LED usage is really heating up, and Taiwan has just recently jumped onto the bandwagon. The Taiwanese government is reportedly looking to change the traffic lights in all counties and cities in Taiwan to LED-based ones.

According to a report in the Chinese-language Central News Agency, Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs has set aside a budget of NT$ 229 million (US$ 7 million) for the next three years starting in 2008 for this project. There are currently 350,000 LED-based traffic light in Taiwan and 420,000 non-LED ones.

LED traffic lights are already in use in quite a number of cities in the world as they are brighter, have sharper colors and are more energy-efficient compared to the bulbs used in non-LED traffic lights. Taiwan's Bureau of Energy estimates a total power consumption savings of 85% once the switch is complete.

 

Until someone else tops this, this will officially be the grossest story covered this day. In Taiwan, while being trucked to a facility where scientists can conduct research (or the autopsy), a 60-ton dead sperm whale blew up all over the street. As in all over the street, all guts, all gory, reports MSNBC. Eww.

The biology and physics lessons implicit here are that the decomposition of dead biological material in a corpse produces gas as a by-product. And that if this gas does not escape, like a balloon waiting to pop, it places strain and pressure on its containing vessel until something finally has to give. Either that, or the whale decided to pass gas post-mortem. Researchers at the National Cheng Kung University in Tainan say that there's still enough of the whale to research.

Oh please, you're not looking at this story because of the implicit biology and physics lesson, are you? Gee, maybe some whale blubber will go well with some microwaved giant calamari.

The banana as we know it is in danger. Scientists are worried about the world's fave fruit.

The banana is the most popular fresh fruit in the U.S., consumed at about 26.2 pounds per year per person. The best known kind of banana is the Cavendish. Every Cavendish is a genetic duplicate of any Cavendish around the world. It was first discovered in Southeast Asia then brought to a botanical garden in the Carribean.

The quality that makes the banana perfect for worldwide consumption, perfect banana clones, may also be it's downfall. Species rely on genetic diversity for survival, so what makes one person sick may not affect another person. Since bananas are all genetic twins, a fungus or a bacterial disease can wipe out an entire plantation then spread around the globe and infect all the plantations.

A banana catastrophe? Rabbids would run out of ammo. But seriously speaking though, it's happened before. The Gros Michel type, nicknamed "Big Mike" used to be the most popular kind imported and exported. It was wiped out by a fungus named the Panama disease. The Cavendish was then accepted as the replacement, since it was immune to the Panama disease.

Now, a new strain of the fungus was discovered in Southeast Asia and wreaked havoc in Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, and Taiwan. It is still making its way to the rest of the Southeast. Experts are racing against time to find a way to prevent another global wipeout and the subsequent shortage. Some scientists estimate that the Cavendish only has five to ten years left. They are trying genetic splicing but if the fungus spreads faster than expected, finding an alternative banana species would be the best choice.

Or switch to apples.

Although Stanley Kubrick's 1966 film version only went as far as Jupiter,  the novel upon which it was based - 2001: A Space Odyssey - took the spacecraft Discovery all the way to Saturnian moon of Iapetus.

Iapetus has long mystified scientists because one side was brighter than the other. In Arthur C. Clarke's novel, the "bright" side was described as a long, smooth white oval, obviously artificial. Photos from the Cassini have shown that the mysterious bright spot definitely is not the product of extra-terrestrial engineering. It has, however, revealed a new feature: a narrow ridge around its middle.

About 13 miles  (20 km) wide and  800 miles (1300 km) long, it stretches along Iapetus' equator like the ridge on a walnut. At the moment, scientists can only guess at what it is. Current theories suggest that it is either a fossil ring system that fell to the surface, or a pile up of crustal rocks formed as the satellite changed its shape. In either case, analysis of impact craters indicate that the ridge is nearly as old as the rest of the solar system, thought to have reached its present configuration about 4.5 billion years ago.

One school of thought states that the ridge formed as the result of the slowing of Iapetus' rotation, which is estimated to have been 10 hours in the beginning, but has since slowed to 80 days. Because of its initial rapid spin while the body had not yet solidified, strong centrifugal force might have caused the equator to bulge outwards. (This actually happens on Earth, but the bulge is so slight - a few miles around the equator - that it not noticeable to observers.)

According to Julie Castillo of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the initial rate of rotation would have caused the young moon to be about 1.5 times wider across the equator than from pole to pole. Eventually, Saturn's tidal forces would have slowed the spin, making Iapetus became more spherical. This would have caused the surface area to shrink, leaving the moon with an excess of solid crust.  Castillo says the big ridge is leftover crust that has piled up along the equator.

Wing-Huen Ip of the National Central University of Taiwan puts forth an alternative: the ridge might be the result of falling debris from rings that once circled the moon, which would have fallen to the surface in a narrow strip along the equator.

A team of Japanese and German scientists recently found out how truly amazing and full of secrets our Earth is. Their team was formed to study the feasibility of turning Carbon Dioxide to liquid form and then injecting it deep beneath the seabed to hamper global warming. But to their surprise, a similar natural formation is found in the East China Sea off the coast of Taiwan.

According to team leader, Fumio Inagaki of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokosukam, the presence of the underground CO2 lake was highly unexpected because it lies only 4,600 feet below sea level. It has to be at a depth of 10,000 feet for the liquid CO2 become heavier than water and not rise to the surface.

The only explanation that the team could muster is that CO2, in this case, is coming from a deep magma chamber and becomes a type of ice as it encounters cold water on top of the chamber.

In what started as a global warming solution, this recent development expanded the experiment even up to determining a possible life presence in planet Mars. The lake, which quiet resembles the surface of the Red planet, is found to have microbes living in it.

The presence of microbes living in a liquid CO2 under the Pacific near Taiwan suggests a way to locate possible Martian life, at least according to a joint German-Japanese research team. The discovery of billions of bacteria and other microscopic life forms in a CO2 trapping layer of sediment under the seabed demonstrate that carbon-based life could survive in similarly hostile environments elsewhere in the universe.

Fumio Inagaki at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology said that the presence of similar environments in polar environments would probably have similar "life signatures utilising chemical materials and CO2 for growth might be found."

Inagaki believes this research may also have implications for solving the problem of global warming. It is possible that excess CO2 could be injected into the seabed; however, precautions would be necessary to avoid ecological damage due to acidification. Some interesting video footage was taken, which you can view here.

China is the second largest consumer of energy next to the USA with coal as its primary fuel. Large amount of carbon emissions and sulfur dioxide (major ingredients of acid rain) from its power power plants plus the growing number of automobiles in the country would lead to what's going on in this image.

A visible pool of air pollution from China is being carried by the Westerlies toward downwind countries like South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Trans-boundary pollution like this one happens regularly in many places around the globe.

This image is taken from, the SeaWiFS Mission, which is part of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, designed to look at our planet from space to better understand it as a system in both behavior and evolution.