A Cornell University research group has made a sweet and environmentally beneficial discovery -- how to make plastics from citrus fruits, such as oranges, and carbon dioxide. In a paper published in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (Sept. 2004), Geoffrey Coates, a Cornell professor of chemistry and chemical biology, and his graduate students Chris Byrne and Scott Allen describe a way to make polymers using limonene oxide and carbon dioxide, with the help of a novel "helper molecule" -- a catalyst developed in the researchers' laboratory.

By using their catalyst to combine the limonene oxide and CO2, the Coates group produced a novel polymer -- called polylimonene carbonate -- that has many of the characteristics of polystyrene, a petroleum-based plastic currently used to make many disposable plastic products.

The Coates research team is particularly interested in using CO2 as an alternative building block for polymers. Instead of being pumped into the atmosphere as a waste product, CO2 could be isolated for use in producing plastics, such as polylimonene carbonate.

There's grim news for people who worry that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. A new mathematical formula has proved Murphy's Law really does strike at the worst possible time.

But now a panel of experts has provided the statistical rule for predicting the law of "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong" - or ((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10)).

Project psychologist Dr David Lewis said: "The lesson from this is that, to cut the seemingly unbeatable Murphy's Law gremlins down to size, you need to change one of the elements in the equation.

"So, if you haven't got the skill to do something important, leave it alone. If something is urgent or complex, find a simple way to do it. If something going wrong will particularly aggravate you, make certain you know how to do it."

A vaccine for AIDS is still years away, warns a new report, with progress being hampered by a lack of scientific, political and economic interest.

"The world is inching toward a vaccine, when we should be making strides," Berkley said during the launch of the report at the XV International AIDS conference in Bangkok, Thailand. "The single biggest obstacle is that vaccine development is that it is not a top scientific, political and economic priority."

He adds that less than one per cent of global spending on health product research and less than three per cent of all money devoted to AIDS goes towards developing a vaccine for the disease.

An extract of prickly pear cactus could herald help for hangovers, quelling some of the wretched symptoms that strike the morning after a night out.

Taking a capsule of the extract before a night of drinking and partying significantly reduced some of the symptoms of a hangover in young adults, compared with a placebo, showed a study by US scientists.

The researchers also measured levels of a protein produced by the liver, called C-reactive protein, which is thought to be involved in the inflammation process.

The higher the levels, the worse the hangover, they found. This is the first study to show this, the team believes. Levels of this protein were also 40 per cent higher in the people who took placebo pills compared with those who took the OFI.

Scientists have performed successful teleportation on atoms for the first time, the journal Nature reports.

What the teams at the University of Innsbruck and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (Nist) did was teleport qubits from one atom to another with the help of a third auxiliary atom.

It relies on a strange behaviour that exists at the atomic scale known as "entanglement", whereby two particles can have related properties even when they are far apart. Einstein called it a "spooky action".

The landmark experiments are being viewed as a major advance in the quest to achieve ultra-fast computers, inside which teleportation could provide a form of invisible "quantum wiring".

A genetically-modified virus that exploits the selfish behaviour of cancer cells may offer a powerful and selective way of killing tumours.

Deleting a key gene from the virus enabled it to infect and burst cancer cells while leaving normal tissues unharmed, reveals a study by researchers at Cancer Research UK and Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of London.

The team examined the effects of the GM virus on pancreatic, lung, ovarian, liver and colorectal cancers in the test tube, as well as on live tumour-bearing mice. The team plans to test the GM virus in clinical trials in people in 2005.

During Tuesday's Good Morning America, a representative of Tyco Fire and Security displayed the amazing properties of the chemical that's called "Sapphire."

As part of a demonstration, Pelton submerged several items into a tank of Sapphire that was on the Good Morning America set. Books did not get wet. Electronics were not be destroyed. Items that were submerged in the liquid were dried in a matter of seconds, and showed no ill effects according to Charles Gibson, Diane Sawyer and other members of the Good Morning America staff who saw items plunged into it.

The Sapphire is intended to become part of fire suppression systems in buildings. It would automatically be sprayed out of a building's sprinkler system when a fire is detected.

There was a substance that had similar properties produced in the past, but that fire suppression liquid was damaging the ozone layer. The new substance by Tyco is supposed to be environmentally safe.

Frequent sexual intercourse and masturbation protects men against a common form of cancer, suggests the largest study of the issue to date yet.

The US study, which followed nearly 30,000 men over eight years, showed that those that ejaculated most frequently were significantly less likely to get prostate cancer. The results back the findings of a smaller Australian study revealed by New Scientist in July 2003 that asserted that masturbation was good for men.

Another theory is that frequent drainage of prostate fluid stops tiny crystalloid microcalcifications - which have been associated with prostate cancer - from forming in the prostate duct, says Leitzmann.

Giles notes that neither study examines ejaculation during the teenage years - which may be a crucial factor. But he says: "Although much more research remains to be done, the take home message is that ejaculation is not harmful, and very probably protective of prostatic health - and it feels good!"

For the first time, a microbial fuel cell has generated electricity while cleaning wastewater, a development that could make sewage treatment more affordable for both industrialized and developing nations, researchers said.

The prototype fuel cell, developed at Pennsylvania State University with support from an $87,000 National Science Foundation grant, is described in the next issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology (subscription required).

The article reports that the fuel cell removed up to 78 percent of organic matter from the water and produced between 10 and 50 milliwatts of power per square meter of electrode surface. Since the paper's submission, the cell has produced up to 200 milliwatts per square meter -- enough to power a small light bulb, said Bruce Logan, the Penn State professor of environmental engineering who directed the project.

While a typical fuel cell runs on hydrogen, a microbial fuel cell relies on bacteria to metabolize food, releasing electrons that yield a steady electrical current. Other microbial fuel cells have used fuels like glucose or ethanol. In this case, the fuel was skimmed from the settling pond of a wastewater treatment plant.

Oral sex can lead to oral tumours. That is the conclusion of researchers who have proved what has long been suspected, that the human papilloma virus can cause oral cancers.

The risk, thankfully, is tiny. Only around 1 in 10,000 people develop oral tumours each year, and most cases are probably caused by two other popular recreational pursuits: smoking and drinking. The researchers are not recommending any changes in behaviour.

Genital HPV infections are common. At any one time, around a third of 25-year-old women in the US are infected. It is thought that only 10 per cent of infections involve cancer-causing strains, and that 95 per cent of women will get rid of the infection within a year. But even this does not explain why so few develop cancer.