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Engineers and entrepreneurs are rushing to explore alternative sources of efficient and renewable energy in New Jersey and elsewhere in the country. A Rutgers School of Business—Camden professor has strong words of caution as projects involving wind farms and photovoltaic cells proliferate.With the electric-power industry poised for its most dramatic changes in decades, too little thought is being devoted to coordinating these piecemeal initiatives, warns Richard Michelfelder in a recent edition of The Electricity Journal, the leading policy journal for the electric industry. The consequence, he fears, might well be a disastrous overload of the nation's electrical grid.

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama suggested his economic plan would create 5 million jobs in environmental industries - easy enough to do when taxpayers are subsidizing even more federal workers but will these so-called "green collar" jobs present the next frontier for U.S. manufacturing?   A new report led by a sociologist from Duke University is backing up Obama's claim. Their report, "Manufacturing Climate Solutions," provides a detailed look at the manufacturing jobs that already exist and would be created when the U.S. takes action to limit global-warming pollution. A copy of the study is available at http://www.cggc.duke.edu/environment/climatesolutions/. 

All of us have experienced being in a new place and feeling certain that we have been there before. This mysterious feeling, commonly known as déjà vu, occurs when we feel that a new situation is familiar, even if there is evidence that the situation could not have occurred previously. For a long time, this eerie sensation has been attributed to everything from paranormal disturbances to neurological disorders. However, in recent years, as more scientists began studying this phenomenon, a number of theories about déjà vu have emerged, suggesting that it is not merely a glitch in our brain’s memory system. A new report by Colorado State University psychologist Anne M.

"Practice makes perfect" and "timing is everything" are cliches are for a reason; they are mostly correct.   According to the findings published in this month's issue of Psychological Science, proper spacing of lessons  can dramatically enhance learning and larger gaps between study sessions result in better recall of facts.Conversely: Cramming – whether it's math for a midterm or a foreign language in anticipation of a trip abroad – is not effective in the long haul.   Hal Pashler and John Wixted, professors of psychology at UC San Diego who led the study, say this can change how we think about education.

Need excellent boots?  W. L. Gore&Associates is the way to go.   Guitar strings?   Yep, they make those too.   Medical devices, electronics and now researchers at Rush University Medical Center are even using a small, soft-patch device made of a Gore-tex-type material to close a common hole found in the heart called a patent foramen ovale (PFO) in order to prevent recurrent strokes and transient ischemic attacks (TIAs) in adults. The randomized, multinational clinical research trial may determine if repairing a PFO using this device, also known as the GORE HELEX Septal Occluder, is more effective in preventing strokes than medical management alone. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently granted approval to use the device for PFO closures.

The American bison(buffalo) is in trouble, says a survey by the Wildlife Conservation Society, though there are many more of them now than there were a hundred years ago, and we love them - as a symbol of the old West and occasionally to eat, so something should be done to make sure we get more of them home on the range.These sentiments were found in a public survey released today by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) at a national conference on restoring bison populations in the North America.The survey is part of an effort spearheaded by the American Bison Society to lobby government agencies, conservation groups, ranchers, and others to do all they can to restore the bison's ecological role as an important species to North America.

When Ohio State glaciologists failed to find the expected radioactive signals in the latest core they drilled from a Himalayan ice field, they knew it meant trouble for their research.   Those missing markers of radiation, remnants from atomic bomb tests a half-century ago, could mean a much greater threat to the half-billion or more people living downstream of that vast mountain range.It may mean that future water supplies could fall far short of what's needed to keep that population alive.

People are different, both physically and mentally, but genetically everyone is very similar, scientists have said for decades. But with population research becoming more and more common, the University of Alberta's Tim Caulfield is concerned that genetic research could awaken racist attitudes.Just last year Nobel Prize winning geneticist James Watson claimed there are genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence. These comments made international headlines, Watson was vilified and he later apologized.

What is the latest recipe for anti-matter?  Take a gold sample the size of the head of a push pin, shoot a laser through it, and suddenly more than 100 billion particles of anti-matter appear.  The anti-matter, also known as positrons, shoots out of the target in a cone-shaped plasma "jet."This new ability to create a large number of positrons in a small laboratory opens the door to several fresh avenues of anti-matter research, including an understanding of the physics underlying various astrophysical phenomena such as black holes and gamma ray bursts.  Anti-matter research also could reveal why more matter than anti-matter survived the Big Bang at the start of the universe.

Researchers dated remains from four multiple burials discovered in Germany in 2005 and found that the 4,600-year-old graves contained groups of adults and children buried facing each other – an unusual practice in Neolithic culture.  One of the graves was found to contain a female, a male and two children. Using DNA analysis, the researchers established that the group consisted of a mother, father and their two sons aged 8-9 and 4-5 years: the oldest molecular genetic evidence of a nuclear family in the world (so far).The burials, discovered and excavated at Eulau, Saxony-Anhalt, were also unusual for the great care taken in the treatment of the dead. The remains of thirteen individuals were found in total, all of whom had been interned simultaneously.

150 years ago it was discovered that the speech center is in the left cortex  and since then functional differences between left and right hemisphere have become well known; language is mainly handled by the left hemisphere while spatial recognition is more specialized to the right hemisphere.However, the structural differences of synapses underlying left-right difference of the brain have remained unknown. Now a research team led by Prof Ryuichi Shigemoto at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Japan, and colleagues have found that synaptic size and shape in the center of the spatial memory (i.e. hippocampus) were asymmetrical between synapses receiving input from the left and right hemisphere.

Water vapor is known to be Earth's most abundant greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution to global warming has been diminished by attention on the economic/political millstone of western civilization carbon dioxide. Using recent NASA satellite data, researchers have estimated more precisely than ever the heat-trapping effect of water in the air, validating the role of the gas as a critical component of climate change.Andrew Dessler and colleagues from Texas A&M University in College Station confirmed that the heat-amplifying effect of water vapor is potent enough to double the climate warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.