"Behold the power of cheese!"

Growing up in Wisconsin, I always found that cheese-marketing slogan pretty, well, cheesy. But according to Treehugger, a Wisconsin company means it literally: DuBay Ingredients has devised a way to convert byproducts from the cheesemaking process into ethanol. The process also extracts a "high-nutrition cattle feed by extracting two by-products: probiotic feed supplement and salt."

In Iowa, scientists are having success in converting organic materials like bark and corn stalks into bio-oil. According to a new study [pdf], the US can "grow enough fresh biomass -- more than a billion tons each year -- to supplant at least a third of its annual petroleum use."