Lethal Build-Up Of Ozone Poses Threat To UK

(Photo from NASA)

From The Guardian:

Scientists call for global measures amid warnings that the gas damages health and the environment

Britain is ignoring the dangers posed by one of the world's worst air pollutants: ozone. Researchers say that levels of the gas - a powerful contributor to global warming and the cause of hundreds of deaths a year from respiratory illnesses - are rising at an alarming rate.

They have also warned that measures to curtail the gas are failing. As a result, ozone-related deaths, of which there are about 1,500 a year in the UK, could rise by 50 per cent over the next decade. Stronger international treaties need to be set up to counter the threat, they insist.

'A lot more interest needs to be taken in ozone - not only as a cause of global warming but as an immediate threat to human health and to the environment,' said Professor Piers Foster of Leeds University, an author of the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 'It could have a significant impact on the planet.'

Read more ....

Offshore Wind May Power the Future

OFFSHORE WIND: Placing turbines in deep waters offshore could provide a bonanza of power while keeping turbines out of sight--if technical hurdles can be overcome. ©Hans Laubel/istockphoto.com

From Scientific American:

The waters of the Jersey Shore may soon become home to the nation's first deepwater wind turbines. New Jersey officials recently announced the state would help fund an initiative by Garden State Offshore Energy to build a 350-megawatt wind farm 16 miles (26 kilometers) offshore. The state wants by 2020 many more of these parks, at least 3,000 megawatts worth, or about 13 percent of the state's total electricity needs.

"This is probably the first of many ambitious goals to be set by states," says Greg Watson, a senior advisor on clean energy technology to the governor of Massachusetts. "Three thousand megawatts is significant. With that you're able to offset or even prevent fossil fuel plants from being built."

The federal government is about to open up to wind energy development vast swaths of deep ocean waters, and states and wind park developers are vying to be the first to seize the new frontier. Wind parks in these waters can generate more energy than nearshore and onshore sites, they don't ruin seascape views, and they don't interfere as much with other ocean activities.

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VIDEO: Ancient Temples Found In Peru -- National Geographic

The link to the video is HERE.

'Western' Diet Increases Heart Attack Risk Globally

From E! Science News:

The typical Western diet — fried foods, salty snacks and meat — accounts for about 30 percent of heart attack risk across the world, according to a study of dietary patterns in 52 countries reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. Researchers identified three dietary patterns in the world:

* Oriental: higher intake of tofu, soy and other sauces;
* Prudent: higher intake of fruits and vegetables; and
* Western: higher intake of fried foods, salty snacks, eggs and meat.

The Prudent diet was associated with a lower heart attack risk than the Oriental, researchers said.

"The objective of this study was to understand the modifiable risk factors of heart attacks at a global level," said Salim Yusuf, D.Phil., the study's senior author.

Previous studies have reached similar conclusions about the Prudent and Western diet in the United States and Europe. This study broadens those findings and identifies a unique dietary pattern that researchers labeled "Oriental" (because of a higher content of food items typical of an Oriental diet.) The dietary pattern recommended by the American Heart Association is similar to the Prudent diet described in this study.

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Current Mass Extinction Spurs Major Study Of Which Plants To Save

From E! Science News:

The Earth is in the midst of the sixth mass extinction of both plants and animals, with nearly 50 percent of all species disappearing, scientists say. Because of the current crisis, biologists at UC Santa Barbara are working day and night to determine which species must be saved. Their international study of grassland ecosystems, with flowering plants, is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The current extinction event is due to human activity, paving the planet, creating pollution, many of the things that we are doing today," said co-author Bradley J. Cardinale, assistant professor of ecology, evolution and marine biology (EEMB) at UC Santa Barbara. "The Earth might well lose half of its species in our lifetime. We want to know which ones deserve the highest priority for conservation."

He explained that the last mass extinction near the current level was 65 million years ago, called the Cretaceous Tertiary extinction event, and was probably the result of a meteor hitting the Earth. It is best known for the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, but massive amounts of plant species became extinct at that time as well.

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'Junk' DNA May Have Important Role In Gene Regulation

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2008) — For about 15 years, scientists have known that certain "junk" DNA -- repetitive DNA segments previously thought to have no function -- could evolve into exons, which are the building blocks for protein-coding genes in higher organisms like animals and plants. Now, a University of Iowa study has found evidence that a significant number of exons created from junk DNA seem to play a role in gene regulation.

The findings, which increase understanding of how humans differ from other animals, including non-human primates, appear Oct. 17 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

Nearly half of human DNA consists of repetitive DNA, including transposons, which can "transpose" or move around to different positions within the genome. A type of transposon called retrotransposons are transcribed into RNA and then reintegrated into the genomic DNA. The most common form of retrotransposons in the human genome are Alu elements, which have more than one million copies and occupy approximately 10 percent of the human genome.

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The Coming Clean Water Shortage

Photo: This 4-year-old girl in Ghana walks 2 1/2 miles twice each day to carry water for her family.

Thirsty World: Desperate Quest For Water -- CNN

The following is an excerpt from "What Matters," the latest book by "Day in the Life" series creator David Elliot Cohen. For more information, see whatmattersonline.com

Water is the key to life. It is fundamental to all human activities. Water grows the food we eat, generates the energy that supports our modern economies and maintains the ecological services on which we all depend. Yet billions of people worldwide still lack access to the most basic human right: safe, clean, adequate water.

As you would expect, the vast majority of these people are among the poorest in the world, living in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia.

Brent Stirton's images tell many stories if you know how to read them -- from the tragedy brought by lack of safe water or too much water, to the joy and life-changing effects that a new water system can offer.

Read more ....

