When a long time passes quickly, that’s a good sign. When you leave a movie thinking, “I wonder what that meant?”. Suspense without phony fear. Definitely a fine movie. Matt Damon is wonderfully repressed throughout, the only distraction being that I was continually reminded of an old and dear frien...

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Last time, I looked at research on the benefits of harvesting low-input high-diversity prairie plants as a feedstock for bioenergy. This week, practicalities and policies.

Biomass can be burned directly, alongside coal or some other fuel, as a source of energy for heat or power. But unless you’r...

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Start: 95.4 Last week: ??.? This week: 88.5
Tuesday 19 December: Back on a slightly even keel, and about to jet off again for the festive season. So the weighings will go to pot. I hope the weight doesn’t do the same.

Start: 95.4 Last week: ??.? This week: ??.?
Friday 15 December: Is this how it ends, two weeks in a row without a weigh-in and a complete lack of regularity? No, indeed not. But all the signs are there, of much work, much travel, and the impending holiday season. I haven’t had early-morning acce...

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Last year at the Annual General Meeting of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research I don’t believe I heard the word “biomass” once. This year, along with its kissing cousin “climate change,” it was a cold sore on everybody’s lips. For whatever reason—and you can think of as many as I can—these are ideas whose time seems to have come. And by a strange coincidence, two fascinating papers in this week’s Science (as ever hard to access in full for non-subscribers) tackle biomass and bio-energy head on. (They’ve had quite some coverage, but I thought it worthwhile adding a slightly different angle.)

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