Haiti's official seismologist, who predicted the recent earthquake, has warned that an even stronger one is likely to hit Port-au-Prince within the next 20 years. Now the Haitian government is debating how and if the capital should be rebuilt -- or if it should be moved elsewhere.

Claude Prépetit had seen it coming in his figures. He had done the calculations, in millimeters and in centuries, he had calculated the pressure that was building up beneath his feet, and he had estimated the energy that would eventually be discharged. And when the earth finally did shake, and falling concrete ceilings, stone walls and wooden beams killed at least 170,000 people within the space of 40 seconds, that was when Prépetit thought to himself: "This is it -- this has to be a seven."

He had predicted an earthquake with a magnitude of about 7.2 points on the Richter scale, and the actual quake measured 7.0. For years, he had taken precise measurements and performed careful calculations, and he had done his job exceedingly well.

Brazil has approved the controversial construction of a giant hydroelectric dam in the heart of the Amazon, defying a 20-year protest by indigenous and environmental campaigners who say that the project will devastate the surrounding rainforest and threaten the survival of local tribes.

The Belo Monte project on the Xingu river, an Amazon tributary, was started in the 1990s but abandoned amid widespread protests at home and abroad. The rock star Sting led a campaign against the plan with tribal leaders, and revisited Brazil in November last year to urge the Government to consider the impact of deforestation on greenhouse gas levels and global warming.

The $17billion (£11billion) dam in the northern state of Pará will be the world's third-largest and could provide electricity to 23million homes, a supply that the Government says is vital to the country's economic growth. Critics argue that the flooding of 500 sq km of rainforest will damage fish stocks and wildlife and force the displacement of indigenous peoples.

Carlos Minc, the Environment Minister, said on Monday that the land flooded would be a fraction of the 5,000 sq km originally planned. "The environmental impact exists but it has been weighed up, calculated and reduced," he said. "Not one Indian on indigenous land will be displaced."

Reporting from Washington - The Obama administration today will unveil a revamped strategy to ramp up the nation's use of biofuel in hopes of fixing a government effort that officials admit has fallen short in its attempts to wean cars and trucks away from fossil fuels and move toward ethanol, biodiesel and other crop-based fuels.

The new strategy, which the president will outline in an afternoon meeting with Cabinet secretaries and his top energy advisor, seeks to put the United States on track to produce 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022 -- the amount mandated by Congress in the 2007 energy bill.

Study detects predicted wavelike properties during photosynthesis

A dash of sunlight, a sprinkle of light-harvesting proteins and a healthy dollop of carbon dioxide is about all it takes to whip up a batch of tasty plant food -- but you might want some quantum physics to stir the pot. Scientists have caught photosynthetic lake-dwelling algae performing long-lasting quantum tricks at room temperature. The results, published February 4 in Nature, suggest that quantum mechanics may be at the heart of sunlight-to-energy conversion in living organisms.

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Photosynthesis relies on special proteins that absorb incoming photons, or particles of light. These photons excite electrons in the protein, touching off a series of electron transfers that ultimately ferry the energy-laden electrons to centralized collection stations (called photosystems) where the conversion of energy to carbohydrates begins.

Under normal, everyday rules, electrons would make their way to their destinations with quick random hops. But recent studies of photosynthetic bacteria and plants suggest that the electrons might act more like correlated waves instead of hopping particles, a behavior predicted by quantum mechanics (SN: 5/9/09, p. 26). These studies have mainly seen such quantum effects at very low temperatures, where the system is held very still. Scholes and colleagues devised an experiment to see whether these quantum-mechanical wavelike properties were also present at normal temperatures.

The researchers purified the light-catching proteins from two types of photosynthetic algae called cryptophytes. At room temperature, the team shone a laser onto the proteins to excite them and used a second laser pulse to see where the excited electrons traveled. Patterns of long-lasting electron waves -- a property called quantum coherence -- indicated that quantum weirdness was at work.

"This study shows that quantum coherence is present at room temperature," says Graham Fleming, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley -- a result predicted from his lab's previous studies. "It is very likely a general feature of photosynthetic light harvesting complexes," says Fleming, who pioneered some of the early studies on quantum effects in photosynthesis.

To get a better sense of algae's perks and problems, a research team from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville examined the energy costs and environmental impacts of producing algae for fuel. The team then compared these with similar values from algae's biofuel peers -- corn, canola and switchgrass. The algal life-cycle analysis, which used numbers from an online database and published research, finds that algae farms need to minimize use of fertilizer and freshwater to compete with other biofuel plants.

One way to do this would be to put algae operations next to wastewater treatment plants or facilities that emit carbon dioxide. Municipalities should consider infrastructure changes that accommodate algae's food and water needs, says environmental engineer and study coauthor Andres Clarens of UVA. Algae farms will have a much smaller energy footprint if they use recycled carbon dioxide, nutrients and water, rather than virgin products, says Clarens. In the analysis, algae production's dominant energy inputs came from making the fertilizer and carbon dioxide fed to the tiny photosynthesizers, Clarens says.

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The analysis by Clarens' team starts by considering an algae operation that approaches maximum inefficiency. The researchers examined the energy footprint of algae that is fed CO2 from tanks and synthetic nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers. This approach puts the carbon column in the red, the researchers report. The only arenas where algae came off better than corn, switchgrass and canola were land use and nutrient runoff. Growing algae in wastewater and feeding it recycled nutrients and recycled CO2 greened up the process considerably, the researchers report. Researchers in the public and private sectors are already investigating these strategies, putting algae ponds next to facilities with CO2 emissions that can be captured.

Bypassing synthetic fertilizers is also crucial. Composting the remaining algae biomass after the energy-rich lipids have been extracted could supply a partial food source for the next crop of algae, Sheehan says. And using concentrated nutrients extracted from wastewater such as sewage -- nutrients that require dilution before they are released into the environment -- would also reduce the need for chemical fertilizer, Clarens and his colleagues note.

Clarens cites as an example technologies that involve "source-separated urine," which can recover nitrogen from human waste before it is diluted in treatment plants. Such technologies may play an important role in supplying nutrients to the fuel sources of the future. "There are a lot of nutrients that we flush down the toilet," he says.

WASHINGTON -- An academic board of inquiry has largely cleared a noted Pennsylvania State University climatologist of scientific misconduct, but a second panel will convene to determine whether his behavior undermined public faith in the science of climate change, the university said Wednesday.

The scientist, Dr. Michael E. Mann, has been at the center of a dispute arising from the unauthorized release of more than 1,000 e-mail messages from the servers of the University of East Anglia in England, home to one of the world's premier climate research units.

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In the best-known message, he refers to a "trick" in a graph he produced a decade ago showing 1,000 years of essentially steady global surface temperatures followed by a sharp upward spike in the 20th century, seemingly corresponding to increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The so-called hockey stick graph has become an icon for environmentalists. It was prominently displayed in a 2001 United Nations report concluding that greenhouse gases from human activities had probably caused most of the warming measured since 1950.

In some of the e-mail messages, Dr. Mann refers to his assembly of data from a number of different sources, including ancient tree rings and earth core samples, as a "trick." Critics pounced on the term and said it was evidence that Dr. Mann and other scientists had manipulated temperature data to support their conclusions. But the Pennsylvania State inquiry board said the term "trick" was used by scientists and mathematicians to refer to an insight that solves a problem. "The so-called trick was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field," the panel said.

The e-mail messages also contained suggestions that Dr. Mann had hidden or destroyed e-mail messages and other information relating to a United Nations climate change report to prevent other scientists from reviewing them. Dr. Mann produced the material in question, and the Pennsylvania State board cleared him of the charge.