Break it Down! How Scientists are Making Fuel Out of Plants

Break it Down! How Scientists are Making Fuel Out of Plants

The good thing about fossil fuels is that they are very energy dense, i.e., they contain a lot of energy per unit of volume. This means that fossil fuels are very good at powering cars and generating heat. The not-so-good thing about fossil fuels is that the earth has a limited amount of them. Because fossil fuels take millions of years to form, we will eventually use them up before more are ma...

How to break down the barriers.

ONE THEME of the NHS Plan is the government's desire for the barriers between thet raditional roles of nurses and doctors to be broken down.

How Plants Shut out Bacteria

Unlike animals, which breathe through airways lined with pathogen-trapping defenses, plants get air through tiny pores in their leaves that all but invite bacteria to sneak in. How, then, do plants keep them out? They slam their pores, or stomata, shut. Stomata are flanked by guard cells that swell when triggered by bacteria, thus closing the pores. Besides being fascinating in its own right, t...

How free are Canada's unmuzzled scientists?

Are scientists a workforce ? – Or , how

S ome time ago, I was reading Science’s Careers and cringed at the title “Can NIH renovate the biomedical workforce?”. The problem was the word “workforce”, since its Russian equivalent was used by the Communist Party leadership to describe other citizens of the Soviet Union— where I grew up—whom they viewed as mere cogs in a machine at the Party’s disposal. Hoping that my past confused me into...