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My friend couldn’t be more environmentally if she tried! For a start her children wear the most beautiful organic hats when it is cold weather, I am sure that most of their other clothes are organic as well. I know that my friend makes sure that she always recycles everything that she can and will not use plastic bags, she always has plenty of reusable organic cotton bags with her so that she can use those instead of having to take a plastic one.

When she had a party in the summer I was really impressed that she managed to find disposable plates which were made from recycled material and even some biodegradable cups. It was fantastic how she made everything look so beautiful and the organic food was all really delicious, but then she has always been a great cook. I sometimes wonder how she manages to look after her family, keep a job going and look after the environment! I guess it gets easier as you practice more and get to understand more about what you should be doing to care for the environment then it probably becomes habit just to buy environmentally friendly products and recycle and reuse things wherever you can.

“Chemistry look what you’ve done to me,” Donna Summer crooned in Science of Love, and so, it seems, she was right. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, a panel of scientists examined the mystery of what happens when hearts throb and lips lock. Kissing, it turns out, unleashes chemicals that ease stress hormones in both sexes and encourage bonding in men, though not so much in women.

Chemicals in the saliva may be a way to assess a mate, Wendy Hill, dean of the faculty and a professor of neuroscience at Lafayette College, told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Friday.

In an experiment, Hill explained, pairs of heterosexual college students who kissed for 15 minutes while listening to music experienced significant changes in their levels of the chemicals oxytocin, which affects pair bonding, and cortisol, which is associated with stress. Their blood and saliva levels of the chemicals were compared before and after the kiss.

Both men and women had a decline in cortisol after smooching, an indication their stress levels declined.

For men, oxytocin levels increased, indicating more interest in bonding, while oxytocin levels went down in women. “This was a surprise,” Hill said.

In a test group that merely held hands, chemical changes were similar, but much less pronounced, she said.

The experiment was conducted in a student health center, Hill noted. She plans a repeat “in a more romantic setting.”

Hill spoke at the session on the Science of Kissing, along with Helen Fisher of Rutgers University and Donald Lateiner of Ohio Wesleyan University.

Fisher noted that more than 90 percent of human societies practice kissing, which she believes has three components — the sex drive, romantic love and attachment.

The sex drive pushes individuals to assess a variety of partners, then romantic love causes them to focus on an individual, she said. Attachment then allows them to tolerate this person long enough to raise a child.

Men tend to think of kissing as a prelude to copulation, Fisher said. She noted that men prefer “sloppy” kisses, in which chemicals including testosterone can be passed on to the women in saliva. Testosterone increases the sex drive in both males and females.

“When you kiss an enormous part of your brain becomes active,” she added. Romantic love can last a long time, “if you kiss the right person.”

Lateiner, a classical scholar, observed that kissing appears infrequently in Greek and Roman art, but was widely practiced, despite the spread of skin disease at that time by facial kissing. And there was a potential for social faux pas by kissing the wrong person at the wrong time.

Overall, the science of kissing — philematology — is under-researcherd, Hill concluded.

A volcano near Tokyo erupted Monday, shooting up billowing smoke and showering parts of the capital with a fine ash that sent some city residents to the car wash and left others puzzled over the white powder they initially mistook for snow.

Mount Asama erupted in the early hours of Monday, belching out a plume that rose about a mile (1.6 kilometres) high, Japan’s Meteorological Agency said.

There were no reports of injuries or damage from the eruption of the volcano, 90 miles (145 kilometres) northwest of Tokyo. It last erupted in August, 2008, causing no major damage.

Chunks of rock from the explosion were found about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) away from the volcano. Ash was detected over a wide area, including central Tokyo and as far as eastern Chiba.

In Tokyo’s western district of Fussa, the local government office was flooded with calls from residents asking about “the mysterious white powder” falling from the sky and fire departments fielded calls from people afraid the ash was from a nearby blaze.

In the town of Karuizawa, southeast of the volcano, the ash was thick enough to obscure road markings in some areas, town official Noboru Yanagishi said.

“Some people said they heard a strange noise in the morning when the eruption occurred,” he said.

The eruption was not big enough to disrupt daily life near the volcano, though many people awoke to find their cars covered in a fine layer of powder. National broadcaster NHK showed people in Tokyo lining up to get their cars washed or wiping the ash from their windows, with some drivers saying they first thought it was snow.

In Tachikawa, a district in north-western Tokyo, some farming areas were coated with ash.

“Because it’s February and not harvesting season, there was no real damage to any crops,” said Shoichi Matsumoto, a local official.

In Tsumagoi, a small town on the volcano with ski resorts and hot spring baths, residents went about their business as usual. Travellers planning vacations to the area had called to inquire, but no one cancelled, said Masaru Yoshida, a spokesman for the local tourist association.

“The wind has blown the ash to the other side of the mountain,” he said. “It’s a clear day so you can see some smoke, but not as much as we’ve had in the past.”

Mount Asama has been active for thousands of years.

Its last major eruption took place in September 2004, spewing enough ash to damage local crops. It frequently spews smaller amounts of ash from its crater.

