Science & Nature | Environment | Smithsonian.com

8 Things We’ve Learned Lately About Thunder and Lightning

Fri, 24 May 2013 01:17:00 GMT

Much about lightning remains a mystery . Photo courtesy of Flickr user Owen Zammit Summer in America unofficially begins this weekend, and with it come the late afternoon and middle-of-the-night thunderstorms that are Nature’s version of shock and awe. But as common as they are, much about thunder and lightning remains a mystery. In fact, scientists are still debating what actually causes those amazing flashes across the sky. Here are eight recent findings related to storm-watching: 1) Come to the dark side: The dazzling thunderbolts get all the attention, but within each thunderstorm are invisible intense bursts of gamma rays, which have become known as “dark lightning.

Save the Amazon, Increase Malaria

Thu, 23 May 2013 02:03:31 GMT

A pristine stretch of Amazon rainforest–teeming with malaria-transmitting mosquitoes? Photo by Phil P. Harris Most people consider saving the Amazon rainforest a noble goal, but nothing comes without a cost. Cut down a rainforest, and the planet looses untold biodiversity along with ecosystem services like carbon dioxide absorption. Conserve that tract of forest, however, and risk facilitating malaria outbreaks in local communities, a recent study finds. Nearly half of malaria deaths in the Americas occur in Brazil, and of those nearly all originate from the Amazon. Yet few conservationists consider the forest’s role in spreading that disease. Those researchers who do tak

Is a Lack of Water to Blame for the Conflict in Syria?

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The world’s earliest documented water war happened 4,500 years ago, when the armies of Lagash and Umma, city-states near the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, battled with spears and chariots after Umma’s king drained an irrigation canal leading from the Tigris. “Enannatum, ruler of Lagash, went into battle,” reads an account carved into an ancient stone cylinder, and “left behind 60 soldiers [dead] on the bank of the canal.” Water loss documented by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), a pair of satellites operated by NASA and Germany’s aerospace center, suggests water-related conflict could be brewing on the riverba

Digging for the Secrets Beneath Antarctica

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:00 GMT

In early January, the start of summer in Antarctica, a dozen tractors towing sleds laden with 1.2 million pounds of scientific equipment completed a two-week trek from the United States’ McMurdo Station to a site 614 miles across the ice. More than 20 researchers who had arrived by plane used the gear to bore a hole nearly half a mile into the ice—becoming the first people ever to fetch a clean sample from one of the continent’s hidden lakes, arguably the most pristine bodies of water on the planet . What they found promises to open a new chapter in our understanding of life on earth. For several decades at least, scientists have known that vast chambers filled with wat

Never Heard of Doggerland? Blame Climate Change From Millennia Ago

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:00 GMT

As you contemplate the likelihood of sea level rise, consider that just 20,000 years ago—a snap of the fingers in geologic time and well within the span of human existence—the North Sea didn’t even exist. Global sea levels were as much as 400 feet lower than today, Britain was part of Continental Europe and terra firma stretched from Scotland to southern Norway. This vast expanse, known as Doggerland, was a paradise for human hunters, who caught fish and fowl and gathered plants. Archaeologists sifting through seabed artifacts have developed a sketchy portrait of these human societies: Perhaps 10,000 people or more, clustered here and there in grass huts in waterside ca

Scientists Finally Pinpoint the Pathogen That Caused the Irish Potato Famine

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:31:33 GMT

A potato affected by P. infestans, the pathogen responsible for the Irish Potato Famine. The exact strain involved in the 1840s famine has now been identified for the first time. Image via USDA For nearly 150 years, starting in the late 17th century, millions of people living in Ireland subsisted largely off one crop: the potato. Then, in 1845, farmers noticed that their potato plants’ leaves were covered in mysterious dark splotches. When they pulled potatoes from the ground, most were shrunken, mushy and inedible. The blight spread alarmingly quickly, cutting yields from that year’s harvest in half. By 1846, harvest from potato farms had dropped to one quarter of its orig

Endangered Ocean Creatures Beyond the Cute and Cuddly

Fri, 17 May 2013 06:10:02 GMT

Staghorn coral is listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. NOAA Fisheries has proposed it be reclassified as endangered. Photo by Albert Kok Our oceans are taking a beating from overfishing, pollution, acidification and warming, putting at risk the many creatures who make their home in seawater. But when most people think of struggling ocean species, the first animals that come to mind are probably whales, seals or sea turtles. Sure, many of these large (and adorable) animals play an important part in the marine ecosystem and are threatened with extinction due to human activities, but in fact, of the 94 marine species listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), o

The World According to Twitter, in Maps

Fri, 10 May 2013 02:31:00 GMT

Tweets from around the world, plotted by location as part of a new study. Click to enlarge. Image via First Monday/Leetaru et. al. It’s hard to appreciate just how quickly and thoroughly Twitter has taken over the world. Just seven years ago, in 2006, it was an idea sketched out on a pad of paper. Now, the service is used by an estimated 554 million users—a number that amounts to nearly 8 percent of the all humans on the planet—and an estimated 170 billion tweets have been sent, with that number climbing by roughly 58 million every single day. All these tweets provide an invaluable source of news, entertainment, conversation and connection between people. But for sc

The Water On the Moon Probably Came From Earth

Thu, 09 May 2013 06:01:00 GMT

New isotopic analysis of Apollo-era Moon rocks shows that the water locked inside them likely came from our planet . Image via Wikimedia Commons/Gregory H. Revera In September 2009, after decades of speculation, evidence of water on the surface of the Moon was discovered for the first time. Chandrayaan-1, a lunar probe launched by India’s space agency, had created a detailed map of the minerals that make up the Moon’s surface and analysts determined that, in several places, the characteristics of lunar rocks indicated that they bore as much 600 million metric tonnes of water. In the years since, we’ve seen further evidence of water both on the surface and within the

Baby Weddell Seals Have the Most Adult-Like Brains in the Animal Kingdom

Thu, 09 May 2013 01:00:10 GMT

Helpless babe or capable professional navigator? Photo by Samuel Blanc With their big, glossy black eyes and downy fluff, baby Weddell seal pups are some of the most adorable newborns in the animal kingdom. But these cute infants are far from helpless bundles of joy. New research published in the journal Marine Mammal Science reveals that Weddell seal pups likely possess the most adult-like brain of any mammal at birth. The seal pups’ brains, compared to adult seals’ brain proportions, are the largest known for any mammal to date. The researchers write that this is “remarkable” considering that the pups are quite small at birth compared to many other newborn ma

How Does Science Help Pandas Make More Panda Babies?

Wed, 08 May 2013 03:11:27 GMT

The National Zoo’s two giant pandas don’t know how to mate with each other. But thanks to artificial insemination Mei Xiang (L) and Tian Tian (R) have produced two cubs, and a third may be on the way. Photo courtesy of the National Zoo The National Zoo’s two giant pandas have little interest in each other 11 months of the year. Mei Xiang, 15, and Tian Tian, 16, are solitary creatures, happy to spend most of their days chowing down and napping. But March was mating season. For 30 to 45 days, pandas undergo behavioral and physical changes that prepare them for an annual 24- to 72-hour window in which females ovulate, the only time they can conceive. Just because they a

Why Asparagus Makes Your Urine Smell

Fri, 03 May 2013 01:48:33 GMT

Our bodies convert asparagusic acid into sulfur-containing chemicals that stink—but some of us are spared from the pungent aroma. Photo by Gunnar Magnusson If you’ve ever noticed a strange, not-entirely-pleasant scent coming from your urine after you eat asparagus, you’re definitely not alone. Distinguished thinkers as varied as Scottish mathematician and physician John Arbuthnot (who wrote in a 1731 book that “asparagus…affects the urine with a foetid smell”) and Marcel Proust (who wrote how the vegetable “transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume”) have commented on the phenomenon. Even Benjamin Franklin took note, stating in a 1781

Five Innovative Technologies that Bring Energy to the Developing World

Thu, 02 May 2013 06:20:14 GMT

VOTO, a new device that converts the heat from a fire into readily usable electricity. Photo via Point Source Power In the wealthy world, improving the energy system generally means increasing the central supply of reliable, inexpensive and environmentally-friendly power and distributing it through the power grid. Across most of the planet, though, simply providing new energy sources to the millions who are without electricity and depend on burning wood or kerosene for heat and light would open up new opportunities. With that in mind, engineers and designers have recently created a range of innovative devices that can increase the supply of safe, cheap energy on a user-by-user basis,

Baby Sand Tiger Sharks Devour Their Siblings While Still in the Womb

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:01:07 GMT

How many unborn brothers and sisters did this sand tiger shark devour to be here today? Photo by Amada44 Baby animals may seem irresistibly adorable, but in reality many of them are calculating killers. Hyena, wolf or even dog litter runts are pushed aside by their larger siblings and left to go hungry; fuzzy white egret chicks will kick their weaker clutch mates out of the nest to certain doom; and baby golden eagles sometimes go so far as to snack on their smaller brothers and sisters while their mother looks on. Perhaps most disturbing of all, however, is the case of the baby sand tiger shark. While sharks may not be the most snuggly animals to begin with, the sand tiger shark set

