Researchers in Japan are reporting new evidence that the ordinary vinegar — a staple in oil-and-vinegar salad dressings, pickles, and other foods — may live up to its age-old reputation in folk medicine as a health promoter. They are reporting new evidence that vinegar can help prevent accumulation of body fat and weight gain.

Tomoo Kondo and colleagues note in the new study that vinegar has also been used as a folk medicine since ancient times. People have used it for a range of ills. Modern scientific research suggests that acetic acid, the main component of vinegar, may help control blood pressure, blood sugar levels, and fat accumulation.

Their new study showed that laboratory mice fed a high-fat diet and given acetic acid developed significantly less body fat (up to 10 percent less) than other mice.

Importantly, the new research adds evidence to the belief that acetic acid fights fat by turning on genes for fatty acid oxidation enzymes. The genes churn out proteins involved in breaking down fats, thus suppressing body fat accumulation in the body.

from ScienceDaily …

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My daughter has a snake, a tiny 8-inch-long, innocuous corn snake, and I hate that thing.
I have seen it, and once, in the name of pretending to be a good mother, I actually touched it. But I hope to never see or touch it again as long as I live.
As an anthropologist, I know that most people around the globe hate snakes (and yes, I know there are people like my daughter who love these disgusting reptiles, but really, they are freaks, all of them except my daughter). The fear of snakes is called ophidiophobia, which is apparently a subset of herpetophobia, the more inclusive fear of reptiles. Although ophidiophobia might seem like a pathology — how often, really, do we encounter poisonous snakes? — anthropologist Lynn Isbell of the University of California, Davis, suggests in her new book "The Fruit, The Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well" (Harvard University Press, 2009) that this fear is not only part of our nature, it's also a good thing.

 

( no , its not snake of my favorite Metal Gear Solid )

Isbell came to this conclusion while studying monkeys. One day she put a fake snake into the large outdoor cage of Rhesus macaques at the Davis Primate Center only to see a real snake slither into the cage. About half the 80 resident monkeys gathered around the real thing, mobbing it, calling out in alarm. The fear of snakes, Isbell reasoned, must be deeply embedded in our primate history.
More surprising, Isbell claims that the fear of snakes has driven the evolution of our excellent visual abilities. Primates, including humans, see really well. Sure, our vision is not as good as eagles, but still, we see in color and have very good 3-D perception. We also have a pit in each retina that gives us the ability to spot small objects, like little things in bushes. In general, Isbell explains, the neurology of vision, that is what we see and how we perceive it, is expanded in primates over other mammals.
Anthropologists have always assumed that this great vision was a necessary adaptation for life in the trees. Leaping around the canopy requires depth perception, and color vision comes in handy when looking for ripe fruits and leaves.
Going against the standard thinking, Isbell thinks that spotting snakes is the real reason we see well. Snakes, it seems, were the oldest known predator on primates, and they have been the most persistent predators over millions of years. Today, monkeys are scared of them and humans make horror films about them, like "Snakes on a Plane."
Isbell reasons that our vision co-evolved with venomous snakes having monkeys for dinner. As a result, humans have good vision too. But Isbell thinks there might be even more to the snake story for humans.
People are famous for pointing at things, especially things that scare us. And we usually say something like "Ahhh, snake" (or "spider" or "gun") when pointing at something that elicits fear. It may be that the neurological system that brought us good vision to deal with snakes also pushed for the evolution of human communication. And thank goodness for that development because it allows me, a human with naturally good vision and a highly evolved fear of snakes, to say to my snake loving daughter, "Get that thing away from me."

from Live Science …

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Men are on the road to extinction as their genes shrink and slowly fade away, a genetic expert warned today.

The researcher in human sex chromosomes said the male Y chromosome was dying and could one day run out.

However readers shouldn't worry just yet - the change is not due to take place for another five million years.

Professor Jennifer Graves revealed the bleak future to medical students at a public lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCSI) in Ireland.

But all is not lost. She said men may follow the path of a type of rodent which still manages to reproduce despite not having the vital genes that make up the Y chromosome.

'You need a Y chromosome to be male,' said Prof Graves.

'Three hundred million years ago the Y chromosome had about 1,400 genes on it, and now it's only got 45 left, so at this rate we're going to run out of genes on the Y chromosome in about five million years.

'The Y chromosome is dying and the big question is what happens then.'

The male Y chromosome has a gene (SRY) which switches on the development of testis and pumps out male hormones that determine maleness.

In her lecture, entitled The Decline and Fall of the Y Chromosome and the Future of Men, Prof Graves discussed the disappearance of the Y chromosome and the implications for humans.

She said it was not known what would happen once the Y chromosome disappeared.
'Humans can't become parthenogenetic (asexual), like some lizards, because several vital genes must come from the male,' she continued.

'But the good news is that certain rodent species - the mole voles of Eastern Europe and the country rats of Japan - have no Y chromosome and no SRY gene.

'Yet there are still plenty of healthy male mole voles and country rats running around. Some other gene must have taken over the job and we'd like to know what that gene is.'

The scientist said there were several candidate genes which could take over from SRY, adding whichever one did take over was sheer chance.

'It is even possible that two or more different sex-determination systems based on different genes could arise in different populations,' she added.

'These could no longer reproduce with each other, leading to two different species of humans.'

The work of Prof Graves, of the Australian National University, Canberra, on the evolution of sex determination has paved the way for developments in diagnosis of gender disorders and gender-related disease in humans.

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The dinosaurs were wiped out by volcanoes that erupted in India about sixty five million years ago, according to new research.

For the last thirty years scientists have believed a giant meteorite that struck Chicxulub in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula was responsible for the mass extinction of species, including T Rex and its cousins.

But now Professor Gerta Keller says fossilized traces of plants and animals dug out of low lying hills at El Penon in northeastern Mexico show this event happened 300,000 years after the dinosaurs disappeared. Professor Keller said the meteorite, despite having a diameter spanning six miles, seems to have had no effect on any of the plant and animal life of the region whereas the volcano eruptions could have blocked sunlight, altered climate and caused acid rain. She said: 'Not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact.' research, which has taken twenty years, will stop the raging debate at the heart of the demise of the dinosaurs.

She said: 'The decades old controversy over the cause of the mass extinction will never achieve consensus.' Understanding what caused the dinosaurs to disappear remains a great mystery. Theories attempting to explain it include asteroid or cometary impacts, volcanoes, global climate change, rising sea levels and supernova explosions. Scientists know that at a point about 65 million years ago, some phenomenon triggered mass extinctions on the land and oceans.

Dr Richard Lane, of the US National Science Foundation's division of earth sciences which funded the research, said Prof Keller may be onto something. He said: 'Keller and colleagues continue to amass detailed stratigraphic information supporting new thinking about the Chicxulub impact and the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. The two may not be linked after all.'

 

This has been always point of world wide debate … many people have spent years … sometimes their whole life just to find one single answer … HOW DID DINOSOURS REALLY DIED ?? … and , many scientists have their theories … asteroid hit … global warming … disease  … ice age … climate change … evolution … and now … the volcano … but nobody has never ever got confidence or say 100% reliable proof that their conclusion is correct … all theories are just based on assumptions … well , lets hope that someday … we will really able to know how those dinos disappeared suddenly all over the planet … because it can give us idea of future of mankind …

from DailyMail …

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Africans have more genetic variation than anyone else on Earth, according to a new study that helps narrow the location where humans first evolved, probably near the South Africa-Namibia border.

The largest study of African genetics ever undertaken also found that nearly three-fourths of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to West Africa. The new analysis published Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science.

"Given the fact that modern humans arose in Africa, they have had time to accumulate dramatic changes" in their genes, explained lead researcher Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.

People have been adapting to very diverse environmental niches in Africa, she explained in a briefing.

Over 10 years, Tishkoff and an international team of researchers trekked across Africa collecting samples to compare the genes of various peoples. Often working in primitive conditions, the researchers sometimes had to resort to using a car battery to power their equipment, Tishkoff explained.

The reason for their work? Very little was known about the genetic variation in Africans, knowledge that is vital to understanding why diseases have a greater impact in some groups than others and in designing ways to counter those illnesses.

Scott M. Williams of Vanderbilt University noted that constructing patterns of disease variations can help determine which genes predispose a group to a particular illness.

This study "provides a critical piece in the puzzle," he said. For example, there are clear differences in prevalence of diseases such as hypertension and prostate cancer across populations, Williams said.

"The human genome describes the complexity of our species," added Muntaser Ibrahim of the department of molecular biology at the University of Khartoum, Sudan. "Now we have spectacular insight into the history of the African population ... the oldest history of mankind.