Africa Needs Disease Warning Systems

From Cosmos Magazine:

BARCELONA: Africa needs early warning systems to deal with the increased threat of disease spreading from wild animals to humans caused by climate change, health experts say.

Speaking at the International Union for Conservation of Nature congress in Barcelona, Spain, the scientists said that many wildlife pathogens, such as Ebola, may spread as a result of changing temperatures and precipitation caused by climate change

Monitoring patterns

"Building warning systems and undertaking disease surveillance in places like the Congo Basin would be cheaper than building expensive machines to control an outbreak," said William Karesh, head of the Field Veterinary Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

The early warning systems he suggested include monitoring disease patterns in wild animals, and monitoring environmental changes and how these affect the behaviour of wild animals and pathogens.

According to Karesh, these offer both fertile ground for building early warning systems and areas for future research. "Wild animals are more susceptible to new diseases than domesticated animals, and are good indicators of an impending outbreak," he said.

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Hi-Tech Brings Families Together

From the BBC:

Technology is helping families stay in touch like never before, says a report.

Instead of driving people apart, mobile phones and the net are helping them maintain social ties, says the Pew Internet report.

Families are also among the keenest users of technology, the survey of 2,252 Americans revealed.

It found that using the net was often a social activity within families, with 51% of parents saying they browsed the web with their children.

"Some analysts have worried that new technologies hurt family togetherness, but we see that technology allows for new kinds of connectedness built around cell phones and the internet," said Tracy Kennedy of the University of Toronto who helped to write the Networked Families report.

Read more ....

My Comment: My mom (who is 82) loves her iChat .... specially when her grandkids are online.

Volcanoes May Be Original Womb Of Life

Close view of Stromboli Volcano erupting incandescent molten lava fragments.
Credit: USGS and B. Chouet in December 1969

From Live Science:

Fifty years ago, a chemist named Stanley Miller conducted a famous experiment to investigate how life could have started on Earth.

Recently, scientists re-analyzed his results using modern technology and found a new implication: The original sparks for life on our planet could have come from volcanic eruptions.

The 1950s experiment was designed to test how the ingredients necessary for life could arise.

Miller and his University of Chicago mentor Harold Urey used a system of closed flasks containing water and a gas of simple molecules thought to be common in Earth's early atmosphere. They zapped the gas with an electric spark (representing lightning on ancient Earth), and found that after a couple of weeks the water turned brown. It turned out that amino acids, the complex molecules that make up proteins, had formed from the simple materials in the flasks.

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A New Class of Antibiotics Could Offer Hope Against TB

Indian Tuberculosis (TB) patients stand in a queue for sputum collection at a Tuberculosis Treatment Centre in New Delhi. Manan Vatsyayana / AFP / Getty

From Time Magazine:

Eighty years after the discovery of penicillin, researchers say they are on the verge of developing a new class of antibiotics.

Publishing in the Oct. 17 issue of the journal Cell, scientists at Rutgers University describe a group of antibiotic compounds, first isolated decades ago from naturally occurring antibacterial substances in soil. Among them, researchers say, is a compound called myxopyronin that shows great promise. It has been synthesized in the lab and shown to be safe in animal trials, and although the drug hasn't been tested in humans yet, cell-based experiments suggest that it is potent enough to kill a wide range of stubborn bugs, including drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and the deadly type of staph known as MRSA.

The Rutgers research reflects a much-needed, if slow, renewal of scientific interest in antibiotics development. The last two decades of the 20th century saw nearly zero progress, and in those years several disease-causing bacteria evolved resistance to commonly used drugs. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than 40% of staph infections in the U.S. in 2006 were MRSA — a bug that now kills more Americans a year than AIDS. Today, the first line of treatment against MRSA is vancomycin, a formidable antibiotic that has been around since the 1950s and is otherwise typically considered a drug of last resort. In the developing world, health workers report a proliferation of XDR (extensively drug-resistant) and MDR (multidrug-resistant) tuberculosis, against which the current first-line antibiotics, rifamycins, developed in the 1960s, have also become useless.

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NASA Launches Probe To Study Edge Of Solar System

File picture shows shows an ultraviolet image of the sun in something approaching "true color". NASA on Sunday launched a probe into space on a two-year mission to study the distant edge of the solar system. (AFP/NASA/File/Michael Benson)

From Yahoo News/AP:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – NASA on Sunday launched a probe into orbit high above earth to study the distant edge of the solar system where hot solar winds crash into the cold outer space.

The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) was launched at 1745 GMT, according to images broadcast live by the US space agency.

The small probe was deployed on a Pegasus rocket which dropped from the bay doors of a Lockheed L-1011 jet flying at 12,000 meters (40,000 feet) over the southern Pacific Ocean near the Marshall Islands.

"The count went really smooth... and everything appears to be going well," NASA assistant launch manager Omar Baez said shortly after the launch.

The IBEX is on a two-year mission to take pictures and chart the mysterious confines of the solar system -- including areas billions of kilometers (miles) from earth.

Read more ....

Black And White TV Generation Have Monochrome Dreams

From The Telegraph/Science:

Do you dream in black and white? If so, the chances are you are over 55 and were brought up watching a monochrome television set.

New research suggests that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the colour of your dreams.

While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were brought up with black and white sets, often dream in monchrome - even now.

The findings suggest that the moment when Dorothy passes out of monochrome Kansas and awakes in Technicolor Oz may have had more significance for our subconscious than we literally ever dreamed of.

Eva Murzyn, a psychology student at Dundee University who carried out the study, said: "It is a fascinating hypothesis.

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The Passenger Jet That Just Missed Colliding With A UFO 22,000ft Above Kent

From Daily Mail:

As the captain of Flight AZ 284 began his descent into Heathrow, he saw something alarming overhead.

