Bottled-Water Secret: It’s hurting our planet

Most water bottles are made of a plastic called polyethylene terepthalate, or PET. There are two problems with PET bottles.

Problem 1: They take a boatload of crude oil to produce. University of Louisville researchers estimate that around 17 million barrels of oil are used each year to produce PET water bottles—a major reason why bottled water costs roughly four times as much as gasoline.

Problem 2: We’re chucking our water bottles in the trash, instead of the recycling bin. According to the Container Recycling Institute, nearly 90 percent of the 30 billion PET water bottles we buy annually end up in landfills—a huge problem when you consider that PET bottles take from 400 to 1,000 years to decompose.

The bottom line: We should take more tap water whenever possible.

Is This The Best Candidate Yet for A Second Earth?

Astronomers have found a planet which is one of the best candidates for life ever found by telescopes on Earth. The planet is rocky, like ours, and orbits its sun within the 'habitable zone', where temperatures are just right for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface.

The temperature on the surface could be close to Earth's. 'This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it,' study leader Guillem Anglada-Escudé said.

The planet was detected using data from the European Southern Observatory's telescopes, which was analysed to look for 'wobbles' in a star's motion caused the gravitational 'tug' of planets orbiting it.

The new planet has a mass around 4.5 times the Earth, and orbits a star called GJ 667C, 22 light years from Earth - just next door, in galactic terms. The new planet absorbs around the same amount of light as our planet.

'This was expected to be a rather unlikely star to host planets. Yet there they are, around a very nearby, metal-poor example of the most common type of star in our galaxy,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC.

'The planet is around one star in a triple-star system. The other stars are pretty far away, but they would look pretty nice in the sky.'

Re-purpose old magazines

Rather than tossing all of those trees immediately into the recycle bin, you can give them a brand new life, here are several tips:

Give them away to a friend.
Donate to doctor’s offices or anywhere else that has a waiting room.
Donate them to a school or library.

Cut out the images and text for collages. Collage is always a fun craft to do with kids!

Save them up until the holidays get here, and create these adorable upcycled Christmas trees.

Cut out perfect squares, and use your old magazines to make fun pinwheels. The covers work best, or you can double up pages).

Use cut out images and words to make your own custom marble magnets.
Turn a stack of magazines into a sweet planter.
Transform old magazines into sweet little recycled gift boxes.

Shred the pages to make confetti or for packaging valuables.
Fold them into homemade envelopes.

Green Tech: VW's New Chopped Beetle E-Bugster Leaked

Electric E-Bugster concept chops the Beetle’s top and replaces its petrol engine with plug-in drivetrain. Leaked images and details of a funky new version of the Volkswagen Beetle that runs purely on electricity have been revealed online.

The E-Bugster concept will be unveiled at this week’s Detroit motor show, and appears to be a tribute to the eye-catching Ragster concept that was shown six years ago at the same show.

The tough looking new version boasting a three-inch (7.6 centimetre) roof chop, which, while not quite as dramatic as the Ragster’s six-inch (15.2cm) cut, still lends the car a beefier, more masculine presence.

The electric powertrain is capable of producing 85kW of power and 270Nm of torque, with the 315 kilogram lithium-ion battery pack sitting at the rear of the E-Bugster’s body.

Volkswagen claims the range of the electric Beetle is about 130 kilometres, and that it can be recharged to 80 per cent of its capacity in only 30 minutes. A production version of the E-Bugster hasn’t been confirmed but is expected within the next two years, though it’s not likely to carry over the chopped lid.

In other news, Volkswagen will also reveal a hybrid version of the Jetta that is already confirmed for production later this year. The Jetta Hybrid combines VW’s well-known 1.4-litre turbocharged engine with a small electric motor which can propel the car using electricity only for two kilometres, at speeds of up to 70km/h.

First Class on Airbus A380 Looks Like Starship Enterprise

The interior, designed by Marc Newson includes LCD touch panels, leather seating, plants, sheepskin-covered full-length beds and more than 1,000 videos to choose from.

'At first glance, this may look like the interior of the USS Enterprise, but it's actually the first class cabin on a Qantas A380, complete with personal suites and centre socializing area,' writes TechEBlog this week.

The first class cabin of Qantas's A380 super-jumbos looks astonishingly like the U.S.S. Enterprise in Star Trek - although you'll have to settle for earthly routes such as London to Sydney and Sydney to Los Angeles.

The central area is provided for flyers to stretch their legs and sit down for a drink.Each berth even has a dresser for storing clothes - naturally, pyjamas are provided.

There are just 14 berths in the whole cabin.Flyers are provided with noise-cancelling headphones, and the touchscreen-controlled LCD panels in every berth give access to more than 1,000 different programmes.

