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There’s Little Algae Cannot Do
According to estimates from the U.S. Agriculture Department, half the nation’s 2008 corn crop will be diverted to make ethanol. The resulting corn scarcity most likely will drive up the cost of eggs, milk and steaks.
But using microscopic algae like those found in ponds could be a better and cheaper alternative to generate fuel, says Juergen Polle, an associate professor of biology at Brooklyn College.
“This is the fastest growing plant on earth,” says Polle. And unlike corn, it can grow in salty or brackish water without pesticides.
Per acre, microalgae “can produce much higher levels of biofuels than other plants,” says Professor Polle, who began his work ten years ago while an undergraduate student at the Georg August University in Gottingen in his native Germany.
After earning his doctorate, Polle spent five years at the University of California - Berkeley with Anastasios Melis, a phycologist (or algae scientist) who perfected a system to produce large quantities of clean-burning hydrogen as a by-product of algae growth.
Research on the one-cell organisms that thrive on sunlight and a few nutrients has demonstrated that there is little that microalgae cannot do. It can be used in cleaning up toxic spills, removing heavy metals from the environment, and producing large quantities of pigments, protein, enzymes, sugars, fats, amino acids, vitamins, and health food.
“Harvesting is the real problem because you’re dealing with microscopic organisms,” adds Polle, now working at the Laboratory for Experimental and Applied Phycology under an U.S. Air Force contract to isolate new microalgae strains for making jet fuel. But that’s the challenge.
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CUNY School Of Law
Joins Elite U.S. Team
The verdict is unanimous: CUNY School of Law keeps outdoing itself. Two recent achievements brought accolades to the 25-year-old school, whose clinical programs are routinely cited in the country's top 10. CUNY Law – led by Dean Michelle J. Anderson – has posted the highest New York State Bar Exam pass rate in its history (82.75 percent) and has been selected to join an elite group of law schools nationwide to analyze and shape future legal education.
The panel of representatives from 10 law schools – including prestigious Georgetown, Harvard and NYU – is being organized by the Carnegie Foun-dation for the Advancement of Teaching and Stanford Law School. The invitation to participate in the three-year study follows the release of several glowing public reports from the Carnegie Foundation as well as U.S. News & World Report's annual law school rankings.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has called CUNY School of Law "an institution of incomparable value" and has praised the school's leadership for "innovations and tireless advancement of public interest law."
The request to join the current small working group came from Larry Kramer, dean of the Stanford Law School, and Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Their creation of the group flows out of an earlier report issued by the Carnegie Foundation that cited CUNY School of Law for its ground-breaking approach to merging instruction in the clinical practice of law with the traditional law school curricula covering such subjects as torts, criminal procedure, and constitutional law. Students in all three years of study at CUNY School of Law study practical lawyering skills; by the third year, they are required to represent clients in court in real cases under the supervision of faculty members.
"Each of the schools we are inviting to participate have been in the vanguard of assessing their own curricula in recent years," Shulman and Kramer wrote in their letter to CUNY School of Law Dean Michelle J. Anderson inviting her participation in the evaluative project.
Dean Anderson said CUNY Law is delighted to join the working group. "It's a nice coup for the school," she said. "The Carnegie Foundation recognized the innovative pedagogy that melds theory and practice instituted at CUNY School of Law's founding, and now the school is being called upon for its expertise in that area."
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