GEN-ERIC News

Hydrogen is one of the most important fuels of the future, and the sun will be one of our most important sources of energy. Why not combine the two to produce hydrogen directly from solar energy without any detours involving electrical current? Why not use a process similar to the photosynthesis used by plants to convert sunlight directly into chemical energy? Researchers from the German Max Planck Institute have now developed a catalyst that may do just that. As they report in the journal Angewandte Chemie, titanium disilicide splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. And the semiconductor doesn’t just act as a photocatalyst, it also stores the gases produced, which allows an elegant separation of hydrogen and oxygen. “The generation of hydrogen and oxygen from water by means of semiconductors is an important contribution to the use of solar energy,” explains Martin Demuth. “Semiconductors suitable for use as photocatalysts have been difficult to obtain, have unfavorable light-absorption characteristics, or decompose during the reaction.”

A man arrested at the Ottawa courthouse for impersonating a lawyer was released from custody without charge after police confirmed he was in fact a lawyer. Lee Mullowney spent about three hours in police custody last Thursday after he attended as an observer at a bail hearing for a man he had represented once before. Police spokesman Const. Alain Boucher said yesterday the file in the case indicated an allegation had been made that Mullowney had told a Crown lawyer on an earlier occasion he was acting for the same accused man and had improperly received disclosure.

“The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”

Sleeping too much, just like sleeping too little, could be linked to a person’s risk of an early death, a new British study indicates. Researchers at the University of Warwick’s Warwick Medical School studied 10,308 British civil servants in two different time periods: between 1985 and 1988, and between 1992 and 1993. With seven hours seen as the optimal amount of sleep for the average adult, the study subjects who cut the duration of their sleep from seven hours to five hours a night had a 1.7-fold increased risk of death from all causes within the ensuing 11-17 years, according to the research, presented Monday to the British Sleep Society. They also had twice the increased risk of death from a cardiovascular problem. More surprisingly, scientists found those individuals who increased the number of hours they slept per night from seven to eight hours or more were more than twice as likely to die within 11-17 years as those who kept sleeping for seven. They were more likely to die from non-cardiovascular diseases.

Many herbal plants such as strawberry, clover, reed and ground elder naturally form networks. Individual plants remain connected with each other for a certain period of time by means of runners. These connections enable the plants to share information with each other via internal channels. They are therefore very similar to computer networks. But what do plants want to chat to each other about? Recently Stuefer and his colleagues were the first to demonstrate that clover plants warn each other via the network links if enemies are nearby. If one of the plants is attacked by caterpillars, the other members of the network are warned via an internal signal. Once warned, the intact plants strengthen their chemical and mechanical resistance so that they are less attractive for advancing caterpillars. Thanks to this early warning system, the plants can stay one step ahead of their attackers. Experimental research has revealed that this significantly limits the damage to the plants.

A team of researchers at Rice University has filmed carbon nanotubes inside living animals. They’ve used a custom-built microscope and a technique called near-infrared fluorescent imaging to detect DNA-sized nanotubes inside living fruit flies. But more importantly, they’ve compared a group of fruit fly larvae fed with a yeast paste that contained carbon nanotubes with a control group fed normally. And they found no significant differences between the two groups. Does this mean that nanoparticles are innocuous, especially for humans? Only time will tell.