"Everybody's history is part of African history because everybody came out of Africa," Ibrahim said.

Christopher Ehret of the department of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, compared genetic variation among people to variations in language.

There are an estimated 2,000 distinct language groups in Africa broken into a few broad categories, often but not always following gene flow.

Movement of a language usually involves arrival of new people, Ehret noted, bringing along their genes. But sometimes language is brought by a small "but advantaged" group which can impose their language without significant gene flow.

Overall, the researchers were able to study and compare the genetics of 121 African groups, 60 non-African populations and four African-American groups.

The so-called "Cape-colored" population of South Africa has highest levels of mixed ancestry on the globe, a blend of African, European, East Asian and South Indian, Tishkoff said.

"This will be a great population for study of diseases" that are more common in one group than another, she said.

The study also found that about 71 percent of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to western African origins. They also have between 13 percent and 15 percent European ancestry and a smaller amount of other African origins. There was "very little" evidence for American Indian genes among African-Americans, Tishkoff said.

Ehret added that only about 20 percent of the Africans brought to North America made the trip directly, while most of the rest went first to the West Indies.

And, he added, some local African-American populations, such as the residents of the sea islands off Georgia and South Carolina, can trace their origins to specific regions such as Sierra Leone and Guinea.

from Yahoo! …

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There’s a wonderful article in the current issue of Insight, the energy journal published by Platts, called “The Unbearable Lightness of Wind.”

  The author, Ross McCracken, tackles the question that nobody has posed yet – what are the economic consequences going to be of putting up all these wind turbines with government subsidies, mandates and “feed-in tariffs” that tell the utilities, “Buy it whatever it costs”?

“The conundrum,” McCracken writes, “lies in the fact that wind does not directly displace fossil fuel generating capacity, but will make this capacity less profitable to maintain.”

What’s likely to happen, McCracken argues, is that windmills – which generate electricity only 30 percent of the time – will replace some peaking power and some base-load power:

As wind provides neither baseload nor peaking plant it has no impact on reserve capacity. . . [I]t increases redundancy in peaking plants and reduces the profits of baseload generation; potentially good for consumers but bad for investment in non-intermittent sources of power, and presenting the risk of a decline in reserve capacity. . . . [P]eaking plants would be used much less and baseload plant would see sustained period of potential below cost prices – a particular nightmare for the nuclear industry.

So without contributing any reliable capacity, wind will nonetheless make nuclear, by far our most practical and reliable form of zero carbon energy, less profitable. Existing plants will be caught in a trap and new construction will be discouraged entirely. Already the British Nuclear Group is complaining that it can’t build any new reactors if they have to compete against subsidized wind farms. Anti-nuclear activists are turning handsprings, claiming joyously that wind is finally replacing nuclear. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, nothing will be replacing existing capacity–namely, the coal burning plants that are one of the largest sources of carbon emissions–as demand increases in years ahead. That means carbon emissions won’t be meaningfully reduced, since coal plants will have to stay on line to provide backup.

 

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It's 2009 -- several decades after health officials began urging Americans to cut down on salt.

Do you know how much you're consuming?

If you're a typical American, it's about 3,400 milligrams of sodium per day. That's well beyond the 2,300 mg recommended by the U.S. Dietary Guidelines. And it's 15 times as much as the human body requires.

Average sodium intake has increased about 50% since the 1970s. That's largely because we're eating more convenience foods. And, as makers of processed food have cut fat and sugar from their products, they've often added more salt to restore flavor.

How bad is all this sodium for your health?

Excess salt has been linked to osteoporosis, kidney damage and stomach cancer. Worse, it raises blood pressure, a key factor in heart attacks and strokes, which kill about 850,000 Americans a year.

"After smoking, high blood pressure is the leading cause of preventable illness and death," says New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden, who is urging makers of packaged foods and restaurants nationwide to gradually reduce their sodium content by 50% over the next 10 years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that such a reduction could save 150,000 lives and $10 billion in health-care expenditures a year. Some 50 million Americans have hypertension (that is, blood pressure readings consistently at or above 140/90 mm/Hg). Another 20 million are prehypertensive (with blood pressure from 120/80 to 139/ 89 mm/Hg). Hypertension is more common among African-Americans than whites, and nearly 90% of Americans eventually develop it as they age.