Shaped like a missile, the object suddenly veered across the airliner's path causing the pilot to shout 'Look out!' as he attempted to avert a mid-air collision 22,000ft above the Kent countryside.

Travelling at an estimated 120mph, it passed less than 1,000ft from the passenger jet before disappearing from radar screens, leaving the pilot and accident investigators baffled.

Secret documents released for the first time reveal that Ministry of Defence staff accept that an Unidentified Flying Object zooming above Lydd caused the nearmiss.

The incident took place at 7.58pm on April 21, 1991, and was investigated by the Civil Aviation Authority and military experts.

Having ruled out the possibility of it being a missile, weather balloon or space rocket, the MoD was forced to conclude that it was a genuine UFO and close the inquiry.

The unexplained close encounter is one of many recounted in military UFO documents released today by the National Archives.

The Alitalia aircraft was on a routine flight from Milan to Heathrow with 57 people on board when the ten-foot long object, which had no exhaust flame, was spotted by pilot Achille Zaghetti.

Read more ....

More Problems With Hubble

Hubble Telescope

From Science News:

Hubble’s resurrection is suspended while engineers examine two anomalies
Two anomalies onboard the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, which stopped transmitting data on September 27, caused engineers to suspend re-activation of Hubble’s science equipment. Engineers encountered problems following an intricate maneuver to circumvent a piece of failed hardware. Hubble is currently orbiting Earth in a dormant “safe mode” while the malfunctions are assessed.

In an October 17 teleconference, NASA scientists said that it is too soon to know the details of the failures. “We are in the early stages of going through a mountain of data that has been downloaded,” said Art Whipple, manager of the Hubble Systems Management Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., at the teleconference. “This is a marathon, not a sprint.”

These latest anomalies came at a critical time, during the team’s attempt on October 16 to wake up all of Hubble’s science equipment and restore the orbiting telescope to full science capabilities.

The late September failure in Hubble’s science data formatting unit halted all science data communications to Earth. Since then, Hubble has been orbiting Earth silently, performing only basic health and safety functions, with almost all of its science observations suspended.

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Space Expectations

THE MIND OF WERNHER VON BRAUN: In the October 18, 1952, issue of Collier's, von Braun sketched out the 190-foot- (58-meter-) tall "orbit-to-orbit space ship," which he designed to transport people from a space station to lunar orbit.

From Scientific American:

German rocket physicist and astronautics engineer Wernher von Braun played a crucial role in developing the rocket technology, including the Saturn 5 , that put U.S. astronauts on the surface of the moon in 1969. Just 17 years earlier, when spaceflight was little more than a dream, von Braun worked for the U.S. Army building ballistic missiles. It was during this time that the future and first director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., would share his vision of manned space exploration. A series of articles published in Collier's magazine in the early 1950s revealed many ideas that later became reality (including space stations, lunar missions and satellites) and some that never got off the ground (a rocket operated by three rhesus monkeys).

Von Braun's sketches for the magazine's illustrations are up for bid by U.K. auctioneers Bonhams Wednesday. The auction house, which expected the lot of 35 drawings and letters to fetch up to $25,000, was pleasantly surprised with the winning bid came in at $132,000.

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Genetic-based Human Diseases Are An Ancient Evolutionary Legacy, Research Suggests

Artistic illustration of a phylostratigraphy.
(Credit: Irena Andreic, Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb)

From Space Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 19, 2008) — Tomislav Domazet-Lošo and Diethard Tautz from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, have systematically analysed the time of emergence for a large number of genes - genes which can also initiate diseases. Their studies show for the first time that the majority of these genes were already in existence at the origin of the first cells.

The search for further genes, particularly those which are involved in diseases caused by several genetic causes, is thus facilitated. Furthermore, the research results confirm that the basic interconnections are to be found in the function of genes - causing the onset of diseases - can also be found in model organisms (Molecular Biology and Evolution).

The Human Genome Project that deciphered the human genetic code, uncovered thousands of genes that, if mutated, are involved in human genetic diseases. The genomes of many other organisms were deciphered in parallel. This now allows the evolution of these disease associated genes to be systematically studied.

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Monopoly Brings Out the Worst in People

From Live Science:

Last weekend we had some folks over to play Monopoly. There were four adults and three kids, and we all wanted some family fun.

It's always chancy playing board games with good friends because people with dice in their hands, even very nice, mild mannered people, often turn cutthroat.

With this group, it started as the parents set up the board and the kids ran around.

Half the parents, it seemed, wanted to make sure our fiscally innocent children were protected from unscrupulous players. "Let's let the kids win," said one mother.

But the other parents didn’t give a hoot about the kids. "It's their fault if they don't understand economics. Let's take them for all they've got," said one father.

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Men's Reactions Peak At Age 39

From Live Science:

This explains everything.

Scientists asked 72 men, ranging in age from 23 to 80, to tap their index fingers as fast as they could for 10 seconds. The researchers also did brain scans to measure in each subject the amount of myelin — a fatty sheath of insulation that coats nerve axons and allows for signaling bursts in our brains.

Both the tapping speed and the amount of myelin was found to decline "with an accelerating trajectory" after age 39.

Study leader George Bartzokis, professor of psychiatry at UCLA, called the results "pretty striking" and said: "That may well be why, besides achy joints and arthritis, even the fittest athletes retire and all older people move slower than they did when they were younger."

The myelination of brain circuits was known to peak in middle age. Bartzokis and others have long argued that brain aging might be primarily related to the myelin breakdown.

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Could Solar Power Satellites Beam Down Gigawatts of Energy?

