From New Scientist A scorching heat wave in Europe and a spate of forest fires has re-ignited the debate over whether global warming can be blamed for an apparent increase in the world's weird weather.

Scientists agree that no one yet knows the answer to this question, but they point out that an increase in the number and severity of extreme events is exactly what their models of a warmer world predict.

It's been about 42°C (107°F) here, today. For more than one month, a new record is beaten somewhere in France almost every day. That is we're seeing temperatures that were never reached since meteorologists existed! Also, scientists are finding mosquitos in the south of France that were never found there before: the kinds that transmit malaria and dengue fever! Is global warming an hoax? No shit!

Yeah, I know: it's no problem, we just need air-conditioning in every room and every car!

Update: More from Greenpeace.

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From ScienceDaily: Only 15 years after University of California, Berkeley, engineers built the first micro-scale motor, a UC Berkeley physicist has created the first nano-scale motor - a gold rotor on a nanotube shaft that could ride on the back of a virus.

The electrostatic motors represent a milestone in nanotechnology, and prove that nanotubes and other nanostructures several hundred times smaller than the diameter of a human hair can be manipulated and assembled into true devices.

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Amazing: Light travels at a speed of 300 million metres per second in a vacuum, but in recent years physicists have managed to slow laser pulses down to speeds of metres per second - or to bring them to a complete halt - in ultracold gases. In similar experiments physicists have observed superluminal or faster-than-light pulse propagation. These effects have also been observed in crystals at cryogenic temperatures and in "hot" gases. Now Matthew Bigelow, Nick Lepeshkin and Robert Boyd have observed the same effects in a much simpler system - a crystal at room temperature.

Read the rest on Physics Web

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