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The situation has been compounded by a surge in demand for bio-fuels such as ethanol, made from maize, encouraging farmers around the world to divert their efforts away from wheat and barley and into maize, further driving up prices.

Arguably Japan’s biggest concern, however, is its weakening ability to sustain its population with domestic produce. In 2006 the country’s self-sufficiency rate fell to 39%, according to the Agriculture Ministry. It was only the second time since the ministry began keeping records in 1960 that the population derived less than 40% of its daily calorie intake from domestically grown food.

Shinichi Shogenji, dean of the University of Tokyo’s graduate school of agricultural and life sciences, said Japan’s meat consumption had increased by 900% since 1955, in part because expanding incomes had enabled families to supplement the sparse national diet of rice, fish and miso soup with more Western-style food.

After the U.S. engineers finish the design, local workers in the town of Quetzaltenango will manufacture the small-scale turbine. It will produce 10-15 watts of electricity, enough to charge a 12-volt battery that can power simple devices like LED lights.

“They’re replacing kerosene lamps, if anything at all,” said Matt McLean, a mechanical engineer by day and leader of the wind-turbine project by night. “The biggest driver is just keeping the cost way down. We’re shooting for under $100, which is a challenge, but we’re in that range.”

The effort comes amidst recent efforts to bring new light and power to small towns in the developing world. An estimated 1.6 billion people worldwide are without electricity, and many of them are forced to light their homes with kerosene. Using one of these lamps is like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, says the World Bank, and the lamps present a significant fire risk. That’s why many startup companies, such as d.Light, are trying to bring cheaper LED lights to homes, but they still need a solution for producing power locally.

That’s where organizations like Engineers Without Borders come in. Founded in 2002 by Bernard Amadie, a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, it has grown to more than 10,000 members in over 250 chapters. According to Cathy Leslie, the executive director of the U.S. organization, 340 projects are underway.

The turbine was created by the Appropriate Technology Design Team of EWB’s San Francisco chapter. Team members like Malcolm Knapp and Heather Fleming spend their nights and weekends inside D2M’s design shop trying to perfect low-tech gadgets for people 2,500 miles away. D2M, which is Knapp and Fleming’s employer, donates the lab space for after-hours use by the EWB team.

Unlike the large-scale assemblies found in wind farms, the roughly two-foot-wide and three-foot-tall turbine has a vertical axis. McLean said that orientation worked better in the choppy conditions likely to meet the turbine out in the field, where it’ll be bolted on to buildings, towers or even trees.

The turbine, which Fleming refers to as a “she,” is undergoing its final tweaks. Next Sunday, the prototype will undergo its next-to-last build before Fleming and another volunteer head down to the Guatemalan manufacturing facility, XelaTeco, with the building plans in hand.

Police identified Riad Hamad, 55, at a news conference Thursday and said the binding of his limbs and the placement of the tape was consistent with Hamad having done it himself.

Austin police homicide Sgt. Joe Chacon said family members told investigators that the Clint Small Jr. Middle School teacher had “several stressors” in his life and had talked about possibly killing himself. Police said that they think Hamad walked from his car to the lake, based on evidence they gathered at the scene.

“The car was found on the south shoreline with no signs of mysterious activity,” Chacon said.

Police said that they found Hamad’s car along Lady Bird Lake on Tuesday and searched but did not find him.

Joggers found Hamad’s body about 2 p.m. Wednesday near Comal Street and Nash Hernandez Sr. Road. Investigators said they found no signs of trauma or a struggle.

Debbie Russell, president of the local American Civil Liberties Union chapter, sent an e-mail Thursday to dozens of activists throughout the city saying that Hamad’s death had been ruled a homicide. Russell said in a later interview that she wrote that e-mail after she thought she had heard media reports that Hamad had been killed.

She said in the e-mail that Hamad had recently been under investigation by the FBI — federal officials confirmed the investigation — and described him as “NOT a terrorist but a peaceworker.” Hamad was serving as an official for the Austin chapter of the Palestine Children’s Welfare Fund.

FBI spokesman Erik Vasys said that Hamad had been a “person of interest” in a criminal investigation but that he could not elaborate.

Austin police said Hamad’s family reported him missing Monday. Family members released a statement Thursday saying that he disappeared after going to pick up a prescription at a local pharmacy.

Hamad’s body was taken to the Travis County medical examiner’s office for an autopsy. The office did not respond to an open records request Thursday for information about the case and would not confirm that Hamad’s body was there.

According to the family’s statement, which was released through an attorney, Hamad was a University of Texas graduate and had taught in the Austin school district for a decade.

