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15th Jul 2007
Fuels of the Future
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This week, from iPod to iRod as a man's taste for music turns him into a human lightning conductor, why penguins are picky eaters, and better biopsies - why doctors are attracted to a new magnetic cancer detection system. Also a fuel made from fructose that packs a punch like petrol, we find out how to make hydrogen on demand using aluminium, and grow your own gas - do we have enough land to grow our energy in future? Plus, in Kitchen Science, we turn vegetable oil into biodiesel and ask a white van man to test it...
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News
A paper in this week's New England Journal describes a man admitted to hospital with a rather strange pattern of skin injuries including ruptured eardrums, a broken jaw and burns to his chest, neck and the insides both ears!
Doctors discovered that the 37 year old had been out jogging in a thunder...
Penguins living in the Antarctic have changed their minds about their favourite food, a change of diet that could have been triggered by the hunting of whales and seals over the last two hundred years.
Now, you might think that an obvious way to find out what a penguin has been eating would be to l...
For the first time researchers have been able to say with certainty that there is water on a distant planet.
Writing in this week's Nature, UCL's Giovanna Tinetti and her colleagues used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to study a "hot-Jupiter" orbiting a star 60 light years away. Like our...
There was good news this week for lovers of muck and magic, because it seems that organic farming could be capable of producing enough food to feed the world.
That’s according to a study from team of researchers led by Ivette Perfecto from the University of Michigan in the United States. They’ve pu...
Researchers at the University of New Mexico and Albuquerque company Senior Scientific are testing a new breed of iron oxide-based magnetic nanoparticles that are encased in a biocompatible coating. The coating is "conjugated" with antibodies that can recognise specific cancer cells. This c...
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Interviews
Biodiesel is one option for powering cars of the future, but another fuel we could use is hydrogen. This has the benefit of producing only water when it burns, but can be expensive to extract and store. We spoke to Jerry Woodall about a simple way he’s found to extract hydrogen from water…...
An alternative to growing crops to make biodiesel is to make use of existing biomass. James Dumesic spoke to Chris smith about a way of making petrol-like fuel from fructose.
It's all well and good being excited about new fuels, but are the arguments for using them really sound? Can we grow enough crops to make biodiesel? David MacKay brought Chris back down to earth.
For kitchen science, we sent Azi to find out how to make biodiesel from vegetable oil, and to prove that it really works in an engine...
This week, Chelsea finds evidence that Mexican food may not have changed much in hundreds of years, while Bob explores a way to extract energy from vibrations
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