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In their search for a low greenhouse gas emissions fuels, scientists have done a lot of embarrassing things: They have measured kangaroo farts and cow farts. Now they are collecting giraffe manure.

Prowling the animal cages at the Audubon Zoo with tweezers and sandwich bags was an unusual and somewhat disconcerting experience for David A. Mullin and his graduate students.

In the January 10th edition of the New York Times, Guy Gugliotta quotes biologist David A. Mullin (as he prowls the zoo with tweezers and baggies) as saying, "I’d never stood next to a giraffe before. They’re huge."
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We may eventually end up eating it, but a far better use for it would be to burn it as fuel. And we won’t use our own–we’ll use panda poop instead! It turns out that while pandas may have trouble with sex, they have no trouble pooping, and since bamboo makes up about 99% of their diet in the wild, their guts contain bacteria that is especially effective in breaking down the cellulose in plants into nutrients. This means that their excrement contains bacteria which can break down plant material in the way that is needed to use plants like corn as a new biofuels.
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What is "fracking?" It’s removing natural gas from the ground–and there is LOTS of it right here in the US, so if we produce cars that run on natural gas (as lots of trucks do already), then we can solve our oil dependency problems. HOWEVER, fracking uses LOTS of water (which we are ALSO short on) AND it is not necessarily emission-free.
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If you want to lose weight, maybe you should drink less beer. It turns out that beer may make a great new biofuel for cars (and this may be a better use for it!) So don’t drink and drive–drive on drink (and lose some of that beer gut). Biologists don’t even need beer to do it–they plan to use brewery WASTE.

Working with engineers at Anheuser-Busch, they took samples of bioreactor sludge from several breweries over the course of a year and analyzed the gene sequences of the microbes in it. One of the microbial populations in the sludge produces methane gas which Anheuser-Busch already uses to power its plants, saving the company millions of dollars every year.
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