Urchin writes "Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter, the most advanced 'renewable' technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources including indium and platinum — resources that could dry up in 10-15 years if they were widely used in the renewable energy market."

joesmart writes to tell us that new work on OpenChange and KDE seeks to bridge the gap between groupware compatibility and open source. KDE developer Brad Hards spoke at the Linux.conf.au conference and said the goal of OpenChange is to implement the Microsoft Exchange protocols as they are used by Outlook. "OpenChange has client and server-side libraries for Exchange integration and relies heavily on code developed for Samba 4. It is open source software licensed under the GPL version 3. Hards said more work is being done on the client side and 'we have code for the server,' but estimates another 12 months of development is required to produce an OpenChange server ready for production."

mmmscience brings us news of a new study, published in Nature Genetics by an international team of scientists, that tells a scary story: globally, 1% of the population carry a gene mutation that is almost guaranteed to lead to some form of heart problems. On the Indian subcontinent, the prevalence is 4%. The mutation is a 25-letter deletion of DNA data on the heart protein gene MYBPC3, believed to have arisen in India 30,000 years ago. The researchers say that the mutation wasn't selected out of the population because its effects don't occur until after the childbearing years. The article mentions a prediction that "by 2010 India's population will suffer approximately 60% of the world's heart disease."

Thelasko writes "While I was in college, I had the opportunity to take an elective course in Industrial Psychology. One section of the course covered hiring practices and the validity of 'personality testing' to screen applicants (Google link for non-subscribers). The Wall Street Journal has a long article discoursing on how such tests are used in today's economy. While personality tests may be designed to uncover underlying personality traits such as honesty, critics claim that the tests instead reward cheaters." The article talks mostly about the tests' use in winnowing candidates for retail positions — deciding whom to interview. Anybody encountered them in an IT or more technical context?

Square Enix has launched an official website for Final Fantasy XIII. At the moment, it contains screenshots, game music, and brief character bios written in Japanese. Square also launched a site for Final Fantasy Versus XIII, though it doesn't have any content on it yet. A fan site has translated new details about the game from Weekly Famitsu, including information on the battle system. "Players select the 'Action' (the five buttons near the bottom left of the screen) they would like to use, which is then moved to the Command Stock slots (three slots above the Action buttons) to be executed in turn. Some 'Action' buttons seem to have several layers behind them, which means you'll have more than five actions to choose from. Each of the 'Actions' has a number attached to them; this is the 'Cost' or the number of slots that particular 'Action' will take in the Command Stock. For example, you can have three Fire commands in the list since its 'Cost' is only 1, but you can only use Firaga, which costs 3, if you have three empty slots in the Command Stock."

Canadian scientists have created a device that efficiently removes CO2 from the atmosphere. "The proposed air capture system differs from existing carbon capture and storage technology ... while CCS involves installing equipment at, say, a coal-fired power plant to capture CO2 produced during the coal-burning process, ... air capture machines will be able to literally remove the CO2 present in ambient air everywhere. [The team used] ... a custom-built tower to capture CO2 directly from the air while requiring less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per tonne of carbon dioxide."

Geoffrey.landis writes "The administration announced plans to withdraw its support from FutureGen. FutureGen was a project to develop a low CO2-emission electrical power plant, supported by an alliance of a dozen or so coal companies and utilities from around the world. The new plant would have captured carbon dioxide produced by combustion and pumped it deep underground, to avoid releasing greenhouse-gas into the atmosphere. It had been intended as a prototype for next generation clean-coal plants worldwide. Originally budgeted at about a billion dollars, the estimated cost had "ballooned" to $1.8 billion, according to U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman."