Soon every new car in California will be rated based on how much greenhouse gas it spews into the atmosphere. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) plans to roll out a window sticker that will feature two scores, one to rate a car’s smog emissions and another to gauge global warming. The scores will fall on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best possible score.
The agency will compile emissions data for all new 2009 cars. Average polluting cars will be given scores of 5, the least polluting will earn perfect 10s.
CARB says it’s a good way for consumers to compare automobiles and encourage more eco-friendly vehicles. It’s a step in the right direction, but it seems like a round-about way to force manufacturers to produce more efficient, cleaner cars.
“This label will arm consumers with the information they need to choose a vehicle that saves gas, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and helps fight smog all at once,” board chairman Mary Nichols said in a statement. “Consumer choice is an especially powerful tool in our fight against climate change. We look forward to seeing these stickers on 2009 model cars as they start hitting the showrooms in the coming months.”
The early morning light lances gleefully through the holes in your mini-blinds, searing your tender eyelids and turning your slothful dreamworld bloody pink. For some of us, dawn brings a hellish realization that we’ll trudge through the day wearing a shroud of exhaustion, a clammy sheet of fatigue that will dull our senses, smarts and motivation. We’re called “night owls,” and we’re forced to live in a world run by early risers.
Researchers in Portugal have proven what we’ve always known; night people are burdened with greater sleep debt during the week, sleep more on weekends and suffer more sleep-wake irregularities than early birds. Ana A. Gomes, of the University of Aveiro in Portugal, studied 1,654 undergrads at her university, where most classes start at 9 a.m. She found that night people were at a significant disadvantage when compared to early risers. Their performance and grades suffered, as did their sleep. She found the same performance deficits even after night owls were given a few weeks to adjust to a morning schedule.
Gomes believes that the university should adapt to the students’ variations in sleep-wake cycles, offering at least two different schedules. From the ScienceDaily article:
“Given the inevitable existence of diurnal-type variations from person to person, we may infer that any single standardized schedule is likely to be inappropriate. We share the idea that a wiser alternative would be the availability of at least two schedules (early/later), so that all diurnal types may gain. Sleep education would also be of great value in helping students to better adjust the sleep-wake cycle to externally imposed timetables.”
With any luck, Gomes’ suggestion will be taken to heart, both in school and in the workplace. A simple switch in schedule could improve learning and productivity for night owls. Globalization and digitally connected virtual offices should also help shatter rigidly structured work schedules. Internet connectivity means that workers and students can collaborate without being in the same space, or even country, 24-hours a day.
Researchers at the Zernike Institute of Advanced Materials at the University of Groningen have developed super-cheap plastic memory that will likely end up in next-gen RFID tags. It works like Flash memory, but it’s easier and cheaper to manufacture. How do they do it? Flash memory is like a club sandwich—layers of semiconductors between ferro-electric toast. The new memory mixes everything up into one blended semiconductor cake. Current can be channeled through the mixture, leaving programming in its wake. The researchers aren’t totally clear on how they’ve managed this feat, but they say it works wonderfully.
San Jose powerhouse Nanosolar has improved the efficiency of their printable solar cells, made from nanoparticle ink. The company now claims it can pump out enough solar panels every year to harness 1 gigawatt of power from the sun. Still not enough to power the Flux Capacitor (1.21 GW), but it would put a considerable dent in U.S. power usage. The typical U.S. home consumes about 8,900 kilowatt hours per year.
Exposure to stressful situations during childhood—bickering parents, bullies, dog attacks, Disney films—could increase the risk of childhood allergies. German über-scientists at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Leipzig (UFZ), the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the “Institut für Umweltmedizinische Forschung” (IUF) in Duesseldorf, conducted a long-term study of 234 six-year-olds.
They found stressed-out kids had higher levels of the stress-related peptide VIP (vasoactive intestinal polypeptide) in their blood than mellow kids. These peptides can turn the immune system into a hyperactive, yippy little dog that attacks pretty much anything it comes across. This, researchers say, can lead to more allergic reactions.
We’ve all seen how dames are drawn to bad dudes like iron filings to electro-magnets. Now scientists have confirmed the anecdotal evidence: Bad guys really do get the girls. Peter Jonason at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces found that guys who harbor three antisocial personality traits, dubbed the “Dark Triad,” had far more sexual partners than nice guys.
What’s the Dark Triad? A nasty, prickly trident forged from narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Members of the Dark Triad aren’t antisocial like chain-smoking basement shut-ins huddling in the warmth of their Xbox 360s. They’re charismatic, outgoing and popular. They just don’t give a flying squirrel about other people’s feelings and will do pretty much anything to get what they want. Which, in this case, is lots of sex with multiple partners.
