TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Updates: Whatever happened to Fuel Cell Progress? Revving Up Fuel CellsProgress toward hydrogen-powered cars depends on less expensive but greater capacity fuel-cell systems [see “On the Road to Fuel-Cell Cars”; SciAm, March 2005]. Researchers have taken big steps on both the cost and storage challenges. A team from Quebec came up with a recipe that uses iron instead of expensive platinum to catalyze the electricity-making reaction of hydrogen and oxygen. The key was carbon structures containing microscopic pores, which were filled with iron to provide plenty of active sites for chemical reactions. The iron-based substance, described in the April 3 Science, produced catalytic activity within 10 percent of the best platinum versions and 35 times better than previous, nonprecious metal catalysts. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Do Contaminants Play a Role in Diabetes? Eat right and exercise, conventional wisdom has it, if you want to avoid joining the diabetes epidemic.But a new study adds some muscle to a growing body of research suggesting those steps, though beneficial, might not be enough for people exposed to chemicals in the environment. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Wanted: A Geothermal Pump That Can Handle the Heat What will it take to develop a geothermal pump that can operate miles underground in 430-degree-Fahrenheit fluids while maintaining a steady 750 horsepower?A pair of West Coast foundations hope they have the answer: lots of cash. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Capturing Carbon Dioxide That's the sound of clean coal. Well, cleaner coal. A relatively small unit attached to the smokestack at the Mountaineer Power Plant in West Virginia is capturing some 1.5 percent of the carbon dioxide the coal-fired plant would otherwise belch into the sky. The loud thrum comes from the whirring of fans that cool the flue gas and the jostling of an agitator that keeps things moving in the tower where the reaction to actually capture the CO 2 takes place. There’s also the chug of the compressor, which turns the odorless, colorless greenhouse gas into a milky liquid at 1,400 pounds per square inch (psi). [More] rss.sciam.com |
Greenhouse Bananas: Non-Science Smear Campaigns Here’s my conclusion: the only strong evidence we have that Oklahoma Senator James M. Inhofe isn’t a clown is that his car isn’t small enough. As I write in early December, the Copenhagen climate change conference has just begun. And Inhofe, that gleeful anarchist, says he is going to Copenhagen to try to sabotage the affair.Inhofe has famously called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” (Actually, the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people was Lord Amherst’s distribution of smallpox-ridden blankets, but I digress.) But he has also called global warming the “second largest hoax ever played on the American people after the separation of church and state.” Well, it’s good to know that the senator is capable of revising his theories after he acquires new information, a necessary condition for a truly scientific worldview. [More] rss.sciam.com |