Just as plants need sunlight to pull off the trick, Air Fuel Synthesis, the firm profiled in the UK's Independent newspaper, need to use good old-fashioned electric energy to pull off theirs.

In Iceland, Carbon Recycling International opened a plant at the end of 2011 drawing waste CO2 from a power station, with capacity to produce five million litres of methanol per year.

The review follows numerous investigations that have cast doubt on the validity of most forensic methods. Firearms and bullet analysis, for instance, can wrongly place innocent people at a crime scene.

But even DNA evidence is fallible: different labs can return very different results for the same sample.

Cern scientists reporting from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have claimed the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.

A confirmation that this is the Higgs boson would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the century; the hunt for the Higgs has been compared by some physicists to the Apollo programme that reached the Moon in the 1960s.

"We're on the frontier now, on the edge of a new exploration. This could be the only part of the story that's left, or we could open a whole new realm of discovery."

The roots of the blue evergreen hydrangea (Dichroa febrifuga) have been used for centuries in traditional Chinese medicine to treat malaria. Now Tracy Keller and colleagues at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine in Boston have found that halofuginone – a chemical based on the roots' active ingredient – blocks immune reactions that can cause disease.

Animals that receive only just adequate nutrition are known to live longer, partly because diseases which involve inflammation are prevented.

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.

The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.

But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".

When the alloy is immersed in water and exposed to sunlight, the chemical bond between the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in water is broken. The hydrogen can then be collected.

Because pure hydrogen gas is not found in free abundance on Earth, it must be manufactured by unlocking it from other compounds. Thus, hydrogen is not considered an energy source, but rather an "energy carrier." Currently, it takes a large amount of electricity to generate hydrogen by water splitting.

Iran plans to send a live monkey into space in the summer, the country's top space official said after the launch of Rassad-1, state television reported on its website.

At the time, Fazeli touted the launch of a large animal into space as the first step towards sending a man into space, which Tehran says is scheduled for 2020.

Western powers fear that Iran's space agenda might be linked to developing a ballistic missile capability that could deliver nuclear warheads.

Most heat pumps maintain an average useful life of 10-20 years, but researchers at the University of Stavanger in Norway (USN) and the University of Oslo believe that they have developed a new heat pump that will last up to 10,000 years.

Currently, existing heat pumps start to deteriorate after the first year of use, and require frequent inspection thereafter until the pump completely fails.

Last year a succession of volunteers sat down in a research lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico to play DARWARS Ambush!, a video game designed to train US soldiers bound for Iraq.

The volunteers received a few milliamps of current at most, and the simple gadget used to deliver it was powered by a 9-volt battery.

"They learn more quickly but they don't have a good intuitive or introspective sense about why," says Clark.

Last Sunday, Sook Shin was carrying a possible cure for cancer on a small Apple computer with years worth of data.

Unfortunately, most of the data was never backed up, a mistake Shin said could be a major setback in the fight against cancer.

Unfortunately, the couple didn't record the computer's serial number. Police said that makes finding it nearly impossible.