Whenever we eat mashed potatoes and roasted cashew nuts, it never occurred to us that what we got from our food could someday turn into car parts. But this is exactly the idea that an engineering doctorate at the University of Warwick, and his team, had in mind.

Ben Wood, project manager of WMG (a provider of innovative solutions to industry) tweaked an original racing car engine to make it more bio-friendly. Called Eco One, the racing car has tires made from potatoes, and brake pads from cashew nut shells. It also runs entirely on bio-fuels and bio-lubricants.

Wood says that almost everything on the car can be made out of biodegradable or recyclable materials. "All the plastic components can be made from plants and, although the chassis has to be made from steel for strength, steel is a very recyclable material." They had the shell, brake pads, fuel and tires of the car sorted. Wood relates that his aim is to race a car that is 95 percent biodegradable or recyclable.

The car was originally designed with a top speed of 125 MPH, and Ben claims he can achieve up to 150 MPH, given a long and straight tail wind. Eco One will be at the Sexy Green Car Show alongside green offerings from major names in the motor industry at the Eden Project in Cornwall from Friday.

Looks like the British seasons will go bonkers in the near future if weather experts are right. Already, 110C summers have been predicted to hit the isles at the end of this century. Now, scientists from Newcastle University says the English autumn, marked by drizzles and drab skies, will turn into a season of rains. How much rain? The torrential downpour usually associated with tropical monsoon.

The warning came after the researchers discovered increasing cases of strong rainfall. They say the rains that generated the devastating floods in Cornwall in 2004 could be typical of UK's future autumns. The usual suspect: global warming.

Senior researcher Dr. Hayley Fowler says, "The global climate is changing in ways that are likely to have large impacts on our environment and the way we live over the coming decades.The changes we saw over the 40-year period we studied are consistent with the trend we would expect from global warming."

The storms and heavy rain in the UK have increased by 50% since the 1960s. They used to come every 25 years, but the cycle has been shortened to every six years. The weather changes are coming faster than what scientists expected. If the wet weather trend continues, the UK and Europe are expected to suffer from major floods.

A monsoon is a wind pattern system that occurs in Chile and North America. But the monsoon system in the Indian Ocean and
Arabian Sea are the largest characterized by extremely heavy rainfall. Monsoons are driven by the differential heating of large continental regions and adjacent oceans. Land masses heat up during summer and becomes extremely cold during winter, resulting in a temperature gradient between continents and oceans.

Although monsoons are associated with destructive floods, majority of nations in the monsoon regions are largely agriculture-based and depend on monsoon rains for food production and economy.