Changespotting: A gourmet kind of drive

The Lotus Exige is an alternative fuel vehicle that is equipped to run on wine, cheese or chocolate. Photo / Wiki Commons/GNU

An eco-rally last week unveiled the Lotus Exige 270E Tri-Fuel, a car with the capacity to run on ethanol, methanol or conventional gasoline. Potential fuel sources for the car include an ethanol fuel made up of poor-quality wine and whey, waste products that might otherwise be discarded.

Animal testing changes
Animal rights activists have long been opposed to animal testing and a recent scientific study may make the practice obsolete throughout some, or all of the cosmetics industry. The main reason for animal testing is to establish any allergen risks of a product. Researchers in Sweden have used a human myeloid leukaemia cell line to achieve this aim without the need for animal subjects.

Malaria munted?
Preventing the spread of malaria remains a key concern for scientists in the field, and the sterilisation of the mosquitoes responsible for spreading this disease remains the focus of their attention. In a recent development scientists have created sterile male mosquitoes that still appear to be viable mates to their female counterparts. This approach is particularly effective because the females only ever mate once in their lives and cannot differentiate between sterile and non-sterile males.