Discover dedicated its most recent issue to the 100 top science stories of 2008, and there's a lot of good stuff in there. Here is a potpourri things that caught my attention:
- In the midst of the top story, called "The Post-Oil Era Begins," I ran across this string of facts: "the biomass currently tapped for biofuels would be put to better use making electricity. [According to Tim Searchinger of Princeton], 'The process of converting biomass into liquid fuel uses half of the energy in the feedstock. It's far more efficient to burn the biomass for electricity and then use the electricity in cars. That is in part because you waste less making the electricity and also because electric engines convert as much as 75 percent of available energy into forward motion, compared with the 20 percent energy conversion rate of gasoline engines." (I've heard this before, but I thought this was a particularly nice summarization of the facts.)
- A story called "Plants Inspire Better Solar Power" that tells about two MIT chemists who have worked out a way to mimic the way plants store solar energy, and therefore create more efficient and cheap storage systems for solar panels. Combine that with another story, "Sun Catcher Promises Cheaper Solar Power," which tells about a solar concentrator that reduces the cost of materials in solar panels, and we might have a working, affordable system.
- The gene for blue eyes occurred fewer than 10,000 years ago as a mutation in a single individual, and "swept rapidly through the European population..."
- All the jokes about drummers being stupid have it backwards: a Swedish study found that the higher a person's IQ, the more s/he was able to maintain a beat.
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