CARB is taking public comment on proposed standards now

California has been working with the federal government on the CAFE fuel economy standards while at the same time working inside the state government to improve the air quality. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has now confirmed more plans to help improve the air quality in the state and that plan involves mandates to get more electric vehicles onto the market. The plan calls for 1.4 million more electric and plug-in vehicles as well as hydrogen powered cars to hit the roads.

The new standards are expected to cover 2017 to 2025 model year vehicles. The plan wants to reduce greenhouse gas emission from vehicles by 34% compared with the levels set for 2016 and to drive more purchases of EVs. CARB says that the new rules will add $1,900 to the price of a new vehicle by 2025, but the efficiency will save $6,000 in fuel costs over the vehicles life.

If the 1.4 million zero emission or plug-in hybrid vehicle number is reached that would mean one in seven or 15% of all new vehicles sold would be that type of vehicle. Automakers selling cars in California would need to make 15.4% of their entire fleets ZEVs to meet the proposed standards. The rules would also force all passenger cars and light trucks sold in California to reach the state super-ultra-low emission vehicle standards by 2025. If approved by the California Office of Administrative Law, the regulations would become law in 2012.

The proposed rules by the State of California aren't good enough for the Union of Concerned Scientists reports the NYT. This union wants to increase the proposed standard by 30% and put 1.8 million zero emission vehicles on the roads by 2025. A public comment period on CARBs proposal is going until December 12.

Ignorance can be bliss, but it seems it can also promote democracy.

Strongly opinionated members can determine a group's consensus decision, even when they make up only a small minority. New research of animal behavior shows, however, that adding ignorant or uninformed members to the group can counteract the minority's powerful influence and promote a more democratic outcome.

Researchers used several computer models to investigate the decision-making process in various animal groups when a majority wants to travel in one direction and a minority wants to go in another.

When the strength of the two packs' preferences was equal, the group was much more likely to follow the majority. But when the minority had stronger feelings than the rest of the group about its direction, it was able to control the decision.

When the researchers added a third crowd that was ignorant of the options, the majority was able to spontaneously wrestle the decision back from the minority.

"It's very counterintuitive," said Iain Couzin, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University, who was lead author of the study published in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Science. "We previously assumed that uninformed individuals promote extremism by being easily exploited by the [strong] minority."

This year, enormous strides have been made in understanding non-human animal vocalizations. But will we ever be able to hold meaningful conversations with another species, such that both sides understand each other?

Consider what we've learned about dolphins recently. Research a few months ago determined that dolphins talk like humans in terms of the physical process. Previously it was thought that many dolphin calls were just simple whistles, but the study found the sounds are produced by tissue vibrations analogous to the operation of vocal folds by humans.

Acoustics engineer John Stuart Reid and Jack Kassewitz of the organization Speak Dolphin have created an instrument known as the CymaScope that reveals detailed structures within sounds, allowing their architecture to be studied pictorially.

Similar to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, the researchers may then be able to figure out the meaning of dolphin calls. In addition to the whistle-like sounds, dolphins produce chirps and click trains, suggesting they engage in very complex and sophisticated social interactions.

Future shirts and socks could clean themselves using just sunlight, chemists report - all you'll have to do is drape them over the balcony and voila, clean laundry. A coating of titanium dioxide makes this possible.

Titanium dioxide is found in products like solar panels and sunscreen - it absorbs ultraviolet light - and in several cleaning products, because it can be used to oxidize organic material. Cement, paint, windows and even odor-free socks contain TiO2, which is prized for its ability to kill microbes and break down dirt.

Other researchers have incorporated titanium dioxide into clothes before, but they don't get clean unless exposed to ultraviolet light, which isn't exactly practical. Mingce Long of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Deyong Wu of the Hubei University for Nationalities in Hubei, China, set out to create clothing with titanium dioxide coating that can self-clean using only sunlight.

Boston University scientists sifting through satellite photos found the largest crater seen to date in the Great Sahara Desert of North Africa. The 100-million-year old crater, known as Kebira, which means "large" in Arabic, is 19 miles wide.

The crater is on the northern tip of the Gilf Kebir region of southwestern Egypt near Libya. The meteorite that gouged out Kebira probably was three-quarters of a mile wide. The terrain around the crater is 100 million year-old sandstone. Two ancient rivers run through the crater site from the east and west.
The shock of such a large object crashing into Earth tens of millions of years ago may have left behind the field of yellow-green silica chips - the mysterious desert glass - seen today on the surface among the giant dunes of the Great Sand Sea in southwestern Egypt.

As a geologist who had spent most of his career studying the Earth's major deserts, Dr. Farouk El-Baz, now the director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University, knew that the glass formed after a massive meteorite hit the desert with enough energy to splatter chunks of melted sand across the extensive fields where fragments are common today. But beyond the glass, no evidence of such an impact had ever been found. El-Baz decided to take another look at satellite data of the Western Desert to see if he could find the elusive crater.

