With today's environment-conscious attitudes, it pays to have an eco-friendly vehicle to drive.

A time may come when people may have a number of options to choose from aside from solar-powered cars, as scientists are now looking into thermoelectric generation as a possible alternative. More on this highfalutin term after the jump.

When dealing with temperature, you can go hotter than hot, but not colder than absolute zero. Theoretically, you can't go below -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, otherwise known as 0 Kelvin. At that temperature, an entirely new form of matter is created called the Bose-Einstein condensate, a sort of quantum state that atoms collapse into when near absolute zero. Scientists have begun experimenting on this quantum matter and have come up with some interesting data. Details in the full article.

The incandescent light bulb probably dates back to 1801. While the conversion of electrical energy to light is attributed to Sir Humphry Davy, a lot of inventors contributed to perfect the bulb.

More than 200 years later, the light bulb will finally become obsolete, or at least it will be in Australia. Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced the other day that the light bulb will be phased out in three years.

To fully enforce the phase out, Turnbull said that new energy standards will be put up. Turnbull explained,

It'll be illegal to sell a product that doesn't meet the energy standard so that'll happen by 2009, 2010, and so by that stage you simply won't be able to buy incandescent light bulbs because they won't meet the energy standard.

It would be remembered that a similar bill was proposed in California last month. Lawmakers, including Turnbull, reasoned that in doing this, carbon dioxide emissions will be limited. Furthermore, Mr. Turnbull believes that energy-saving globes will be a good replacement for these bulbs. He then mentioned,

If the rest of the world supports us, does what we've been doing here, follows our lead, this will reduce an amount of energy, in effect make the world more energy efficient to the tune of five times as much energy as Australia consumes, so this is a little thing but it's a massive change.

Photosynthesis is nature's way of converting light energy to chemical energy. Happening mostly with plants, the leaves are the primary site of the process of photosynthesis. Professor Max Crossley's molecular electronics group at the University of Sydney has tapped into this process, in the hopes that by mimicking aspects of natural photosynthesis, synthetic molecules in plants may one day form the basis of highly efficient solar cells.

Creating a synthetic form of chlorophyll that performs the first part of the process (that would be the conversion of light energy to electrical energy), Crossley and the team shaped it like a soccer ball, with a dendrimer scaffold, a highly-branched nanosized polymer made of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. Attached to the dendrimer are synthetic versions of the light-harvesting pigment porphyrin. These synthetic molecules, arranged in a dense array, then act in concert to efficiently collect photons of light. Buckyballs, or spherical carbon molecules, then sit between the porphyrin and soak up electrons from the photons of collected light.

"There has to be a lot of them because if there was only one it would be a very inefficient process," says Crossley.

The team has recently presented its research at the International Conference on Porphyrins and Phtalocyanines in Rome. Meanwhile, Dr. Deanna D'Alessandro, team member and postdoctoral researcher, is one of 16 scientists who are set to present their research to the public for the first time under the Fresh Science initiative.