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Not by the bacteria themselves. I don't think E.Coli do carbon fixation, not yet, anyway. From my understanding, E.coli get their carbon from eating stuff like glucose, rather than from the atmosphere.

I don't have access to the full figures on the paper, but this preview figure seems to show glucose going into the cell

You would be making glucose through photosynthesis in plants or algae or cyanobacteria (I guess?) and THAT would pull carbon from the atmosphere. So yeah, I'm guessing this would still be carbon neutral unless you were somehow getting glucose from something you dug up.

Such negative comments by supposedly gadget-loving geeks. I suppose you've never heard of the Chem-E-Car Competition. Although this is an RC car and the Chem-E-Car rules don't allow that.

Ethics is an interesting concept - first thing that may come a person's mind :

"good and bad"
"wrong or right"
"black and white"

Personally, when one finds themselves in IT related predicaments, I'm guessing it's not that usual to land in a black or white situation, but one of a million shades of gray.

A few more:

"the way one lives"
"actions that land you on the right (good?) side of the fence"
"oath"
"creed"
etc . . .

What is a creed? One definition in an online dictionary defines it as ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/creed ) : " . . .any system or codification of belief or of opinion. . ."

eek . . . the entertainment industry (I'm guessing a person can come up with centuries or more worth of examples there) would have us believe in "good" creeds or "bad" creeds - religions, knights, assassins and more.

One might also ask - will your ethics lead you to copy chunks of the comments to the slashdot article above? Ethics in research and writing papers - that's a fought over issue as well. (people often hate to look in this mirror :)

Several professional groups have published "ethics" . . .

American Chemical Society ( http://pubs.acs.org/meetingpreprints/ethics.html )
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics ( http://www.aiaa.org/content.cfm?pageid=198 )
American Institute of Architects ( http://www.aia.org/about_ethics )
American Institute of Chemical Engineers ( http://www.aiche.org/About/Code.aspx )
American Society of Landscape Architects ( http://www.asla.org/about/codepro.htm )
Instutute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers ( http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/iportals/aboutus/ethics/code.html )

To pick a few. Look kind of like science/fantasy fans might see as guild rules :)

IT is no different.

People who strive for SANS/GIAC certification agree to their ethics as part of completing the certification process. ( http://www.giac.org/overview/ethics.php )

SAGE, LOPSA & USNIX share the same code of ethics - http://lopsa.org/CodeOfEthics

ACM - http://www.acm.org/about/se-code

CISA, CISM, CGEIT - ( http://www.isaca.org/Template.cfm?Section=Code_of_Professional_Ethics&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=20454
)

SSCP, CAP & CISSP (certification) ethics - ( https://www.isc2.org/cgi-bin/content.cgi?category=12 )

I'm sure there are plenty more.

I'm guessing there are very few if any CS or IT related courses that don't include some kind of ethics class or section.

Personally - when I was growing up - with a lot of computer enthusiasts in the neighborhood - some slided one way or the other (ethics wise) and some stood fairly firmly on one side or the other (usually the "old guys").

I've been in the professional IT industry for several years - and doing semi-professional IT stuff on and off years before that. Seeing I'm still there - I hope I'm on the an acceptable side of the fence :)

I've been involved in a few ethics dust-ups over the years . . . never got a horrible

I was at AIChE 2005 (Chemical Engineering stuff if you don't bother to click the link), and followed the fuel-cell topical. These cells did make a few appearances (also last year in Austin already).

The cell is being researched by professor Richard Masel and his group. It has a relatively low power density, but that's enough for mobile electronics (no, it will not be usable on cars). The reason Masel's group is the only one working on these is that previous results discredited formic acid as a fuel, but Masel's group found out that they were using the wrong catalyst: platinum was being used (as in any other fuel cell), but for formic acid the correct one was actually palladium. Apparently, formic acid has much less problems in membrane permeation than methanol (that is, it does not burn without you using it), and has already passed tests of over 2500 consecutive hours of power production without failure.

Masel actually complained a bit that this very press release had been delayed one week, last week he could have had the press release at the same time of the conference, and could have mentioned the name of Motorola explicitly.

Another curious fact is that probably everybody of you reading has eaten some formic acid (it's in various foods), even if the high concentration at which it is used in fuel cells makes it unsuitable for a snack (it is actually going to be "burn" the skin).

For those interested, here are some abstracts: Present Status of Formic Acid Fuel Cells, High Performing Air Breathing Passive Direct Formic Acid Fuel Cell (Dfafc), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Mri) Microscopy of Operating Direct Formic Acid Fuel Cell (Dfafc), Formic Acid Electro-Oxidation by Pd: Particle Size Effects. Proceedings are however not free for the taking, and one has to buy the CD (135 $). No guarantee they contain anything more than the abstracts for the given papers, however.

the most technologically advanced nation in the world

I thought too that the US were a long way ahead in technology. I came for a conference in Austin, TX last November, and on the way back I stayed for a week in NY. I was disappointed in some ways:

• How comes that I can't bloody call Europe from a payphone in Chicago airport? And where are the credit-card phones? It's an international airport, not a café! It's not that I did not try, and I tried the week later too. Yes, I know you use 011 instead of 00. It finally worked on Broadway by the 50th street.
• Why doesn't my damn GSM mobile work? What's the fuss with multiple standards over here? (Yes, my phone is a triple band and was supposed to work in NY and Chicago, though not Austin). Damn, these work in Thailand, why don't they work in the US?
• The conference in Austin was AIChE 2004. Number of participants: about 5,000. Number of complimentary internet connections: 0. Luckily there was a nice café at 6th/Congress with free access to Macs.
• My Diners stopped working for a couple of days, and the Visa was dead. It would work early in the morning.
• (This one is getting flamed)The statue of Liberty is small!!! I can't believe it's taller than the one in my town.
• Why are still stuck in the stone, pound and foot age?
• Times square: it's not square to begin with, and it's ludicrously small. It looks so big in the images from new year's eve...

Ok, ok, I have to compensate with some positive points...

• Ok, there are people who speak other language than English. I expected worse, on the plane to New York I was sitting beside a girl who completely by chance spoke Italian (and not bad either!).
• Ellis Island more than compensated for Liberty Island. The museum there was cool, even if I did not find my grandfather's brother in the archives.
• Food is nowhere near terrible as in England, and because of Mexico food in Austin was actually quite good. Que vivan los migrantes!
• I happened to hear the Veteran's Day speech at the Texas capitol. Sorry for the people governed by these beasts, but for me it was an experience to see the closest thing to a Nazi rally I will ever witness (I hope).
• Prospect park in NY rules!
• Now, when I see "Venner for livet" (Friends) or "Sex og singelliv" (Sex and the city) I actually recognize the places!

Anyway, back to the point: the US are not as advanced as many, Americans and not, think they are. At least not in the level of technology the citizens are exposed to, I have definitely seen enough to deem it unlikely that I was victim of a long series of unlucky coincidences.

He gave a talk for my organization a couple of months ago on his thermochemical process that converts cellulosic waste to precursor chemicals for fuels and fine chemicals. You can read a litte more on it here or by googling his name and Biofine. He claims the energy inmput/output ratio is quite good--I recall in the 30-40 range--and there is a process-scale facility online in Italy with interest to build a couple in the US.

Here are links to the Retinal Implant Project which was a joint Harvard-MIT collaboration. Another link here(in German)leads to the page of German researchers on the same project. Here's an article that describes the project in a little detail.

Interesting project, it seems they've been working on this for 10 or more years in joint collaboration with several universities in different countries as well as the government.