Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles have synthesized a class of sponge-like crystals that can soak up carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas in industrial emissions. The crystals --- zeolitic imidazolate frameworks, or ZIF's --- are grids of metal atoms and organic molecules that loosely trap carbon dioxide as it drifts into microscopic pores. The researchers believe that atomic charges hold the gas in place.

One variety, ZIF-69, is so absorbent that a single liter of the material can hold 83 liters of carbon dioxide, according to a study published in the journal Science. The crystals could be tailored to capture carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, factories and other industrial sources, said Omar M. Yaghi, the chemist from UCLA who led the study.

The idea is to line the insides of smokestacks with a layer of ZIF. Carbon dioxide that enters the pores could be sucked out periodically and sequestered underground. Yaghi said the ZIF material also could be used to line vehicle exhaust systems. When drivers fill their gasoline tanks, they also could have the carbon dioxide removed.

" That is a little bit more challenging than in the power plants," he said. Capturing industrial carbon dioxide emissions is considered a key strategy for staving off global warming. The leading method relies on a chemical reaction to trap carbon dioxide in a toxic liquid, a process deemed too expensive to implement on a commercial scale. The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated that retrofitting a power plant with such a system at least would double the cost of generating electricity. More testing is needed to determine whether ZIF's can reduce the cost.

SI.
THE IMMENCE MAJORITY OF INTELLECTUALLY EMINENT MEN DISBELIEVE IN CHRISTIAN RELIGION, BUT THEY CONCEAL THE FACT IN PUBLIC, BECAUSE THEY ARE AFRAID OF LOSING THEIR INCOMES.

-- BERTRAND RUSSELL.

WHY IS GOD CONSIDERED AN EXPLANATION FOR ANYTHING?? IT'S NOT, IT'S A FAILURE TO EXPLAIN, A SHRUG OF THE SHOLDERS, AN "I DUNNO " DRESSED UP IN SPIRITUALITY AND RITUAL. IF SOMEONE CREDITS SOMETHING TO GOD, GENERALLY WHAT IT MEANS IS THAT THEY HAVEN'T A CLUE, SO THEY'RE ATTRIBUTING IT TO AN UNREACHABLE, UNKNOWABLE SKY-FAIRY. ASK FOR AN EXPLANATION OF WHERE THAT GOD CAME FROM, AND ODDS ARE YOU'LL GET A VAGUE, PSEUDO-PHILOSOPHICAL REPLY ABOUT HAVING ALWAYS EXISTED, OR BEING OUTSIDE NATURE. WHICH, OF COURSE, EXPLAINS NOTHING.

Si says: God exists.
That is not a belief or a thought. It is a fact. Like the Hawking proof. the creator is a fact.
I say, prof. Richard Dawkins has proven that god certainly does not exist.. You are most definately WRONG.

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.

2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.

3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a "crane", not a "skyhook", for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.

4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. we now can safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that -- an illusion.

5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. this kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. but the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.

6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.