Recent reports show growing reserves of unconventional gas are available and that there is an appetite from policy makers, industry, and others to better understand the GHG impact of exploiting reserves such as shale gas. There is little publicly available data comparing unconventional and conventional gas production. Existing studies rely on national inventories, but it is not generally possib...

This study addresses several questions concerning the peaking of conventional oil production from an optimist’s perspective. Is the oil peak imminent? What is the range of uncertainty? What are the key determining factors? Will a transition to unconventional oil undermine or strengthen OPEC’s influence over world oil markets? These issues are explored using a model combining alternative world e...

In this special issue we present a selection of papers from the Symposium on Natural/Unconventional Computing and its Philosophical Significance, held during the AISB/IACAP 2012 World Congress in Birmingham (UK). This article is an editorial, introducing the special issue of the journal with the selected papers and the research program of Natural/Unconventional Computing.

Classical computing has well-established formalisms forspecifying, refining, composing, proving, and otherwise reasoningabout computations. These formalisms have matured over the past70 years or so.Unconventional Computing includes the use novel kinds of sub-strates – from black holes and quantum effects, through to chem-icals, biomolecules, even slime moulds – to perfor...

GRASP proteins associate with the Golgi apparatus and have been implicated in the stacking of Golgi cisternae, vesicle tethering, and mitotic progression, but their specific functions are unclear. In this issue, Kinseth et al. (2007) show unexpectedly that a GRASP homolog is required for an unconventional secretory pathway that bypasses the usual route for Golgi-dependent membrane traffic.

Tourist submersibles are a new class of underwater vehicles where materials and innovative structural concepts used. Because the lack experience with these vessels, prescribed rules classification societies not directly applicable in their design. Thus, novel design-by-analysis approach, as given Boiler Pressure Vessel Code ASME, is employed for dimensioning components. Design-by-analysis stand...

Computer music is a truly interdisciplinary field; practitioners are well known for experimenting with new and developing technologies from a wide span of disciplines. Such experimentation is a tradition that stems back to the genesis of computer music, where a mathematician with a musical background programmed an early computer in the early 1950s to play a tune. The area of computer music has ...