Michael Massing at The NY Review of Books weighs in on the future of news organizations in the era of blogs:

Diesel and gasoline fuel sources both bring unique assets and liabilities to powering internal combustion engines. But what if an engine could be programmed to harvest the best properties of both fuel sources at once, on the fly, by blending the fuels within the combustion chamber?

Such an engine just might be possible thanks to the University of Wisconsin-Madison engine research group headed by Rolf Reitz. The research team is developing a diesel engine that produces significantly lower pollutant emissions than conventional engines, with an average of 20 percent greater fuel efficiency as well. 

Early modern humans living on the southern Africa coast employed pyrotechnology, the controlled use of fire, 72,000 years ago,  to increase the quality and efficiency of their stone tool manufacturing process, according to a report in Science.

The international team of researchers deduces that "this technology required a novel association between fire, its heat, and a structural change in stone with consequent flaking benefits." Further, they say their findings ignite the notion of complex cognition in early man.

If their findings hold up, it could mean humans' ability to solve complex problems may have occurred at the same time their modern genetic lineage appeared, rather than developing later as has been widely speculated.

The green of a tree's leaves is from the larger proportion of the chlorophyll pigment in the leaves.  As days get shorter, less chlorophyll is  produced and green is no longer dominant because yellow xanthophylls and orange carotenes are also present in the chloroplasts.

But why will the leaves of some trees be red in America yet yellow in Europe?  

Garter snakes like to eat newts. Newts don't like to be eaten, and to deter snakes from eating them, they have evolved a seriously lethal neurotoxin. This toxin, called tetrodotoxin (TTX), is chemically similar to that found in pufferfish, and a few milligrams is enough to take out a hefty adult human.

But some garter snakes really like newts, and instead of searching for other prey, several species of garter snakes have managed develop resistance to newt neurotoxins.