From BBC News:

Researchers Convert Chicken Fat to Fuel.

Hoping to find an efficient way to help power automobiles and trucks, researchers at the University of Arkansas say they have developed a way to convert chicken fat to a biodiesel fuel.
…
R.E. Babcock, a professor of chemical engineering, said chicken-fat fuels are better for the environment and the machines.

“They burn better, create less particulate matter and actually lubricate and clean things like cylinders, pistons and fuel lines,” Babcock said.
…
In his studies, Mattingly used high-quality fat (less than 2 percent fatty acid content) and low-quality, feed-grade fat (6 percent fatty acid content) obtained from Tyson Foods Inc. plants in Clarksville and Scranton. The high-quality fat is more expensive than the feed-grade fat, but both are less expensive than soybean oil.

Read the whole article.

From BBC News:

Surgeons in France have carried out the first face transplant….

The woman had lost her nose, lips and chin after being savaged by a dog.

In the controversial operation, tissues, muscles, arteries and veins were taken from a brain-dead donor and attached to the patient’s lower face.

Doctors stress the woman will not look like her donor, but nor will she look like she did before the attack - instead she will have a “hybrid” face.
…
he 38-year-old French patient from the northern French town of Valenciennes underwent extensive counselling before her operation, which is believed to have lasted at least five hours, and which took place at the weekend at a hospital in Amiens.

The French magazine Le Point reports that the tissues, muscles, arteries and veins needed for the transplant were taken from a multi-organ donor in the northern city of Lille, who was brain-dead.

This is a wonderful chance for the poor woman to have a new life. But it’s not an unmixed blessing:

Mr Hutchison, who is chief executive of Saving Faces - the Facial Surgery Research Foundation, warned blood vessels in the donated tissue could clot, the immunosuppressants could fail - and would increase the patient’s risk of cancer.”

Mr Hutchison added there were ethical and moral issues around donating facial tissue.
…
“The transplant would have to come from a beating heart donor. So, say your sister was in intensive care, you would have to agree to allow their face to be removed before the ventilator was switched off.

Read the whole article.

Scientists in Italy have found that the sensations one feels when falling passionately in love (the fluttery stomach, goofy smile, racing heatbeat, etc.) are actually triggered by the nerve growth factor (NGF) molecule, and that the feeling will only last a year. Ah, science!

According to the Reuters story:

The Italian scientists found far higher levels of NGF in the blood of 58 people who had recently fallen madly in love than in that of a group of singles and people in long-term relationships.

But after a year with the same lover, the quantity of the ‘love molecule’ in their blood had fallen to the same level as that of the other groups.

The study, which is about to be published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, “said it was not clear how falling in love triggers higher levels of NGF, but the molecule clearly has an important role in the “social chemistry” between people at the start of a relationship.”

Amnesty International is in a lather because the U.S. is about to host the 1,000th execution since they were reinstated in 1976:

USA: 1,000th execution looms as lottery of death reaches shameful milestone

A prison guard takes a man out of a prison cell. The guard leads the man through a hallway to an execution chamber and in the presence of witnesses, the prisoner is poisoned to death.

The witnesses go home, many of them traumatized for life. The prison authorities who directly participated in extinguishing a human life are similarly traumatized. The journalists write stories about the man that has just been put to death in front of them. Officials clear the room until the next time.

In the USA, this scene is fairly routine. Since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated by the US Supreme Court, nearly 1,000 men and women have been killed by the state in the name of justice.

As the 1,000th execution in the US approaches, Amnesty International, along with a broad spectrum of human rights organizations, social justice groups, and concerned individuals, is calling on US State and Federal authorities to put an immediate end to all executions.

“The death penalty is by nature ineffective, arbitrary and does not deter crime. On the contrary, it creates more victims and demeans society as a whole”, said Amnesty International.

That’s their side of it. Now for a few points from the opposite perspective:

• The 575 killers who were executed between 1998 and 2004 had murdered at least 1,199 people. That is an average of 2.09 victims per executed killer. How can we justify not executing these thugs?

• More than 5,000 prisoners have been slated for execution since 1976 (there were 3,315 prisoners on death row in 2004 alone). Of these, fewer than 1,000 have been executed.

• Between 1976 and 2002, there were 473,310 murders and 494,729 victims. That’s nearly half a million murder victims over a 26-year period and we’re only just hitting 1,000 executions! It can be argued that so few executions have very little deterrent effect, but for real deterrence, we would need more executions on a timely basis, not fewer.

  Out of so many murders, only 1% (5,000) were so extraordinary that they rated a death sentence, and less than 20% (1,000) of those who’ve been convicted have had their sentence carried out! Yet another example of justice denied to the murder victims.

  With stats like these, I can sympathize with those who say being executed in this country is as likely as winning the lottery. The answer of course is for a significant percentage (25% or more) of the people convicted of murder to pay the ultimate penalty for their crime. Certainly the solution isn’t banning the only punishment that, when carried out, acts as a deterrent to other killers, and guarantees that the executed will never kill again.

Read more!

This picture really says it all about how popular the anti-war movement is in the U.S.

Read more!

