Rock-steady way to tackle rising Carbon Dioxide

Barrack Obama has famously pledged to put the US at the forefront of global warming (cynics would say it already is!), so it's fitting that a US scientist has this week developed a strategy that could lock away literally billions of tonnes of CO2 per year. Writing in this week's PNAS, Columbia Uni...

Booze-prone brain behaviour

Scientists have uncovered a genetic reason why some people are prone to alcoholism. University of Massachusetts Medical School researcher Gilles Martin and his colleagues, writing in this week's PNAS, have found that one of the components of a pore (called the BK channel) found on the surfaces of b...

A fungal solution to climate change?

The fight against future climate change may have an unexpected ally, in the form of mushrooms living on the soils of northern Spruce forests of Alaska, Canada and Scandinavia. Steven Allison and Kathleen Tresede from the University of California Irvine conducted experiments in Alaska and found that...

The world’s smallest solar panels

The world’s most minute solar panel cells have been built and tested and one day in the not too distant future they could be used to power even tinier microscopic machines. The solar panels were built by Xiaomei Jiang and her team of researchers from the University of South Florida in the States. ...