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Let me begin by stating for the record that I am not a scientist. I have not spent my life researching Planetary Climatology, and I really don’t have any personal insight into the mysteries of earth’s climate cycles or even any personal opinion about the pseudoscientific claims in Al Gore’s Gospel of Doom based on his politically motivated global warming via capitalist-pig doctrine. Of course, this makes me just as qualified to speak on the subject as Al Gore, who also is not a scientist or one who is any more in touch with earth’s many mysteries than the...

Hockey players, rejoice! A team of University of Alberta researchers has created technology to regrow teeth—the first time scientists have been able to reform human dental tissue. Using low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS), Dr. Tarak El-Bialy from the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry and Dr. Jie Chen and Dr. Ying Tsui from the Faculty of Engineering have created a miniaturized system-on-a-chip that offers a non-invasive and novel way to stimulate jaw growth and dental tissue healing. “It’s very exciting because we have shown the results and actually have something you can touch and feel that will impact the health of...

LONDON — Nanofreeze Technologies Lund AB, a startup company that claims to have developed cooling technology that is 10 to 15 times more efficient than Peltier coolers, has won 300.000 Swedish krone (about $40,000) in a competition organized by Vinnova in conjunction with Energimyndigheten. "In 5 years you will own a refrigerator cooled by Nanofreeze," the company asserted at its Website although the company expects to start with less demanding applications such as mobile phones. Nanofreeze (Lund, Sweden) was founded in September 2005 to develop research in the field of thermoelectrics originally performed at Lund University. The Vinnova competition...

Researchers at IBM have overcome an important obstacle to building computers based on carbon nanotubes, by developing a way to selectively arrange transistors that were made using the carbon molecules. The achievement, described in the current issue of Nano Letters, could help make large-scale integrated circuits built out of carbon nanotubes possible, leading to ultrafast, low-power processors. For decades, the size of silicon-based transistors has decreased steadily while their performance has improved. As the devices approach their physical limits, though, researchers have started looking to less conventional structures and materials. Single-walled carbon nanotubes are one prominent candidate -- already researchers...

Scientists have uncovered a class of gold atom clusters that are the first known metallic hollow equivalents of the famous hollow carbon fullerenes known as buckyballs. The evidence for what their discoverers call “hollow golden cages” appeared today in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The fullerene is made up of a sphere of 60 carbon (C) atoms; gold (Au) requires many fewer—16, 17 and 18 atoms, in triangular configurations more gem-like than soccer ball. At more than 6 angstroms across, or roughly a ten-millionth the size of a comma, they are...

Generators fabricated from wires only nanometers or billionths of a meter wide can convert vibrations to electricity, experts told UPI's Nano World. These nanogenerators could help power nanoscale devices without the need for unwieldy batteries, finding use in everything from portable electronics and wireless nanosensors to medical implants, said researcher Zhong Lin Wang, a nanotechnologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. "There is a lot of mechanical energy available in our environment," Wang said. The generators could, for instance, harvest energy from body motions, muscle stretching and blood pressure or from sea, wind or acoustic waves or...

Eating veggie burgers and tofu to lower "bad" cholesterol may not help, a new review of soy's health benefits suggests. The American Heart Association reviewed 22 randomized trials comparing soy protein and the soy component isoflavone to milk or other proteins. The majority of the trials concluded soy led to an average decrease in LDL or "bad" cholesterol levels of just three per cent. "This reduction is very small relative to the large amount of soy protein tested in these studies, averaging 50 grams, about half the usual total daily protein intake," the committee wrote in the Jan. 17 online...

Physicists in the US have generated extra-bright beams of infrared light from single-walled carbon nanotubes. The new technique is more efficient than many existing methods for producing light and could have applications in optoelectronics (Science 310 1171).Phaedon Avouris of IBM Research, Jie Liu of Duke University and co-workers began by laying down nanotubes with diameters of 2-3 nanometres by chemical vapour deposition. The nanotubes spanned trenches in a silica coating on a silicon substrate. Palladium source and drain electrodes were then added to the nanotubes. Suspended nanotubes The IBM-Duke team found that when certain voltages were applied, the nanotubes...

   Hurricanes aren't the only things that spin faster with the addition of hot air.   Advocates of the global warming theory seem to spin faster, too - take their recent spin on this summer's hurricanes.   An August article in the San Francisco Chronicle warned, "As the United States experiences more... out-of-season hurricanes like this summer's, more Americans will recognize what the rest of the world has long accepted: Global warming is here, it will get worse..."1   This analysis has a critical flaw: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says the hurricane season runs from June 1 to November...

Human activities have little to do with the Earth's current warming trend, according to a study published by the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA). In fact, S. Fred Singer (University of Virginia) and Dennis Avery (Hudson Institute) conclude that global warming and cooling seem to be part of a 1,500-year cycle of moderate temperature swings. Scientists got the first unequivocal evidence of a continuing moderate natural climate cycle in the 1980s, when Willi Dansgaard of Denmark and Hans Oeschger of Switzerland first saw two mile-long ice cores from Greenland representing 250,000 years of Earth's frozen, layered climate history. From...