With 108 active volcanoes, Japan is among the most seismically busy countries in the world. The country lies in the “Ring of Fire” — a series of volcanoes and fault lines that outline the Pacific Ocean.

Later Monday, the agency also reported a minor eruption at another volcano — Sakurajima in southern Japan.

An alert level of three was in place Monday for a 2.5-mile (4-kilometer) radius, which bars entry into the area and urges nearby residents to take caution.

“We don’t think there will be any stronger eruptions, but we don’t see the activity stopping anytime soon, either,” agency official Kazuya Kokubo said.

Giant cave bears froze to death during the last Ice Age in Europe about 28,000 years ago, according to a study on Wednesday that cleared human hunters of driving them to extinction thousands of years later.

The largely vegetarian bears, weighing up to a tonne and bigger than modern polar bears or Kodiak bears, apparently died off as a sharp cooling of the climate led to a freeze that killed off the fruits, nuts and plants they ate.

The bears vanished 27,800 years ago, or about 13,000 years earlier than previously believed, the scientists in Austria and Britain said in a study of bear remains using radiocarbon dating including at hibernation sites in the Alps.

“There is little convincing evidence so far of human involvement in extinction of the cave bear,” they wrote in the journal Boreas. Some past reports have suggested that the cave bears’ demise was linked to over-hunting.

Cave bears ranged from what is now Spain to the Ural Mountains, and were one of several large creatures — such as the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, giant deer and cave lion — to vanish during the Ice Age that ended 10,000 years ago.

“Our work shows that the cave bear … was one of the earliest to disappear,” Martina Pacher, one of the co-authors at the University of Vienna, said in a statement.

“Other, later extinctions happened at different times within the last 15,000 years,” she said. Previous studies had errors in dating samples and sometimes confused remains of cave bears with those of brown bears, which still survive.

“A fundamental question to be answered by future research is: why did the brown bear survive to the present day, while the cave bear did not?” said Anthony Stuart, the other author at the Natural History Museum in London.

Answers might involve differing diets, hibernation habits, geographical ranges, habitat and perhaps hunting by people, he said.

The human brain possesses a unique navigation system, much like satellite navigation, with in-built maps, grids and compasses, according to neuroscientist Hugo Spiers.

This mechanism resides in the brain’s hippocampus area, which is responsible for learning and memory, famously shown to be different in a London taxi drivers’ study carried out by Eleanor Maguire at University College, London.

The study showed that a region of the hippocampus was enlarged in London taxi drivers compared to the general population.

“London taxi drivers, who have to know their way around hundreds of thousands of winding streets, have the most refined and powerful innate sat-navs, strengthened over years of experience,” informed Spiers, as he made a presentation at the BA Festival of Science.

Even bus drivers do not have the same enlarged area, suggesting that the difference is linked to ‘knowledge’ of the city’s 250,000 streets built up by taxi drivers over many years.

In a follow-up study, Spiers and Maguire used the Playstation2 video game “The Getaway” to examine how taxi drivers use their hippocampus and other brain areas when they navigate.

Taxi drivers used the virtual reality simulation to navigate the streets of London whilst lying in an fMRI brain scanner. The researchers found that the hippocampus is most active when the drivers first think about their route and plan ahead.

In contrast, activity in a diverse network of other brain areas increases as they encounter road blocks, spot expected landmarks, look at the view and worry about the thoughts of their customers and other drivers.

“The hippocampus is crucial for navigation and we use it like a ’sat-nav’,” said Spiers. Inside the hippocampus and neighbouring brain areas scientists have identified three types of cells which, said Spiers, make up the sat-nav. These are called place cells, head direction cells and grid cells.

“Place cells map out our location, lighting up to say ‘you are here’ when we pass a specific place. There are thought to be hundreds of thousands of place cells in the brain, each preferring a slightly different geographical place,” Spiers said.

“Head direction cells act like a compass, telling us which way we are facing.

“Grid cells, discovered in 2005 by Edvard Moser’s group at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, tell us how far we have travelled using a grid-like pattern akin to how we use latitude and longitude for navigation.”

Scientists have found that the continent of Australia has been largely untouched by humans, and stands as one of the world’s top five wilderness havens, ranking alongside the Amazon forest and the Sahara desert.

A report by two conservation groups, the Pew Environment Group and the Nature Conservancy, found that forty percent of Australia qualifies as wilderness.

The two conservation groups have hired scientists to scan the globe for the last remaining areas of wilderness and the report, the Wild Australia Program Study, put Australia towards the top of the list.

“As the world’s last great wilderness areas disappear under pressure from human impact, to have a continent with this much remaining wilderness intact is unusual and globally significant,” said co-author Barry Traill.

The report identified 12 regions of Australia, which remain largely undamaged by humans, ranging from the Nullarbor plains to the rainforests of Cape York peninsula.

But, it warns Australia has the worst rate of species extinction and wilderness areas are under threat from feral animals such as pigs, buffaloes and weeds.

“Wild areas needed to be actively managed for the future,” said Traill.

