We've known for a long time that smaller bodies of water like ponds and lakes absorb carbon. What we didn't know until recently was that they do the feat in dramatically faster ways than oceans and trees do. This discovery can have some good applications when you consider the kind of problems that the global community is facing today. Learn more about it in the full article up next.

Chalk up another one for Charles Darwin, for scientists now actually can prove their point: species do evolve and adapt against harsh environments. The chimpanzee, regarded as the human's closest link down the evolutionary chain, used a primitive form of a spear to hunt bush babies (nagapies).

While observing the Fongoli chimpanzees of southeastern Senegal, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani of Iowa State University also noticed that only the females created spears and used them to hunt.

Bertolani claims to have seen an adolescent female chimpanzee select a branch, strip off the twigs and leaves, and chew one end into a sharp point.

With the rather unimpressive spear, the chimpanzee would then poke holes in places where they believe the nagapies could be hiding. They only were able to observe a successful kill once.

Though it may look to be just a fluke of nature, Pruetz claimed to have seen it happen repeatedly over the course of 19 days. Because only the females use the spears, Pruetz believes that the males depend on their physical strength to hunt and gather for food. She believes that perhaps females were originally the ones who invented weapons for hunting.

She continues to conclude her findings:

The observation that individuals hunting with tools include females and immature chimpanzees suggests that we should rethink traditional explanations for the evolution of such behavior in our own lineage. The multiple steps taken by Fongoli chimpanzees in making tools to dispatch mammalian prey involve the kind of foresight and intellectual complexity that most likely typified early human relatives.

Sometimes, you have to wonder if people see the big picture. In this case, we're not so sure.

Researchers at Iowa State University are developing a way to turn fuel ethanol into food-grade alcohol. Unlike the fuel ethanol and other types of fuel we use, there is a greater amount of distillation needed, as well as a lot more chemical processes done, to ensure that food-grade alcohol is actually safe for use. This leads to a high cost for food-grade alcohol and, consequently, products that use it, such as cough medicine, mouthwash, and actual drinks.

The technology which Jacek Koziel, assistant professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering, and Hans van Leeuwen, professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering, are trying to adapt for this process is composed of two primary steps. First, they bubble ozone gas through the fuel to remove impurities, and then they filter the fuel through granular activated carbon to absorb further impurities in the ethanol.

The two researchers say that once the process is perfected, it should drastically lessen the costs for making food-grade alcohol. According to van Leeuwen, "based on my experience treating water and wastewater with these technologies, this could cost a lot less than a cent per gallon."

What we're potentially missing from the source, however, would be hope for reverse-engineering the process: turning booze into cost-efficient fuel. It sounds insane, but doesn't there seem to be a bit more hope in attempting that? With a war going on, and an impending worsening of the world's oil crisis, we could use all the alternative fuel solutions we could get.