Nanotechnological filters could lead to wearable or implantable artificial kidneys, experts told UPI's Nano World. Animal studies for artificial-kidney prototypes should begin one or two years from now, and clinical trials would follow a year or two afterward, reported scientists at Biophiltre in Burlingame, Calif., the medical-device company developing the artificial-kidney technology. Nearly 900,000 patients worldwide suffering from kidney disease require dialysis, a medical procedure mimicking the kidney's normal function of filtering waste from the blood. "About 21 percent of patients on dialysis on any year die," nephrologist Allen Nissenson, director of the University of California at Los Angeles...

SAN MARCOS, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexico's "Fire Volcano" spewed a column of rock, ash and lava almost three miles into the sky on Monday in its largest eruption for at least 15 years, civil protection officials said. The government was considering evacuating tiny communities around the 12,540-foot (3,860 meter) Colima volcano in the western state of the same name after the predawn eruption. "It's the largest explosion in the past 15 years and we are monitoring it because the activity is increasing, though gradually," said federal civil protection coordinator Carmen Segura. "If necessary we will carry out evacuations." A...

QuantumSphere, Inc., a manufacturer of metallic nanopowders, working toward catalyzing the future for fuel cells, batteries, and hydrogen generation, is moving forward with the collaboration of Robert Dopp, of Doppstein Enterprises, Inc. (DSE). Together they are testing QuantumSphere's new line of nano-catalysts in functioning air electrodes to better identify significant parameters in the development cycle. Mr. Dopp has developed a cathode manufacturing process expressly designed to manufacture small "coupons" of highly uniform, very active and reproducible gas diffusion electrodes. These are typically used in metal air batteries, alkaline fuel cells, other air breathing systems as well as hydrogen generation...

BERKELEY – A group of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, is giving new relevance to the term "sharper image" by creating a superlens that can overcome a limitation in physics that has historically constrained the resolution of optical images. Schematic drawing of nano-scale imaging using a silver superlens that achieves a resolution beyond the optical diffraction limit. The red line indicates the enhancement of "evanescent" waves as they pass through the superlens. (Images by Cheng Sun, UC Berkeley)Print-quality image available for download Using a thin film of silver as the lens and ultraviolet (UV) light, the researchers...

PHOENIX, April 19 /PRNewswire/ -- RoseStreet Labs announced today a Solar Cell Commercialization Agreement to develop full spectrum photovoltaics, commonly referred to as PV's or solar cells, utilizing licensed technology jointly developed by Cornell University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. These solar cells will be the first commercialized that capture the broad spectrum of the sun's energy utilizing thin film technology, a single material system and with potential efficiencies exceeding 55%. RoseStreet Labs plans on leveraging FlipChip International, its high volume semiconductor bumping foundry in Phoenix, to produce an excellent low cost renewable energy solution with this technology. The...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Sunlight splitting water molecules to produce hydrogen using devices too small to be seen in a standard microscope. That's a goal of a research team from the National Nuclear Security Administration's Sandia National Laboratories. The research has captured the interest of chemists around the world pursuing methods of producing hydrogen from water. Sandia researchers John Shelnutt and Zhongchun Wang gaze upon the glow of porphryin nanotubes caused by the nanotubes’ intense resonance light scattering activity. (Photo by Chris Burroughs) "The broad objective of the research is to design and fabricate new types of nanoscale devices," says...

Toshiba's 'NanoBattery' Recharges In Only One Minute Toshiba Corporation today announced a breakthrough in lithium-ion batteries that makes long recharge times a thing of the past. The company's new battery can recharge 80% of a battery's energy capacity in only one minute, approximately 60 times faster than the typical lithium-ion batteries in wide use today, and combines this fast recharge time with performance-boosting improvements in energy density. The new battery fuses Toshiba's latest advances in nano-material technology for the electric devices sector with cumulative know-how in manufacturing lithium-ion battery cells. A breakthrough technology applied to the negative electrode uses new...

THIS week there was a wailing and a gnashing of teeth as the Kyoto Protocol came into effect without Australia's co-operation. Greenpeace's stunt at Warragamba Dam reflected the contempt for the facts we have come to associate with it. The dam is half empty and activists broke in and put a sign on the bare earth that read: THIS IS WHAT CLIMATE CHANGE LOOKS LIKE. This is nonsense. Climate change these days means global warming: there is some evidence the earth has warmed about 0.6C in the past century. So Greenpeace is saying warmer countries must have less rainfall than...

Tiny nanocables, 1,000 times smaller than a human hair, could become key parts of toxin detectors, miniaturized solar cells and powerful computer chips. The technique for making the nanocables was invented by UC Davis chemical engineers led by Pieter Stroeve, professor of chemical engineering and materials science. They manufacture the cables in the nano-sized pores of a template membrane. The insides of the pores are coated with gold. Layers of other semiconductors, such as tellurium, cadmium sulfide or zinc sulfide, are electrochemically deposited in the gold tube until a solid cable forms, then the membrane is dissolved, leaving finished...

ReferenceMolg, T. and Hardy, D.R.  2004.  Ablation and associated energy balance of a horizontal glacier surface on Kilimanjaro.  Journal of Geophysical Research 109: 10.1029/2003JD004338. BackgroundLike many other tropical glaciers, the ice field atop Kilimanjaro on the Tanzania-Kenya border in East Africa has retreated drastically throughout the 20th century, which retreat has prompted many people, including U.S. Senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton, to claim that its wasting away has been driven by 20th-century global warming (see our review of Kaser et al., 2004).What was doneTo further investigate this claim, Molg and Hardy derive an energy balance for the horizontal surface...