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The most disruptive idea being explored by startups is to channel coal stack carbon dioxide emissions into water filled bags with carbon-eating algae which can re-purpose carbon and hydrogen into fatty acids which can be used to create liquid biofuels.

The past six months have brought scenes from a hungry apocalypse, as at least 14 countries have been wracked by food-related violence. By mid-April UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon acknowledged that "the steeply rising price of food has developed into a real global crisis." It's the product, economists say, of multiple factors: high oil prices, prolonged drought, biofuel production, and burgeoning meat consumption. In the short term, food aid will help. In the medium term, market-distorting trade tariffs and farm subsidies must end. But the long-term task is monumentally harder: transcending the limits of today's global food production.

The technology to make biobutanol, a non-food based biofuel, cost-competitive with gasoline isn't here yet, but companies in the know say that it could be by 2010.

This is the homepage for an ongoing research and development project named PATIKA - Pathway Analysis Tools for Integration and Knowledge Acquisition. Within this project so far, among others, an ontology has been defined; a pathway database (which integrates and interfaces with several public pathway databases) has been constructed; and some software tools have been developed for effective integration, querying, analysis, and manipulation of pathway data.