Pricless Information about Environment, Family And Relationships And More

A Temple University researcher has come up with a simple device that can help improve automobiles’ fuel efficiency by 20 per cent.Rongjia Tao, Chair of Temple’s Physics Department, has revealed that the small device harnesses a power supply from a vehicle’s battery to create an electric field that thins fuel, so that smaller droplets are injected into the engine.

He says that the process, in turn, leads to more efficient and cleaner combustion than a standard fuel injector.

The researcher says that six months of road testing in a diesel-powered Mercedes-Benz automobile has shown that the device can increase highway fuel from 32mpg to 38mpg, a 20 per cent boost, and a 12 to 15 per cent gain in city driving.

“We expect the device will have wide applications on all types of internal combustion engines, present ones and future ones. Electrorheology Leads to Efficient Combustion,” he wrote in the study papers, published in the bi-monthly journal Energy and Fuels.

Tao believes that even better mileage can be achieved with further improvements in the device.

He insists that the device can be best utilised for engines powered by gasoline, biodiesel, and kerosene.

Temple has licensed the new device to California-based Save The World Air, an environmentally conscientious enterprise, which is currently working with a trucking company near Reading to test it on diesel-powered trucks.

Joe Dell, the Vice President of Marketing for STWA, estimates the device can increase fuel efficiency of truck by as much as six to 12 per cent.

According to him, such an increase in fuel efficiency can save tens of billions of dollars in the trucking industry, and have a major impact on the economy through the lowering of costs to deliver goods and services.

“Temple University is very excited about the translation of this new important technology from the research laboratory to the marketplace,” said Larry F. Lemanski, Senior Vice President for Research and Strategic Initiatives at Temple.

“This discovery promises to significantly improve fuel efficiency in all types of internal combustion engine powered vehicles and at the same time will have far-reaching effects in reducing pollution of our environment.”

Scientists have found that one of the genes necessary for jellyfish to sting is similar to a gene in bacteria, suggesting the ancestors of the marine animal picked up the gene from microbes.”The result was a great surprise,” developmental biologist Nicolas Rabet of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France, who led the team, told Nature News.

“This kind of horizontal gene transfer is often neglected, and could sometimes be more important than we thought,” he added.

Unlike vertical gene transfer from parent to offspring, the horizontal variety happens between organisms, or even between different species.

Common in microbes, it has only been described a few times in animals.

The gene in question codes for a subunit of poly-gamma-glutamate (PGA) synthase. PGA itself is a major component of stinging cells. The gene appears in all known genomes of creatures from the phylum cnidaria, which includes jellyfish, anemones and corals.

By collecting positive ions, PGA allows the cells to regulate their osmotic pressure; a sudden change in that pressure launches a poisonous barb.

In bacteria, the same compound can form a protective capsule. It also gives the fermented Japanese food natto its stringy texture and pungent aroma.

Using phylogenetic analysis, Rabet and his colleagues found that the cnidarian gene fits well into the bacterial family tree. They also showed that the gene turns on in at least one jellyfish, Clytia hemisphaerica.

The same gene pops up in certain sponges, worms and fungi, suggesting it jumped between species more than once, the scientists said.

It is not yet clear how the transfer might have occurred, or why this particular gene would be so well travelled.

According to Michael Syvanen, who studies comparative genomics at the University of California, Davis. other possibilities cannot be ruled out.

“There are other explanations for the incongruencies they see in the tree,” said Casey Dunn, an evolutionary biologist who studies phylogenetic problems at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

For instance, the gene could be vertically transferred from a distant progenitor, before being lost from some organisms. It may be possible that more than one animal independently evolved the gene.

“At the end of the day, it will probably take far more data to paint a conclusive picture of what’s happening,” said Dunn.

Terrie Robbins expected to find storm damage when she and other residents were allowed to return home on Bolivar Peninsula for the first time Friday since fleeing Hurricane Ike.