Image from NASA

From Treehugger:

How pie-in-the-sky is Ben Bova's space satellite scheme? Mr. Bova, the president emeritus of the National Space Society and a prolific science fiction author, penned a column in last Sunday's Washington Post calling on the next president to build an armada of solar power satellites (SPS) -- basically large accumulations of solar cells -- to help meet a substantial chunk of our energy needs. The idea of building orbiting solar systems in space is nothing new (see my posts about Japan's Space Solar Power Systems and India's space plans); the concept, as described by its creator, aerospace engineer Peter Glaser, would be a satellite in high orbit (where sunshine is always present) that would use microwave transmission to beam solar power to receiving stations on Earth.

The obvious benefit: a continuous 24-hour, 365-day supply of solar energy. Powered by solar energy itself, a single SPS could generate up to 10 gigawatts of power continually, according to Bova. If that's even remotely true, just imagine how much continuous power a group of these SPSs could provide.

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Protective Shield Of The Sun Is Shrinking

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

LONDON: The protective bubble around the sun that helps to shield the Earth from harmful interstellar radiation is shrinking and getting weaker, NASA scientists have discovered.

New data from the Ulysses deep-space probe show that the heliosphere, the protective shield of energy that surrounds our solar system, has weakened by 25 per cent over the past decade and is now at it lowest level since the space race began 50 years ago.

Scientists, baffled at what could be causing the barrier to shrink in this way, were set to launch a mission overnight to study the heliosphere.

The Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or Ibex, will orbit 240,000 kilometres above the Earth and "listen" for the shock wave that forms as our solar system meets interstellar radiation.

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The Final Frontier: An Essay By Stephen Hawkings

From Cosmos Magazine:

In the 1960s the space race created a fascination with science and great technological advances. To find alien life we need to take back up that mantle, says astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, and send people further into space.

Why should we go into space? What is that justification for spending all that effort and money on getting a few lumps of Moon rock? Aren't there better causes here on Earth?

In a way, the situation was like that in Europe before 1492. People might well have argued that it was a waste of money to send Columbus on a wild goose chase over an almost unimaginable distance. Yet, the discovery of the New World made a profound difference to the old one.

Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect; it will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all.

It won't solve many of our immediate problems on Earth, but it will give us a new perspective on them and cause us to look both outwards and inwards. With luck it could unite us to face a common challenge.

Read more ....

Man's Oldest friend: Scientists Discover The Grandad O Modern Dogs... From 31,700 Years Ago

A Siberian husky, thought to most resemble the Paleolithic dogs of our forefathers
(Photo from Daily Mail)

From Daily Mail:

For hundreds of years they've been considered man's best friend, and now it seems dogs have been around longer than thought.

Scientists have discovered the oldest-ever remains of dogs dating back 31,700 years - that's 221,900 in dog years...

The remains push back the date for the earliest dog by 14,000 years, and suggest the forefathers of the modern canine were a lot stronger and a lot hungrier than next-door's Fido.

From studying the fossils, found at Goyet Cave in Belgium, the international team of scientists believe the animals subsisted on a diet of horse, musk ox and reindeer.

Lead author Mietje Germonpré, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, said: 'In shape, the Paleolithic dogs most resemble the Siberian husky, but in size, however, they were somewhat larger, probably comparable to large shepherd dogs.

'The Paleolithic dogs had wider and shorter snouts and relatively wider brain cases than fossil and recent wolves.'

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Colossal Black Holes Common In Early Universe, Spectacular Galactic Collision Suggests

Artist’s conception of the 4C60.07 system of colliding galaxies. The galaxy on the left has turned most of its gas into stars, and the black hole in its center is ejecting charged particles in the two immense jets shown. The galaxy on the right also has a black hole causing the galaxy’s central region to shine, but much of its light is hidden by surrounding gas and dust. Vast numbers of stars are forming out of the gas and dust, and some of the material is being pulled away from the galaxy. (Credit: David A. Hardy/UK ATC)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 16, 2008) — Astronomers think that many - perhaps all - galaxies in the universe contain massive black holes at their centers. New observations with the Submillimeter Array now suggest that such colossal black holes were common even 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only 1.7 billion years old and galaxies were just beginning to form.

The new conclusion comes from the discovery of two distant galaxies, both with black holes at their heart, which are involved in a spectacular collision.

4C60.07, the first of the galaxies to be discovered, came to astronomers' attention because of its bright radio emission. This radio signal is one telltale sign of a quasar - a rapidly spinning black hole that is feeding on its home galaxy.

When 4C60.07 was first studied, astronomers thought that hydrogen gas surrounding the black hole was undergoing a burst of star formation, forming stars at a remarkable rate - the equivalent of 5,000 suns every year. This vigorous activity was revealed by the infrared glow from smoky debris left over when the largest stars rapidly died.

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Awesome Pictures Of The Sun

Boston.com published some great pictures of the Sun. The link is HERE.

The Power Of Music

(Image from University of East Anglia)

Amazing Power of Music Revealed -- Live Science

More than 7,000 runners who raced earlier this month in a half-marathon in London were under the influence of a scientifically derived and powerful performance-enhancing stimulant — pop music.

The dance-able, upbeat music at London's "Run to the Beat" race was selected on the basis of the research and consultation of sport psychologist Costas Karageorghis of Brunel University in England. He has learned how to devise soundtracks that are just as powerful, if not more so, as some of the not-so-legal substances that athletes commonly take to excel.

"Music is a great way to regulate mood both before and during physical activity. A lot of athletes use music as if it's a legal drug," Karageorghis told LiveScience. "They can use it as a stimulant or as a sedative. Generally speaking, loud upbeat music has a stimulating effect and slow music reduces arousal."

The link between music and athletic performance is just one example of the inroads scientists and doctors are making into understanding the amazing power that music has over our minds and bodies. Science is backing up our intuition and experience, showing that music really does kill pain, reduce stress, better our brains and basically change how we experience life.

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Even Moderate Alcohol Seems To Shrink Brain

Image from Sottish Youth Parliament

From Future Pundit:

Using 1,839 subjects in the Framingham Offspring Study examined with functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) researchers find that even lower levels of alcohol drinking are associated with more rapid brain shrinkage with age.

Increasing alcohol intake was associated with loss in total brain volume greater than expected from age alone (P<0.001), reported Carol Ann Paul, of Wellesley College, and colleagues in the October issue of the Archives of Neurology. In the cross-sectional study, women were affected more strongly than men by moderate alcohol intake averaging one to two drinks a day (eight to 14 per week). Do you drink two drinks a day? If so, you are probably getting dumber faster than you need to. The hope was that cardiovascular benefits of moderate alcohol consumption would keep the brain better fed with blood and slow brain aging. But that hope seems unrealistic now. The cardiovascular benefits of low to moderate alcohol intake are thought to result from increasing blood flow rates, which would have been expected to benefit the brain also, Paul said. But rather than preventing normal age-related volume reductions, the effects of moderate drinking were closer to those of heavy drinking, which has been linked to brain atrophy and cognitive decline, the researchers noted.

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World's Hottest Ever Planet Is Discovered - At A Sizzling 2250C It's Half As Hot As The Sun!

Hottest ever: The new planet is half the temperature of the Sun (Image from the Daily Mail)

From The Daily Mail:

Scientists have made an amazing discovery in space - the hottest ever planet ever found.

The planet, known as WASP-12b, is believed to be an amazing 2250 Centigrade, about half as hot as the Sun.

The planet, which one and half times the size of Jupiter, orbits at one fortieth the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Despite the mind-boggling temperature of the new planet, it may not necessarily keep hold of its record for long. Wasp-12b only just edges out the last record-holder HD 149026b, which is a searing 2040 Centigrade.

The discovery was made using two sets of telescopes, one in Spain's Canary Islands and the other in South Africa, to search for signs of 'transiting' planets, which pass in front of and dim their host stars as seen from Earth.

Read more ....

Reading This Will Change Your Brain

Jeff Sherman / Taxi-Getty Images (Photo from Newsweek)

From Newsweek:

A leading neuroscientist says processing digital information can rewire your circuits. But is it evolution?

Is technology changing our brains? A new study by UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small adds to a growing body of research that says it is. And according to Small's new book, "iBRAIN: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," a dramatic shift in how we gather information and communicate with one another has touched off an era of rapid evolution that may ultimately change the human brain as we know it. "Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically," he writes. "As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills."

The impact of technology on our circuitry should not come as a surprise. The brain's plasticity—it's ability to change in response to different stimuli—is well known. Professional musicians have more gray matter in brain regions responsible for planning finger movements. And athletes' brains are bulkier in areas that control hand-eye coordination. That's because the more time you devote to a specific activity, the stronger the neural pathways responsible for executing that activity become. So it makes sense that people who process a constant stream of digital information would have more neurons dedicated to filtering that information. Still, that's not the same thing as evolution.

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Mysterious Cyclones Seen At Both of Saturn's Poles

From National Geographic:

Saturn boasts cyclones at each of its poles that dramatically outpower Earth-roving hurricanes, new images reveal.

The Cassini spacecraft—a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency—recently peered below what had previously appeared to be isolated cumulus clouds at the planet's south pole.

"What looked like puffy clouds in lower resolution images are turning out to be deep convective structures seen through the atmospheric haze," Cassini imaging team member Tony Del Genio said in a press release.

"One of them has punched through to a higher altitude and created its own little vortex."

"Little" is relative—the eye of the storm is surrounded by an outer ring of clouds that measures 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) wide. That's about five times the size of the largest cyclones, or hurricanes, on Earth.

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Einstein's Relativity Survives Neutrino Test

From E! Science News:

Physicists working to disprove "Lorentz invariance" -- Einstein's prediction that matter and massless particles will behave the same no matter how they're turned or how fast they go -- won't get that satisfaction from muon neutrinos, at least for the time being, says a consortium of scientists. The test of Lorentz invariance, conducted by MINOS Experiment scientists and reported in the Oct. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters, started with a stream of muon neutrinos produced at Fermilab particle accelerator, near Chicago, and ended with a neutrino detector 750 meters away and 103 meters below ground. As the Earth does its daily rotation, the neutrino beam rotates too.

"If there's a field out there that can cause violations of Lorentz invariance, we should be able to see its effects as the beam rotates in space," said Indiana University Bloomington astrophysicist Stuart Mufson, a project leader. "But we did not. Einsteinian relativity lives to see another day."

Mufson is quick to point out that the Physical Review Letters report does not disprove the existence of a Lorentz-violating field. Despite the sophistication and power of MINOS's detector, "It may be that the field's effects are so exceedingly small that you'd need extraordinary tools to detect it," Mufson said.

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Asia Trumping US On Science R&D

(Click To Enlarge)

From Christian Science Monitor:

Federal funding for research has been falling in real terms. Is the nation’s economic edge at stake?

Tallying this year’s Nobel Prizes so far, it’s been a respectable year for US-based scientists. Four shared the prestigious awards – three for chemistry and one as part of an international trio for physics.

As congratulations pour in, however, some science-policy specialists in the United States see troubling signs that federal support for research – measured by checks written rather than checks promised – may be weakening.

To those involved in federally funded research, their work represents a kind of intellectual infrastructure that, if allowed to erode, can begin to undermine the country’s economic competitiveness.

The immediate concern is the continuing resolution the president signed Sept. 30. Congress punted final passage of the federal budget to next March. Except for the Defense Department, other federal agencies responsible for performing or funding research must hold spending at or below fiscal year 2008 levels.