China's Coolest Town

If Santa fancies taking a breather after his gift-giving jaunt around the world tonight, there's one spot on the planet where he'll feel right at home. For the town of Harbin in northeast China has created an entire city carved out of ice and snow. The 28th Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival, which opens on January 5, features work by some of the best ice sculptors and attracts thousands of visitors from around the world.

Spread out across three zones, the theme park features a range of snow-based rides, ice mountains and reproductions of some of the most iconic buildings in the world - all carved from giant blocks of ice and snow.

The town, located near the border with Russia, experiences dry but freezing winters and has an abundance of ice on tap from the nearby Songhau River. Winter activities at the festival include Yabuli Alpine Skiing, winter-swimming and the ice-lantern exhibition in Zhaolin Garden.

A Christmas Decoration 1,000 Light Years Away

Even a far-far universe celebrates Christmas. Yes, Nasa scientists were in a very festive mood in last week, releasing an amazing image of a nebula they nicknamed the 'wreath nebula.' The scene looks like a ring of evergreens decorated with a red Christmasy bow with silver bells throughout.It was captured by Nasa's WISE space telescope. The star-forming nebula is actually named Barnard 3, or IRAS Ring G159.6-18.5, discovery.com reports.

But this picture of serenity is deceiving. From 1,000 light years away, this nebula looks peaceful but it is actually a mass of savage winds blasting from the central bright star. in the middle of the red area.

The blizzard winds have turned the warm dust into a wreath shape.The central red glow is thought to be metal-rich gases being heated up by the central bright star.Factor in the many shining stars, lovingly dubbed 'silver bells' by Nasa scientists, and you have a truly cosy Christmas scene.

Doubled Earth-size planets spotted!!!!

Last week, scientists have found doubled Earth-sized planets orbiting a star outside the solar system, an encouraging sign for prospects of finding life elsewhere. The discovery shows that such planets exist and that they can be detected by the Kepler spacecraft, said Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. They're the smallest planets found so far that orbit a star resembling our sun.

Scientists are seeking Earth-sized planets as potential homes for extraterrestrial life, said Fressin, who reports the new findings in a paper published online Tuesday by the journal Nature. One planet's diameter is only 3 percent larger than Earth's, while the other's diameter is about nine-tenths that of Earth. They appear to be rocky, like our planet.

But they are too hot to contain life as we know it, with calculated temperatures of about 1,400 degrees and 800 degrees Fahrenheit, he said.

You are what you eat

And eating a heavy mid-day meal will often make you feel lethargic for the rest of the afternoon. "Consider what you're eating at lunch. If you're having that post-pasta slump at 2 p.m., and need java or cookies to pep back up, maybe you should try a salad or something a bit lighter so you won't lag," suggests Hohlbaum.

The key is keeping your blood sugar levels steady throughout the day, according to Kari Kooi, RD, corporate wellness dietician at The Methodist Hospital in Houston, who recommends three light meals and two snacks at regular intervals. "Heavy meals can make you feel sluggish because they require more energy to digest," Kooi says. "[A quality lunch] will consist of a fiber-rich carbohydrate, like water-rich veggies, and a lean protein, like chicken or fish," she says.

And what does Kooi suggest you avoid? "A highly processed meal, like some of the frozen meals in the grocery store, will not give you the sustainable energy you need. The less processed the better when it comes to keeping your energy levels up." When you hit that midday slump, Kooi suggests going for proteins like mixed nuts and fruit instead of the usual energy-zapping pretzels, cookies or candy, which cause your blood sugar levels to spike and then drop and may even make you hungrier, according to Kooi.

Stop killing trees with e-book

Tablet computers and electronic readers promise to eventually close the book on the ink-and-paper era as they transform the way people browse magazines, check news or lose themselves in novels. “It is only a matter of time before we stop killing trees and all publications become digital,” Creative Strategies president and principal analyst Tim Bajarin told AFP.

Online retail giant Amazon made electronic readers mainstream with Kindle devices and Apple ignited insatiable demand for tablets ideal for devouring online content ranging from films to magazines and books. The combined momentum of e-readers and tablets will push annual revenue from digital books to $9.7 billion by the year 2016, more than tripling the $3.2 billion tally expected this year, according to a Juniper Research report.

Readers are showing increased loyalty to digital books, according to the US Book Industry Study Group (BISG). Nearly half of print book buyers who also got digital works said they would skip getting an ink-and-paper release by a favorite author if an electronic version could be had within three months, a BISG survey showed.

NASA Astronomers Discover Habitable Blue Planet

Astronomers have discovered the first habitable blue planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a star similar to the Sun. NASA’s Kepler Mission has been finding new worlds at an incredible rate over the past year but this is the first discovery of what could be a habitable super-earth as it appears to be large, rocky planet with a surface temperature of about 72 degrees Fahrenheit, similar to spring day on Earth.