With that in mind, the CDC is urging anyone who has hypertension, is African-American or over age 40 -- nearly 70% of the U.S. population -- to follow a stricter guideline of just 1,500 mgs a day. Even people with normal blood pressure can cut their risk of developing hypertension later by lowering their salt intake. "We think of hypertension as being a normal part of the aging process and it's not," says Commissioner Frieden.

About 80% of Americans' salt intake comes from processed foods and restaurant meals; only 20% comes from salt used in home cooking and added at the table. But cutting salt from processed food isn't easy. Besides enhancing taste, salt helps provide texture to many foods and acts as a preservative. And Americans have become accustomed to the taste. The Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents food makers, says many of its members have cut sodium in their products and introduced lower-salt items in recent years. But it believes that any government effort needs to include consumer education and scientific research as well. "It's not as collaborative as it should be," says Robert Earl, the group's vice president for science policy, nutrition and health.

In the U.K., which started a similar salt-reduction effort in 2003, many food makers and restaurant chains have already cut salt by 20% to 30%. The average consumption there is down to 8.6 grams from 9.5 grams a day.

A few critics don't think a broad reduction in sodium is warranted. Michael Alderman, a professor of medicine and public health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, N.Y., says it hasn't been conclusively shown that cutting salt intake across the population would save lives, and it could have unintended consequences. Lowering salt can cause kidney problems and contribute to insulin resistance in some cases, says Dr. Alderman, who is an unpaid consultant to the Salt Institute, an industry group. Darwin Labarthe, director of the CDC's Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention, counters that there's a very broad consensus that reducing salt would cut the risk of heart attacks and strokes, and there is little evidence of harmful effects. The American Heart Association, the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization all urge lower salt consumption.

Besides, says Commissioner Frieden, "We aren't taking choice away from people. We are giving them choice. We want to let them determine how much salt they want to add." What can you do about your own salt intake? It's impossible to know for sure how much you're consuming. Even raw chicken in the grocery store is sometimes "enhanced" with salt water to make it plumper (and heavier, and thus more costly). But you can get some idea by checking the Nutrition Facts labels on products you buy and keeping a running tally. Some bakery goods and breakfast cereals have far more sodium than you'd expect. There's often a wide range of sodium among brands of the same product. Be sure to check the serving size indicated on the label. A bag of chips that looks individual may be listed as multiple servings.

Even low-sodium labels have different meanings: "Sodium free" means less than 5 mg per serving; "very low" has less than 35 mg; "low" is less than 140. "Reduced sodium" just means that it's down 25% from what an earlier formulation was -- but could still be high in sodium, just like "No added salt" doesn't mean salt free.

Ask restaurants to use less salt when you order. Lawrence Appel, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, says many people feel bloated after they eat out. "It's actually a sodium load, and it takes a few days to get rid of it," he says. When you cook at home, experts counsel to use only half the salt the recipe calls for; experiment with herbs and spices, or go with the natural flavor. Kids who grow up with less salt may never develop a "salt tooth." It may take a while to get accustomed to less salt, but once your tastes adjust, you may not want to go back. Commissioner Frieden likens reducing salt to switching from whole milk to skim milk. "If you go back, whole milk tastes like heavy cream," he says.

from The WSJ …

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Scientists have created a "Eureka machine" that can work out the laws of nature by observing the world around it – a development that could dramatically speed up the discovery of new scientific truths.

The machine took only hours to come up with the basic laws of motion, a task that occupied Sir Isaac Newton for years after he was inspired by an apple falling from a tree.

Scientists at Cornell University in New York have already pointed the machine at baffling problems in biology and plan to use it to tackle questions in cosmology and social behaviour.

The work marks a turning point in the way science is done. Eureka moments, which supposedly began in Archimedes' bath more than 2,000 years ago, might soon be happening not in the minds of geniuses, but through the warm hum of electronic circuitry.

"We've reached a point in science where there's a lot of data to deal with. It's not Newton looking at an apple, or Galileo looking at heavenly bodies any more, it's more complex than that," said Hod Lipson, the computer engineer who led the project.

"This takes the grunt out of science by sifting through data and looking for the laws that govern how something behaves."

Details of the machine are described in the US journal Science. The study appears alongside a report from scientists at the universities of Aberystwyth and Cambridge describing the first discovery of new scientific knowledge by a laboratory robot.

