Hydrogen Storage Gets New Hope

Ammonia borane (AB) is a potential hydrogen releasing fuel. In this Los Alamos National Laboratory graphic, the AB would be used on-board the vehicle to run a fuel cell. Once hydrogen is released, the AB could then be regenerated and reused. In the scheme shown, the recycle of dehydrogenated fuel back into AB would take place off-board the vehicle. (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Los Alamos National Laboratory)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 7, 2009) — A new method for “recycling” hydrogen-containing fuel materials could open the door to economically viable hydrogen-based vehicles.

In an article appearing in Angewandte Chemie, Los Alamos National Laboratory and University of Alabama researchers working within the U.S. Department of Energy’s Chemical Hydrogen Storage Center of Excellence describe a significant advance in hydrogen storage science.

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Hard Labor: How 10 Animals Struggle to Survive

From Live Science:

Many Americans think of Labor Day as merely the end of summer and part of a welcome three-day weekend. Its origin, however, is in celebrating the labor movement and workers' rights. So enjoy the break (if you get one in this modern 24/7 world), but if you think you have it tough, consider the hard labor put in by these 10 creatures, all just to survive. The list is courtesy the National Wildlife Federation.

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Shuttle Crew In Home Stretch Of Station Resupply

Astronauts Nicole Stott and Danny Olivas retrieve experiments from the Columbus module during a spacewalk last Tuesday. (Credit: NASA)

From CNET:

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston--Sailing into the home stretch of a busy space station resupply mission, the shuttle Discovery astronauts worked Sunday to wrap up equipment and supply transfers before taking a half day off to relax and enjoy the view.

Overnight, engineers successfully tested a new motor-driven bolt in the berthing mechanism holding the shuttle-delivered Leonardo cargo module in place on the Earth-facing port of the lab's Harmony module.

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Google To Remove European Titles From US E-Book Settlement

From The Wall Street Journal:

BRUSSELS (Dow Jones)--Online search giant Google Inc. (GOOG) Monday said it will remove all European books that are still commercially available from a $125 million U.S. settlement with publishers to scan orphaned and out-of-print books in the U.S. and sell them online.

The concessions come given the concerns of European authors and publishers, who don't want the search engine to scan books by European authors, which are still protected by copyrights, without asking their permission.

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Islamic Search Engine ImHalal Filters Out Potentially Sinful Material

The ImHalal search engine warns users of potentially illicit words and material on the internet.

From Times Online:

Muslims will be able to surf the internet without the fear of accidentally encountering sinful material after a Dutch company launched the world’s first Islamic search engine.

The ImHalal service works like any other search facility until potentially illicit words are entered, when it rates the search from one to three on its risk of generating “haram” or forbidden material.

Reza Sardeha, founder of AZS Media Group which runs the search engine, said: “The idea grew up when some friends of mine complained that when they searched on Google or Yahoo once in a while they bumped into sexually explicit content.”

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Is There a Climate-Change Tipping Point?

NASA / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

Global warming — the very term sounds gentle, like a bath that grows pleasantly hotter under the tap. Many people might assume that's how climate change works too, the globe gradually increasing in temperature until we decide to stop it by cutting our carbon emissions. It's a comforting notion, one that gives us time to gauge the steady impact of warming before taking action.

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Breakthrough In Fight Against Diabetes

From The Telegraph:

A gene that controls the way the body responds to the hormone insulin has been identified, marking a breakthrough in the fight against diabetes.

Scientists believe a variation in the gene's DNA promotes insulin resistance, the primary cause of type 2 diabetes. The disease is the most common form of diabetes, affecting around two million people in the UK.

The discovery could lead to new drug treatments that target the genetic fault and prevent the body failing to respond to insulin.

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Short-Haired Bumblebee To Be Repopulated In UK

A queen short-haired bumblebee, one of a species which died out in the UK, but survived in New Zealand after being shipped there more than 100 years ago, is to be reintroduced in the UK. Photograph: Bumblebee Conservation Trust/Dave Goulson

From The Guardian:

Descendants of the lost UK bumblebee will be brought from New Zealand to Dungeness in what could be a landmark repopulation programme.

British conservationists have drawn up plans to repopulate the countryside with a species of bumblebee that was declared extinct here nearly a decade ago.

The short-haired bumblebee officially died out in the UK in 2000, but descendents of the doomed community live on in small pockets of New Zealand, where they were taken to pollinate red clover in the late 19th century.

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Lost In Space: Astronomy Photographers Capture Cosmic Masterpieces For Competition

The horsehead nebula in Orion by Martin Pugh from the UK

From The Daily Mail:

The dramatic rearing horsehead nebula and mysterious glowing Bow of Orion are just two of the unforgettable images that have been entered into the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2009 competition.

More than 500 entries from around the world - from dedicated amateurs as well as true beginners - have been sent in, including some taken with mobile phones.

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Nano Printing Goes Large

Photo: Nano press: This 10-by-30-centimeter plastic sheet (top) has been patterned with a series of nanoscale polymer lines using roll-to-roll nanoimprint lithography (bottom). The film is iridescent because of the way its nanoscale features scatter light. Credit: ACS Nano

From Technology Review:

A rolling nanoimprint lithography stamp could be used to print components for displays and solar cells.

A printing technique that could stamp out features just tens of nanometers across at industrial scale is finally moving out of the lab. The new roll-to-roll nanoimprint lithography system could be used to cheaply and efficiently churn out nano-patterned optical films to improve the performance of displays and solar cells.

Nanoimprint lithography uses mechanical force to press out a nanoscale pattern and can make much smaller features than optical lithography, which is reaching its physical limits. The technique was developed as a tool for miniaturizing integrated circuits, and a handful of companies, including Molecular Imprints of Austin, TX, are still developing it for this application.

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ISS's New Reactor Uses Sound Waves To Form Materials Attainable Only In Space

Space-DRUMS: The Space-DRUMS chamber makes use of 20 sound beams to produce materials free of container contamination. Semiconductors are especially an area of interest for the souped-up pressure cooker. NASA

From Popular Science:

This dodecahedron-shaped device currently on board the International Space Station may resemble a landmine, but in fact it serves quite an opposite purpose: within, scientist Jacques Guigne hopes to use sound waves to cleanly manipulate a brew of ingredients into custom materials that can only be made in the unique conditions of space.

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Economists Measure GDP Growth From Outer Space

Increased nighttime lighting indicates economic growth in Poland and Eastern Europe between 1992 (left, above) and 2002. Poland is in the top left quarter of each image. (Credit: NOAA and USAF Weather Agency)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 6, 2009) — Outer space offers a new perspective for measuring economic growth, according to new research by three Brown University economists. In a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, and David N. Weil suggest a new framework for estimating a country or region’s gross domestic product (GDP) by using satellite images of the area’s nighttime lights.

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Powerful Ideas: Cars Could Run on Watermelons

From Live Science:

Watermelon juice could become the newest renewable energy source for vehicles, scientists now suggest.

Each year, about 1 out of 5 watermelons are left behind in fields because they are misshapen or because of cosmetic blemishes. In the 2007 growing season, this amounted to roughly 360,000 metric tons of lost melons in the United States alone.

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Is The Near-Earth Space Frontier Closed?

The development of the ICBM, and the satellite systems linked to these missiles, created a synergistic relationship that effectively settled the near-Earth space frontier. (credit: US Air Force)

From Space Review:

How the ICBM opened, developed, and closed its own frontier.

If you challenged people in the civilian space community to identify a set of space systems that repaid their initial investment in proportion to their cost, most would be hard pressed to identify more than one or two nonmilitary systems. That set of applications would unlikely be a compelling enough reason to pour the resources that would be needed to open the space frontier from scratch.

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Plasmobot: The Slime Mould Robot

Single-celled slime moulds could be programmed as robots (Image: Visuals Unlimited / Corbis)

From New Scientist:

THOUGH not famed for their intellect, single-celled organisms have already demonstrated a surprising degree of intelligence. Now a team at the University of the West of England (UWE) has secured £228,000 in funding to turn these organisms into engineering robots.

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Finding A Scapegoat When Epidemics Strike

DEMONIZED Above, a detail from the Friese Chronicles showing the 1349 massacre of Erfurt Jews in Germany, who were blamed for the Black Death. Yeshiva University Museum

From The New York Times:

Whose fault was the Black Death?

In medieval Europe, Jews were blamed so often, and so viciously, that it is surprising it was not called the Jewish Death. During the pandemic’s peak in Europe, from 1348 to 1351, more than 200 Jewish communities were wiped out, their inhabitants accused of spreading contagion or poisoning wells.

The swine flu outbreak of 2009 has been nowhere near as virulent, and neither has the reaction. But, as in pandemics throughout history, someone got the blame — at first Mexico, with attacks on Mexicans in other countries and calls from American politicians to close the border.

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The Teen Brain: The More Mature,The More Reckless

Michael Blann / Getty

From Time Magazine:

Teenagers are a famously reckless species. They floor the gas and experiment with drugs and play with guns; according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures, more than 16,000 young people die each year from unintentional injuries. The most common-sense explanation for teens' carelessness is that their brains just aren't developed enough to know better. But new research suggests that in the case of some teens, the culprit is just the opposite: the brain matures not too slowly but, perhaps, too quickly.

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Tigers Are 'Brainier' Than Lions

Photo: Getty

From The Telegraph:

As the King of the Jungle, the lion may have the brawn, but it is the tiger that has the brains, claim scientists.

Researchers have discovered that the tiger has a far bigger brain than its big cat rival, even though it is often seen as lower down the food chain.

A team of zoologists at Oxford University compared the brain cavity in the skulls of both animals and found tigers are 16 per cent bigger than lions, leopards and jaguars.

In evolutionary terms, brain size has usually been linked to intelligence.

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Giant Statues Give Up Hat Mystery

The ancient statues have giant red hats

From BBC:

Archaeologists have solved an ancient mystery surrounding the famous Easter Island statues.

At 2,500 miles off the coast of Chile, the island is the world's most remote place inhabited by people.

Up to one thousand years ago, the islanders started putting giant red hats on the statues.

The research team, from the University of Manchester and University College London, think the hats were rolled down from an ancient volcano.

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Lost World Of Fanged Frogs And Giant Rats Discovered In Papua New Guinea

The Bosavi Woolly Rat had no fear of humans when it was discovered.
Photograph: Jonny Keeling/BBC

From The Guardian:

A lost world populated by fanged frogs, grunting fish and tiny bear-like creatures has been discovered in a remote volcanic crater on the Pacific island of Papua New Guinea.

A team of scientists from Britain, America, Hawaii and Papua New Guinea found more than 40 previously unidentified species when they climbed into the kilometre-deep crater of Mount Bosavi and explored a pristine jungle habitat teeming with life that has evolved in isolation since the volcano last erupted 200,000 years ago. In a remarkably rich haul from just five weeks of exploration, the biologists discovered 16 frogs which have never before been recorded by science, at least three new fish, a new bat and a giant rat, which may turn out to be the biggest in the world.

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