If you ever find yourself on a leisurely submarine ride through the northeastern Indian Ocean, be on the lookout for some amazing views: more than 50 large seamounts, or underwater mountains, dot the ocean floor, some rising as high as 3 miles (4,500 meters).

The Christmas Island Seamount Province, as the area is known, spans a 417,000-square-mile (1 million square kilometers) swath of seafloor.

Just how the massive underwater structures got there has been up for debate, but some new geochemical detective work may have solved the mystery.

The seamounts are made of recycled rocks from the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, said geochemist Kaj Hoernle of the University of Kiel in Germany. Their turbulent geological history explains the massive size and puzzling placement of these features.

Ubiquitous and mysterious

Tens of thousands of seamounts line the floors of the world's oceans, but exactly how most of these formed is unclear.

Some, like the Hawaiian - Emperor seamount chain that extends northwest from the Hawaiian Islands, formed over hotspots in the mantle, just as the islands themselves did. Other seamount chains were created when tectonic plate boundaries and other fractures in the ocean crust allowed lava to escape and harden at the surface.

But the Christmas Island Seamount Province doesn't fit either of these models, Hoernle said. The structures are too widespread and diffuse to have formed over a single hotspot; they're also aligned perpendicularly along breaks in the ocean crust, which means they didn't form above a fracture.

"We knew they were volcanic," Hoernle told OurAmazingPlanet, "but beyond that, it was more or less a mystery."

The Tōhoku earthquake that rattled Japan on 11 March changed Earth's gravitational field enough to affect the orbits of satellites. The satellites' altered courses suggest that the earthquake was stronger and deeper than instruments on Earth indicated.

These weren't just any satellites: they are the twin spacecraft of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), which fly 220 kilometres apart in a polar orbit about 500 kilometres above Earth. GRACE's job is to map the Earth's gravity field, and it does this by monitoring the effect of minute variations in the field on the trajectories of the satellites and the changing distance between them.

Earth's gravity field changes whenever there is a redistribution of mass on its surface. This may be a result of snowfall, flood, melting of ice caps - or earthquakes. "That perturbed gravitational field affects the satellite orbits," explains Shin-Chan Han of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Millions of genetically modified insects designed to destroy food crop pests could be released into the countryside.

The Government is considering plans by a British company for the 'open release' of a GM strain of the diamondback moth, which it has developed.

Diamondback moths attack cabbages, broccoli, cauliflowers and similar crops.

With the GM strain a lethal gene is inserted into the male of the species so that when they mate with wild females, their offspring die almost immediately, causing the population to crash.

That could lead to increasing crop yields and profits for farmers.

The company involved, Oxitec, is keen to begin trials next year, but it faces opposition from groups who say the untested technology could threaten wildlife and human health.

A commercial satellite operator says it has captured a rare image of China's first aircraft carrier as it sailed through the Yellow Sea, after going through an exercise that's the 21st-century equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack.

DigitalGlobe said the aircraft carrier showed up on a cloud-filled picture snapped on Dec. 8 by its polar-orbiting QuickBird satellite from a height of 280 miles (450 kilometers). An analyst spotted the ship while checking the image on Tuesday, the company said.

Experts have been hoping for a glimpse of China's aircraft carrier at sea. The former Soviet Union started building the ship, originally known as the Varyag, but never finished it. After the Soviet breakup, the Varyag ended up in the hands of the Ukrainian government. The ship was auctioned off to the Chinese in 1998, and since then the Varyag, rechristened the Shi Lang, has been under refurbishment for sea service. DigitalGlobe said this picture was taken during the carrier's second sea trial, approximately 62 miles (100 kilometers) south-southeast of the port of Dalian.

China says the Shi Lang will be used for research and training, and the project is thought to be part of the country's strategy to expand its presence as a naval power. The Chinese military is expected to build more copies of the ship in coming years. In fact, sources told Reuters in July that a second aircraft carrier was under construction.

"China's next moves have to be watched carefully, or there eventually could be a negative impact on maritime safety in Asia," Yoshihiko Yamada, a professor at Japan's Tokai University, told Reuters at the time.

Forget about slow-motion shots of a bullet destroying an apple or a hummingbird shaking off water. Making a slow-motion video of light beams bouncing around inside a 1-liter bottle required a new super-fast imaging system - one capable of taking 1 trillion frames a second. MIT's Media Lab has now made such a system possible by harnessing camera technology usually found in chemistry experiments.

An imaging system that makes light seem slow speaks for itself, especially when light travels 700 million miles an hour on a good day in a vacuum. But to better appreciate 1 trillion frames per second (fps), consider that the iPhone 4S camera shoots HD video at just 30 fps. Even Hollywood has relied upon a mix of digital wizardry and cameras shooting at 24 fps to capture its beloved slow-motion explosions. (Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson just recently stepped up his game by choosing to film The Hobbit prequels at 48 fps.)

"There's nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera," said Andreas Velten, a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Media Lab.