The robot, called Adam, devised and performed experiments to investigate the genetics of bakers' yeast. When scientists did their own experiments, they came to the same conclusions. Ross's team is already working on a second robot called Eve.

Together, the papers raise the question of how the role of scientists will change over the coming decades. For now, scientists believe the new technology will work alongside them rather than relegate them to technicians who tap in data and perform maintenance tasks, but leave the real thinking to the machines.

The Cornell machine uses a computer program that can search through huge amounts of data and look for underlying patterns. For example, a falling apple will abide by Newton's second law, which is often stated as F=ma, where F is the force acting on an object, m is its mass, and a is its acceleration. When fed information on the mass of the apple and its velocity as it falls, the machine would be able to work out the equation.

Lipson tested the machine by giving it information from basic lab experiments, such as swinging pendulums and tiny cars that moved up and down tracks on a cushion of air. After crunching through the data, the machine pinged and displayed several laws of motion and conservation of momentum.

The system runs its own checks to decide whether the laws it has found are likely to be interesting. In the pendulum test, for example, the tip of the pendulum is always the same distance from the pivot, but this does not shed any light on the underlying physics.

After proving that the machine worked, Lipson's team set it to work on the complex problem of metabolism in biological cells. The computer produced some equations, which the scientists are still trying to make sense of.

"It's like going to an oracle and asking what's going on. You are given an equation, but you need to work out what it means before you can understand what's really going on," said Lipson.

The team say they also plan to look at problems in cosmology and even social behaviour, which could reveal the underlying laws at play when people form social networks on the internet.

"The real test now is whether it can discover new laws of nature and I believe it will. There's no way forward in a lot of sciences without tools like this," Lipson said.

from .. the guardian ..

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Scientists said today the Antarctic ozone hole, caused largely by human pollution, is not showing any signs of recovery so far this year. Meanwhile, a separate study shows that nature itself is destroying ozone high in the atmosphere over Earth’s North Pole.

Ozone is a colorless gas that in the stratosphere (6 to 30 miles above the planet’s surface) absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Without the ozone,skin damage would suddenly be worse and the planet would be downright hostile to life as we know it. Holes, which are really areas where ozone is very thin, occur over each pole during their respective hemisphere’s spring. Typically these holes form when sunlight breaks up man-made chemicals, like chloroflurocarbons (or CFCs), and resulting gases such as chlorine destroy the ozone. But other naturally-occurring chemicals can also eat away at the ozone.

Strong winds

In March 2006, stronger-than usual winds circling high above the Arctic pulled ozone-destroying nitrogen oxides down in altitude some 30 miles, where they could attack ozone in the upper stratosphere, according to a study in the Sept. 27 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The destructive nitrogen oxides are created above the stratosphere when sunlight breaks up nitrogen and oxygen molecules. This finding shows that the winds have a greater impact on ozone levels than scientists previously thought. The destruction caused by the winds around the North Pole is only rivaled by the nearly 60 percent reduction in ozone molecules that occurred there in the winter of 2003-2004, when a series of powerful solar storms bombarded the region, creating higher levels of nitrogen oxides.

"We knew strong winds would lead to more [nitrogen oxides] in the stratosphere if there were solar storms, but seeing that much come down into the stratosphere when the sun was essentially quiet was amazing," said lead author Cora Randall of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

This upper-level destruction occurs far above the lower stratosphere’s CFC-induced ozone hole, and so doesn’t cause an immediate health threat. But it could have unanticipated climate consequences because the upper-level ozone usually heats up the stratosphere as it absorbs ultraviolet radiation, according to Randall. Human-induced climate change might also affect the strength of the polar winds, which could pull even more nitrogen oxides down into the stratosphere, she said.

"The atmosphere is part of a coupled system, and what affects one layer of the atmosphere can influence other layers in surprising ways," Randall said. "We will only be able to predict and understand the consequences of human activities if we study the entire system as a whole, not just in parts."

No Recovery over Antarctica

Studying the consequences of human activities on ozone is just what NASA scientists are doing at the bottom of the globe. Today, researchers released the latest image of the Antarctic ozone hole. Scientists have been monitoring the ozone hole’s annual maximum for signs of improvement since the Montreal Protocol, which phased out CFC’s, was passed 19 years ago.