Jonason tested 200 college guys for the telltale signs of Dark Triadism. Those who racked up the highest evil scores had far more sexual partners than goody-two-shoes. The scientist theorizes that there must be some sort of evolutionary advantage to being just a little evil, otherwise the Dark Triad of personality traits would’ve been bred out of the population ages ago. He believes that it simply comes down to bad guys being able to spread their seed more effectively than good guys. They may not stick around to raise psychologically healthy kids, but they produce a lot of them.
If being a card-carrying member of the Triad is so good, from an evolutionary standpoint, then everybody should be a certified psychopath, right? That’s obviously not the case and researchers have yet to discover why. There must be negative aspects of membership in Club Evil (like incarceration, getting gunned-down by other psychopaths in Old-West style shootouts, contracting STDs).
Another possibility, and I’m just talking off the cuff now, is that these personality traits aren’t actually inborn. They’re learned. It may explain why the kids of Dark Triad dads don’t all turn out to be bad apples.
Research is still being carried out to answer these questions. In the meantime, it may payoff to flip up your collar and adopt a wicked scowl.
U.S. superstar climate scientist D.r James Hansen estimates that if humankind wants to avoid global warming catastrophe, we’ll need to slash atmospheric co2 to no more than 350 parts per million. 350.org ran with it, launching a campaign and a dazzling video to encourage people everywhere to reduce co2 emissions. Check out the video:
A U.C. Berkeley team has rejuvenated geriatric stem cells, restoring their youthful vigor and ability to rebuild damaged muscle tissue. With a simple injection of bioengineered antibodies, crotchety mice were able to recover from strenuous exercise and injury as well as spry young mice. The trick? The antibodies modified how adult stem cells respond to natural chemical signals that trigger aging.
Irina Conboy, assistant professor of bioengineering and an investigator at the Berkeley Stem Cell Center and at the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), led the research team. She noticed that adult mice stem cells, when placed in “young” blood, behaved like young stem cells. They kicked into overdrive, dividing and repairing. Conversely, young stem cells slowed to a crawl when placed in “old” blood.
The researcher discovered that the cells were responding to two natural chemical signals via a set of receptors. The first receptor, called Notch, activates elated cell replication. The second, a receptor for the protein TGF-beta, sets off a chain reaction that slows cell division. Too much Notch and cells can divide too quickly, hastening tumor and cancer growth. Too much TGF-beta and adult stem cells slow down; cells succumb to the ravages of aging.
Conboy and her team knocked out the “aging pathway” that halts cell replication using a method of RNA interference and a custom antibody. The result: Old mice with the stem cells of young mice.
More research needs to be carried out before any such methods can be used on humans. Conboy fears that interrupting the aging pathway could lead to hyperactive cell division and increased rates of cancer.
Craig Venter etched his name into the annals of history by decoding the human genome (his own genome, in fact) in less time than it takes the ebola virus to replicate. Now he has his sights set on oil. In a recent Newsweek interview with Fareed Zakaria, Venter outlines his plans to genetically engineer bacteria that will suck up C02 and spit out ethanol or biodiesel. The bug could solve two of humanity’s biggest problems—global warming and a dwindling supply of fossil fuels. From the interview:
Zakaria: How are you going to create the fuel of the future? Venter: We think multiple fuels of the future are going to come out of biology, by manipulating the genetic code of simple organisms to convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels that people are very familiar with, like diesel fuel and gasoline.
What would a “refinery” that uses microorganisms to create fuel look like?
They’re just large, bacteria-processing fermenters. People are familiar with this: that’s how wine and beer are made. We’re using similar processes, but ones that are designed to produce much more complex molecules than ethanol, and therefore fuels that will be much higher in energy content, and will work well with the existing energy infrastructure.
How close are you to creating an organism that can produce fuels in this way?
We think the first fuels are maybe one to two years away. We’re definitely thinking in terms of years, not decades.
It’s a must-read interview that’ll fill even the most pessimistic doomsday prognosticators with warm fuzzy optimism. Kinda like wine and beer. All hail our genetically modified bacterial overlords!
Plastic typically insulates, protecting you from nervous-system-frying electrocution. But a team of Dutch researchers have discovered that if you mash two types of plastic together just right, they’ll conduct electricity as well as metal and exhibit properties that trump high-tech semiconductors.
Alberto Morpurgo and a team at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands squashed a micrometer of the organic polymer TTF to another micro-layer of a polymer called TCNQ. The two plastics stick together due to van der Waals forces—weak magnetic forces that act on molecules. Both polymers are insulators, but when they’re forced together electricity flows along the junction as well as it flows through metal.
Morpurgo believes that electrons are able to jump between spaces in the TCNQ molecules, allowing current to flow. It’s a new way to channel current and the researchers expect to discover many “interesting electronic properties” as they examine the material further.
The new polymer combo could replace semiconductors in circuitry. (Semiconductors are used to control the flow of electrons and are indispensable to modern electronics.) According to researchers, it’s much better at conducting electricity than current semiconductors.
“The electron concentration there is an order of magnitude higher,” he says. “That has the power to create new effects, from magnetism to superconductivity.”