The family’s statement described him as a “peace activist who worked tirelessly on behalf of those less fortunate than him and was loved and admired by many members of the local, as well as international community.”

“Mr. Hamad’s family and friends are obviously devastated over their loss,” the statement said.

Hamad had taught at Austin Community College but was fired in June 1998 after officials said he violated the school’s nondiscrimination policy by making “sexist and off-colored jokes” in class, school officials said.

Small Middle School Principal Sheila Anderson sent a letter to parents at the Southwest Austin school Thursday informing them of Hamad’s death and saying that grief counselors were available for students and teachers.

For the first time, Canadian and Japanese researchers have managed to efficiently produce a constant stream of natural gas from ice-like gas hydrates that, worldwide, dwarf all known fossil fuel deposits combined.

“We were able to sustain flow,” said Scott Dallimore, the Geological Survey of Canada researcher in charge of the remote Mallik drilling program. “It worked.”

For a decade now, Dallimore and scientists from a half-dozen other countries have been returning to a site on Richards Island on the very northwestern tip of the Northwest Territories to study methane gas hydrates.

A hydrate is created when a molecule of gas – in this case, methane or natural gas – is trapped by high pressures and low temperatures inside a cage of water molecules. The result is almost – but not quite – ice. It’s more like a dry, white slush suffusing the sand and gravel 1,000 metres beneath the Mallik rig.

Heat or unsqueeze the hydrate and gas is released. Hold a core sample to your ear and it hisses.

More significant is the fact that gas hydrates concentrate 164 times the energy of the same amount of natural gas.

And gas hydrate fields are found in abundance under the coastal waters of every continent. Calculations suggest there’s more energy in gas hydrates than in coal, oil and conventional gas combined.

Getting that energy to flow consistently and predictably, however, has been the problem. Using heat to release the gas works, but requires too much energy to be useful. Researchers have also been trying to release the methane by reducing the pressure on it.

Last month, the Mallik team became the first to use that method to get a steady, consistent flow.

“That went really well,” said Dallimore. “We definitely demonstrated that these hydrates are responsive enough that you can sustain flow.

“We were able to take conventional technologies, modify them, and produce. That’s a big step forward.”

Although countries including India, China, Japan and the United States have undertaken major programs to identify gas hydrate fields, it’s the first step in years toward making them productive.

The Mallik well produced fire from ice for six days at a rate lower than conventional gas but about equivalent to a coalbed methane well, Dallimore said.

This year’s results prove the basic idea works, he said. The next step is a full-scale pilot project with every consideration that goes into a commercial production rig, including safety and environmental concerns, and questions regarding how much water and sediment are produced per unit of gas.

Dallimore suggests that as conventional natural gas prices increase and supplies diminish, gas hydrates could offer an alternative. They also emit less greenhouse gas than oil or coal.

So far, no Canadian agency is planning a full gas hydrate pilot project.

But Japan is planning one using data from the Mallik project. The United States Geological Survey is trying to start one with other agencies and energy companies.

“Everybody agrees this is what we need to do. It’s just (a question of) where,” said Brenda Pierce of the U.S. survey. “We’re trying to look at doing this on the north slope of Alaska.”

Commercial production of natural gas from hydrates is still a few years off, said Dallimore – but perhaps not too far off.

“The last thing the public wants is fuel shortages,” with prices at record highs, Wicks said by telephone today from Rome, where he’s attending the International Energy Forum.

The minister spoke after Ineos Group Holdings Plc, owner of the Grangemouth refinery, said Scotland may suffer fuel cuts as early as April 25 because of a walkout by members of the Unite trade union over plans to change the company’s pension program.

“This is an industrial dispute about pensions between the union and the company,” Wicks said. “It is a matter for those two parties to resolve as soon as possible. There is nothing directly government can do.”

Ineos has started shutting the 200,000-barrel-a-day refinery, Britain’s sixth-largest, before the scheduled April 27-28 stoppage for safety reasons, the company said today in a statement. Output may be cut for as long as a month because of the time required to restart units, Unite said April 18.

Actually, they will take as many as they can get. Faced with the difficulty of recruiting during a long and unpopular war, the United States Marine Corps has started marketing itself to women in a concerted way for the first time. It is running ads in magazines like Shape, Self and Fitness, which appeal mainly to female readers, as well as through more mainstream outlets like “American Idol,” where the message is a unisex one of patriotism rather than macho swagger.

The Marine Corps still runs its traditional ads — during National Basketball Association and National Hockey League games, and in magazines like Sports Illustrated and Men’s Fitness — often showing male recruits parachuting from airplanes, wielding big guns, driving heavy tanks and stampeding across the ground.