"Willing to die"

A female survivor of this month's violent storming by Pakistani forces of Islamabad's Red Mosque has spoken of how she wanted to be a suicide bomber.

[...]

"We wanted to carry out suicide attacks.  We didn't have enough ammunition to fight face-to-face...  Yes, we had a passion and we were willing to go to all lengths."

[...]

Just one of 30 women to leave the mosque alive, she said her greatest regret was that she had not embraced martyrdom, adding that she was "overcome by grief" when she saw her father again.

Well, I suppose one could always execute the lot and give them all their hearts' desires.  "You want to be a martyr?  No problem."

Virgin bio-butanol

Virgin (yeah, that Virgin), not content with buying into spaceflight, is buying into biofuels now — specifically, buying into Gevo, a CalTech spinoff founded to commercialize bio-butanol.  Unlike ethanol, butanol is not hygroscopic (it does not absorb water from the environment), which means that unlike ethanol, it can be shipped via pipelines that may be contaminated with water.¹

Butanol has 91% of the energy density of gasoline, comparing very favorably with ethanol at 61%, and most engines designed for gasoline or gasohol will run on straight butanol without modification.  Gevo plans to later produce butanol-based fuels for trucks and jet engines.

[1]  Though personally, I don't really see the problem with pumping ethanol through wet pipes.  You'll probably be discarding the first few kilolitres through the pipe anyway, because it's going to be contaminated with all kinds of stuff, and after the ethanol goes through, that pipe will be DRY.  Water in the pipes is almost more of a problem with gasoline than with ethanol, since it doesn't mix with the gasoline, which means any water the gas does pick up is going to settle out into the bottom of ... say, your gas tank.  Ethanol, meanwhile, will just dissolve it and carry it harmlessly through your engine.