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Your produce and frozen foods could soon arrive at grocery stores in trucks that release fewer emissions. Researchers are developing a clean technology to keep your food cool while it travels.

Engineers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are working to replace refrigerated trucks' diesel-burning cooling system with fuel cells. These fuel cells mix hydrogen and air to create energy; the byproduct is water. Researcher Kriston Brooks says that means fewer greenhouse gas and particulate emissions than diesel engines.

"From the big picture of how much carbon dioxide we produce and other emissions, it's pretty small. But it's a start," Brooks says.

Brooks says hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as the diesel engines used to cool refrigerated trucks, but they can be expensive. He and his colleagues are working to make them cheaper for companies to use. The cooling system they are currently working on — which includes a fuel cell and cooling container, — costs about $40,000. By comparison, a diesel engine-based cooling system typically runs $20,000-$30,000. But, Brooks says, the price of fuel cells is quickly dropping.

He says people also get a little nervous when they hear the words hydrogen and fuel in the same sentence.

"We are working very hard on this project to include the hydrogen safety panel that [the Department of Energy] has set up to make sure that we're incorporating suggestions that they have so that it can be a safe technology," Brooks says.

Researchers will spend the next year testing the equipment in the lab. Field tests will take place in the summer of 2015, when trucks powered by the fuel cells will be used to transport groceries in California, Texas, and New York. The goal over the 400 hours of logged run time is to assess the fuel cell's durability as it rumbles down the road.

"We wanted to verify that it would work in various climates in different times of year. Certainly it's a lot more rigorous on a fuel cell and a [transport refrigeration unit] during the summertime," Brooks says.

Several grocery facilities participating in the research already power their forklifts with hydrogen fuel cells. Experiments are also being run in buses and cars, and on grid reliability projects. Researchers are also working on powering luggage transportation carts at airports with fuel cells.

The fuel cells, which are about the size of a breadbox, will save about 10 gallons of fuel per day per truck, the researchers say. That may not sound like much, but the hope is that if fuel cells can replace the diesel engines currently used to cool some 300,000 refrigerated trucks on the road in the U.S., the energy savings will soon add up.

This post originally appeared on Earthfix, a joint reporting project between Oregon Public Broadcasting, member station KUOW, KCTS 9 Public Television, Idaho Public Television, Northwest Public Radio and Southern Oregon Public Television.

One of the surprise movie hits this past weekend was almost entirely in Spanish. Instructions Not Included made an enormous amount of money per screen, more than $22,000, playing in fewer than 350 theaters. The boys in One Direction had the number one film, but they pulled in less than $6000 per screen. That's a huge victory for star Eugenio Derbez, a household name in Mexico, and for Pantelion films, which has been trying to find a Spanish-language hit in the U.S. film market for a few years now.

Instructions Not Included has a familiar story, no matter what language you tell it in: An American woman and a Mexican playboy have a fling in Acapulco. Months later, she shows up at his doorstep, hands him a baby she says is his, and takes off, leaving the bachelor to clean up his act and raise the adorable little girl by himself.

The film was made specifically for the Mexican and U.S. Latino audience. The studio — a joint venture of Lionsgate and the Mexican company that owns Univision — put its all into promoting the film and its star.

"We did a five city tour with Eugenio," says Pantelion CEO Paul Pressburger. "Eugenio was on Univision non-stop the last week in terms of morning and evening shows."

All of that promotion convinced Catherine Rosales to buy a ticket for Instructions Not Included this week in Washington, D.C.

"It has one of the funniest Hispanic actors," she said on her way into the theater. She'd seen the trailer and heard friends talking about it, too.

Research indicates that many Latinos in the U.S. are movie lovers. Last year, a quarter of all movie tickets sold were bought by Latinos, according to Nielsen. That's not a surprise to Alex Nogales, president of the National Hispanic Media Coalition.

"We're a very family-oriented culture," he points out. "When we go to the movies we don't go two at a time. We go all of us at the same time."

But Latinos in the U.S. won't see just any movie says Nogales. Pantelion's been releasing Spanish-language films for a few years but none of them have done very well at the box office. Only one topped the $5 million mark: A comedy starring Will Ferrell, called Casa de mi Padre. It got terrible reviews.

With Instructions Not Included, Alex Nogales thinks Pantelion found the right movie at the right time.

"You have distributors, you have stars, you have population. So when you have all these stars aligning you're going to get these results," Nogales says.

Pantelion is hoping those stars say in alignment. This weekend Instructions Not Included will open in 153 more theaters in the U.S... and in Mexico later this month.

Although he says he did not ask Congress to authorize the use of force against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime "as a symbolic gesture," President Obama reiterated Wednesday that "I always reserve the right and responsibility to act on behalf of America's national security."

The president's comment came during a joint news conference in Stockholm with Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. Obama had been asked what he will do if Congress rejects his request to use military force as a way to respond to Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons. While the president did not say he would go ahead with his plan even without the OK of Congress, he did not rule that out.

Obama is on the first day of a short visit to Europe, during which he will press other international leaders to agree that the world must act in response to the attack near Damascus two weeks ago in which, the U.S. says, about 1,400 people were killed and even more were injured.

"If we don't" respond forcefully, Obama said of taking military action against Assad, "we are effectively saying that even though we may condemn it [the use of chemical weapons] ... somebody who is not shamed by resolutions can continue to act with impunity."

Echoing a comment made Tuesday by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Obama also said that "I didn't set a red line" by saying Assad would be crossing such a mark if he used chemical weapons. "The world set a red line," Obama said, "when governments representing 98 percent of the world's population said the use of chemical weapons [is] abhorrent."

And Congress, he added, "set a red line when it ratified that treaty" after World War I.

Nations cannot just "shake our heads and go about our business" after attacks such as what happened in Syria, Obama said.

Prime Minister Reinfeldt said of Sweden's position that "this small country will always say 'let's put our hope in the United Nations' " and that he's hoping any decision on the use of force will be put off until U.N. inspectors report about what they found at the site of the attack in Syria. But, Reinfeldt added, "I understand the problem of not having a reaction to the use of chemical weapons and what kind of signal that sends to the rest of the world."

No one has ever doubted Mois Yussuroum's patriotism. As part of the Greek resistance during World War II, he fought Benito Mussolini's fascist army and then the Nazis.

"The other resistance fighters didn't know I was Jewish," he says, since he used the name "Yiorgos Gazis" in case he was captured. "But my superiors did know, and they gave me many responsibilities, including making me a garrison commander."

Now, more than 70 years after Yussuroum and other Greeks fought the German Nazis, Greece confronts the rise of the Golden Dawn Party, which espouses a far-right ideology. Its members use Nazi symbolism and slogans and blame "Jewish bankers" for the country's debt crisis. They say they're patriots, not fascists, a claim that makes Yussuroum, a retired dentist who's now 94, cringe.

"Their minds are sick," he says. "They say the Holocaust is a lie, and they don't believe the Germans killed Jews."

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