Science

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We are constantly hearing about climate change and global warming. Some of the biggest countries in the world, both in size and population really aren't doing that much to avert the problem. Some are even making it worse, then there is Peru. Yes I said Peru. Peru has started an ambitious plan to refoliate the country. It is planting the unheard of amount of over 512,000 trees a day. The country hopes that it will have over 40,000,000 trees planted in the next 3 months. So far they are on schedule as far as I can find out and they think that they will meet their goal by 20 February, 2009. Peru is putting us to shame in this area, if they can do this, we certainly can do something in the United States.

British engineers have invented a new kind of cement, one that is very friendly to the environment. The cement is capable of destroying carbon dioxide. It is estimated that two billion tons of cement is used every year, but I believe that the figure is actually much higher. That much cement usually puts out 5% of the world's carbon dioxide. Many people don't know that cement is a carbon dioxide emitter. This much carbon dioxide is more than the entire aviation industry. Here is the other thing, demand for cement is increasing and it is believed that it will increase to 1.5 times its current demand in about 11 years. This brings me to a strange question. What will happen if we get the carbon dioxide down to where it was before the crisis? Will the cement continue to eat carbon dioxide and at some point could this be harmful?

Scientists are now claiming that they have identified the area of the brain that causes us to hate. It is not in the part of the brain that is responsible for emotions. That is where I bet you thought it would be, I know that I did? It is near that part of the brain that is responsible for aggression, but not in it. Biologists claim that hate and love are closely related and are both irrational. Seventeen volunteers, both male and female, were shown pictures of people they hated along with neutral photos. When they saw the photos of those they hated, activity began in an area that includes structures in the cortex and in the sub-cortex as well as components that generate aggressive behavior and translate it into action. Two structures in the brain are involved in hate and the same two structures are involved in love.

Researchers at Stanford have been studying batteries and silicon nanowires. It looks like their research has paid off. The scientists claim that they have invented technology that will allow for a new battery that will hold ten times the charge of a Li-ion battery, the current champ. It has been called a revolutionary breakthrough. Think of it, that hybrid car that gets 30 miles before the gasoline motor kicks in, wouldn't need a gasoline motor at all, because it would travel 300 miles between charges, similar to a gasoline powered car today. We should be able to take the Li-ion battery and improve it to the point, using this technology, where it can be used in the home to store electricity from solar cells efficiently, thus cutting down on our use of electricity from the grid and maybe even eliminating it some day. Now all we need is to see it on the market, or will it be swallowed up by big oil?

IBM is going to build a computer that acts like the human brain. The electronic circuits will mimic the circuits in our brains. This is going to be a project that will not only use electrical engineers and computer experts, but also neurobiologists and psychologists. This sounds like we are building a HAL type computer. If you remember, HAL was the computer in the movie, 2001 A Space Odyssey. In that movie a computer went crazy and tried to kill the crew on a spaceship. Then there were the computers in the Terminator that tried to wipe out the human race. These were both science fiction movies of course, but let's hope that they were not foretelling our future. IBM has said that the goal of the project is to create a system that will be at the level of the brain of a cat.

We have all seen how memory devices for electronics are constantly shrinking in size. It has gotten to the point where we have to be very careful not to lose some of these tiny storage objects. Well, if you think that they are small, wait to I tell you this. Scientists have just figured out how to store information in an atom. Not only was information stored in a phosphorous atom, but scientists were able to use both the core and electron of the atom. This is a major breakthrough in quantum computing. How tiny will our storage devices get? It could turn out that they will be so small, that there will never be a need to add to them to get more memory. Linking this with the new circuits that retain memory when the current is shut off, means that computing will be completely different in the near future.

There has been a debate going on for years among scientists. The debate concerns whether we have any Neanderthal genes. Putting it another way, did man and Neanderthals mate and produce offspring that became us? According to geneticists we don't have any Neanderthal genes and yet, some scientists think that we must have interacted with these people socially. The subject came up again recently, when a skeleton was found in Portugal that dated back over 24,000 years ago. It is said to be of a hybrid. The product of a human and Neanderthal. The Neanderthals were thought to be gone by this time, since it was dated 4,000 years after their disappearance. This shows that humans and Neanderthals lived together on the Iberian Peninsula at the time. This could change everything as far as the scientific community is concerned. So why can't scientists find Neanderthal genes in our bodies? That is another question that has to be answered.