Can technology save us? Yes, maybe

At the heart of Backbone’s May/June focus issue on green tech is the hope that innovation can save us. Yes, we’ve made a hell of a mess of this planet, but if we care about that and work to fix…

At the heart of Backbone’s May/June focus issue on green tech is the hope that innovation can save us. Yes, we’ve made a hell of a mess of this planet, but if we care about that and work to fix it, we can pull ourselves out of this nosedive, and new and innovative technology  will be one of the tools we use to do that.

Take the recent catastrophe in Burma. Part of the reason the storm was so destructive, said the ASEAN Regional Centre for Biodiversity Conservation, is that the mangrove forests that would have taken some of the force of the water have been systematically cut down to make more room for crops. Of course, no one can blame the area residents for doing this — we would all do the same — but these agricultural demands did make the storm’s effects worse than it might have been otherwise. And now the area’s crop have been all-but wiped out and planting new rice will be very difficult.

And as climate change continues, scientists are warning that storms like Cyclone Nargis will become both more frequent and severe.

In the face of this reality, perhaps projects like the one recently launched by IBM and researchers at the University of Washington will help. The two are employing unused and donated compute power from almost one million PCs to tackle the study of rice at the atomic level. The initiative, called "Nutritious Rice for the World," hopes to combine its results with traditional cross -breeding techniques to create crops that are hardier and more nutritious.

To participate, volunteers load a small application on their PCs and, when the machines are not in use, a small amount of data is downloaded and crunched, and the results sent back to the central server. Information is at www.worldcommunitygrid.org.

The resulting World Community Grid will have 167 teraflops of processing power.
 
If the project is successful, it is only because three types of technology are all hitting at the same time, according to Robert Zeigler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. “The world is experiencing three simultaneous revolutions: in molecular biology and genetics; in computational power and storage capacity; and in communications. The computational revolution allows scientists around the world to tackle almost unimaginably complex problems as a community, and in real-time.

“While there are no silver bullets, rice production can be revitalized with the help of new technologies.  The world community must invest now and for a long time to come.”
 
According to IBM, World Community Grid will run a three-dimensional modeling program created by computational biologists at the University of Washington to study the structures of the proteins that make up the building blocks of rice. Understanding the structure is necessary to identify the function of those proteins and to enable researchers to identify which ones could help produce more rice grains, ward off pests, resist disease or hold more nutrients. In the end, this project will create the largest and most comprehensive map of rice proteins and their related functions, helping agriculturalists and farmers pinpoint which plants should be selected for cross-breeding to cultivate better crops.   
 
Processing power, modelling and databases seem a distant topic when faced with the unimaginable suffering of the Burmese people, but it is projects like this that may make the next storm less devastating.

By Peter Wolchak
Backbone magazine

Filed Under: Web/Tech