MIT's researchers have discovered a way to blend carbon nanotubes, current media darlings of the chemistry world, with an existing material used for storing heat energy. In doing so they've come up with something incredible: A new chemical, far cheaper than its competition, that can store solar heat energy with about the same density as the electrical power we jam into lithium-ion batteries. What could this mean? If we're lucky, in the sunnier parts of the world it could mean an end to home heating bills... but that's just the start. The material works like this: The molecules are simply exposed to the radiation of plain, bright sunlight. Incoming energy excites the molecules, and causes some of their cleverly engineered chemical bonds to "flip" as they get excited. This means a tiny sliver of energy is stored in each bond, and if you have trillions of the molecules in a bulk material, this energy can quickly add up. To discharge this solar-thermo-chemical battery, you need a trigger such as a small burst of heat or a catalyst material, and the bonds begin to flip back to their resting state, releasing the stored energy as heat. It's much cheaper than an earlier success, which contained the rare and expensive material ruthenium, and it's also about 10,000 times better than its competitors at storing energy densely--in fact it can fit in about as many units of energy per cubic centimeter as devices like lithium-ion batteries, a tech we now take for granted.

Carbon tax compo aimed at most needy: Gillard

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has conceded some households will be losers under the climate change plan, saying there is no way of "sugar-coating any of this". "Yes, there are some people who will not receive tax cuts or family payment increases that bring them out square. That is, they will pay a price themselves," she told Radio National on the first day of her campaign to sell the plan to voters. But she said the scheme's impact on the price of living would be modest - calculated by Treasury at $9.90 a week for the average family, or 0.7 per cent on top of the consumer price index. While low-income earners and pensioners will be overcompensated by 20 per cent above the extra costs associated with the tax, households earning as little as $65,000 will miss out on full compensation. "I had to make choices about who needed assistance the most. I've determined that lower income Australians, more than 4 million lower income households, pensioners and the like, should come out with a 20 per cent buffer," Ms Gillard said Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says people who are well down on the income scale will miss out on full compensation. "A single-income family with one child under five, on average weekly earnings, is going to be worse off, and that's even on the Government's own modelling," he said.

Warming a debate with compelling facts

It might be just a theory, but you can't ignore the evidence climate change is real and happening. BRACE yourselves for the onslaught of the ideologues. Between the rapturous claims from the green movement that Julia Gillard's carbon tax will save Mother Earth and the rabid rantings from highly paid shock jocks and their political masters pronouncing the nation's impending doom, it is worth taking a deep breath and looking at a few hard facts. As the debate over pricing carbon moves to the extremes, the shrill cries from either side long ago drowned out the truth. Cleaning up is a costly business. As a nation, we tend to pride ourselves on our living standards and hygiene. We willingly fork out vast amounts to ensure not only that our cities and towns have world-class sewage and effluent removal systems, but that the resulting waste is not merely tipped into the sea but extensively treated. We pay our local councils enormous annual levies to remove garbage, household wastes, recyclables and green material. No one bats an eye. Have you been to a local government tip lately? Or had some renovation work that required the removal of a few bricks and some soil? Prepare for a bill of astronomical proportions. In the past few decades, after years of public outcry, we've banned our corporations from dumping toxic chemicals into our waterways or into landfill. Offenders are heavily fined and held up to public ridicule. Make no mistake, it was much cheaper for them to dump dioxin or acids into Sydney Harbour or the Yarra than incur the costs of expensive disposal systems. So the demands from the public have carried a hefty cost and those costs have been passed on. But when it comes to polluting the atmosphere, the air we breathe, suddenly Australians jump to the back of the queue on taking any action.