SCIENCE IN THE NEWS WEEKLY
New Nuke-Sniffing Machines Only a Marginal Improvement
Last week a report from the National Research Council found that new radiation detection machines the government has been developing to find smuggled nuclear materials at ports are only marginally better than existing monitors and would cost more than twice as much.
In other technology news, researchers said that powerful enzymes produced by soil fungus appear to have the potential to turn corn plant waste into cheap biofuel.
Wind power currently makes up less than 3 percent of America's total electricity generation. But a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that wind could eventually satisfy America's energy needs.
The New York Times looked at the potential and possible pitfalls of tapping into the Earth's geothermal energy. A deep-drilling project in Basel, Switzerland set off an earthquake in 2006.