Here146;s a Nutty Idea

Each year, Americans buy 700 million pounds of peanut butter. But about 3.5 million pounds of it ends up unused, stuck at the bottom of the jar...

Each year, Americans buy 700 million pounds of peanut butter. But about 3.5 million pounds of it ends up unused, stuck at the bottom of the jar, according to Sherwood Forlee, a former Princeton University engineering student. So he8217;s come up with a simple and Kramer-esque solution: his Easy PB038;J jar has straight interior walls and twist-off lids at both ends. He spent eight years perfecting his invention and hopes to begin production later this year.

8220;It8217;s a really novel concept,8221; says Lee Zalben, founder of Peanut Butter 038; Co., a Manhattan sandwich store. The peanut-butter industry, however, is hurting from an uncertain supply of peanuts and soaring fuel costs, and may be slow to embrace a packaging change. 8220;It would seem much more expensive to manufacture,8221; says Leslie Wagner of the Peanut Advisory Board. In that case, we8217;ll just have to keep using our fingers.
Newsweek

Marine politics: Whales on the agenda
As delegates from 81 countries converged on Chile for the International Whaling Commission8217;s annual meeting, the host government left little doubt about where it stood on Japan8217;s efforts to overturn the IWC8217;s commercial-whaling moratorium. Last month Chilean President Michelle Bachelet declared whales a national monument and introduced legislation to make Chile8217;s waters a permanent sanctuary where no whale or other marine mammal could ever be hunted or traded. The message to the visiting Japanese delegation was clear: no whaling on our watch. Japan continues to risk international opprobrium over its hunts which exploit an IWC loophole that allows for up to 1,000 whales a year to be killed for 8220;scientific research8221;, even though whale blubber keeps turning up on sushi menus and in school cafeterias in Japan. Tokyo is threatening to unilaterally resume whaling if the IWC doesn8217;t relax its moratorium, which has been credited with ensuring the comeback of the endangered blue whale off Chile8217;s coast. Japan is unlikely to succeed8212;changing the moratorium requires the approval of 75 percent of IWC nations.

Books and driving don8217;t often go together
Is reading in a moving car bad for your health? Why do some people get carsick when they do? 8220;Reading in the car is not really bad for your health, although it can make you feel bad,8221; said Dr. Michael G. Stewart, chairman of the department of otorhinolaryngology at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical College. 8220;The issue is the disconnect between what your eyes see and your body feels, which can give you vertigo.8221; Dr. Stewart defined vertigo as the sense of movement, of yourself or of your surroundings, when there is none. Your balance center receives three inputs: visual input; the sense of position, called proprioception; and input from the inner ear, which measures acceleration and movement, Dr. Stewart said. 8220;When any of those inputs is out of sync, then you feel vertiginous, or dizzy,8221; he said. 8220;The problem with reading in the car is that your vision is fixed on an object that is not moving, but your body and inner ear perceive motion, so it can induce vertigo in some.8221; The best cure is to regularly look up, and regain your visual perspective of motion, but even then, the action of focusing on the book while your body feels motion can briefly induce vertigo. NYT

Deep-sea rock as a place to store carbon dioxide
As everyone knows, the world has a carbon dioxide problem, and there are many suggestions for dealing with it. One is sequestration, keeping the gas out of the atmosphere through long-term storage. A great idea, if you can figure out where to put it. Many ideas have been proposed 8212; pumping it into old oil and gas fields or saline aquifers, to name a few. At the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, researchers propose injecting CO2 into deep-sea basalt formations, specifically a huge expanse of the rock under 8,000 feet of ocean on the Juan de Fuca plate in the Pacific Northwest. David S. Goldberg, Taro Takahashi and Angela L. Slagle suggest in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that these porous deposits have several advantages. One is that minerals in the rock would react with the CO2, forming stable carbonates. Another is that the deposits are blanketed by 1,000 ft of sediments that could block leaks. And the area is near the coast, so CO2 could be piped directly from power plants to injection sites. The researchers estimate there is enough basalt to hold more than 120 years8217; worth of industrial and power-plant emissions by the United States.