Solar power increasing in Germany
The German Solar Industry Association (BSW) has announced that German solar power producers have increased electricity output this year by 60 percent over 2010 to 18 billion kWh. This is more than three percent of total power output volumes. BSW’s managing director Carsten Koernig stated that “solar energy has become an indispensable ingredient of a successful energy strategy shift”. The solar sector has already produced enough electricity to power approximately 5.1 million households. This accounts for about one-eighth of all households in Germany. Renewable power accounted for about 19.9 percent of the energy mix in 2011, compared with 16.4 percent last year, as BDEW’s preliminary data shows.
Calm mothers
Studies in rats have shown that epigenetics can influence maternal behavior and that this effect can be passed from one generation to the next by acting on the pup’s brain alone, without altering germ cells. When pups are born, genes involved in regulating the animals’ responses to stress are decorated with inhibitory methyl marks, which enhance sensitivity to stress. If the pups are raised by a relaxed and nurturing mother, many of their methyl groups will melt away, leaving the animals calmer. When these pups mature, they, too, will be easygoing, attentive parents. If the pups, however, are raised by a fearful, passive mother, their genes will gain methyl marks. They grow up to be nervous and neglectful caretakers.
Fastest Rotating Star
An international team of astronomers has been using ESO’s Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, to make a survey of the heaviest and brightest stars in the Tarantula Nebula, in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Among the many brilliant stars in this stellar nursery the team has spotted one, called VFTS 102, that is rotating at more than two million kilometres per hour — more than three hundred times faster than the Sun and very close to the point at which it would be torn apart due to centrifugal forces. VFTS 102 is the fastest rotating star known to date.
The astronomers also found that the star, which is around 25 times the mass of the Sun and about one hundred thousand times brighter, was moving through space at a significantly different speed from its neighbours