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Gasoline refiners claim that the reason gas prices are so high is because there are 50 different blends of gasoline in this country, all of them mandated by various cities and states to match their environmental needs. ?[Refiners] are in a difficult position, it?s tough to make everyone happy,? according to Mark Zandi of Economics.com.

Jerry Thompson, of Citgo, says there could be supply problems this summer in places like California and the Great Lakes regions that have specific gasoline requirements to cut smog. Refiners would like to see only three blends in the future. ?The real pinch point is distribution and tankage,? says Thompson.
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Hackers not only hit the UFO Internet Conference, they?ve gotten into the White House as well.

The barrage came from Chinese hacker groups that made coordinated attacks on U.S. websites in an anti-American protest, knocking out the government internet for 2 hours. ?The internet service provider was clogged due to an enormous amount of data sent to the White House website,? said spokesman Jimmy Orr.

The attack came after a Chinese hacker group posted instructions on how to download and use a ?flood? tool and called for it to be used against White House and CIA sites, according to the Virginia-based security firm iDefense. ?We didn?t notice a significant impact on [the CIA] site,? says iDefense spokesman Michael Cheek.
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Sometimes when we?ve ordered expensive bottled water in a restaurant, we?ve thought that our parents would whirl in their graves if they knew we were actually buying water. Now it turns out they?d be right: a study commissioned by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has found that bottled water is no safer or healthier than tap water.

Some bottled waters that sell for 1,000 times the price of tap water turned out to be basically the same thing?water taken from the tap and put into bottles. The WWF is advising people to drink tap water ?for the benefit of the environment and their wallets.?
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New measurements show that the atmosphere?s ability to keep itself clean is decreasing. In the past 10 years, levels of an important cleansing chemical have declined markedly in the Northern Hemisphere.

Chemicals are generated in the air by forces such as ultraviolet light and lightening. These chemicals are highly reactive and tend to remove polluting gases. One of the most important of these is the hydroxl radical, OH, which is the water molecule minus one hydrogen atom. The missing hydrogen atom makes it highly reactive so that it easily sucks up pollutants. OH changes pollutants into gases that are easily dissolved in water and thus are removed from the atmosphere during rainfall.
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