Yawning wolves, face-mites and space-based lasers to fight global warming

Who’d Have Thunk It? 31.08.14

Do you ever get annoyed at having to wait for ages at border immigration? Well it could be that the time-consuming checks are not totally effective at matching photos to faces: A study on passport officers in Australia found that there was a ‘14% acceptance rate of ‘fraudulent photos’. Perhaps they should employ Walkabout bouncers instead.

Passport officers aren’t the only organisms interested in your face – miniature mites exist that make your mug into a maison. Scientists from the US scraped the faces of human volunteers and were able to see mites in 14% of them. However, they didn’t just look for mites themselves, but for DNA evidence that mites had been there, finding mite DNA in a staggering (and revolting) 100% of adult samples.

We don’t just share a home with other creatures, but certain behaviour too. In the past 2 weeks, studies have shown that wolves have ‘yawn contagion’ and that pigeons display similar risk-taking behaviour when rewarded with food as humans do when rewarded with money. I guess that shows that bankers really are as smart as pigeons.

But we don’t just take risks when it comes to money – heavy industry is laden with (sometimes literal) pit-falls. And a new study calculates that fluid-injection underground (such as in fracking, solution mining and enhanced geothermal power) could theoretically ‘trigger’ large earthquakes to go off sooner than expected when conducted near existing fault lines. [Read the full TSiC article HERE]

An alternative to fracking for hydrocarbon fuel is to develop technologies such as fuel-cells. A new study has been developing new catalysts for use in Direct Urea Fuel-Cells, which use a key component of urine as an important chemical for temporarily storing H₂ and CO₂. A prototype fuel cell generated a maximum of 1.57 mW cm^-2 which is around 100-1000 times smaller than in some commercial-grade fuel cells, but operates at a much lower temperature (which is probably a good thing for the researchers’ noses).

And finally, while fuel cells could help us to reduce the amount of CO₂ we pump into the atmosphere, a brilliant new idea has been presented for removing existing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere – blasting them with giant lasers from space! But this wasn’t the only anti-global-warming space-laser idea presented at the conference – another group suggested that lasers can help to seed clouds to help control the climate or to reflect sunlight to help cool the planet. I guess space-lasers are just like buses…

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All images are open-source/Creative Commons licence.Credit: Realhj (First); Volker.G (Second); NASA (Third)

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