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"Last year, the South Pacific Island of Tokelau, a tropical atoll governed by New Zealand, became the first completely solar powered territory on Earth. Having invested $7.2 million on the project, the island of 1500 souls is now redirecting money it would have spent on oil to education, irrigation, and health care. Could Tokelau's experience be a harbinger for the rest of the world? Maybe, maybe not. It is worth remembering, after all, that most of the island's inhabitants are subsistence farmers, and that thousands of their countrymen have emigrated to New Zealand and Samoa. An advanced economy it is not."

Lowering energy consumption associated with computer data storage (specifically, cloud computing) and saving millions of dollars are possible now, thanks to new memory technology, a field that researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have been exploring through a four-year, $1.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded in 2009 titled, "Large: Storage Class Memory Architecture for Energy Efficient Data Centers."

Coating concrete destined to rebuild America's crumbling bridges and roadways with some of the millions of tons of ash left over from burning coal could extend the life of those structures by decades, saving billions of dollars of taxpayer money, scientists reported here today at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. They reported on a new coating material for concrete made from flyash that is hundreds of times more durable than existing coatings and costs only half as much.

The high cost of health care is deterring parents from taking their children to the doctor or buying prescription medication, regardless of how much money they make or whether they have health insurance, according to a study to be presented Sunday, May 2, at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Denver.

A new study from the Karolinska Institute and Stockholm School of Economics shows that the brain has built-in mechanisms that trigger an automatic reaction to someone who refuses to share. In the study publishing next week in the online open access journal PLoS Biology, the subjects' sense of justice was challenged in a two-player monetary fairness game, and their brain activity was simultaneously measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). When bidders made unfair suggestions as to how to share the money, they were often punished by their partners even if it cost them. This reaction to unfairness could be reduced by targeting one specific brain region, the amygdala.

Winter cover crops are an important component of nutrient cycling, soil cover and organic matter content. Although its benefits are well documented, cover crop use in farming systems is relatively low. Research has shown that time and money are the two primary reasons why farmers are hesitant to adopt the technique. Developing innovative and cost-effective crop cover systems could increase the use of winter cover crops.