We see articles vaguely along these lines all the time. What’s interesting about this one is that the technology is already up and running on a small scale, and plans are for a commercial plant to be online by 2011…just a couple years out.

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol – Times Online

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Another week, another geeky new technology to get all excited about.

Leo Laporte was twittering about SproutCore, which caught my interest and led me to a couple of articles. The actual SproutCore website is throwin an error at the moment so I can’t get to the source, but what I’m reading is that SproutCore wants to replace Flash, Adobe AIR and Silverstream as a technology for RIA (rich internet applications).

The beauty of it is that its all written in javascript, so there’s no plug-in to download. Which gets me wondering about SproutCore vs Lively Kernel (another Javascript-based RIA platform in development). Are they in competition or do they compliment one another?

Interesting times. Anyway, here’s a couple of articles worth reading. Thanks to Leo for Twittering about this.

Apple’s open secret: SproutCore is Cocoa for the Web

Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore