwell said.
       Habitats such as the Skagit Valley and the Klamath Basin can be thought of as links in a chain along the migratoryshorebird flyway.
       You can do stuff at a series of links in the chain up and down the flyway, but if at one site there's a serious problem there, well, the whole population could plummet.
       Nevertheless, Colwell added, enough of these projects spread out along the flyway could help birds find enough food over the courses of their annual migrations.
       The University of Washington's Payne noted that migratory shorebirds are opportunistic, particularly along inland flyways where wetland conditions are unpredictable.
       "They know a good habitat when they see one, such as a normally dry area that floods in a particularly wet year,"Payne said.
       Alternative habitats such as temporarily flooded fields, she said, suits this group of species.

Sound familiar?

       Your TOT crossed its heart and hoped to die if it fails to have actual third-generation mobile phone service in a little corner of Bangkok before New Year's Eve; Vichien Narkseenuan, the firm's senior executive president for vice, said he expects to sign a deal Real Soon Now with a socalled mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that will carry the TOT service,although no names, please; Mr Vichien promised "about" 500,000 numbers would be available; real yuppiephone networks scoffed at the TOT offer to let them in on the deal, because they fear that if they rent a network now, the National Telecommunications Commission won't let them bid for a licence to run their own 3G services.
       Vichien Narkseenuan, the senior executive president of vice for your TOT ,said that the state monopoly plans to open a third-generation (3G) phone service with 100,000 numbers, and serving the entire country; TOT has no intention of building its own base stations,though, and will rent them from real phone companies; Mr Vichien forgot to mention when this nationwide 3G service might start for the lucky 100,000.
       The National Telecommunications Commission announced it will open public hearings on third generation phones next Monday; Prasert Aphipunya, secretary in charge of vice for the NTC, said you should bring along a large truck load of money if you want to start the bidding for licences, say,oh, somewhere around 10 billion-witha-"b" baht; after next weeks' hearing,there will be a notice in the Royal Gazette ,and actual bidding for four (and only four) available licences may open as early as December; rules on all of this should be up on the NTC's website by now at www.ntc.co.th.
       For the third time in a row, the strug-gling TT&T company won a multibillion-baht lawsuit against your TOT and for the third time in a row your TOT told them to pound sand; this time,an agree-upon arbitrator decided that TOT owed the up-country phone provider 2.3 billion baht in misguided revenue sharing for long distance calls;but TOT president Varut Suvakorn rejected the arbitration and told TT&T,"See ya in court, boys"; in case the Administrative Court rules against TOT yet again, Mr Varut said he was pretty sure the state firm didn't have that kind of money to pay off anyhow; TT&T explained that lawsuit number four is about to be filed.
       No 2 yuppiephone firm DTAC of Norway opened its new headquarters in new Chamchuri Square , bragging that it spent one billion baht on the 19-floor (!) digs; all 3,200 DTAC employees relocated from the Chai Building to the new location at the Sam Yan intersection,overlooking Chulalongkorn University;CEO Tore Johnsen signed a 10-year lease for the 61,160-square-metre office,which includes the firm's main call centre; Mr Johnsen said new staff will work harder to pay the extra rent money; the kicker is that DTAC is asking the following price for the Chai Building one billion baht; Mr Johnsen said that DTAC was pressing ahead aggressively on its 3G trials and so on and etc and zzzzzzz.
       Energy Minister Wannarat Channukul, apparently unaware that you can't spell "Thaksin" without "hub", said that Asean should become the energy exporting hub of the world; no, really,his reasoning is that Southeast Asia has so much food that it can make biofuels galore and sell it to the world at Arabesque profits; not only does Southeast Asia (sic) have a lot of extra food to feed the world's cars, it's, well, better "higher yields and more commercially viable for biofuel than corn and beetroot" from the US and Europe; to coin a phrase, in the klongs there are fish and in the fields there are biofuels.
       Energy Minister Wannarat Channukul called in state firms and phuyai of the private sector for a heart-to-heart joint statement that everyone would cooperate on saving energy; this year's spin is that the programme will "save"100 billion baht, and Mr Wannarat got away unchallenged with a claim that a similar project last year saved 30 billion baht; the deal is that the Federation of Thai Industries (FTI) and the Thai Chamber of Commerce (TCC) and so on - 30,000 firms altogether - will work on conservation, purchase green technology and so on, and in return they will get some tax breaks and subsidies on loans taken through the energy services company fund (Esco); the minister is looking for one billion baht to fund Esco this year.

Egat sells off three decommissioned Mae Moh generators

       The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand has sold three decommissioned generators from its Mae Moh power station for 297 million baht.
       Egat sold the 25-year-old generators so it could mine lignite coal located under the units, the assistant director for production at Mae Moh, Polrit Setthakamnerd, said.
       The generators were taken out of service between nine and 10 years ago.
       Thepprathanporn Construction and Recycle Co of Bangkok bought the three generators for 297 million baht on Sept 9 in an electronic auction. Eight other companies meeting Egat's selection criteria participated in the auction.
       Thepprathanporn will remove the plants fromMae Moh compound in 18 months. An Egat source said the com-pany was expected to use the generators at its power plants in Indonesia.
       Egat started building the three generators at the Mae Moh lignite mine in 1975. They began generating and distributing electricity in 1978,1979 and 1981, respectively, Mr Polrit said.
       The first plant was decommissioned on Oct 1,1999, and the other two followed on March 1,2000.
       The three units must be removed by 2011, Mr Polrit said. Mae Moh now has another 10 generating units in operation.
       The power station has been at the heart of an environmental controversy for years.
       Greenpeace in 2004 said the power station released 1.6 million tonnes of sulphur gas into the air every day, making it the largest source of sulphur dioxide in Thailand.