If you've been watching in awe as ethanol, the renewable fuel adored by environmentalists and endorsed by politicians including Al Gore, has raised prices on food and done nothing to combat emissions, you may be skeptical about new claims of green gasoline.

Not so fast.   Biomass may still be the answer, say University of Oklahoma researchers, and they won't require changes to current fuel infrastructure systems. Lance Lobban, director of the School of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering, says "green" fuels can still be an important part of our energy future. 

Never underestimate the ability of companies to let you believe you're doing a good thing if they can make a buck.   It was once said classical music was good for kids - in a bizarre, isolated 'correlation is causation' way - so a company decided that a TV show with classical music in the background would make infants smarter and the "Baby Einstein" juggernaut was born.    Was there any evidence for it?   No, but there is evidence against it, and a child expert is warning parents to limit the amount of television children watch before the age of two, after an extensive review of 78 studies published over the last 25 years and published in the January issue of Acta Paediatrica.    It can do more harm than good to their ongoing development.

Never 'heard' of thundersnow?  It's a rare sort of thunderstorm but the precipitation is snow rather than rain and because the snow dampens the sound so while you might  thunder from a typical storm miles away  the boom of thundersnow can only be heard for a few hundred yards.

Patrick Market, associate professor of atmospheric science at the University of Missouri, is chasing storms in the dead of winter in order to release weather balloons that will produce data about the little-known phenomenon of thundersnow and he says it can teach us a lot about predicting weather.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute say their new polarization-matched type of light emitting diode (LED)  has significantly improved lighting performance and energy efficiency.

Sometimes we talk about a water shortage but it's really more of an energy shortage.    Less than 2% of the water on Earth can be consumed but with cheaper energy the water availability, even in remote areas, is unlimited.   

But if cheap energy isn't on its way any time soon, energy efficient water purification is a good interim step.     Engineered osmosis could be a key to addressing the global need for affordable clean water, according to two Yale researchers.
 

A 2000-year-old painted statue is being restored to her original glory by scientists from Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG),  an academic department of the University of Warwick, along with the University of Southampton and the Herculaneum Conservation Project.