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Turning a greenhouse gas into a clean energy fuel is the Holy Grail of energy research. UC San Diego chemists have a prototype they think is an important milestone.
Their device captures energy from the sun, converts it to electrical energy and "splits" carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide (CO) and oxygen.
Obviously carbon monoxide in and of itself is not great either but millions of pounds of it are used each year to manufacture chemicals including detergents and plastics. It can also be converted into liquid fuel.

In the children’s game "red light green light," winners are able to stop, and take off running again, more quickly than their comrades. New research reveals that a similar race goes on in our brains, with impulse control being the big winner.
"The research provides new insights into how the brain controls movements, which helps explain the impulsivity of people with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder," study co-author Jeffrey Schall, E. Bronson Professor of Neuroscience at Vanderbilt University, said.

Scientists using one of the nation's newest and most capable research aircraft are launching a far-reaching field project this month to study plumes of airborne dust and pollutants that originate in Asia and journey to North America. The plumes are among the largest such events on Earth, so great in scope that scientists believe they might affect clouds and weather across thousands of miles while interacting with the sun's radiation and playing a role in global climate.

Researchers have discovered that the genetic malfunction that causes a form of mental retardation called Noonan Syndrome (NS) produces an imbalance in the genesis of two types of cells in the developing embryonic brain. This imbalance, they theorize, could explain how the genetic abnormality gives rise to the neural pathology of the disorder. More broadly, they said, the new insight into the mechanism underlying NS could apply to other inherited forms of retardation.

Marvin Chun of Yale University and colleagues have pinpointed brain regions critical to one of the brain’s more remarkable feats — piecing together a continuous view of the world by integrating snippets of visual input from constantly moving eyes.
Since the eyeball has only a narrow field of clear view, it must continually make tiny shifts to sample the visual world. And during these shifts, which last thousandths of a second, people are essentially blind.

Despite the fact that they both infect the liver, the hepatitis A and hepatitis C viruses actually have very little in common. The two are far apart genetically, are transmitted differently, and produce very different diseases. Hepatitis A spreads through the consumption of fecal particles from an infected person (in pollution-contaminated food or water, for example), but hepatitis C is generally transmitted only by direct contact with infected blood. Hepatitis A produces fever, nausea and abdominal pain that can last for weeks, but rarely lead to death; hepatitis C, by contrast, often spends decades quietly damaging the liver, until a victim’s only hope for survival is an organ transplant.

This device, called HeartLander, can be inserted using minimally invasive keyhole surgery. Once in place, it will attach itself to the heart and begin inching its way across the outside of the organ, injecting drugs or attaching medical devices. In tests on live pigs, the HeartLander has fitted pacemaker leads and injected dye into the heart.

An international research team has found evidence of the Earth's earliest forest trees, dating back 385 million years.
Upright stumps of fossilised trees were uncovered after a flash flood in Gilboa, upstate New York, more than a century ago. However, until now, no-one has known what the entire trees looked like.

New evidence of the brutish and short lives of Stone Age Britons has been revealed by researchers from Cardiff University and the University of Central Lancashire.
Carbon dating of 14 human remains discovered at a prehistoric burial site suggests that most could have died together in a massacre, possibly in a scramble for land or a cattle raid.

The prehistoric chambered long barrow where the remains of 14 people were discovered. Credit: Cardiff University

Ethanol is widely touted as an eco-friendly, clean-burning fuel. But if every vehicle in the United States ran on fuel made primarily from ethanol instead of pure gasoline, the number of respiratory-related deaths and hospitalizations would likely increase, according to a new study by Stanford University atmospheric scientist Mark Z. Jacobson.

Climate model simulations for the 21st century indicate a robust increase in wind shear in the tropical Atlantic due to global warming, which may inhibit hurricane development and intensification. Historically, increased wind shear has been associated with reduced hurricane activity and intensity. This new finding is reported in a study by scientists at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami and NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, N.J.

Warmer oceans feed storms, yet increased wind shear is able to also impair their intensity. Credit: NOAA GFDL

There will be 10 million workers in nanotechnology related jobs by 2014, according to Andrew Maynard and Robert Aitken. Measuring the health of these workers, and their exposure to airborne engineered nanomaterials, is vital.
Maynard is chief science advisor at the Wilson Center's Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies and Aitken is director of strategic consulting at the Institute of Occupational Medicine in Edinburgh.