On the record

“Who would have thought you'd have standing room only at a geek event?”

Immunologist John Cohen is astonished at how Café Scientifique — a series of informal debates with scientists — has taken off in Colorado.

Source: New York Times

Scorecard

Dog turds

A California company announces plans to use a ‘methane digester’ to extract energy from faeces scooped up at a popular San Francisco park.

Thermal underwear

Employees at Japan's environment ministry bundle up to stay warm, after turning off the heat to help meet the country's targets for greenhouse-gas emissions.

Blackbeard

Engineers are building a sand dune underwater to protect what is believed to be the famed pirate's ship, sunk in 1718 off the coast of North Carolina.

Datapoint

How much do people in different countries care about science? A glimpse comes from the Science and Engineering Indicators 2006, published by the US National Science Board. People indicated their interest in new scientific discoveries on a scale from 1 to 100.

China 70

United States 69

Europe 54

South Korea 50

Japan 44

Number Crunch

Earth crossed another population milestone last weekend.

6.5 billion is the world's population, as of 25 February.

131 million people will be born in 2006.

57 million people will die in 2006.

Source: US Census Bureau