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Coolest Inventions Of 2008

From Popular Mechanics:

Popular Mechanics Picks Them; The complete list can be found HERE.

Genetic Reasons For Baldness

Hope for the hairless: Researchers in Europe isolated stem cells from the hair follicles of mice (shown here under a microscope) and transplanted them onto the backs of hairless animals, which then sprouted hair. Credit: Nature Genetics

Baldness Genes -- Technology Review

Finding the genetic causes could lead to new therapies for baldness.

It may be small comfort to anyone sporting a comb-over, but researchers have found a second genetic risk factor for baldness.

Two groups, working independently, found variants on chromosome 20 that are associated with male pattern baldness--the most common cause of hair loss in men, and the root of a multimillion-dollar industry devoted to protecting, nurturing, and transplanting hair.

A third report identifies a new kind of stem cell in the hair follicles of mice that, when transplanted onto the skin of hairless rodents, causes the animals to sprout tufts of hair.

These latest findings offer greater insight into the genetic underpinnings of male pattern baldness, and into the process that produces a glorious head of hair in the unafflicted. According to a research team led by Tim Spector of King's College London, figuring out the genetic variants linked to the disorder could lead to gene therapies for baldness. The discovery of a risk factor on chromosome 20 may point to "an intriguing new potential target" for gene therapy.

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Earliest Known Human TB Found In 9,000 Year-old Skeletons

The Skeletons submerged at the Alit-Yam site.
(Credit: Image courtesy of University College London)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 15, 2008) — The discovery of the earliest known cases of human tuberculosis (TB) in bones found submerged off the coast of Israel shows that the disease is 3000 years older than previously thought. Direct examination of this ancient DNA confirms the latest theory that bovine TB evolved later than human TB.

The new research, led by scientists from UCL (University College London) and Tel-Aviv University and published today in PLoS One, sheds light on how the TB bacterium has evolved over the millennia and increases our understanding of how it may change in the future.

The bones, thought to be of a mother and baby, were excavated from Alit-Yam, a 9000 year-old Pre-Pottery Neolithic village, which has been submerged off the coast of Haifa, Israel for thousands of years. Professor Israel Hershkovitz, from Tel-Aviv University's Department of Anatomy, noticed the characteristic bone lesions that are signs of TB in skeletons from the settlement, one of the earliest with evidence of domesticated cattle.

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New Evidence Provides An Alternative Route 'Out Of Africa' For Early Humans

A generalized map of the Sahara shows the location of the sample sites and the fossilized river courses. (Credit: Anne Osborne)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 15, 2008) — The widely held belief that the Nile valley was the most likely route out of sub-Saharan Africa for early modern humans 120,000 year ago is challenged in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A team led by the University of Bristol shows that wetter conditions reached a lot further north than previously thought, providing a wet 'corridor' through Libya for early human migrations. The results also help explain inconsistencies between archaeological finds.

While it is widely accepted that modern humans originated in sub-Saharan Africa 150-200 thousand years ago, their route of dispersal across the hyper-arid Sahara remains controversial. The Sahara covers most of North Africa and to cross it on foot would be a serious undertaking, even today with the most advanced equipment.

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Why Women Have Bad Teeth

Anthropologist John Lukacs shows a 250,000-year-old "Kabwe skull" from Africa. The sex is unknown, but this specimen has 15 teeth still intact or partially present. 12 of them have obvious damage from dental cavities. Credit: Jim Barlow/U. of Oregon

From Live Science:

Women had poor dental health compared to men back in the hunter-gatherer era, and it got worse as societies turned to farming.

Now an anthropologist is pointing to an overlooked explanation — hormonal and dietary changes related to higher pregnancy rates.

Anthropologists usually argue that women's poor dental health resulted from culture-driven factors, such as cooking duties and the ongoing nibbling that can go along with that. But that narrow focus may overlook biological factors connected to women bearing more and more children in agricultural societies.

Today, men are more likely than women to suffer from gum disease, possibly because men are more likely to ignore dental care, according to Delta Dental. Nonetheless, women do not tend to have better oral health than men, for hormonal reasons, according to the American Academy of Periodontology.

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NASA To Start Long Distance Repairs On Hubble

Hubble Space Telescope is seen with ground view in this picture taken from Space Shuttle in March 2002. (NASA/Handout/Reuters)

From Yahoo News/AP:

WASHINGTON - NASA engineers say they know how to fix the broken Hubble Space Telescope: They have to wake up computer parts that have been sleeping in space for more than 18 years.

On Wednesday, NASA will start a complicated remote-control fix of a major glitch that stopped the telescope from capturing and beaming down pictures. Hubble should be able to send stunning astronomy photos back to Earth by Friday, officials said.

The abrupt failure more than two weeks ago caused NASA to postpone its Hubble upgrade mission from October to sometime next February or so. The delay is costing NASA about $10 million a month, officials said in a Tuesday teleconference.

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Chimps 90 Percent Gone In A "Final Stronghold"

A young chimpanzee is shown in Côte d'Ivoire's Taï National Park in an undated photo. (Photo from National Geographic)

From The National Geographic:

West African chimpanzees have declined by 90 percent in the last 18 years in an African country that is one of the subspecies' "final strongholds," a new study stays.

Scientists counting the rare chimps in Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) found only about 800 to 1,200 of the apes—down from about 8,000 to 12,000 in 1989-90. Before the new survey, the country had been thought to harbor about half of all West African chimps.

"We were not expecting such a drastic decrease," said lead author Geneviève Campbell, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

The 1989-90 survey had itself represented a significant decline from 1960s estimates of about a hundred thousand West African Chimps in Côte d'Ivoire.

