Talk about self-serve. Researchers have found a way of making hydrogen fuel from plants that is so efficient it could one day lead to cars that run on grass clippings. The method, detailed in the journal Science, entails evaporating soy oil to produce hydrogen. It is 10 times faster than current methods of extracting hydrogen from plants and almost as fast as getting it from fossil fuels. Lanny Schmidt, a University of Minnesota chemical engineer who led the study, says it’s only a first step. “We’re not at a point where a landscaper could refine grass clippings from cutting the front yard to make fuel for cutting the backyard,” he says. “But it’s a possibility.” (Newsweek)

Old viruses resurrected

Thanks to advances in DNA technology, scientists can now reconstruct new copies of old viruses. Last year US scientists reconstructed the virus that caused the influenza epidemic of 1918. Now a team of French scientists has rebuilt a virus that infected our apelike ancestors million years ago. The scientists did not isolate a virus from a fossil. Instead, they examined vestiges of the virus that survive today within the human genome. About 100,000 segments of human DNA are remarkably similar to retroviruses. Retroviruses insert a copy of their genes into the genome of their host cell. Scientists estimate that 8 percent of the human genome is made up of this viral DNA, known as human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs.

Many HERVs found in the human genome have counterparts in the genomes of other species. They infected our distant ancestors millions of years ago, and were passed down from generation to generation.

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