Stinking lagoons of pig manure created by thousands of animals in giant hog farms can pollute rivers, poison groundwater and pump out clouds of methane and carbon dioxide. So finding alternative uses for the slurry – to generate electricity, say – makes a lot of sense. The problem was that no one has been certain which way of doing it makes the most electricity for the least greenhouse gas production.
Archive for October, 2009
If you’re looking to haggle, steer clear of big, beefy salesmen. The same hormone responsible for their brawn may also reduce their generosity, new research suggests.
“Our broad conclusion is that testosterone causes men essentially to be stingy,” says Karen Redwine, a neuro-economist at Whittier College in California, who presented the work at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Chicago last week.
EACH summer, a team from the University of Oslo in Norway go hunting for monsters on the island of Spitsbergen. They carry guns in case they get menaced by the world’s largest living land carnivore, the polar bear. But it is not bears they are after. They are searching for much bigger quarry, the most formidable predators that ever lived.
A spacecraft named LCROSS, speeding toward the moon at 5,600 miles an hour, fired a two-ton empty rocket casing precisely into the heart of a dark lunar crater early Friday and sent thousands of tons of moon rocks, sand and dust high into the sunlit sky in a quest for water near the moon’s South Pole.