Japanese scientists may have found a cheaper and more efficient way to produce “biodiesel.” The renewable, vegetable oil-based fuel can be used in conventional diesel engines, which are found in about 2 percent of cars currently sold in the U.S. and in about 40 percent in Europe

According to National Geographic News:

The breakthrough could be just in time—industry experts say that demand for the cleaner, greener fuel is on the rise.

Any vegetable oil can become fuel, but not until its fatty acids are converted to chemical compounds known as esters. Currently the acids used to convert the fatty acids are prohibitively expensive.

Michikazu Hara, of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Yokohama, Japan, and his colleagues have used common, inexpensive sugars to form a recyclable solid acid that does the job on the cheap. Their research is reported in last week’s issue of the journal Nature.

“We estimate the cost of the catalyst to be one-tenth to one-fiftieth that of conventional catalysts,” Hara said.

The breakthrough could provide cost savings on a massive scale, he said, because the technique could fairly easily make the transition from the lab to the refinery—if interest warrants.

“We have developed this material for large-scale chemical production,” Hara said. “Unfortunately, interest in biodiesel in Japan is not higher than in the U.S. and Europe.”

Most of the biodiesel fuel consumed in the U.S. is B20, a blend of 20% biodiesel and 80% conventional diesel that costs about the same as premium gasoline. Currently, there are 45 plants producing about 295 million gallons of biodiesel fuel per year. Cogeneration Technologies, parent company of the Biofuel Industries company is developing a 50-million-gallon facility, so there’ll be nearly 350 million gallons produced annually within the next few years.

That sounds like a lot, but keep in mind that the U.S. consumes about 145 billion gallons of gasoline per year!

Which shows there’s a lot of growth potential for biodiesel.

Besides helping end our suicidal dependence on OPEC, biodiesel also pollutes less than regular diesel fuels:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has determined that the greener fuel emits only a third of the unburned hydrocarbons and half of the carbon monoxide and particulates that standard diesel fuel emits. Furthermore, biodiesel’s sulfur oxide and sulfate emissions, which cause acid rain, are negligible.

The fuel is also biodegradable, so safety concerns and pollution issues are minimal.

While we’re many years from being able to tell OPEC to take a hike, breakthroughs like the Tokyo Institute’s new catalyst will someday turn that old Saudi saying “My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet airplane. His son will ride a camel.” into a reality.

Read the whole article.

According to an article in The Washington Post, Democrats are upset by Vice President Cheney’s recent assertions that Senate Democrats are hurting the war effort in Iraq with their constant complaints and attempts to rewrite history. (Hat tip: Little Green Footballs.)

Unfortunately for them, results from the RT Strategies National Omnibus Poll of 1001 adults nationwide (conducted November 17-20) show that the American public strongly agrees with the Vice President.

When asked:

Thinking about the war in Iraq, when Democratic Senators criticize the President’s policy on the war in Iraq, do you believe it HELPS the morale of our troops in Iraq or HURTS the morale of our troops in Iraq?

IF HELPS/HURTS, ASK:

And do you believe it (HURTS/HELPS) morale A LOT or just SOME?

70% opined that it hurts morale (44% of whom said it hurts morale a lot), only 13% thought it helped morale.

The following question was asked in two alternating forms:

When Democrats criticize the President’s policy in Iraq, do you believe they are criticizing the President’s policy because they believe their criticisms will help the United States’ efforts in Iraq?

OR

When Democrats criticize the President’s policy in Iraq, do you believe they are criticizing the President’s policy to gain a partisan political advantage?

51% said Democrats were criticizing the President’s policy to gain a partisan political advantage and 31% said they were criticizing the President’s policy because they believe their criticisms will help the United States’ efforts in Iraq.

The poll, which has a margin of error of ±3%, was given to 31% Republicans, 35% Independents, and 33% Democrats, so a lot of Democrats agree that their party is striving for political gain at the expense of America’s War on Terror!

By the way, check out the other results in the RT Strategies poll–they’re fascinating. Here are a few snippets:

• 38% identified themselves as solidly conservative, 27% as liberal

• 46% were strongly Pro-life, 48% strongly Pro-choice

• 34% said religion was extremely important, 29% very important, and 22% somewhat important

If only it was something as dramatic as excessive hubris that caused my long absence from blogging. Come, I will keep nothing from you: I forgot to pay the bill for my TopTechWriter domain name and, thanks to a series of mischances, only realized there was a problem when the site disappeared last month.

On the plus-good side, I had extra time to watch HBO’s excellent Rome series. A realistic and lurid tale of events in the Eternal City at the time of Julius Caesar, it’s just about flawless. If you missed it, the season reruns begin in December.

On the double-plus-ungood side, the news drought ended with a flood of headlines and I was hors de combat. Such juicy stories as Congress dropping the “Bridges to Nowhere” from the budget, a former Canadian Minister of Defense announcing that President Bush is going to get us into an intergalactic war with space aliens, and the amazingly controversial startup of the center-right blogger emporium Open Source Media Pajamas Media site went unremarked. Mea maxima culpa!

Well, I’m back! Er, for now at least.