News Scan Briefs; September 2007; Scientific American Magazine; by Jonathan Scheff, Charles Q. Choi, JR Minkel, Lisa Stein, Nikhil Swaminathan; 2 Page(s)

Black Rock City--complete with a post office and volunteer emergency service crews--rises from Nevada's Black Rock Desert for only one week of every year, thanks to Burning Man, a festival of art and counterculture. Running from August 27 to September 3, it ends with the destruction of the "city," capped by the arsonous elimination of art, structures and a central effigy of "the man." This year's event, dubbed Green Man, has an environmental theme. Organizers will try to offset the carbon footprint of the festival. They will decrease solid waste by 70 percent through composting and shredding and switch from last year's 20,000 gallons of diesel to 20,000 gallons of local biofuel derived from cooking grease and supplied by Bently Biofuels in Minden, Nev. They will also deploy a 30-kilowatt solar array for the event and partner to build a 150-kilowatt array for neighboring Gerlach, Nev., which will also receive the smaller array after the event.

The search for extraterrestrials must look beyond life as we know it, scientists have advised NASA. The space agency mostly hunts for life that, like on Earth, is based on water, carbon and DNA, a National Research Council committee found. The dozen committee members--specialists in genetics, chemistry, biology and other fields--instead recommend NASA consider what they call "bizarre life." For instance, synthetic biology experiments have devised molecules that encode genetic data but that have more nucleotides than DNA or RNA do. Instead of water, aliens might employ ammonia or sulfuric acid as the basis for their life-sustaining biochemical reactions. Novel organisms might use minerals as catalysts, rather than enzymes. In their July 6 report, the council scientists singled out Saturn's moon Titan (photograph) as especially deserving of a follow-up mission because of evidence of mixtures of liquid ammonia and water in its interior.