I need a new car, and in my case “new” really means “used”. I can’t afford one of the shiny new electric ones, so it’s either gasoline or diesel. But in recent years we’ve seen a lot of bad headlines about diesel. Why do diesel engines have such a bad reputation? How much does diesel exhaust affect our health really? And what’s the car industry doing about it? That’s what we will talk about today.

There is a vast menagerie of potentially habitable worlds in the cosmos, which means the Universe could be home to a diversity of life beyond what we can imagine. Creatures built on silicon rather than carbon, or organisms that breathe hydrogen instead of oxygen. But regardless of how strange and wondrous alien life may be, it is still governed by the same chemistry as life on Earth, and that means it needs a chemical solvent.