Energy companies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania are required to buy some solar power each year. 

They are required to overpay for that solar power.

In return for overpaying, they get Solar Renewable Energy Certificates (SRECs) which let them  pass the extra cost onto local families and taxpayers. 
Most people can't read lips. If you turn down the sound on your television, you can see why it is difficule. Unless trained, if you see someone speak a sentence without the accompanying sounds, you are unlikely to recognize many words but it turns out people can lip-read themselves better than they can lip-read others, and that shows an interesting link between speech perception and speech production.
Should child care providers be tasked with childhood obesity too? 

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys found that over 21% of children ages 2 to 5 were considered overweight or even obese.  That has led some advocates to posit that child care settings can tackle teaching children about nutrition, since nearly 50% of children in the United States under age 5 go to some kind of child care.
When I was a young guy living in Florida, on one station we used to get reruns of a television show called "The Saint". I liked the stick figure cartoon and the halo that would appear above his head in the beginning. Roger Moore was cool.

He became the third actor to play Ian Fleming's British super spy James Bond (and the longest-running) and was the perfect choice. Yet most people remember the 'cartoon-y' James Bond films that came on his watch. He is unfairly derided as the worst James Bond now, and that is saying something in a roster that includes George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton.  "The Spy Who Loved Me " holds up pretty well, the recurring actors all have at least one good movie.

OptiNose US Inc. has announced that its Norwegian affiliate was awarded $2.1 million by the Research Council of Norway to study its nasal drug delivery technology in the treatment of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs).

OptiNose will use this research grant to investigate "nose-to-brain" transport of oxytocin via the patented OptiNose Bi-Directional delivery technology for the treatment of ASDs. Partners who have agreed to collaborate with OptiNose in the project include the Department of Psychiatry at Oslo University Hospital, SINTEF and Smerud Medical Research and Norwegian academic insitutions. 

New data from the RELY-ABLE study have provided additional support to the safety profile and efficacy of Pradaxa(R) (dabigatran etexilate) for stroke prevention in patients with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (AF) over a period in excess of 2 years.[*][1]

The new long-term results presented at the American Heart Association's (AHA) Scientific Sessions, are consistent with the findings from the RE-LY trial[*]. The rates of stroke and haemorrhage observed during an additional 2.3 years of blinded follow-up in RELY-ABLE correspond to the initial RE-LY results, with the benefit of both doses of dabigatran etexilate sustained throughout the study's duration.[1]-[3] 

Twelve-month data from the Global Anticoagulant Registry in the FIELD (GARFIELD) show that the poor management of stroke prevention therapy is widespread in clinical practice, which may lead to elevated rates of mortality, stroke and bleeding among individuals with newly diagnosed atrial fibrillation (AF).

Researchers and academics below the full-professor level in Italy are currently busy with an idle exercise - putting together their applications to a selection for would-be assistant and full professors. By the way, this is happening to me as well, so you may understand why this blog has received little attention from me this past week: the occupation is extremely time-consuming.

Becoming university professors in Italy in the last few decades has been a rather complicated business, where the merit of candidates was often overshadowed by favouritisms and private interests.
Climate change was ignored for all but the last week of the American presidential election. Then, a hurricane hit and it mobilized voters who were otherwise disappointed that neither party cared about science or the climate. 

Yet it's hard to have a real talk about climate change when activist groups are so anti-science about energy and energy produces a lot of emissions.  While Hurricane Sandy may have been the 'October surprise' that re-elected a president (1) but it may also have done something that even an earthquake in Japan could not do; force a real, adult conversation about nuclear power.
Researchers have observed the quantum regime in the interaction between nano-sized spheres of gold, thanks to the change of color of the gap between these particles when they are at distances of less than one nanometer.

They have literally 'seen' a quantum kiss between nanoparticles.