But she didn’t expect to find her home more than 500 feet from its concrete foundation, dumped next to a bar across the main highway that runs through the peninsula.

She said she was lucky. Her parents, who live two streets away, weren’t even able to locate their home.

“We survived (Hurricanes) Carla and Alicia. Just not Ike. Ike was more powerful,” said Robbins’ sister, Kellie Collins, 34. “We’re still rich in other things — our health, life, children, memories. That’s something Ike could not take away.”

Robbins, 49, and other Bolivar residents crowded onto the only roadway into the peninsula on Friday. They were allowed to check out the massive wreckage left behind after Hurricane Ike roared through this thin strip of land along the Gulf of Mexico. While most residents fled before Ike arrived, a small group stayed.

The peninsula’s 4,000 or so residents were allowed back on a “look and leave” policy. Officials said the area is not safe to live in because of a lack of water and utilities as well as dangers from snakes and alligators.

The peninsula just northeast of Galveston was among the hardest-hit areas when Ike blasted ashore Sept. 13 with 110 mph winds and a storm surge that swept away homes and businesses.

It was slow going at times Friday on the only road leading onto Bolivar, as traffic backed up at least 5 miles. Federal Emergency Management Agency officials stood by the road just off the peninsula, handing out fliers on how to apply for aid. Further down the road, tents were set up where people could get ice, water, mosquito repellent or tetanus shots.

Many residents found their homes had been wiped away and were forced to scour nearby fields and rummage through rubble in hopes of salvaging personal belongings.

Kevin McKnight, 48, who lives across the street from Robbins, managed to find some of his antique collectibles, including photographs and clocks, as well as a drum set and a motorcycle. They were underneath trees, mud and other debris that sat where his house once stood.

“I’m in a state of denial,” said McKnight, who owns a grocery store in Crystal Beach that was also destroyed. “That’s what it is right now, one day at a time. I just have to knock it out.”

Just east of Crystal Beach, in the small town of Gilchrist, Raymond and Lola Rice joined neighbors in a field across the street from their vacation beach houses. The storm surge from Ike had reduced their homes to concrete slabs and splintered wooden beams and had washed many of their belongings, including plates, VCRs and toilets, onto the field.

“When we bought it, we knew this could happen,” Lola Rice said of her home, which she and her husband bought in 1969. “But you thank the Lord for the time you had.”

The most stunning sight amid the devastation in town may have been Warren and Pam Adams’ bright yellow home — the only house along the beach in Gilchrist left standing.

Warren Adams credited his home’s survival to several reasons: It was built higher off the ground than surrounding houses and its foundation was made with reinforced concrete. Also, the house, completed last year, was built to new hurricane building codes.

Pam Adams felt a sense of guilt that her home survived and those of her neighbors didn’t.

“It is just devastating. I feel so sorry for all these people,” she said. While their home remains standing, the first-floor garage was wiped away, the wooden staircase to the second floor was knocked out and the home’s interior suffered water and mud damage.

Warren Adams said he planned to repair and rebuild. But like many other Bolivar Peninsula residents who planned to do the same, he worried whether his home could be seized by the state because Ike eroded so much of the beach that it might now sit on public property.

Jim Vondra, 63, whose beachfront home in Crystal Beach was destroyed, said he plans to fight the state if it decides to claim his land.

“We’ve got plenty of lawyers,” he said. “We are going to go after them.”

The Bolivar Peninsula’s population more than doubles during the summer months with the arrival of tourists and beach home owners. The peninsula stretches 27 miles along the Texas Gulf Coast. It is bounded on one side by Galveston Bay and on the other by the Gulf of Mexico.

The peninsula, named for South American revolutionary hero Simon Bolivar, is about 3 miles at its widest point and about one-fourth of a mile at its narrowest. Its five residential communities are Crystal Beach, Port Bolivar, Caplen, Gilchrist and High Island.

Ike has been blamed for at least 64 deaths, including 29 in Texas. More than 1 million people evacuated the Texas coast.