In this installment of Tech Tuesday we've opened the email in-box to pull in a few announcements from major scientific journals. First up is work from Cornell University and Rutgers University showing that as climate change sets in plants and bees have kept pace.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, the analysis of bee collection data over the past 130 years offers some interesting conclusions. In that time period, spring has started arriving as much as 10 days earlier than in the 1880s, but bees and flowers have kept pace arriving earlier in lock-step. The study also found that most of the shift has occurred since 1970 when the change in temperatures increased.

Although the triggers for bee spring emergence are unknown, bees may simply be cued to emerge when temperatures rise above a threshold over a number of days, but if climate change accelerates the researchers don't know if bees will be able to keep up.

Source: Cornell University

Sugarcane, Ethanol and Pollution

A study from the University of California, Merced, shows burning sugarcane fields prior to harvest for ethanol production can create air pollution that detracts from the biofuel's overall sustainability. That's according to a study published last month in Nature Climate Change and includes work from UC-Merced, the University of Iowa and the Universidad Andres Belo in Chile.

The work focused on Brazil, the world's top producer of sugarcane ethanol and a possible source for U.S. imports of the alternative fuel (especially since the tariff on imports ended Dec. 31).

What the researchers found is that the satellite date of sugarcane burns may be inaccurate with the actual pollution from burning being as much as four times greater than indicated. Researchers believe this discrepancy is caused by the small scale nature of individual fires, which satellites may not measure.

While governments encourage a reduction in field burning, more than half Brazil's crop is burned ahead of harvest. That leads to a reduction in air quality that can offset the benefits of ethanol over petroleum fuels that emit more greenhouse gases during their use. The researchers say that this sugarcane burning should be a consideration when determining whether to import or ramp up domestic ethanol production (from corn and other sources).

Source: University of California, Merced

Self-Cleaning Cotton

Here's an idea: jeans, sweats and socks that clean and deodorize themselves when hung on a clothesline in the sun or draped on a balcony railing. In a report that appeared in a recent edition of Applied Materials & Interfaces researchers report on the development of a new cotton fabric that cleans itself when exposed to sunlight.

The fabric uses a coating made from a compound of titanium dioxide, the white material used in everything from white paint to foods to sunscreen lotions. Titanium dioxide breaks down dirt and kills microbes when exposed to some types of light. It already has found uses in self-cleaning windows, kitchen and bathroom tiles, odor-free socks and other products. The self-cleaning cotton idea isn't new, but previous technology relied on ultraviolet light.

The report describes cotton fabric coated with nanoparticles made from a compound of titanium dioxide and nitrogen. They show that fabric coated with the material removes an orange dye stain when exposed to sunlight. The coating remains intact after washing and drying.

One stumbling block to this technology may be the rise in local laws that limit or prohibit clothesline use and hanging clothes outside to dry (not usually an issue on a farm, but in suburbs it's a hot button).

Source: American Chemical Society