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Men Who Never Smoke Live Longer, Better Lives Than Heavy Smokers

From E! Science News:

Health-related quality of life appears to deteriorate as the number of cigarettes smoked per day increases, even in individuals who subsequently quit smoking, according to a report in the October 13 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Smoking has been shown to shorten men's lives between seven and 10 years, according to background information in the article. It also has been linked to factors that may reduce quality of life, including poor nutrition and lower socioeconomic status.

Arto Y. Strandberg, M.D., of the University of Helsinki, and colleagues followed 1,658 white men born between 1919 and 1934 who were healthy at their first assessment, conducted in 1974. Participants were mailed follow-up questionnaires in 2000 that assessed their current smoking status, health and quality of life. Deaths were tracked through Finnish national registers.

During the 26-year follow-up period, 372 (22.4 percent) of the men died. Those who had never smoked lived an average of 10 years longer than heavy smokers (more than 20 cigarettes per day). Non-smokers also had the best scores on all health-related quality of life measures, especially those associated with physical functioning. Physical health deteriorated at an increasing rate as the number of cigarettes smoked per day increased, with heavy smokers experiencing a decline equivalent to 10 years of aging.

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Archaeological Dig Uncovers Roman Mystery

Archeologist Roger Wilson pulls out the clay amphora from its 1,500 year hiding place. (Credit: Photo courtesy of Roger Wilson from Science Daily)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 14, 2008) — University of British Columbia archaeologists have dug up a mystery worthy of Indiana Jones, one that includes a tomb, skeletons and burial rites with both Christian and pagan elements.

This summer, Prof. Roger Wilson led excavations at Kaukana, an ancient Roman village located near Punta Secca, a small town in the south-eastern province of Ragusa in Sicily.

Combing through the sand-buried site, the 15-member team made a series of startling discoveries. Central to the mystery was finding a tomb inside a room in a house dating from the sixth century AD.

Wilson explains that tombs during this period are normally found only in cemeteries outside the built-up area of a town, or around the apse of a church. And since the building was substantial with mortared walls and internal plaster, this would have been likely a tomb for the wealthy.

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Home Lighting Could Be Wireless Network

An illustration shows an office where LED lighting provides both illumination and wireless communication. Credit: Boston University

From Live Science:

Lights may soon do more than just shine in dark places – they might wirelessly connect your computer, phone or car to the Internet.

Sounds strange, but consider this. Remote controls already use infrared light to communicate with TVs and DVD players. Turning ceiling and reading lamps into wireless access points could allow you to get your Internet fix almost anywhere.

"We can provide ubiquitous communication if we have network access wherever there's lighting," said Thomas Little, a computer engineer at Boston University.

These aren't just any lights, though. Little and other researchers hope to piggyback on the spread of light-emitting diode (LED) light bulbs, which are finding favor as low-energy, long-lasting alternatives to the more conventional incandescent or fluorescent light bulbs.

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Step Aside, Chicken Soup: Eight Cold Elixirs

From ABC News:

Spanning the Globe in Search of Alternative Home Remedies for the Common Cold
No matter where you live or what language you speak, the symptoms of a coldare understood the world over -- no translation required: Your throat feels sore; your nose runs; you might cough or sneeze; and your body aches.

It's time to crawl under the covers and get the extra rest you need.

But a cold virus will need some coaxing to hit the road. Colds rarely make a quick exit and usually take about a week to run their course.

That's where the time-honored tradition of folk medicine comes into play.

Faced with a cold and a lack of modern medicine, our ancestors turned to nature for its treatments. And throughout the world, parts of plants -- the roots, stems, leaves, fruits and flowers -- are used to ease a cold and its symptoms.

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For U.S. Astronauts, A Russian Second Home

The centrifuge at Star City is large enough for people to ride in and subjects them to high G-forces such as those experienced during spacecraft launches and re-entries. (Photo from the New York Times)

From The New York Times:

STAR CITY, Russia — Garrett Reisman was on his way to this formerly secret military base for several weeks of training, making his way through Kennedy Airport, when his cellphone rang. It was his boss, Steven W. Lindsey, the head of NASA’s astronaut office.

“Come back to Houston. They’ve canceled your training — they’re playing hardball,” Mr. Reisman recalled his boss saying. He was caught in a momentarily important dispute between NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos.

Ultimately, Mr. Reisman’s aborted trip was just a bump in the road on the way to space: he spent three months aboard the International Space Station earlier this year, performed a spacewalk and even traded jokes over a video link with Stephen Colbert.

Everyone who works with the Russian space program has similar stories to tell of implacable bureaucrats, byzantine rules and decisions that seem capricious at best. And many of those stories are played out here in Star City, where cosmonauts and, now, astronauts from all over the world train to fly on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to go to the $100 billion International Space Station.

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Google Satellite's Eye-Opening First Picture Promises Even Clearer Views Of Earth

Pin-sharp ... yet GeoEye-1's picture of Pennsylvania's Kutztown University
campus was taken from 423 miles above

From The Daily Mail:

Google's new satellite has beamed back its first picture, taken the moment the on-board camera was switched on.

The crystal-clear image promises to make the internet giant's photographic atlas, Google Earth, even more detailed.

The satellite went live for the first time two days ago following its launch last month from a U.S. air force base in California.

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Introducing the World’s Largest Solar Powered Winery

(Photo from Treehugger)

From Treehugger:

The largest solar installation of any winery in the world is set to be built for Constellation Wines’ Gonzalez winery in Monterrey County, CA by Pacific Power Management. Mitsubishi solar panels will cover 170,000 square feet on the winery warehouse roof, and will generate 1,700,000 kilowatt hours a year—enough to power over 50 percent of the winery’s energy needs.

