At the opening of last week’s Nobel Laureate symposium, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu endorsed a low-tech tool to keep climate change at bay: white paint.  According to Chu’s colleague Art Rosenfeld, lightening our planet’s dark roofs and roads would be enough to offset the carbon emissions of cars for the next 11 years.  

Do you have what it takes to be Scientific Blogging's alpha geek?  Well it’s time put your geek where your mouth is…IF YOU CAN!

But first a warning: yes, you could Google for these answers, but then, deep down, you’ll know you’re a bad person. Then again, you might win a free Geeks’ Guide to World Domination. So you’ll have to balance total loss of self worth with free geek schwag. It’s up to you.

Sequence gaps in human chromosome 15 have been closed by the application of 454 technology. Researchers writing in Genome Biology have described a simple and scalable method for finishing non-structural gaps in genome assemblies. Manuel Garber worked with a team of researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts, USA, to develop an approach for closing class III gaps, those non-structural gaps that are refractory to clone-based approaches, using 454 sequencing.

We're somewhat lost in how to meet future carbon footprint goals.  Heck, Germany should have been able to just close a few Soviet-era East German factories and hit their Kyoto protocol targets but even they couldn't do it.   

The answer, as always, may be in nature.   Some parts of outer space are great at getting rid of excess carbon, including an unusual carbon-rich star that was part of a mystery stellar explosion recorded in 2006.

"We were on a break," is just an excuse likely to get you yelled at today but a new study at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Gamboa, Panama says there may be some long-term value in it - at least if you are an ant.

Fungus-farming ants have cultivated the same fungal crops for 50 million years, they say.  Each young ant queen carries a bit of fungus garden with her when she flies away to mate and establish a new nest. Short breaks in the ants' relationship with the fungus during nest establishment may contribute to the stability of this long-term mutualism.

African-Americans are significantly more likely to be sanctioned by the United States welfare system than Caucasians, according to research published in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, but is there bias?  Welfare sanctions in response to rules violations should be applied, in both law and principle, according to behavior and not characteristics like race, yet Sanford F. Schram, a professor of social theory and policy at Bryn Mawr College's Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, says that is exactly what happens.

"This study provides powerful evidence that race and stereotype-consistent traits interact to shape the allocation of punishment at the frontlines of welfare reform," according to Schram.

The terms 'athlete' and 'jock' are sometimes used interchangeably - especially be people who dislike athletes.   And it's usually negative.   Due to that, only 18 percent of students in a recent study strongly identified with the identity of "jock," while 55 percent strongly identified with the identity of "athlete."   Students were twice as likely to reject the jock label.

A University of Leicester student will be presenting his discovery of 425 million year-old fossils found in rocks from the Silurian period of geological time in Herefordshire.  The fossils represent a great range of animal groups and their study has tremendously increased knowledge of the evolution of life.

David Riley’s research represents the first major attempt by scientists to understand the preservation pathway giving us a rare ‘window’ into a Silurian sea floor environment.

Penguin poo (guano) stains, visible from space, have helped British scientists locate emperor penguin breeding colonies in Antarctica. Knowing their location provides a baseline for monitoring their response to environmental change.   In a new study published this week in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) describe how they used satellite images to survey the sea-ice around 90% of Antarctica's coast to search for emperor penguin colonies. The survey identified a total of 38. Ten of those were new.

Of the previously known colonies six had re-located and six were not found.

When we think of volcanic conditions, our minds leap to images of vast eruptions like Mount St. Helens in Washington State, or lava oozing down the slopes of Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii. With my family, I once visited that lava flow.

We are used to stones being “rock solid” but here molten orange-hot rock oozes across a two-lane road and pours over a cliff, causing clouds of steam to erupt from the Pacific Ocean.

My daughter Ásta, five years old at the time, was understandably very suspicious of the stuff and would not go near the lava flow. It radiated an oven-like heat, even from fifty feet away.