Reviewing the Literature (aka procrastinating…)

For all of you interested in alternative energy, some chemists at MIT made a major breakthrough recently by discovering a cheap new way to catalyze solar powered water electrolysis. (In plain English: they use energy from sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen; one can then later recombine the hydrogen and oxygen in a fuel cell or by burning to get back some of the stored solar energy, and the “exhaust” would just be water.) Older ways of doing this required platinum, and so were prohibitively expensive. This new method uses cheap, abundant materials, and should be able to work on an industrial scale – it has the potential to have a major impact on solar power generation (and maybe even desalination of seawater!).
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/321/5889/620
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/oxygen-0731.html

On an unrelated note, this article may amuse anyone who has ever experienced obsessive, unrequited interdisciplinarity
http://arxiv.org/abs/adap-org/9910002v1

~ Abhijit