Former vice president Al Gore keeps racking up the hardware in his campaign to fight global warming. First An Inconvenient Truth, his documentary on climate change, nabbed an Academy Award for best documentary. (Although the Oscar actually went to director Davis Guggenheim, Gore gave an acceptance speech.) Then he was awarded, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. And last night, to cap it all off, Gore's print version of An Inconvenient Truth won the Grammy for best spoken-word album, thanks to its release as an audio book.

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Giving Alzheimer's patients a battery of cognitive tests may help predict whether it's safe for them (and us) to get behind the wheel, according to a new study.

"We found that tests that involved visual perception and visual memory were particularly important in preventing driving errors," says Jeffrey Dawson, a biostatistician at the University of Iowa College of Public Health in Iowa City and lead author of the study published in Neurology.

Dawson hopes the findings will pave the way for the creation of a test that physicians could give to people diagnosed with Alzheimer's to determine if it’s safe for them to be on the road.

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Any biology textbook will tell you that all cells—human, bacteria, plant, what have you—build their membranes using phospholipids, fatty molecules that contain phosphorus. But a new study published online in Nature suggests that phytoplankton, the plant-like microorganisms living on the surface of oceans, may be in a league all of their own; unlike other organisms, they don't necessarily make their membranes with phospholipids.

"Phosphorus is an essential nutrient, but in some parts of the ocean that nutrient is very scarce," says lead study author Benjamin Van Mooy, a geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass. "The phytoplankton that live there are doing just fine. We have found that the reason for this is that they have the ability to make their membranes without using phosphorous."

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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved an Rx called ATryn, which is made from goats genetically altered to produce the blood-thinning protein antithrombin.

ATryn has been okayed for use by people with a condition called hereditary antithrombin (AT) deficiency that puts them at increased risk of developing clots in their legs and lungs during childbirth and surgery. One in 5,000 people in the U.S. have AT, according to the FDA.

"The approval of ATryn marks a significant milestone in the development of this innovative recombinant technology and delivers a new therapeutic option,” Geoffrey Cox, chairman and CEO of Massachusetts biotech GTC Therapeutics, said in a statement.

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Fellas, you might want to think, well, twice about following Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps' lead. A study published today in the journal Cancer linked frequent marijuana use to the possibility of a slim increased risk of testicular cancer.

Researchers from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle found that about 72 percent of 369 men, ages 18 to 44, diagnosed with this type of cancer reported having smoked pot; those at greatest risk appeared to have started toking before they were 18 and/or were heavy users. But the scientists acknowledge the study did not prove a connection between pot and a heightened risk of the disease, which strikes about 8,000 men in the U.S. annually and has a high survival rate, according to the American Cancer Society. The percentage of healthy men who reported having smoked pot at least once–68 percent of a 979 randomly sampled group–is not much lower than the group who had already been diagnosed with testicular cancer.

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If you follow biotechnology at all, you probably know that there is red biotech for medical applications (example: using bacteria to produce drugs); white biotech for industrial applications (example: using microbes instead of chemicals); and green biotech for agriculture (example: using genetically modified crops.)

So it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a term for using biotechnology to come up with new fuel sources. "Black biotech" is the phrase Richard Gallagher at The Scientist has coined to describe the rush going on in the life sciences to enlist microbes in a bid to prolong the age of oil in the  latest issue. But  it really comes down to figuring out what's up down in those subsurface oil formations.

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At least 135 people have died and authorities say that more than 200 may have perished in wildfires that have been raging in southern Australia since Saturday. The fires in Victoria and New South Wales have destroyed more than 750 homes and charred 815,000 acres (330,000 hectares), according to the Sydney Morning Herald. The Associated Press reports that more than a dozen of the 400 blazes ignited over the weekend are still burning; arson is suspected.

"What do you say about anyone like that?" Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on Australian TV, speaking of the suspected arsonists. "There's no words to describe it, other than it's mass murder."

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There's a new kind of meat that's getting a lot buzz Down Under these days. Word is it's better for the planet. Or at least that's what scientists argue in a paper published in the journal Conservation Letters. Instead of feasting on the meat hacked out of "introduced ruminants" (read: cows and sheep), Australians should be enjoying the high-protein, low cholesterol steaks carved out of kangaroos.

No need to worry that the hopping marsupials are endangered, actually they're thriving out of control in some places, say researchers, thanks to the same grassland rid of trees and other vegetation to make pasture for cattle. More importantly, the jumpers don't belch or give off as much gas as cows do, because of bacteria in their stomachs that aid the digestion of grass (savvy Australian researchers are working on transferring said bacteria to cattle even as I write).

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A new study suggests that potentially deadly infections in cystic fibrosis (CF) patients might be destroyed by dousing them with a mixture of mostly soybean oil and water. The so-called "nanoemulsion" has so far only been tested in bacteria in the lab, but the researchers say they will now test it in animals and, if successful, conduct clinical trials in people with CF.

"The nanoemulsion inhibited the growth of all 150 [bacterial] strains tested," says John LiPuma, a pediatrician at the University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Arbor and coauthor of the study published recently in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. "It was very effective in vitro."

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Do you always use your lucky blue pen on an exam? Maybe you should switch to red.

University of British Columbia (UBC) researchers tested 600 people on detail-oriented tasks (such as proofreading) and creative tasks (such as brainstorming). They did better on the detail-driven tests when the background on their computers was red, and better on the creative tests when the background was blue, according to results published in today's Science Express.
 
Even if most of us associate red with danger and blue with tranquility, the link between color and cognitive performance isn’t as obvious as it sounds, says study co-author Julia Zhu, an assistant professor of marketing at UBC. "People are very unaware of the different effects of color: They always think blue will help them do better," Zhu tells ScientificAmerican.com. "If the task is requiring detailed attention, go with red, but if it's asking you to think outside the box, blue will help."

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