The British government unveiled the world’s largest coordinated trial of environmentally friendly vehicles this week.
After years of wrangling over carbon capture and storage, governments have started to back the technology with policy and money.
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/ 15 December 2008
To a casual observer, it looks no different from a standard modern Mini, the British classic reimagined, to great plaudits, by BMW.
A tiny rectangle in the Sahara captures the seductive appeal of the audacious plan to cut Europe’s carbon emissions by harnessing the sun’s power.
Fears that the rapid draining of water from the top of Greenland’s ice sheet may be contributing to the rise of global sea levels have been allayed by new research. Though scientists confirmed that the water can drain away faster than Niagara Falls, it did not seem to accelerate the movement of the ice sheet into the ocean as previously thought.
Fictional robots always have a personality: Marvin was paranoid, C-3PO was fussy and HAL 9000 was murderous. But reality is disappointingly different. Sophisticated enough to assemble cars and assist during complex surgery, modern robots are dumb automatons, incapable of striking up relationships with humans. But that could soon change.
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/ 19 October 2007
Human ancestors used make-up and enjoyed shellfish dinners much earlier than previously thought, according to scientists. The discovery, made by analysing fossilised remains of an ancient beach community in the Western Cape, shows that key elements of modern human behaviour were in place more than 165 000 years ago.
For the first time, researchers have sequenced proteins from the long-extinct Tyrannosaurus rex, the mightiest of dinosaurs, leading them to the discovery that many of the molecules show a remarkable similarity to those of the humble chicken. The research provides the first molecular evidence for the theory that birds are the modern-day descendants of dinosaurs.
The oceans off the Antarctic peninsula are some of the most mysterious on the planet. A thick cover of ice has concealed what life they contain for the past few millennia. But with the rise in global temperatures, speeded by the gaping hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica, some of these ice sheets have collapsed.
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/ 21 December 2006
Planting trees to combat climate change is a waste of time, according to a study by ecologists, who say that most forests do not have any overall effect on global temperature, while those furthest from the equator could actually be making global warming worse.