Scientists at Georgia Tech have developed a way to use hamsters as a clean source for renewable energy.  (Well, “clean” is up for debate.  Those little rodents can get smelly.)

To harness hamster power, the scientists sewed electricity-generating threads one-fiftieth the width of a human hair into a yellow jacket worn by the hamsters as they ran. A human-sized jacket, capable of powering an iPod, could be ready in as little as three years.

“This can totally be scaled up,” said Zhong Lin ‘ZL’ Wang, who co-authored a paper describing the research in this month’s issue of Nano Letters. “This is just the first step. The idea is that we would harvest energy from any body movement, from walking, breathing, from any kind of vibration.”

CNN interviews Joe Lucas, the spokesman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (via Reality Blog):

[Question:] Can you just answer that yes or no? If you believe that burning coal causes global warming?
[Joe Lucas:] I don’t know, I’m not a scientist.

Echoes of the time not so long ago when tobacco chiefs claimed, in testimonies before Congress, that cigarettes aren’t addictive.

Yet another image to utterly freak you out: researchers at Purdue have mapped pollution with Google Earth (via Huff Po).

Can’t say this bums me out.  Corn ethanol is a bridge solution, and I think we’ve passed the bridge. From the NYT:

Barely a year after Congress enacted an energy law meant to foster a huge national enterprise capable of converting plants and agricultural wastes into automotive fuel, the goals lawmakers set for the ethanol industry are in serious jeopardy.

As recently as last summer, plants that make ethanol from corn were sprouting across the Midwest. But now, with motorists driving less in the economic downturn, the industry is burdened with excess capacity, and plants are shutting down virtually every week.