A team of researchers, including Carnegie Institute's Alan Boss, made the discovery which will be published in The Astrophysical Journal. The discovery team, led by William Borucki of the NASA Ames Research Center, used photometric data from the NASA Kepler space telescope, which monitors the brightness of 155,000 stars.

This discovery is the first detection of a possibly habitable world in orbit around a Sun-like star.
The host star lies about 600 light-years away from us toward the constellations of Lyra and Cygnus. The star, a G5 star, has a mass and a radius only slightly smaller than that of our Sun. As a result, the host star is about 25 per cent less luminous than the Sun.

Monster Black Holes Found, Biggest Yet!

"They are monstrous," Berkeley astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma told reporters. "We did not expect to find such massive black holes because they are more massive than indicated by their galaxy properties. They're kind of extraordinary." The previous black hole record-holder is as large as 6 billion suns.

In research released by the journal Nature, the scientists suggest these black holes may be the leftovers of quasars that crammed the early universe. They are similar in mass to young quasars, they said, and have been well hidden until now. The scientists used ground-based telescopes as well as the Hubble Space Telescope and Texas supercomputers, observing stars near the black holes and measuring the stellar velocities to uncover these vast, invisible regions.

Black holes are objects so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape. Some are formed by the collapse of a super-size star. It's uncertain how these two newly discovered whoppers originated, said Nicholas McConnell, a Berkeley graduate student who is the study's lead author. To be so massive now means they must have grown considerably since their formation, he said.

The world's Most Spectacular Sea-caves

Many 'sea caves' are famous among the watersports community - largely because you have to strap on a pair of flippers and an air tank to explore sights such as Belize's Great Blue Hole.

But the relentless action of the waves over millennia has carved out some spectacular caves that you don't even need a snorkel to explore such as Fingal's Cave in Scotland - just a sturdy pair of boots.

Fingal's Cave, on the uninhabited island of Staffa in Scotland, showcases unique, unspoiled geography - and was reputed to be home to a giant who built a causeway between Scotland and Ireland.

Cyclops Shark is Real

The fisherman who discovered the Cyclops shark is reportedly hanging on to the preserved remains, news outlets reported. But scientists have recently examined and X-rayed the fish, authenticating the catch. According to Seth Romans, a spokesman for Pisces Fleet, Galvan Magana and his colleagues will publish a scientific paper about the find within the next several weeks.

The Cyclops shark is an exception. While rare, "cyclopia" is a real developmental anomaly in which only one eye develops. Human fetuses are sometimes affected, as in a 1982 case in Israel reported in 1985 in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. In that case, a baby girl was born seven weeks early with no nose and only one eye in the center of her face. The infant, who lived only 30 minutes after birth, also had severe brain abnormalities.

In 2006, a kitten born with one eye and no nose (a rare condition called holoprosencephaly), created a stir online as news organizations and bloggers tried to determine if the bizarre photos of the animal were real. A veterinarian confirmed the kitten's condition; "Cy," as the cat was known, lived only a day. The remains were sold to the creationist Lost World Museum.

New Research: Gamma-ray Bursts Could End Life on Earth!

New research suggests the continuation of life on Earth depends on massive explosions on the other side of the galaxy.

The explosions, gamma-ray bursts thought to occur when two stars collide, can release tons of high-energy gamma-ray radiation into space. Scientists believe they have already played a part in some the planet's extinctions.

They say the blasts could be contributing to the depletion of the Earth's ozone layer. Brian Thomas, of Washburn University, in Topeka, Kansas, said: 'We find that a kind of gamma-ray burst — a short gamma-ray burst — is probably more significant than a longer gamma-ray burst. 'The duration is not as important as the amount of radiation.'

The research is being presented on Sunday, October 9, at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting in Minneapolis. It is thought to be the first time scientists have connected the timing of these gamma-ray bursts to extinctions on Earth that can be dated through the fossil record.

Livescience.com reports that there are two types of gamma-ray bursts: a longer, brighter burst and a 'short-hard' burst, which lasts less than a second but seems to give off more radiation than a longer burst.

If such a burst were to happen inside the Milky Way, its effects on Earth would be much longer lasting. The short bursts may be caused by fender-benders between stars, such as dense neutron stars or black holes colliding.

Orangutans Allows to Smoke?

An activist said that orangutans in many of Indonesia’s zoos were allowed to smoke as visitors could freely toss cigarettes to them without proper monitoring.

“Cigarettes are bad for orangutans’ health. We demand the zoos closely monitor the orangutans,” Centre for Orangutan Protection campaigner Hardi Baktiantoro told AFP.

