TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| New fuel efficiency standards: Too much or not enough? The Obama administration unveiled a plan to boost fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks to an average of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016--four years ahead of current schedule and up from an average of just 25 miles per gallon today. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Chestnut's Revival Could Slow Climate Change The American chestnut tree, which towered over eastern U.S. forests before succumbing to a deadly fungus in the early 20th century, appears to be an excellent sponge for greenhouse gases, according to a new study. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Chinese and American utilities to cooperate in capturing carbon from coal A large, coal-burning utility in the U.S. and another in China have agreed to cooperate to develop methods to more cleanly burn coal, including so-called carbon capture and storage technology . Duke Energy will partner with China's Huaneng Group to further develop and build technologies to gasify coal and strip it of its impurities, including the carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere from coal burning. As it stands, Huaneng releases some 285 million metric tons of CO2 per year while Duke emits 112 million metric tons, according to data from the Center for Global Development, a Washington, D.C.-based thinktank. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Abruptly Forgotten: Working Memory Disappears in a Blink When you go from bed to bathroom on a dark night, a quick flick of the lights will leave a lingering impression on your mind’s eye. For decades evidence suggested that such visual working memories--which, even in daylight, connect the dots to create a complete scene as the eyes dart around rapidly--fade gradually over the span of several seconds. But a clever new study reported in the journal Psychological Science finds that such memories actually stay sharp until they are suddenly lost.Cognitive psychologists Weiwei Zhang and Stephen J. Luck, both at the University of California, Davis, tested subjects’ recall for the hues of colored squares flashed briefly on a screen up to 10 seconds earlier. Subjects marked their answer on a color wheel. If memories decay gradually, the guesses should have become increasingly imprecise as time wore on, evidenced by participants selecting yellow or red, for example, when the correct choice was orange. Instead subjects went straight from fairly accurate answers to random choices--no better than chance--indicating the memories were decaying all at once. According to Zhang and Luck’s mathematical analysis, most subjects’ memories went “poof” somewhere between four and 10 seconds after the stimulus. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Earth-Like Planets May Be Made of Carbon Astronomy is the science of the exotic, but the thing that astronomers most want to find is the familiar: another planet like Earth, a hospitable face in a hostile cosmos. The Kepler spacecraft, which was launched last March, is their best instrument yet for discovering Earth-like planets around sunlike stars, as opposed to the giant planets that have been planet finders’ main harvest so far. Many predict that 2010 will be the year of exo-Earths. But if the giant planets, which looked nothing like what astronomers had expected, are any indication, those Earths may not be so reassuringly familiar either.It has dawned on theorists in recent years that other Earth-mass planets may be enormous water droplets, balls of nitrogen or lumps of iron. Name your favorite element or compound, and someone has imagined a planet made of it. The spectrum of possibilities depends largely on the ratio of carbon to oxygen. After hydrogen and helium, these are the most common elements in the universe, and in an embryonic planetary system they pair off to create carbon monoxide. The element that is in slight excess ends up dominating the planet’s chemistry. [More] rss.sciam.com |