SuperForest

Good Morning SuperForest!

We’ve got a special announcement for all of our Californian SuperForesters!

Josh Tickell’s new film, Fuel is premiering this Friday in Los Angeles and he has got a special message for us all:

“Hello SuperForest!

This is filmmaker Josh Tickell inviting all SuperForesters in the Los Angeles area to please come to the premier of my new film FUEL, which opens on Friday, February 13th in Los Angeles.

FUEL opens at AMC Lowes Broadway 4 in Santa Monica (TICKETS) and at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Hollywood (TICKETS)

Tell your friends, bring your family, take your Valentine, and spread the word.

President Obama wants us all to take part in change – here’s your chance!

Sincerely,

Josh”

Thank you, Josh!

Here’s the trailer:

For added fun, the first 100 folks who show up on bikes get free tickets. How cool is that?

Here is the invite:

“BIKE RIDE FOR FUEL
Join the alternative car and bike parade to L.A.’s February 13 Opening Night Show. Free tickets for the first 100 riders! Mount your trusty two-wheeler or rev up that biodiesel. Put your pedal to the metal to show LA what FUEL is taking about!

Alternative Car and Bike Parade – 6 PM PST, February 13, 2009

DETAILS

* Gather at 6 PM PST
* Meet at the top of the Santa Monica Pier by the cannon in Palisades Park
at the corner of Ocean and Colorado
* RSVP to Jon Luskin — jonluskin@gmail.com
* Parade will lead to 7 pm opening night showing of FUEL at the AMC Lowes Laemmle Sunset 5 on 3rd Street in Santa Monica.
* Everyone in the parade gets a glow necklace to wear since it will be nightfall.

Well, that sounds fun. I wish I could be there. I love a good bike ride.

Hope everyone has a good time. And a big thank you to Josh for the message and to SuperForester Julia for hooking up the info.

Love to All,

Jackson

Well, I just heard some great news.

Continental Airlines just completed its first test flight with a Boeing 737 that was partially powered by biofuel made from algae! The flight was the first test done so by a US commercial carrier.

Props to Continental!

One of the planes’ two engines consisted of a 50-50 mix of biofuel and aircraft fuel.

“The flight from Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport completed a circuit over the Gulf of Mexico, and pilots carried out a series of tests at 38,000ft (11.6km), including a mid-flight engine shutdown.

‘The airplane performed perfectly,’ test pilot Rich Jankowski told the Houston Chronicle newspaper.

‘There were no problems. It was textbook.’”

Textbook baby!

The best part about the test is that the biofuel used is a “drop-in fuel”, meaning that there is no modification required for the aircraft to use it. The use of algae is fast becoming the future for biofuel: it grows extremely fast, does not compete with food crops, and is better for the enviroment.

All that is left is to make algae commercially competitive.

Check out the full BBC article here.

To get your algae fix, click here.

“Make enough food for everyone. That’s the end game.
And to get there, we have to start thinking a little crazier about what food is.“

Homaru Cantu is a Chicago chef with some bold new ideas about the future of food.

This is a very pressing question with so many new humans born every year, and the Earth’s resources being stretched thin as it is. How are we to ensure that everyone will be fed?

Mr. Cantu’s idea: Challenge the very idea of what makes food food!

Wired.com has a great interview up now.

“Wired.com: What is food?

Cantu: It’s what enables us to live — and more than that, it’s dense energy storage. If you look at it from that point of view, you start shooting two birds with one shot.”

So if “food” is just another word for dense calorie storage, that pretty much means that anything that you ingest to provide your body with muscle energy is food.

By this definition, “food” can now be made in a great number of ways.

Like using a laser printer!

Sayeth Mr. Cantu:

“There’s two ways to look at it. Let’s say you have a food printer and eight cartridges, and grow eight crops on the roof, and that’s all you need to replicate any food product you can imagine, from mom’s apple pie to a cheeseburger with French fries. That would decentralize the food structure, and you’d know exactly where your food comes from.”

Right now we use 3D printers to create everything from new cell phone designs to human organs. Why not just use basic food molecules in place of plastic or cells?

Print a pie! Print a burger! Print some fries to go with that!

(via flickr user oskay)

This amazing object was printed by the superstars over at Evil Mad Scientists Labs using the Candyfab. Is is made by heating white sugar and extruding it in layers.

Obviously this is a major leap from the ways food is thought of and prepared today, but keep in mind that research into what Homaro Cantu is proposing will inevitably lead to refinement, mass production, and ultimately could solve how we go about feeding our billions of brother and sister humans.

And not only that, but “food printing” will come in mighty handy when we decide to start seriously exploring both outer space and the sea bed.

Homaro Cantu is an amazing mind. When asked what he’s been up to recently, he replied:

“Homaro Cantu: We’ve been trying to incorporate food from the green world, and started growing microalgae. You can get 10,000 to 30,000 gallons of algae per acre. It can be grown in salt or fresh water, in a whole variety of temperatures. It increases the food supply rather than depleting it, and it’s a net energy gain.

For $300 we built a photobioreactor that produced 15 gallons of food per month. The idea was to take algae, process it into sushi and fuel, and deliver it it in a truck running on algae biofuel. And we’re just a bunch of chefs. If we can figure this out, I don’t know why others can’t.”

Here’s an algae-makin’ bioreactor in action:

In his free time Homaro Cantu works up bioreactors for sushi and fuel. This cat is an absolute hero!

Here is Homaro Cantu’s site: Cantu Designs.
And here is the full wired.com interview.

For further reading, check out the amazing wikipedia entries on:

Molecular gastronomy.
Rapid Prototyping.
Algae fuels.

Homaro Cantu, for your algae-loving, sushi creating, forward-thinking ways, in addition to your research into how to feed the Earth’s humans, you are the deserving recipient of the SuperForest Good Person Award:

Bravo, Homaro!!!