A report examining the impact of biofuels on greenhouse gas emissions during the 21st century has found that carbon loss stemming from the displacement of food crops and pastures for biofuels crops may be twice as much as the CO2 emissions from land dedicated to biofuels production.

The Science Express study also predicts that increased fertilizer use for biofuels production will cause nitrous oxide emissions (N2O) to become more important than carbon losses, in terms of warming potential, by the end of the century. 

One small step for mankind, one giant leap for ... averting natural and man-made disasters?

A new Tel Aviv University technology combines sensors in orbit with sensors on the ground and in the air to create what they call a "Hyperspectral Remote Sensor" (HRS) which will provide advance warnings about water contamination after a forest fire, alert authorities of a pollution spill long before a red flag is raised on earth - or even tell people in China where a monsoon will strike. 

The HRS simultaneously acquires hundreds of optical images, each from a different frequency, that enable a "spectral assessment" from distances high in the air via airplanes and in orbit using satellites. This raw data is then processed to yield sophisticated thematic maps.

Antidepressants are ineffective in fully 50% of the people who take them.   It is clearly early 20th century medicine, where you keep trying things and hope something happens while pharmaceutical companies who impress doctors the most make the most money.

With so much research and money spent on depression studies, how is it possible that it is only as effective as doing nothing at all?  

1)  The cause of depression has been oversimplified.  A study from the laboratory of  depression researcher Eva Redei presented at the Neuroscience 2009 conference in Chicago this week addresses some strongly held beliefs about depression.

Prenatal sex-based biological differences extend to genetic expression in cerebral cortices and the differences in question are probably associated with later divergences in how our brains develop, according to a new study by Uppsala University researchers Elena Jazin and Björn Reinius in Molecular Psychiatry.

Professor Elena Jazin and doctoral student Björn Reinius at the Department of Physiology and Developmental Biology previously say they have demonstrated that genetic expression in the cerebral cortices of human beings and other primates exhibits certain sex-based differences. It is presumed that these differences are very old and have survived the evolutionary process.

The most distant galaxy cluster yet, known as JKCS041, has been discovered by combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical and infrared telescopes at the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT), the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope in Hawaii and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The JKCS041 cluster is located about 10.2 billion light years away, and is observed as it was when the Universe was only about a quarter of its present age.

The previous record holder for a galaxy cluster was 9.2 billion light years away, XMMXCS J2215.9-1738, discovered by ESA's XMM-Newton in 2006, which broke the previous distance record by only about 0.1 billion light years while JKCS041 surpasses XMMXCS J2215.9 by about ten times that.

Education quality is a moving target these days.   With college education a right since the early 1990s and student loans unlimited to pay for it, costs and claims have expanded, as hot air must, to fill the available money space.

Because everyone with good grades can afford to go to Stanford with enough loans or rich parents, lower ranked schools have no reason to charge less because the pool of high-ranked schools can accept is limited - they just have to wait.