We all know that science can be complicated and confusing, but don’t let that get you down – Fake Science is here to straighten everything out. Did you know that the periodic table is actually based on Scrabble, or that wind power uses giant fans to make wind? Science has never been so simple.

Want to lose weight? Keep it off your plate

Simply leaving serving dishes on the kitchen counter rather than bringing them to the dining table reduces the amount of food you eat, say researchers at Cornell University. They found that this simple dieting strategy reduces the temptation of second helpings, cutting the number of calories people consumed by 20%.

Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, said that the same idea can be used to promote healthier foods over sugary snacks – keeping fruit on display makes you more likely to eat it instead of reaching for a piece of cake in the fridge.

Animal privacy? Not in my backyard

Wildlife documentaries infringe an animal’s right to privacy, says Brett Mills, a lecturer in film studies at the University of East Anglia:

“We have an assumption that humans have some right to privacy, so why do we not assume that for other species, particularly when they are engaging in behaviour that suggests they don’t want to be seen?”

I’m a staunch defender of civil liberties, but even I think extending the right to privacy to animals is going a bit too far. Of course, great care should be taken to avoid distributing their natural habits or causing them distress, but I really don’t think animals mind us watching them doing what they do.

Green tax would hurt the poorest

A proposed tax on carbon footprints would hit the poorest households hardest, according to study from the University of Leeds. The carbon tax would cost low earners 6% of their annual income, while the richest households would only pay around 2%.

The difference is the result of poorer households spending more on costs such as heating and electricity – 40% of their income, compared to just 8% for high earners.

With big thanks to Jacob for hosting this on Just A Theory, here’s my account of recording the recent programme on energy production in India for the BBC’s The Climate Connection season.

The first sign of trouble was a heated exchange that suddenly blew up between an armed security guard and our driver Antony. Though the raised voices were in Tamil, it was clear that the guard was deeply unhappy, pointing angrily to my camera and recording equipment.

We were at the entrance to Kalpakkam, a small township that serves the nearby Madras Atomic Power Station. We had interviewed the plant’s chief superintendent for our edition of The Climate Connection season on the BBC, exploring how India can meet its sharply increasing demand for electricity whilst keeping its carbon emissions in check.

After the interview, we’d wandered into the township to speak to the residents. We expected them to be lauding the employment and economic benefits of having a large power station on their doorstep and crowing about this reliable source of electricity, a luxury unavailable to many who live in India’s rural communities.

Instead, we heard that the power actually bypasses the township in favour of the 8 million inhabitants of Chennai about 70km north. They told us that the power station forbids other businesses locating within the area, thereby curbing job opportunities.

Most seriously, the villagers claimed that power station workers had become ill, with several dying of cancer and that some the township’s children were sick and lethargic. How can you be sure? I asked, anything could be making them ill, you can’t be certain it’s the power station. But, they pressed on, repeating their claims that the plant was a source of harm and hardship rather than wealth and opportunity.

The guard threatened to report us to the authorities and was making noises about us being detained until Antony worked some kind of magic and the man let it go. But the villagers’ revelations were safely recorded and I had a stash of photos. Right now, it was definitely time to go.

However attitudes to the power station are different in the city.

The ever-resourceful Antony drove us to a neighbourhood of workshops and small business units in Chennai where he knew twin brothers who run a successful firm manufacturing and exporting cashew nut processing machines. The city’s creaking electricity supply only provides 70 per cent of the power they need to run their heavy machinery.

Annoying though that seems, the brothers are quite sanguine. Out in the countryside, full power is only available for five hours a day. At least their supply is relatively stable, even if it is a lower fat version of what they’d ideally like.

And, for them, the Kalpakkam nuclear power station is a good thing. It’s not, by a long way, the sole source of their electricity but the brothers are glad it’s there and they’re hoping for more nuclear plants in the future. They dismiss any suggestion that nuclear is a source of health problems. Anything that props up the power supply will be good for business.

Earlier we had interviewed Dr Pugazhendi – a firebrand of a man who has examined many Kalpakkam residents. Talking at us for forty minutes without pausing for breath, Dr Pugazhendi listed cases of cancer and other illnesses associated with the nuclear power station, insisting that he has solid evidence but that he has been blocked from carrying out full studies and publishing the findings.

The fact remains that there is no hard, published evidence that the nuclear plant has caused any illness among the local population. The station’s management told us that they take their workers’ health very seriously, regularly monitoring their wellness.

One of the villagers we met in Kalpakkam had given us Dr Pugazhendi’s mobile phone number and when I called him, he jumped at the chance of talking to us. He’d drop everything, he said, and come and find us wherever we were.

Whilst he was on his way, we turned up unannounced at the HQ of the Tamil Nadu State Electricity Board. A contact in town had recommended we speak to the board’s chairman, Mr C P Singh.

Sure enough, Mr Singh, an affable gentleman in an office overlooking the sprawling monsoon soaked metropolis granted us an interview. The most penetrating questions came from my companion Hita Unnikrishnan, a feisty young ‘Climate Champion’ of the British Council of India. A recent life sciences graduate, she now lectures in Botany at Banaglore’s Jyoti Nivas College. She was travelling with me, taking on the role as local protagonist in our programme.

Mr Singh obligingly fielded Hita’s onslaught of questions. We learned that Tamil Nadu was the first state in India to supply electricity to all households and that it is one of the most progressive in the country when it comes to green energy. Half its power comes from hydroelectric and wind.

But the board is struggling to keep up with Tamil Nadu’s rapidly increasing demand. Whilst renewables are part of the solution, the state needs more power stations. For now, there will be more power cuts and the state will have to continue buying in expensive electricity from outside.

But I spent most of the interview in a state of considerable anxiety. Earlier, after negotiating with Mr Singh’s assistant for permission to meet the boss, I had been awaiting the verdict in a holding room down the corridor, when Dr Pugazhendi called me, saying he was in the area. I let slip exactly where we were.

This, I feared, was a potentially catastrophic move. One assumes that a well-known and vocal local opponent of the state’s nuclear power station would be less than welcome in the Electricity Board’s offices.

Throughout the interview with the chairman I had unsettling visions of Dr Pugazhendi, barging his way in, pushing aides and assistants aside and insisting on speaking to the BBC.

In the event, we met Dr Pugazhendi later on in a car park down the road and our interview at the Electricity Board passed off without incident. This was good. I could have done without a second altercation with security officials in as many days.

You can hear the programme at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0053sqq

Or download it here (until Thurs Dec 10):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/oneplanet/

Video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbLSM2hFL7Q

Photos on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23404067@N06/sets/72157622927385208/

This week Times Higher Education have an interesting article about your favourite and mine, the “formula for” story. Of particular concern is the move by PR companies to use students to advertise their dodgy equations, such as the formula for a perfect night out from last month.

The concern is that students could be damaging their scientific reputations by taking part in this kind of PR activity, and that universities should take more care in publicising the work through their press offices. It turns out that Leeds University, home to “VKendologist” Phillippa Toon, were happy to facilitate media interviews for the nonsense formula story. A bit worrying, really.

Test-tube burgers, anyone?

Would you eat meat grown in a petri dish? Scientist in Holland have produced lab-grown meat for the first time – though they haven’t tasted it yet.

Cells taken from the muscle of a live pig grew into sticky muscle tissue, which doesn’t sound very appetising because the meat needs exercise to give it a more normal consistency.

I’d certainly welcome lab-grown meat, as long as it tasted like the real thing. It would take much less space and resources than breeding pigs or cattle, and animals wouldn’t have to die before we tuck in. I’m sure many people will be horrified by the idea, but a meat cell is a meat cell, wherever it grows.

Oh nos!

It had to happen eventually. The lolcats have got in to the Large Hadron Collider, and I think we all know how it’s going to end:

The latest idea I’ve seen comes from researchers at the City College of New York, who’ve developed a way to literally suck energy from the air flow around cars and planes. They’re using materials with piezoelectric properties, which convert physical movement in to electricity, to generate a form of wind power.