U.N. climate talks in Ghana are making progress on ways to help developing nations slow deforestation and have eased disputes over use of greenhouse gas targets for industrial sectors, delegates said on Monday.“It’s moving pretty well now,” Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told reporters of the August 21-27 talks which are defining the building blocks of a new U.N. global warming pact meant to be agreed by the end of 2009.

“We’re getting beyond some of the rhetoric,” he said of the 160-nation meeting among about 1,500 delegates. “People are beginning to understand each other better.”

The Accra meeting is the third session this year under a plan to agree a broad new climate treaty by the end of 2009 to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which sets greenhouse gas targets for just 37 developed nations.

Accra is focusing largely on ways to encourage tropical developing nations to slow the rate of deforestation and debating whether industries such as steel, aluminum or cement should have international benchmarks for efficiency.

“The Accra meeting has been very successful so far,” said Luiz Figueiredo Machado, a Brazilian expert chairing talks on new ways for countries ranging from the United States to China to curb emissions.

Accra is not meant to end with any firm agreements.

Many delegates left the last session, in Germany in June, saying the talks were lagging in an assault on climate change that could drive more species to extinction, bring more desertification, floods, heatwaves and rising seas.

TREES

“The chances that it (a new U.N. scheme to slow deforestation) will go ahead, in my mind, are much higher,” Machado told Reuters. He said that there was an “overwhelming consensus” on the importance of the project.

Trees soak up carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as they grow and release it when they are burnt, often by poor farmers clearing land for farming. U.N. data suggests it accounts for 20 percent of greenhouse gases from human sources.

Cash to slow deforestation is widely seen as an incentive to get poor nations to start slowing their rising emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels.

Emily Brickell, forest campaigner with the WWF environmental group, said it might cost between $20 to $30 billion a year to set up a system to safeguard tropical forests, perhaps using a mixture of carbon markets or donor funds.

The talks are also seeking to bridge differences over whether to impose sectoral targets for industries, an idea championed this year by Japan.

Some developing nations, smarting from the collapse of world trade talks last month, fear such benchmarks could be a backdoor way to impose trade barriers on their less efficient producers of metals or cement.

But Japan clearly stated during the talks that it did not favor imposing common international standards. “What I saw and heard in our debates on sectoral actions and approaches was a very fruitful debate,” Machado said. “It clarified the issue.”

The car has such a short range as it is and there are so few outlets available! Now I hear the state wants everyone to pay 18 cents a gallon for road taxes, but they never complain about all the road taxes paid for lawn mowers, chain saws, weed wackers, and snow throwers do they! When are the taxpayers going to get a refund on all of that road tax paid when the engine never touched the road? Hey Honda when are you going to sell diesels that we can afford? And why is diesel fuel so expensive when it costs them less to produce diesel than gasoline! How many believe the feds are screwing with everyone on these things?

I don’t think that they wanted you to travel long distances with the compressed natural gas car and seriously, I don’t think that it is very appealing right now because you can’t find any of those outlets.

I’ve heard people, most notably Jennifer Aniston, say/brag that they brush their teeth in the shower in order to conserve water. Aniston even followed this statement up by preaching about how 2 minutes in the shower uses an entire day’s worth of water for someone in Africa. My immediate thought when I hear this is, “That’s stupid. You’re using more water, not less”. After all, brushing your teeth outside of the shower only requires the water to be on for about a second to first wet the brush and then another second to rinse it. When you brush in the shower, you’re using more water for a longer period of time. You’re essentially just extending your shower, right? Or am I missing something? I’m only asking because I would do it if I honestly thought it was helpful, but the way I see it it’s just a bigger waste and someone needs to set Ms. Aniston straight.

lets see a 4 oz cup of water to wet the brush,then wet the mouth,then rinse out the mouth and rinse out the brush compared to a low flow shower head that uses .5 litres of water every minute that would be approx 1 litre of water wasted to do the same thing.Jennifer darling you may have the looks but not the sensibilities.

Environment

The world heats up and cools down and has been doing it for billions of years. It is questionable rather we began global warming or not but is more then likely we are contributing to it, but we don’t know how much. It is also unknown if there would be any change in global warming if we stop polluting all together. there is no doubt we are affecting the atmosphere, and that is not a good thing. but the atmosphere and earth’s climate is always changing and there really isn’t much we can do about that except try and not to contribute to it. Oh by the way don’t listen to politicians, read articles from published and acredit physical scientists, a phd (unlike myself) if you really want to know whats going on.
thermal vents, volcanic activity and many more contribute to wether the erath is in the proccess of heating up or cooling down.

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the ozone layer has nothing to do with anything.

Global warming is caused by natural cycles.
Humans can’t do anything about it.

Don’t allow pinhead nazis (most of whom are not even elected to any office) tell you how to live your life, and don’t let them raise your taxes.
If you want to be taxed into abject poverty and have a pathetic life similar to that of a medieval peasant, keep voting for liberal Global Warming Nazis.

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85% solar + 15% internal/thermal +~unknown. These are the primary sources. But there are other profound secondary effects from the black-body concept, albedo, and selective absorbers, just to name a few.