“Orangutans can also smoke cigarettes because they tend to imitate human behaviour,” he said. Baktiantoro said the apes were able to receive any food or cigarettes thrown to them as there were no barriers between them and zoo visitors.

In Malaysia, an orangutan named Shirley that amused visitors by smoking cigarette butts thrown into her cage was being forced to go cold turkey after authorities seized the great ape from a state-run zoo last week.

Energy consumption and investment

The story of energy for mankind began when fire was discovered for the first time in the ancient world. Since then human started to consume energy and it was taken from renewable energy resources such as sun, wind and water power. Together with the development in industrial sectors, demands for energy have increased significantly, human started to explore and began massive exploration and production of energy. The advancement of technology human owned at that time has a major contribution in the exploration of energy resources, and that was the time when energy consumption had accelerated rapidly.

Human has developed technology that turns heat to energy based on fossil fuels. It has become one huge business. The acceleration of this type of investment is unstoppable, solar energy investments are among the most explored investments in energy industry. The exploitation of coal deposits to oil and natural gas fields on a global scale has become unstoppable. The next era of energy resource begins not very long after the fossil-based era, the major transition takes place when human invented nuclear-based energy, but since the production cost and the security are another issue, production of nuclear energy hasn’t as fast as fossil-based energy.

World population has increased; new plants were being built and operated. This all needs more and more energy to run, in the 19th century alone world population has increased by 3 times and that was the time when the essential change of energy consumption took place. World data for energy consumption shows that today fossil-based fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas are the primary contributors of total energy supply, and this one fact alone has shown why Investing in natural gas, oil and coal become extremely significant.

Since the energy sources will not last forever, it left each of us a global issue. We have to ask ourselves on how we use energy, that’s our homework. While for investors and inventors out there, it will be a great challenge for them to create some energy forms that will last forever and can be consumed without polluting the environment.

HTV-2 - An unmanned Hypersonic Glider

An unmanned hypersonic glider developed for U.S. defense research into super-fast global strike capability was launched atop a rocket early Thursday but contact was lost after the experimental craft began flying on its own, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said.

The problem occurred during the critical point of transition to aerodynamic flight, DARPA said in a statement that described the mission as an attempt to fly the fastest aircraft ever built.

Shaped like the tip of a spear, the small craft is part of a U.S. military initiative to develop technology to respond to threats at 20 times the speed of sound or greater, reaching any part of the globe in an hour.

The HTV-2 is designed to be launched to the edge of space, separate from its booster and maneuver through the atmosphere at 13,000 mph (21,000 kph) before intentionally crashing into the ocean.

The World's Only Penis Museum: What are Their Collections?

From gigantic whale penises to speck-sized field mouse testicles and lampshades made from bull scrotums, Iceland's small Phallological Museum has it all -- and recently put its first human member on display.

"This is the biggest one," founder and curator Sigurdur Hjartarson says, patting an enormous plastic canister. Inside was a liquid-immersed greyish-white mass as wide as a small tree trunk and as tall as a man.

Weighing 70 kilos and measuring around 170 centimetres, the Sperm Whale specimen "is just the front tip," he explained.

"The full penis could in fact be five metres and weigh something like 350 to 450 kilos -- but of course, the animal it came from weighed around 50 tonnes," says the 69-year-old retired headmaster, chuckling beneath his woolly, grey beard.

A total 276 specimens from all of Iceland's 46 mammals, along with a few foreign contributions, are on show at what may be the world's only penis museum.

The cramped room is filled with test tubes and glass containers in all shapes and sizes, holding formaldehyde-immersed offerings from whales, dolphins, walruses, redfish, goats, polar bears and rats, just to mention a few.

Scientists Discover Lost World

An ancient landscape long ago submerged beneath the North Atlantic Ocean has been discovered by scientists.

Researchers found the 56million-year-old lost terrain, which they have likened to the mythical lost city of Atlantis, by analyzing data collected for oil companies using an advanced echo-sounding technique.

The 1.2mile-deep landscape is located in the North Atlantic west of the Orkney-Shetland Islands and has peaks that once belonged to mountains and eight major rivers.

It would once have risen up to 0.6miles above sea level and probably joined up with what is now Scotland, and may even have stretched as far as Norway, the scientists said.

Researcher Nicky White, from University of Cambridge, said: 'It looks for all the world like a map of a bit of a country onshore. 'It is like an ancient fossil landscape preserved 1.2miles beneath the seabed.'

The discovery came from data gathered by a seismic contracting company. A hi-tech echo-sounding technique was deployed that involved releasing high-pressured air underwater - this produced sound waves that traveled through sediment on the ocean floor. An echo would bounce back each time these waves happened upon a change in the terrain through which they were traveling.