Solar cells are constructed of layers that absorb sunlight and convert it to electrical current. Thinner solar cells can yield both cheaper and more plentiful electricity than today's cells, if their capacity to absorb sunlight is optimized.

Electricity-generating solar cells are one of the most attractive alternatives for creating a long-term sustainable energy system, but thus far solar cells have not been able to compete economically with fossil fuels. Researchers are now looking at how nanotechnology can contribute in bringing down the cost.

Scientists at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden say the electrons in nanoparticles of noble metal oscillate together apace with the frequency of the light. This phenomenon can be exploited to produce better and cheaper solar cells.

Drug treatments for depression can take many weeks for the beneficial effects to emerge. The excruciating and disabling nature of depression highlights the urgency of developing treatments that act more rapidly.

Ketamine, a drug used in general medicine as an anesthetic, has recently been shown to produce improvements in depressed patients within hours of administration. A new study being published in the February 15th issue of Biological Psychiatry provides some new insight into the mechanisms by which ketamine exerts its effects.

The downside? It's in the same class of drugs as PCP (phencyclidine).

University of Sussex astronomers predict that the Earth will be swallowed up by the Sun unless the Earth’s orbit can be altered - but we have about 7.6 billion years to do it.

Dr Robert Smith, Emeritus Reader in Astronomy, said his team previously calculated that the Earth would escape ultimate destruction, although be battered and burnt to a cinder, but they did not take into account the effect of the drag caused by the outer atmosphere of the dying Sun.

He says: "We showed previously that, as the Sun expanded, it would lose mass in the form of a strong wind, much more powerful than the current solar wind. This would reduce the gravitational pull of the Sun on the Earth, allowing the Earth's orbit to move outwards, ahead of the expanding Sun.

An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a petaflop, itself a thousand times faster than a teraflop. Teraflop computers —the first was developed 10 years ago at Sandia — currently are the state of the art. They do trillions of calculations a second. Exaflop computers would perform a million trillion calculations per second.

Ten years ago, people worldwide were astounded at the emergence of a teraflop supercomputer, Sandia’s ASCI Red, able in one second to perform a trillion mathematical operations. More recently, bloggers seem stunned that a machine capable of petaflop computing — a thousand times faster than a teraflop — could soon break the next barrier of a thousand trillion mathematical operations a second.

NUREMBERG, Germany, February 22 /PRNewswire/ --

- Eco-Experts Call for Clear Climate Concepts for Organic Farming

All consumers and experts would agree that, whenever a person eats organic products, they are also doing something for the environment. But does an organic apple from Argentina protect the climate more or better than a conventional apple from a nearby orchard? This seems to be an area, in which the organic sector still has some catching up to do, if one is to believe the experts that came together last Thursday to discuss issues affecting the organic sector.

A paper by Professor Fabrizio Schifano at the University of Hertfordshire’s School of Pharmacy, which has been published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, indicates that 1,022 people died between 1990 and 2004 in instances where the presence of cocaine/crack cocaine was detected.

In this descriptive and correlational study, Professor Schifano reviewed the number of mentions on death certificates during the specified period, last year use of cocaine; treatment demand, number of drug offenders; seizures, prices and average purity levels.