It works like this. Airplanes, cars and other vehicles all create an airflow as the move forward and push the air around the to one side. Placing a small piezoelectric device into this flow, not much bigger than your thumbnail, will produce a voltage that can charge a battery.

You’re not going to be running your car on it any time soon – the energy produced is nowhere near enough to power an engine. We use cars for a lot more than just driving these days though, and the piezoelectric devices could power internal computer systems, or charge your mobile phone. The researchers are now trying to model the best location for their devices on a vehicle to maximise the energy they produce.

I think that ideas like this are the future of electricity generation. It’s not a very sexy solution to the problems of climate change, and you won’t see any politicians crying “let’s all attach small things to our cars!”, but if we can come up with loads of small ways to produce clean power, it could add up to a significant carbon saving.

Champion horse rider Gillian Higgins has come up with a novel way for veterinary students to learn the skeletal structure of a horse – paint it directly on to the skin. Pretty cool, if slightly creepy!

Watch the carbon clock ticking

Early this year I wrote about research showing that the Earth effectively has a carbon budget of one trillion tonnes. Emitting more than this will lead to a global temperature rise of 2°C, and we’ve already spent over half a trillion.

To illustrate our spending, Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University has created a ticking carbon clock, counting down to the release of the trillionth tonne. That’s currently set for some time in March 2045 but as our rate of emissions continues to rise, this date gets nearer by the second. It’s sobering to watch.

Fancy a drink?

This photo of an ant refreshing itself after a hard day’s work was taken by András Mészáros, and won him a prize in the 2009 Veolia Environnement wildlife photographer of the year. Take a look at some of the other winners, including a wolf caught mid-jump and a stag with a crown of bracken.

Green roofs are not just a load of greenwash. That’s according to a new study which has measured the amount of carbon absorbed by 13 different green roofs.

“I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want a green roof,” says Kristin Getter, who carried out the research with colleagues at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Getter’s team examined 12 existing green roofs and grew their own Sedum-covered roof. They found that the roofs absorbed up to 375 grams per square metre over the two years of their study.

Read the rest at New Scientist.

Turning our waste paper in to biofuel could replace over 5% of global petrol consumption, say scientists from Singapore and Switzerland. It would also reduce the burden on our rapidly filling landfills.

So-called “first generation” biofuels made from food crops such as corn or soy have been widely criticised as an unworkable solution to the energy crisis. Growing crops for fuel takes up valuable agriculture land and leads to higher food prices. Now, a new wave of biofuel producers are looking to alternative sources.

A study published in the journal GCB Bioenergy details the possibility of producing a fuel called cellulosic ethanol from waste paper and cardboard. The researchers created a model to estimate the amount of this waste in each country, and found that the potential for waste-based biofuel amounts to over 80 billion litres globally.

Clearly, the quantity of fuel that can be produced depends on the level of waste in each country. Nations like Sierra Leone could only manage to produce around a third of a litre of fuel per person each year, while Norway could potentially turn out nearly 50 litres.

Fuel demands also vary by country of course. By modelling this demand and comparing it with the potential for generating fuel from waste, the researchers found cellulosic ethanol could replace 5.36% of global petrol demand.

Cutting down on petrol also means reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The data on emissions from cellulosic ethanol is varied, but the researchers estimate that a switch to biofuel would save between 29.2% and 86.1% of greenhouse gas emissions.

“Our results suggest that fuel from processed waste biomass, such as paper and cardboard, is a promising clean energy solution,” said study author Associate Professor Hugh Tan of the National University of Singapore.

“If developed fully this biofuel could simultaneously meet part of the world’s energy needs, while also combating carbon emissions and fossil fuel dependency.”

SHI, A., KOH, L., & TAN, H. (2009). The biofuel potential of municipal solid waste GCB Bioenergy DOI: 10.1111/j.1757-1707.2009.01024.x

Carbon dioxide may be the lead cause of global warming, but other gases are more potent greenhouse agents. So what is it about these molecules that makes them such effective heat trappers?

