Hydrogen fuel cells may be the best option for powering zero-emission vehicles, Toyota will make them available in the United States in 2015, but those fuel cells require an electrocatalyst -- a platinum surface -- to increase the reaction rate, and the cost of the precious metal makes it hard for hydrogen fuel cells to compete economically with the internal combustion engine. 

Social attitudes are reinforcing the negative beliefs towards people who self harm, according to an analysis of the life stories of people who self-harm and who were also diagnosed with a personality disorder revealed that several spoke of being refused pain relief while being sutured by hospital staff. Others had met staff who thought they were immune to pain because they self-harmed.

An estimated 5% of adults have self-harmed with the aim of relieving psychological distress.

The was carried out by Dr. Jane Simpson from Lancaster University with Charlotte Morris, Mark Sampson and Frank Beesley from the NHS. The researchers said, “The responses of others had the potential to exacerbate distress and even trigger further self-harm.” 

Making sure school-aged kids get to sleep at a regular hour is often a struggle for parents but it’s well worth the effort. The researchers behind a new paper say that a good night’s sleep is linked to better performance in math and languages – subjects that are powerful predictors of later learning and academic success.

Could climate change be making flying more unsafe? KamrenB Photography, CC BY

By Todd Lane, University of Melbourne

By studying the motions of different stellar populations in the disk of the Andromeda galaxy, researchers have deduced that Andromeda has had a more violent past than our Milky Way. 

The structure and internal motions of the stellar disk of a spiral galaxy hold important keys to understanding the galaxy's formation history. The Andromeda galaxy, called M31 by almost no one except the 2 percent of astronomers who like to insist on renaming and reclassifying things, is the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way and the largest in what is called the Local Group of galaxies in our cosmic address. 

It won't exactly set off a Blu-ray versus HD-DVD cultural firestorm, but there is an alternative to 3-D printing. And it's better in many ways. 

Pop-up assembly relies on compression buckling. If that sounds like one of children's books, with the little structures that fold out when opened, that's because those are a good analog. Pop-up fabrication starts as a flat two-dimensional structure and 'pops up' into a more complex 3-D structure. Using a variety of advanced materials, including silicon, the researchers behind it have produced more than 40 different geometric designs, including shapes resembling a peacock, flower, starburst, table, basket, tent and starfish.

So why is it better than 3-D printing? 

Games have been test beds for new ideas in Artificial Intelligence (AI) since computers came on the scene and there have been significant milestones - Deep Blue sort of defeated Kasparov in chess and Watson sort of defeated Jennings and Rutter on Jeopardy! 

But solving a game is a lot tougher than defeating a player, though researchers in the Computer Poker Research Group at the University of Alberta in Canada say they have essentially solved heads-up limit hold'em poker. 

In an interstellar race against time, astronomers measured the space-time warp in the gravity of a binary star and determined the mass of a neutron star just before it vanished from view.

The researchers measured the masses of both stars in binary pulsar system J1906. The pulsar spins and emits a lighthouse-like beam of radio waves every 144 milliseconds. It orbits its companion star in a little under four hours.  The mass of only a handful of double neutron stars have ever been measured, with J1906 being the youngest. It is located about 25,000 light years from Earth. 

Up close and personal with the demon shrimp. Amaia Green Etxabe - University of Portsmouth

By Alex Ford,University of Portsmouth

Demon vs killer shrimp sounds like the latest CGI movie to come out of Hollywood. But in fact these are two particularly pernicious crustaceans that have been making their way westward across Europe from countries surrounding the Black Sea, eradicating native freshwater rivals en route.

80 percent of current coal reserves, 50 percent of gas reserves and 33 percent of oil reserves should remain in the ground by 2050 to avoid the 2°C target established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and used as a benchmark by policy makers, according to a new estimate.

So much for that Peak Oil of 1992. We need to worry about Oil Glut instead.

The paper identifies the geographic location of existing reserves that should remain unused - it's no secret that is China, Russia and the United States, along with 260 billion barrels oil reserves in the Middle East. The Middle East should also leave over 60% of its gas reserves in the ground.