for starters...

In all the hubbub over Peak Oil, other potential shortages are being ignored.  An interesting one that the Next 100 blog covers is Peak Lithium.  Lithium is the critical ingredient in our best battery technologies, and society is becoming more and more reliant on its availability.  Seeing as batteries are the major limiting factor in many of the newest, coolest technologies this poses a real problem.

My hope is that we develop a new type of small transportable power source or energy storage medium in the near future, but this seems unlikely at the moment.  Batteries have fallen way behind our other technologies.  Just goes to show that you can innovate with Physics relatively easily, but Chemistry products are much harder to develop (and don’t even mention Biology…).

More exciting research into Dark Energy, as found in BBC News.

“Putting all of this data together gives us the strongest evidence yet that dark energy is the cosmological constant, or in other words, that ‘nothing weighs something’,” said Alexey Vikhlinin, who led the research from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, US.

Nothing weighs something — how cool is that?  Since I learned about it back in college, I’ve always been fascinated that only 5% of the mass in the universe is made up of what we call ‘matter’ - the stuff we can see.  The other 95%?  Not really sure…

The NOAA just released the climate report for the month of November - doesn’t look so good…

• For November alone, the month is fourth warmest all-time globally, for the combined land and ocean surface temperature. The early assessment is based on records dating back to 1880.

Also…

• Arctic sea ice extent in 2008 reached its second lowest melt season extent on record in September.
• The 2008 Atlantic hurricane season was the third most costly on record in current dollars, after 2005 and 2004, and the fourth most active year since 1944. This was the first season with a major hurricane (Category 3 or above) each month from July through November.
• The United States recorded a preliminary total of just under 1,700 tornadoes from January - November. This ranks 2008 second behind 2004 for the most tornadoes in a year, since reliable records began in 1953.

We’ll have to wait 8 years, but this is bound to be a pretty cool mission.  I think it could be improved by a couple of flybys of Jupiter’s moons, but I guess you can’t have everything.