How green is your car

♦ A website, carboncounter.com, has looked at carbon footprints of 125 new cars now being sold in the US. It takes into account the type of fuel used, mileage, the greenhouse gases generated when they were manufactured and, in the case of electric vehicles, gases produced by power plants. There were quite a few surprises among the findings. For example hybrid car Lexus RX has a much bigger carbon footprint than some internal combustion engine cars which consume the least fuel (ie, have an excellent mileage). And while electric cars are usually the greenest ones, the very large ones such as Toyota's Rav4, are less green than a number of hybrids.


 

Radical cleaner

♦ The free radicals released after a heart attack are capable of obstructing the healing process and can thus be the trigger for future cardiac episodes. Now a team of biomedical technologists from the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute of Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST) in Thiruvananthapuram has come up with a mechanism that can mop up the damaging free radicals. When a person suffers a heart attack, blood flow to the heart and other organs is stopped. Doctors need to quickly reestablish blood flow by opening up the damaged blood vessels. But when it is done, those cardiac tissues that received a fresh inflow of blood produce an excess of dangerous free radicals that may damage proteins and DNA in the cells, causing the tissue to die. The Thiruvan-anthapuram scientists have developed a synthetic hydrogel, which once injected, can scavenge such free radicals. "This novel concept was found promising in lab studies, but we are yet to test it in animals," says Jayabalan Muthu, who heads SCTIMST's polymer science division and is the lead author of a paper scheduled to appear in the journal Materials Science and Engineering in February next year.

ILLUSTRATION: MANISH MOITRA