Natural gas is a non-renewable fuel that’s odorless, colorless and tasteless. So, why is it that you smell rotten eggs when you turn the gas on? It’s a chemical called mercaptan added before distribution as a safety device. Natural gas is harvested in production fields, and stored in large underground systems.

Natural gas is used to heat homes, water heaters, pools and spas, and even grills and fireplaces. It can also generate electricity.

Many studies reveal the benefits of using natural gas at home. Natural gas furnaces last twice as long as an electric heat pump providing a more comfortable heat.

Natural gas is great to heat water and dry clothes also. It’s helpful if you dry consecutive loads to bank on stored heat. Separate heavy clothes from light weight fabrics to reduce drying time and use the proper water level for your load size when washing.

Gas is safer to cook with since you can see the flame reducing the chance of getting burned. The flame must always be smaller than the bottom of your pan. If the flame goes beyond the bottom you’re wasting energy. Use lids and covers to reach a certain temperature.

You should ensure that your furnace is clean and regularly checked. If you get your furnace checked once a year, you can save up to 2% on energy costs. The pilot light should be turned off if you are not going to use the appliance for a while. Seal all your doors and windows. Make sure you turn off fireplace dampers and close doors and vents in unused areas.

If your gas radiator is near an outside wall of your home, you might need to do something to avoid loss of heat. Place a sheet of aluminum foil between the radiator and the wall to reflect the heat back into the room.

If you’re upgrading your appliances be sure and purchase the Energy Star models. They are usually the most energy-efficient appliances. You might even take advantage of rebates when you switch from electricity to gas. Your dealer can usually help you with this.

More home builders and home owners are choosing to use natural gas, especially for heating. If you can save money, and use energy more efficiently, is that not a good enough reason to switch?

Take a moment to check cheap electricity and find real savings.

Got a derelict spaceship you need to tow back to star base? Or maybe you’re trying to prevent an enemy vessel from escaping? No problem: fire up the tractor beam.

This jack-of-all-trades tool ranks as a science fiction staple right alongside lasers and faster-than-light travel. An invisible tractor beam on the Death Star hauled in the Millennium Falcon in the original “Star Wars” flick, while a shimmering ray — which doubled as a repulsing beam — saved the crew’s bacon multiple times on “Star Trek.”

In sci-fi, tractor beams often consist of exotic-sounding particles and energies. In our day and age, using regular ol’ light to hold and manipulate objects tractor beam-style is already a reality, albeit on very tiny scales.

Biologists, for example, have used “optical tweezers” to study cells, DNA and other small bits since the late 1980s. “Optical trapping has been around a long time,” said Paul Stysley, a laser engineer at NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Stysley’s organization, among others, would like to see tractor beam-like technologies graduate to bigger tasks. Light could be used, NASA researchers

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A mobile home park in Florida can offer even more to those who look at the area and people around the homes. These parks are usually nestled in some very beautiful locations in Florida and are located near some of the Sunshine State’s waterways. The people in these mobile home parks are a friendly sort and the club house is always bustling with activities. A mobile home park in Florida can really be a great choice for people looking to retire.

Young men who take erectile dysfunction drugs for fun may damage their sex lives, a new study suggests.

Nearly 6 percent of the sexually active college men involved in the study reported taking drugs for erectile dysfunction (ED) without a prescription. Yet an analysis of these students’ sex lives unveiled a paradox: The more ED drugs men took, the worse they felt.

“Using ED drugs recreationally has the potential to negatively influence one’s confidence,” said Christopher Harte, lead author of the study published this month in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Men who abused ED drugs reported the same level of physical sexual functioning as non-users did, but Harte found that they were less confident about their abilities to get and maintain an erection. The recreational users also were less satisfied with their sex lives overall, even if they were satisfied during intercourse.

“One needs to be careful when they are frequently using these medications. It can set you up to have unreasonable expectations” about your sex life, said Harte, a research fellow at VA Boston Healthcare System.

Because the survey captured students’ feelings at one moment in time, Harte said it isn’t clear how the link

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Ancient creatures resembling stout-necked Loch Ness Monsters apparently developed arthritis in their monster jaws, revealing that even such lethal killers could suffer from and eventually succumb to diseases of old age, researchers find.

Scientists reached that conclusion while investigating the fossil of an extinct marine reptile known as a pliosaur. The carnivore was apparently an old female extending some 26 feet (8 meters). It had a 10-foot-long (3 meters), crocodilelike head, short neck, whalelike body and four powerful flippers to propel it through water to hunt down prey.

“This pliosaur, like many of its relatives, was truly huge,” researcher Michael Benton, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England, told LiveScience. “To stand beside its skull and realize that it is 3 meters long, and massive and heavy as it is, that it once functioned with muscles and blood vessels and nerves, is amazing. You can lie down inside its mouth.”

