A new biofuel has been created from yeast and ordinary table sugar. The yeast produces oils and fats, known as lipids, that can be used in place of petroleum-derived products. 

It has something everyone can love. And hate. It's a biofuel, which environments love, but the yeast has been genetically optimized, which environments hate. And it uses table sugar, which will make Mark Bittman and New York Times readers recoil in diet fad horror.

Comments on anti-smoking public service announcements (PSAs) in online forums like YouTube degrade the persuasiveness of the videos - even if the comments are positive. PSAs lose their effectiveness when the public being protected is allowed to discuss.

Comments are controversial, and even science media is not immune. The problem is not spam, organizations can get rid of that by requiring a login. Contradictory comments are also a concern and so some popular websites that prefer to talk at the audience have banned comments by the public entirely.

Why does beer transform from a liquid to a foamy state after an impact? Science is on the wave propagation case.

As you know, if you shake a carbonated beverage, it will foam over when you open it. But one messy and slightly dangerous bar trick involves hitting a bottle on the opening and watching the base explode. It can happen unintentionally also. Home brewers of beer call this a bottle bomb.

How did we get limbs from ancestral fish fins? It's a fascinating topic, a science enigma.

Our first four-legged land ancestor came out of the sea about 350 million years ago. Watching a lungfish, our closest living fish relative, crawl on its four pointed fins gives us an idea of what the first evolutionary steps on land may have looked like. However, the transitional path between fin structural elements in fish and limbs in tetrapods remains elusive. 

There is a looming drug crisis approaching and the results of a new paper about the FDA understanding of clinical trials is only going to make it worse.

Right now, the private sector conducts drug development and they are vilified by the media, the public and their competitors in government-funded academia. But drug development fails 95% of the time before getting to market, it costs billions, has to undergo rigorous testing and then has a short window for sales, during which time everyone complains that greedy companies charge too much. As a result of a hostile business climate and increased regulation, drug development is disappearing rapidly, to be replaced by...nothing. Government-controlled science can't do applied research.

What if nearly half of the cars on the road today were replaced by the electric kind, those vehicles that environmentalists and electric vehicle marketing groups claim are "90% efficient" and worth the extra cost? How much better would our emissions scenario be?

It wouldn't make much difference. Even a sharp increase in the use of electric drive cars (hybrid, plug-in hybrid and battery electric) by 2050, up to as much as 42 percent of passenger vehicles in the U.S., would not significantly reduce emissions of high-profile pollutants like carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxides.