There’s no shortage of solutions proposed to solve the problem of global warming, some devised after long, painstaking, and expensive hours of research. But President Obama’s key energy expert has come up with what appears to be a low-cost no-brainer – paint the roofs of all buildings white.

According to U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, a Nobel prize-winning scientist, painting roofs and paved surfaces in white or other light colors would reduce global warming by conserving energy and reflecting sunlight back into space. He goes as far as to say that making all building roofs white would be the equivalent of taking all the cars in the world off the road for 11 years.

Chu’s premise is that when sunlight reflects off a white or light-colored surface, much of the light will pass through the atmosphere and back into space. On the other hand, infrared radiation emitted from warm surfaces is trapped by greenhouse gases, causing the atmosphere to further heat up and contribute to global warming.

Chu believes demands on air conditioning systems would be reduced if buildings have white or light-colored surfaces. Moreover, he added that painting vehicles in lighter colors would make them more energy-efficient in the summer, reducing demands on vehicle air conditioners.

While Chu’s idea is plausible, implementation on any massive scale would be challenging. I’m no expert on building construction, but how would you modify building surfaces in large cities like New York, where I live, with their diverse styles and constructions? Can one picture the Empire State Building painted white? What happens to all the landmark buildings where any exterior modification would require local legislative action and likely throw building historians into a tizzy?

I have a request for President Obama: Can you get Congress to pass legislation to give us tax credits to help us pay to paint our house roofs and dark-colored cars white?

Much of the attention during the current space shuttle mission has focused on making long-awaited repairs to the aging Hubble Space Telescope. But there are other matters to attend to as well. Such as tasting water recycled from urine.

On Wednesday, astronauts aboard the International Space Station conducted the first taste test of an onboard recycling system that turns urine, sweat, and moisture from the air into drinking water. The system pumps the urine from the toilet to a large tank, where the water is boiled off and the vapor collected. Urine brine is thrown away. This vapor is then mixed with water from air condensation and filtered for purification into clean drinking water.

The $154 million water recycling system is part of a $250 million regenerative life support system intended to sustain larger space station crews, with fewer supply drop-offs from visiting spacecraft. The recycling system would recoup its cost by reducing the amount of water that would have to be shipped up.

American astronaut Michael Barratt gave the water a thumbs-up after tasting it. Given the glitches the recycling system experienced during several tests on earth, NASA considered the successful test of the recycling system aboard the space station a milestone.

I’ll drink to that – with Poland Spring water.

Earlier this week the space shuttle Atlantis took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on the fifth – and what is said to be final – repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. Launched in April 1990, Hubble has produced some spectacular images over the years, greatly expanding our knowledge of the universe well beyond anyone’s expectations. Although it’s getting a bit long-in-the-tooth now, technologically speaking, it is hoped that this last hurrah by the crew of STS-125 will give the old soldier 70-times more discovery capability and extend its life by another 5 or 6 years.

A lot of people in America take the space shuttle for granted. Understandable, I suppose, after 125 flights and the government’s plans to mothball the fleet in a year or two. But I’m not one of them. For me, every launch still brings a sense of wonder, pride, and – truth be told – just a touch of anxiety.

Not many people know this, but back in 1976 or ’77 when NASA began recruiting candidates for the space shuttle astronaut program, I applied. I was fresh out of engineering school, working for the Navy on their prestigious F-14A fighter program, and it sounded exciting. Fortunately NASA got hundreds, maybe even thousands, of resumes from people a lot more qualified than me, so I didn’t make it. But that disappointment did little to diminish my interest in the program. Maybe I’m just a hopeless romantic.

It’s often been said that one of the fringe benefits of being a journalist is that, from time to time, you get to live vicariously through others. If that’s true, then perhaps I finally made it after all. About a year ago I got the opportunity to interview Andrew Feustel, one of the astronauts aboard Atlantis this week. Although it’s his first trip into space, he will be making 3 of the 5 space walks necessary to complete the mission. Throughout my career I’ve had the privilege of speaking with champion athletes, rock stars, and politicians, but I don’t think any of them got me as pumped up as I was after speaking with Feustel.

Why? I don’t know. Maybe a tiny piece of that cocky young engineer who dared to dream some 30-odd years ago still survives. Or maybe I’m just one of those techno-nerds who grew up during the space race and still believes the key to unlocking the mystery of why we’re here is out there. Either way, this week my thoughts and prayers are on board Atlantis with Feustel and his comrades. Good luck, my friend. May your mission go smoothly, and may you return to Earth safely.

Star Trek aficionados will once again get to see their beloved Starship Enterprise traveling at warp speed – the speed of light – when the latest Star Trek movie opens in theatres today. While ‘warp speed’ has long been associated with the long-running science fiction entertainment series, the concept remains a pipe dream to practicing physicists and engineers involved with space exploration.

Or is it? Two physicists at Baylor University in Texas believe the concept of warp-speed travel is possible, within the realms of existing scientific theory. The scientists, associate professor of physics Dr. Gerard Cleaver and post-doctoral student Richard Obousy, theorize that creating a ‘bubble’ that expands the space-time dimensions around the spaceship could propel the ship to travel faster than the speed of light. According to Cleaver, manipulating the 11-dimension would create sufficient dark energy that would push the spaceship, encased in the bubble between the expanding and shrinking space-time dimensions, to travel at light-like speed.

The scientists explained that because space would move around the ship, their theory would not violate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which states that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object faster than the speed of light.

So what’s the hurdle? For one, the researchers estimate the amount of energy needed to produce the added dimensions to allow light-speed travel is equivalent to the entire mass of Jupiter being converted into energy. The trick is producing a mechanism to harness such an enormous amount of energy, which according to Dr. Cleaver is a long way off.

Maybe Captain Kirk or Dr. Spock can beam up some ideas.

Tornadoes are fast-moving but deadly events, able to carve out a wide path of destruction in just seconds. Now, scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and other organizations hope to get a better handle on how and why tornadoes form, by launching what is reportedly the largest and most ambitious tornado study ever undertaken.

The collaborative international project, known as VORTEX2, will be conducted from May 10 through June 13. Scientists will deploy radars and other ground-based instruments across a 900-mile swarth of the Great Plains region, stretching from west Texas to southwest Minnesota. This is the part of the U.S. most prone to tornadoes.

The radar fleet will include ten mobile radars, which will have resolution as fine as 300 feet and time steps as small as 15 seconds. More than three dozen portable surface weather stations will blanket the area in and near a target storm.

“We still do not completely understand the processes that lead to tornado formation and shape its development,” said Roger Wakimoto, director of NCAR’s Earth Observing Laboratory and a principle investigator for VORTEX2. “We hope that VORTEX2 will provide the data we need to learn more about the development of tornadoes, and in time help forecasters give people more advance warning before a tornado strikes.”

In the New York City area where I live, the effects of coastal hurricanes are more of a concern than tornadoes. But while forecasters can now predict when and where hurricanes will strike with reasonable accuracy, current weather observation networks and radars often fail to accurately capture rapidly-changing temperature and wind changes that can spawn a tornado within minutes.

I have all too often seen video footage of the destruction tornadoes leave. Within seconds, tidy, well-kept homes are destroyed, with all the possessions families work hard to attain buried in a pile of rubble. Within seconds, families’ lives are turned upside down .

Let’s hope the study can help scientists better predict when and where these deadly storms will strike next.