"The Antarctic ozone hole will reach sizes on the order of 8-10 million square miles nearly every year until about 2018 or so," said Paul Newman, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. That area is larger that all of North America. Between 2020 and 2025, Newman expects to see detectable decreases in the hole’s size, but says it probably won’t reach normal levels until around 2070.

"So we will soon see what this year’s peak will reveal about the ozone hole and our ability to predict its development and recovery," Newman said. Meantime, in a statement, he and colleagues said: "Though it is still too early to tell, the 2006 Antarctic ozone hole has not shown any substantial signs of recovery."

from LiveScience …

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A couple of weeks ago there was an interesting opinion piece in the NYTimes about how physicists are the harbingers of doom, and are responsible for the end times. Or, more specifically, it’s because of physicists that the financial markets are in tatters all around us.

The basic idea is that greedy physicists have gone to Wall Street, cooked up all sorts of arcane derivative products, and subsequently unleashed these weapons of mass destruction on the financial markets. This sentiment is best epitomized by a statement from none other than Warren Buffett (perhaps the world’s most successful investor, and certainly the world’s richest): “beware of geeks bearing formulas”

Undoubtedly there is some truth underlying this sentiment, in the sense that there are plenty of (mostly lapsed) physicists working on Wall Street. And these physicists have indeed helped develop fairly mathematical and esoteric models for the markets. These models made it possible to leverage excessively (i.e., invest significantly with very little money down), and made it exceedingly difficult to evaluate risk. And it sure is convenient to find scapegoats on which to blame the global recession. But, fundamentally, the markets are in free-fall because of rampant and unfettered greed. And it turns out there was plenty of that to go around. For the last few years it was simply too easy to make huge sums of money by taking on large risk. So long as the markets went up, all was good. But when there’s the possibility to make vast sums of money, there’s an equal and opposite possibility of losing vast sums of money. Newton’s 3rd law of finance, I suppose. And this law has been much in evidence as of late.

from Discover Magazine …

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Being student , when ever i come across any new word , i first try on wikipedia ... and sometimes i tried that for my term papers and assignments too ... ( ahh , i was not the only one .. ) ... but i found that our professor used to remind us every time that "DON'T SEARCH ON WIKIPEDIA , BETTER USE BOOKS" ... but heyyyyyy , i'm not teacher's pet .. so i always try to find information in wikipedia first and then look in books ( only if can't find it on wikipedia or google ) ...



And i always wonder why people hate wikipedia ?? .... few days back i heard a chunk of information ... according to that , there are millions of people who browse Wikipedia in any given month, but only 2 percent of them (roughly 1,400) are responsible for editing nearly 75 percent of the information on the entire website.In other words, Wikipedia, while editable by anyone, is fueled almost entirely by the knowledge of a small, select group of individuals.

Consider them the Illuminati of Wikipedia; they control the flow of information that often finds its way into our college essays, despite our professors’ best attempts to dissuade us from citing it. The source of this startling revelation? The face of Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales. But, [Wales] insisted, the truth was rather different: Wikipedia was actually written by "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" where "I know all of them and they all know each other". Really, "it's much like any traditional organization."

I guess , there are lots of tools are available for analysis and simulation of energy ... i call it engineering of energy ... ;) ... but i thought that they always charge for this sort of sotwares and tools ... but in my previous solar energy class , our professor introduced us with new software provided by US, Department of Energy aka DOE ... the name is Energy Plus ...

EnergyPlus models heating, cooling, lighting, ventilating, and other energy flows as well as water in buildings. While originally based on the most popular features and capabilities of BLAST and DOE-2, EnergyPlus includes many innovative simulation capabilities such as time steps of less than an hour, modular systems and plant integrated with heat balance-based zone simulation, multizone air flow, thermal comfort, water use, natural ventilation, and photovoltaic systems. It is a stand-alone simulation program but it is not having any GUI , all the I/P and O/P are text based ... but they say GUI will be soon there ... ( i guess , its pretty enough for free , right ?? ) ..

To download it , you must have to register first at DOE site ... and then you can have option to choose for download, they also have this program for Linux and MAC OS ... once you register , they will send an email containing password ... which we are required to provide during installation ...

I say , if you want to try some tool for energy analysis or just want to experiece how things really work when guys design some system , what they really calculate , what are the factors that make efficent system then this software is really good ....

give it a try ...

Save the Planet ...