A team at NASA think they know, and the work could be used to create more environmentally friendly materials.

Timothy Lee and his colleagues at the Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, California, analysed the physical and chemical properties of powerful greenhouse gases called fluorocarbons. They discovered that molecules containing fluorine atoms are particularly effective at trapping heat, especially when many fluorine atoms are bonded to a single carbon atom, which is the case with fluorocarbons.

Read the rest at New Scientist.

Your finger and toenails are growing faster than they would have 70 years ago, according to the Daily Mail. It sounds like nonsense, but it’s apparantly true.

Research published in in the Journal Of The European Academy Of Dermatology And Venereology last week found that the average thumbnail grows at 3.55mm a month, compared to the 3mm a month reported by a study in 1938.

Our modern-day diet could be the cause, say researchers from the University of North Carolina. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to access the paper to read their full results, but another explanation does occur to me: perhaps the 1938 study was simply inaccurate, and nails continue to grow at the same rate they always have.

Green energy

Trees contain enough power to run a small electric circuit, scientists at the University of Washington have found. Although the energy output is very small, it could be put to use powering sensors to monitor environmental conditions or forest fires.

Using nanotechnology components which do not require much power, the team created a circuit that uses an average of 10 nanowatts. By comparison, a 100W lightbulb uses 10 billion times as much power. The results will soon be published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Transactions on Nanotechnology.

Despite their success, the researchers don’t yet understand where the tree power comes from, according to one of the paper’s co-authors, Babak Parviz:

“It’s not exactly established where these voltages come from. But there seems to be some signaling in trees, similar to what happens in the human body but with slower speed,

“I’m interested in applying our results as a way of investigating what the tree is doing. When you go to the doctor, the first thing that they measure is your pulse. We don’t really have something similar for trees.”

It has been a few weeks since the second of two research ships of ‘Project Kaisei’ set of from San Francisco bound for the huge “island” of rubbish in the Pacific Ocean. An accidental-island build by swirling currents pushing the waste together in an area supposedly twice State of Texas. Now, a separate research group have published the results of new study looking at just what happens to plastic waste as it floats in the sea.

It has been well documented that plastics pose one of the biggest direct threat to marine animals – when they eat or get caught up in them. Researchers from Nihon University now report that plastics are not as ‘indestructible’ as once thought. With a surprisingly speedy decomposition these versatile convenience materials are resulting in a double whammy of harm as they release toxic substances into the water.

“Plastics in daily use are generally assumed to be quite stable,” said study lead researcher Dr Katsuhiko Saido, “We found that plastic in the ocean actually decomposes as it is exposed to the rain and sun and other environmental conditions, giving rise to yet another source of global contamination that will continue into the future.”

Dr Saido and his team found that when plastic decomposes it releases potentially toxic bisphenol A (BPA) and PS oligomer (both not normally found naturally) into the water, causing additional pollution. They also discovered that three new compounds not found in nature formed. These are styrene monomer (a known carcinogen) and styrene dimer and trimer- both also suspected to be. Although plastics don’t usually break down in an animal’s body after being eaten, the substances released from decomposing plastic are absorbed and could cause harm. BPA and PS oligomer are of concern because they can disrupt the functioning of hormones in animals and can seriously affect reproductive systems.

The timeframe for this process can be surprisingly short, polystyrene begins to decompose within a year. Cancers, hormonal abnormalities and reproductive problems are just the tip of our knowledge about the long term adverse effects of plastic, and yet we still can’t get enough of the stuff.

Mia Kukathasan studied biology at King’s College, London, and has taught science in secondary schools. She has written bits for Null Hypothesis and in the book Defining Moments In Science and the occasional student publication. Mia also dresses up in gorilla suits in the name taking science to music festivals, as a co-organiser of Guerilla Science. Science aside, she has a show On ICradio based on Free Music.