Solar Powered Wine-Making, Solar Powered Living
What’s more, during the summer months when the winery isn’t operating at full capacity (it doesn’t process grapes in summer months), the electricity will be exported in order to power 25 percent of the energy needs of surrounding residential areas—1,695 homes in the city of Gonzalez.

This may very well be the most expansive effort to power a winery with alternative energy (though there are more than a few very green wineries already in operation, and it won't lay claim to the first carbon neutral winery).

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Haemorrhagic Virus Carried By Common African Mouse

From the New Scientist:

Three people have died and another is seriously ill with a previously unknown strain of a virus carried by a common African rodent. The virus requires close contact to spread, but experts warn that more like it could be circulating.

A 36-year-old woman on a small farm outside the Zambian capital Lusaka developed flu-like symptoms in early September. When they worsened she was taken by air ambulance to South Africa, where she died.

Alarms were raised after the ambulance paramedic and the nurse who attended her also died after developing similar symptoms two weeks later. The nurse who tended the paramedic is also in a serious condition.

On Sunday South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases announced that the victims were infected by an arenavirus, one of a family of viruses carried by rodents.

"They are very widespread," says Bob Swanepoel, former head of the NICD and one of the world's leading experts on haemorrhagic viruses. In Africa, arenaviruses are carried, with no symptoms, by the multimammate mouse, a common farm pest sold in Europe as a "pocket pet".

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Fusion Will Be Cracked "Within 30 Years"

(Click To Enlarge)
Temperatures inside the fusion reactor will reach 100 million degrees Celsius (ITER.ORG)

From Swissinfo:

Despite the complexity and high research and development costs, scientists are convinced they can unlock the massive power of nuclear fusion within a generation.

On Monday the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor Organisation (ITER) signed a cooperation agreement at the opening of an IAEA fusion energy conference, held in Geneva.

"ITER is one of the most important scientific projects in the world," said IAEA's director general, Yuri Sokolov.

ITER, or "the way" in Latin, is an experimental reactor being built in Cadarache, southern France, which has a practical goal: to establish whether fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun and the hydrogen bomb, can be tamed to generate useful power on Earth.

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Break Out The Bubbly: White Wine May Be Good For You

From The New Scientist:

White wine lovers can feel a little less guilty about their habit. New research suggests that white varieties may offer similar heart benefits to red wines.

Rats that were fed white wine as part of their diet suffered less heart damage during cardiac arrest, compared to animals fed only water or grain alcohol. These benefits were similar to animals that ingested a red wine or its wonder ingredient found only in grape skin, resveratrol.

White wine, made from the pulp of the grape but not the skin, contains no resveratrol, which led many to pin the so-called "French paradox" – high fat intake but low rates of heart disease – on moderate consumption of red wines.

Not just reds, says Dipak Das, a molecular biologist at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington. "The flesh of the grape can do the same job as the skin."

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How We Evolve

From Seed Magazine:

When the previous generation of life scientists was coming up through the academy, there was a widespread assumption, not always articulated by professors, that human evolution had all but stopped. It had certainly shaped our prehuman ancestors — Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the rest of the ape-men and man-apes in our bushy lineage — but once Homo sapiens developed agriculture and language, it was thought, we stopped changing. It was as though, having achieved its aim by the seventh day, evolution rested. "That was the stereotype that I learned," says population geneticist and anthropologist Henry Harpending. "We showed up 45,000 years ago and haven't changed since then."

The idea makes a rough-and-ready kind of sense. Natural selection derives its power to transform from the survival of some and the demise of others, and from differential reproductive success. But we nurse our sick back to health, and mating is no longer a privilege that males beat each other senseless to secure. As a result, even the less fit get to pass on their genes. Promiscuity and sperm competition have given way to spiritual love; the fittest and the unfit are treated as equals, and equally flourish. With the advent of culture and our fine sensibilities, the assumption was, natural selection went by the board.

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Extending The Life Of Fresh Cranberries

Cranberry harvest in New Jersey. (Credit: Photo by Keith Weller)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 11, 2008) — Cranberries are tart, tiny fruits packed with powerful antioxidants. The small, red berries offer a wide variety of health benefits. Not only are cranberries a healthy, low-calorie snack, but they can also play a significant role in preventing urinary tract infections, reducing the risk of gum disease and much more. In fact, studies show that the significant amounts of antioxidants in cranberries may help protect against heart disease, cancer, and other diseases.

The good news about cranberries is spreading, resulting in growing consumer demand for fresh cranberries and cranberry products. This demand has led to increased interest in finding ways to extend the shelf life of the popular fruit. Setting out to determine the optimum conditions for storing fresh cranberries, Charles F. Forney. a research scientist in Postharvest Physiology at the Atlantic Food and Horticulture Research Centre in Nova Scotia, Canada, conducted a study of fresh cranberries and their postharvest life. Forney's study was published in the April 2008 issue of HortScience.

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Promising New Material Could Improve Gas Mileage

Up to three-quarters of the potential energy you are paying at the gas pump for is wasted. A good deal of it goes right out the tailpipe instead of powering your car. (Credit: iStockphoto/Rich Legg)

From Space Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 10, 2008) — With gasoline at high prices, it's disheartening to know that up to three-quarters of the potential energy you are paying for is wasted. A good deal of it goes right out the tailpipe instead of powering your car.

Now a Northwestern University-led research team has identified a promising new material that could transform a technology that currently cools and heats car seats -- thermoelectrics -- into one that also efficiently converts waste heat into electricity to help power the car and improve gas mileage.

The researchers discovered that adding two metals, antimony and lead, to the well-known semiconductor lead-telluride, produces a thermoelectric material that is more efficient at high temperatures than existing materials. The results are published online in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

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