This column begins a new feature for this blog.  Every week or two, for the near future, I plan to have an interview with a well respected scientist or thinker on the subject of energy.  Regular readers of this blog know that I believe that facing and solving the multiple issues concerning energy is the single most pressing problem that we face as a species.  There is a lot of media coverage about energy, alternative energy and global warming, but what has been missing is the knowledge and point of view of scientists, at least in the main stream media.  What do the best and b

Scientists at the University of Portsmouth are using the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence to develop the world's first thinking car wheel.

The 'smart' wheel is being developed under a £200K Department of Trade and Industry-funded Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project with Hampshire-based company PML Flightlink Ltd.

The era in which standard serology tests divided populations into two basic blood groups, ABO and Rh, may soon be a thing of the past. Nearly a century after blood group analysis began, new technologies for genotyping of blood offer a far more accurate picture of blood groups, experts reported at the 12th Congress of the European Hematology Association.

Primates with severe Parkinson’s disease were able to walk, move, and eat better, and had diminished tremors after being injected with human neural stem cells, a research team from Yale, Harvard, the University of Colorado, and the Burnham Institute report today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

These results are promising, but it will be years before it is known whether a similar procedure would have therapeutic value for humans, said the lead author, D. Eugene Redmond Jr., professor of psychiatry and neurosurgery at Yale.

While solar power and hybrid cars have become popular symbols of green technology, Stanford researchers are exploring another path for cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas that causes global warming.

Carbon capture and storage, also called carbon sequestration, traps carbon dioxide after it is produced and injects it underground. The gas never enters the atmosphere. The practice could transform heavy carbon spewers, such as coal power plants, into relatively clean machines with regard to global warming.

The vocal learning process in the zebra finch offers a model system to study the neural and behavioral mechanisms by which humans learn to produce sounds. Songbirds such as zebra finches have specialized areas of their brains devoted to communication. That is why they have been used as animal models to study speech disorders, such as stuttering. It is estimated that more than 3 million Americans stutter.

Yesterday, the Israeli Air Force took out at least two buildings in Gaza City in response to the previous day’s Palestinian militants’ attack. Not far away, a group of environmentalists called Friends of the Earth Middle East is taking a different tack to quell the violence. By bringing together Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians to work together on environmental issues that affect them all, they hope to build lasting peace.

It seems to be working.

Take the West Bank village of Baqa Al-Sharqiya, for example.

Want to play the ultimate version of The X-Men's "Wolverine" this Halloween? You'll need self-healing skin after those claws come out. Researchers at the University of Illinois are here to help. They have invented the next generation of self-healing materials, which mimics human skin by healing itself time after time. The new materials rely upon embedded, three-dimensional microvascular networks that emulate biological circulatory systems.

Rome's Mayor Walter Veltroni will officiate at the first public viewing of "Rome Reborn 1.0," a 10-year project based at the University of Virginia and begun at UCLA to use advanced technology to digitally rebuild ancient Rome.

“Rome Reborn 1.0" shows almost the entire city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls as it appeared in A.D. 320. At that time Rome was the multicultural capital of the western world and had reached the peak of its development with an estimated population of one million.

In a TED talk, Stewart Brand pointed out that all over the world, poor villages — the same villages that Jeffrey Sachs seems to want to preserve — are vanishing. The people who lived in them have moved to squatter cities, where, according to Brand, there is zero unemployment and a much better life. Because Jeffrey Sachs’ interest in poor African villages seems to be recent, I am not surprised that he may end up on the wrong side of the helped/didn’t help ledger.