Spremberg, Germany  - An electricity plant that burns lignite coal but does not pollute the atmosphere with carbon dioxide was billed Tuesday in Germany as the future of coal power.

The utility Vattenfall built the pilot plant on the Schwarze Pumpe Industrial Estate at Spremberg near Germany's Polish border. It burns lignite dust mixed with pure oxygen, then captures the resulting carbon dioxide to be buried in deep rock.

"Coal has a future, but emissions of carbon dioxide don't," said Tuomo Hatakka, chief executive of the Swedish-based utility's German unit, Vattenfall Europe, just before Tuesday's commissioning of the experimental plant.

Washington, Sept 9 : Virginia Tech researchers have created a new class of stable fullerene molecules by replacing a carbon atom with nitrogen in the all-carbon structure.

Chemistry Professor Harry Dorn says that this work may pave the way for molecular semiconductors and quantum computing applications.

Fullerenes are a family of carbon allotropes, molecules composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, tube, or plane.

In a previous study, Dorn had devised a way to play with fullerenes, and displayed how to put other atoms inside an 80-atom molecule.

Melbourne, Sept 9 : A new revolution in TV viewing will start hitting the Australian market as early as this year.

Today, the Internet can only be accessed on a television set through external hardware such as a games console or computer, such as the Apple TV.

However, these television sets are capable of directly accessing news, weather details, stock quotes and, eventually, on-demand video content from the Internet.

The content will run as "widgets" alongside regular TV shows and poses a significant threat to established free-to-air and pay TV broadcasters, which already see the Internet as a way for viewers to bypass their networks.

Washington, September 9 : Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Applied Materials Research IFAM in Bremen are exploring how useful a combination of riveting and adhesive bonding can be in the development of lighter aircraft, which will consume less fuel and, thereby, help reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Dr. Oliver Klapp of the IFAM points out that, to create lighter planes, aircraft manufacturers are pinning their hopes on particularly lightweight construction materials that include fiber composite plastics, particularly carbon-fibre reinforced plastics (CFRPs).

The researcher says that whenever two CFRP components have to be joined together, this has so far been accomplished primarily by riveting.

Washington, September 9 : A team of researchers from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering and Mascoma Corporation in New Hampshire, US, have genetically engineered a bacteria that is important for producing large quantities of cellulosic ethanol, a leading candidate for a sustainable and secure alternative to petroleum-derived transportation fuel.

For the first time, the group has genetically engineered a thermophilic bacterium, meaning it’s able to grow at high temperatures, and this new microorganism makes ethanol as the only product of its fermentation.

Washington, September 9 : Scientists have pointed to forests for carbon storage solutions, as they help stabilize the climate and are abundant sources of other ecological goods and services – such as cleansed air, fertile soil and filtered water.

The scientists, who have determined how much carbon is stored annually in upper Midwest forests, hope their findings will be used to accelerate global discussion about the strategy of managing forests to offset greenhouse gas emissions.

Quantifying the amount of carbon that forests can keep out of the atmosphere is one way of showing forests’ value to energy policymakers, they suggested.