If wind and solar companies want to continue to get government money, they should take a page out of the natural gas playbook - a new economic analysis found that just three state grants to support natural gas programs totaling $52.9 million generated $128 million in economic impact and 927 full-time jobs in 2014. 

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) administered the three grants: the Clean Transportation Triangle (CTT), the Alternative Fueling Facilities Program (AFFP) and the Texas Natural Gas Vehicle Program (TNGVP).

Can he be the global warming culprit? Link

Could our meat-loving Western diets push climate change over the edge?

That was the message of a recent report from UK think tank Chatham House that, even if the world moves away from fossil fuels, growth in meat and dairy consumption could still take global warming beyond the safe threshold of 2C.

The demise of radio has been predicted for 70 years, but it is still going strong - it is just more consolidated than it was in the past. Even college radio which, thanks to taxpayers, isn't under the same financial pressure as the corporate kind, has declined in popularity, because young people have been listening to the radio much less.

Yet since 2008, social networks have been changing that. Like much of college radio, it wasn't planned but they made it a feature as it happened. 

Credit: L. Sabetelli / Wellcome, CC BY

The Black Death struck Europe in 1347, killing 30-50% of the European population in six violent years.

It wasn’t a one-off epidemic: it signaled the start of the second plague pandemic in Europe that lasted for hundreds of years and only slowly disappeared from the continent after the Great Plague of London in 1665-1666.

In an experiment, 221 college students in an online chat room watched a fellow student get "bullied" right before their eyes but only 10 percent did something about it, either by helping the victim or confronting the bully.

Even in the safe online world, modern young people are less inclined than ever to get involved. Using the online equivalent of taking a picture of a victim rather than helping, 70 percent of participants who noticed the bullying gave the bully or the chat room a bad review. For the experiment, the undergraduate students were led to believe they would be testing an online chat support feature that was part of a server used for online research surveys and studies.

You often see demonstrations of titration using an expensive glass burette, but you can build titration lab ware using a disposable serological pipette, a solder sucker bulb, and a ring stand or support stand. For this build I’m using the tripod stand from the Thames and Kosmos Chem C3000 chemistry set.

Titration is the process of determining the unknown concentration of a solution by adding a known amount of a solution with a known concentration.

The Internet of Things is Web 2.0 of 2004 or Big Data of 2013 - a great buzzword that marketing groups are trying to exploit by rebranding what already exists. But the promise, the idea that everything in the human environment, from kitchen appliances to industrial equipment, could be equipped with sensors and processors that can exchange data, helping with maintenance and the coordination of tasks, is real.

Yet there is a huge barrier, in a world that would like to reduce greenhouse gases without actually embracing energy that produces no greenhouse gases, like nuclear science - the energy drain of the off-state power, the leakage power, of all those transmitters that are just idling much of the time.

Tumors require blood to emerge and spread. That is why scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center believe that targeting blood vessel cells known as pericytes may offer a potential new therapeutic approach when combined with vascular growth factors responsible for cell death.

A study lead by Valerie LeBleu, Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Cancer Biology at MD Anderson, looked at how cellular signaling by vascular growth factors called angiopoietin-2 (ANG2), when combined with depletion of pericytes, may decrease breast cancer tumor growth that spreads to the lungs. Targeting pericytes and ANG2 signaling may also offer new potential therapy options for treatment of some breast cancers.

Do you care where the food you buy comes from? amy, CC BY-NC

The public reaction to the Hepatitis A scare linked to contaminated frozen berries imported from China continues.