MEXICO CITY (23 January 2008)—At the end of January, more than 200,000 crop varieties from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East—drawn from vast seed collections maintained by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)—will be shipped to a remote island near the Arctic Circle, where they will be stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a facility capable of preserving their vitality for thousands of years.

The shells of diatoms are so heavy that when they die in the oceans they typically sink to watery graves on the seafloor, taking carbon out of the surface waters and locking it into sediments below.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, said on Monday it would buy more than 1.3 billion kilowatt hours a year of renewable energy certificates, making it the largest corporate purchaser of alternative energy in the United States.

The certificates will subsidize the development of wind, solar, biomass and small-scale hydro-electric sources of energy, Intel said in a statement.

Common in many US homes (and perhaps homes in other countries) is the folding attic stair. More akin to a step ladder than a stair, the device, which folds into the ceiling below an attic, is used to gain occasional access to the space to expand storage options or for maintenance of equipment that might be residing there. The opening for the stair is fairly standard at about 2 feet by 5 and is covered when closed by a sheet of thin plywood attached to the ladder and its spring-loaded closing/opening mechanism.