Normally, with huge jaws and teeth about 8 inches (20 centimeters) long, this pliosaur could have ripped most other animals apart. However, paleontologists found this specimen was apparently afflicted with an arthritis-like disease.

Old lady pliosaur

Benton and his colleagues analyzed an

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Adult sleepwalkers are more common than previously realized, with upward of 8 million American adults prone to nighttime ambulation, a new study finds.

In fact, about 3.6 percent of U.S. adults have walked in their sleep at least once in the previous year, researchers report Monday (May 14) in the journal Neurology. One percent experienced at least two episodes of sleepwalking per month.

The findings are higher than previous studies had suggested, the researchers wrote, including an estimate from a decade-old study of the general European population, which found that only about 2 percent of people had trouble with sleepwalking within the previous year. Results from the new study also showed certain mental illnesses, including depression, and some antidepressant medications were linked with a higher risk of experiencing sleepwalking. The study may provide some clues for treating the disorder, said study researcher Maurice Ohayon, a psychiatrist at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

“Now we know the biggest associations with sleepwalking, and the first thing to do is remove these pathological associations — sleep apnea, insomnia, alcohol consumption,” Ohayon told LiveScience. “The key thing we must say to people is, don’t be ashamed to be a sleepwalker.” [Top 10 Spooky Sleep Disorders]

Sleepwalking: a chronic problem

Sleepwalking, also known as somnambulism, usually occurs during non-rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (dreams, on the other hand, are most linked with the REM phases of sleep). Sleepwalkers should take episodes seriously, Ohayon said, as unconscious amblings can result in major injuries. Sleepwalkers may fall, run into things or even attempt complex tasks like driving a vehicle or initiating sex.

Children are more likely than adults to sleepwalk, a fact borne out by Ohayon and his colleagues’ study: Slightly more than a quarter of people

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Canon Inc. is moving toward fully automating digital camera production in an effort to cut costs — a key change being played out across Japan, a world leader in robotics.

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It took 16 days, but Claire Lomas of England, paralyzed from the waist down after a horse-riding accident in 2006, completed all 26.2 miles of the London Marathon last week with the help of robotic legs.

She had with her at the finish line her 13-month-old daughter, Maisie — also being assisted with her walking, albeit lovingly, by an adult, being the shaky toddler that she is.

But Lomas didn’t seem to mind that she came in last place; she pushed just as hard as the other racers, she said.

“It was very challenging on my arms and hard mentally, because I can’t feel my legs, and I had to concentrate on every step,” Lomas told the BBC.

Lomas isn’t the first paraplegic to finish a marathon. Dozens, in fact, completed the 2012 London Marathon in wheelchairs, zipping across the finish line in a few hours, not days. Many, however, consider Lomas’ accomplishments all the more pioneering. She is the first person to “run” a marathon with robotic legs.  She was outfitted with a bionic walking device called ReWalk, a 40-pound (18-kilogram) motorized exoskeleton created by an Israeli company, Argo Medical Technologies. [Bionic Humans: Top 10 Technologies]

At about $70,000 apiece, ReWalk isn’t cheap. And you could argue that it isn’t very practical, given the fact that most paraplegics can get about reasonably well in a wheelchair. Yet ReWalk and similar first-generation robotic devices represent a promising future for humans with compromised mobility.

E. Paul Zehr, a neuroscience expert at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, describes this type of application for robotic-mobility devices in his book, “Inventing Iron Man: The Possibility of a Human Machine” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

“Tony Stark would be proud,” Zehr said of Lomas, comparing her

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Baby formula someday may include the ingredient of mucus, to help protect babies against viral infections, researchers say.

Unlike breast milk, baby formula lacks elements of the mother’s immune system that protect the baby against disease. This may be one reason mothers hesitate to switch to baby formula, said Katharina Ribbeck, a biological engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“It would be great if we could improve the quality and add those missing components,” Ribbeck said.

In their recent study, Ribbeck and colleagues showed that mucins, which are the proteins that are the main component of mucus, protected cells against infection by human papillomavirus(HPV), influenza A (a type of flu virus) and Merkel cell polyomavirus (a virus that can cause skin cancer).

Although the researchers tested only these three viruses, they suspect mucins protect against infection by other types of viruses.

The findings suggest mucins might be added to a variety of products, from hygiene products to baby formula, as an antiviral supplement, the researchers said. Mucins are already added to some products, but not for their antiviral properties; for example, they are added to certain moisturizers for their moisturizing properties.

However, obstacles remain. The study was conducted on human cells in a dish, so more work would be needed to show the same thing would happen in the human body.

In addition, the mucins used in the study were collected from pigs’ stomachs. Some people may not be comfortable with the idea of consuming an animal product, Ribbeck said.

In the future, researchers may find a way to mass-produce synthetic mucins, Ribbeck said. She noted that in the case of insulin, a synthetic version was created after the first studies used a version isolated from pigs.

Mucus, which coats wet surfaces of the

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