The Strange Beauty of David Maisel’s Aerial Photographs

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 02:07:53 GMT

Terminal Mirage 2, 2003. Credit: David Maisel/INSTITUTE For almost 30 years, David Maisel has been photographing areas of environmental degradation. He hires a local pilot to take him up in a four-seater Cessna, a type of plane he likens to an old Volkswagen beetle with wings, and then, anywhere from 500 to 11,000 feet in altitude, he cues the pilot to bank the plane. With a window propped open, Maisel snaps photographs of the clear-cut forests, strip mines or evaporation ponds below. American Mine (Carlin NV 2), 2007. Credit: David Maisel/INSTITUTE The resulting images are beautiful and, at the same, absolutely unnerving. What exactly are those blood-red stains? As a nod to the con

14 Fun Facts About Penguins

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 02:30:52 GMT

Emperor penguins swimming. Photo by Polar Cruises Penguins seem a bit out of place on land, with their stand-out black jackets and clumsy waddling. But once you see their grace in the water, you know that’s where they’re meant to be–they are well-adapted to life in the ocean. April 25 of each year is World Penguin Day, and to celebrate here are 14 facts about these charismatic seabirds. 1. Depending on which scientist you ask, there are 17–20 species of penguins alive today, all of which live in the southern half of the globe. The most northerly penguins are Galapagos penguins (Spheniscus mendiculus), which occasionally poke their heads north of the equator. 2. While they can’

For Some Species, You Really Are What You Eat

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 03:30:23 GMT

Flamingos depend on plant-derived chemical compounds to color their feathers, legs and beaks. Photo: Flickr user longhorndave Pop quiz: Why are flamingos pink? If you answered that it’s because of what they eat—namely shrimp—you’re right. But there’s more to the story than you might think. Animals naturally synthesize a pigment called melanin, which determines the color of their eyes, fur (or feathers) and skin. Pigments are chemical compounds that create color in animals by absorbing certain wavelengths of light while reflecting others. Many animals can’t create pigments other than melanin on their own. Plant life, on the other hand, can produce a variety of them, and if a large qua

Before and After: America’s Environmental History

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:21:37 GMT

A difference of nearly four decades: at top, a ski area in Aspen, Colorado last year, captured by Ron Hoffman; at bottom, the same location in 1974, shot by Dustin Wesley. Credit: US EPA In 1971, about 70 photographers, commissioned by the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency, set out to document the American landscape on just 40 rolls of film each. They trudged through coal mines and landfills, traversed deserts and farms and discovered big cities’ small corridors. The end result was DOCUMERICA, a collection of more than 15,000 shots capturing the country’s environmental problems—from water and air pollution to industrial health hazards—over six years. Decades lat

Which Primate Is the Most Likely Source of the Next Pandemic?

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:01:09 GMT

This chimp may look innocent, but he may harbor any of dozens of diseases that infect humans. Photo by AfrikaForce Anyone who has read a Richard Preston book, such as The Hot Zone or Panic in Level 4, knows the danger of tampering with wildlife. The story usually goes something like this: Intrepid explorers venture into a dark, bat infested cave in the heart of East Africa, only to encounter something unseen and living, which takes up residence in their bodies. Unknowingly infected, the happy travelers jump on a plane back to Europe or the States, spreading their deadly pathogen willy-nilly to every human they encounter upon the way. Those people, in turn, bring the novel virus or bact

Genetically Modified E. Coli Bacteria Can Now Synthesize Diesel Fuel

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 07:01:07 GMT

By combining genes from different bacteria species, scientists created E. coli that can produce diesel fuel from fat. Image via Marian Littlejohn/PNAS Over the past few decades, researchers have developed biofuels derived from an remarkable variety of organisms—soybeans, corn, algae, rice and even fungi. Whether synthesized into ethanol or biodiesel, though, all of these fuels suffer from the same limitation: They have to be refined and blended with heavy amounts of conventional, petroleum-based fuels to run in existing engines. Though this is far from the only current problem with biofuels, a new approach by researchers from the University of Exeter in the UK appears to solve at leas

10 Things We’ve Learned About the Earth Since Last Earth Day

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 03:09:20 GMT

Image via NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring Last year, to celebrate the 42nd Earth Day, we took a look at 10 of the most surprising, disheartening, and exciting things we’d learned about our home planet in the previous year—a list that included discoveries about the role pesticides play in bee colony collapses, the various environmental stresses faced by the world’s oceans and the millions of unknown species are still out in the environment, waiting to be found. This year, in time for Earth Day on Monday, we’ve done it again, putting together another list of 10 notable discoveries made by scientists since Earth Day 2012—a list that ranges from specific top

Hurricane Sandy Generated Seismic Shaking As Far Away As Seattle

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:01:07 GMT

New research finds that the superstorm’s massive ocean waves produced seismic activity as far away as Seattle. Image via NASA If you weren’t on the East Coast during Hurricane Sandy, you likely experienced the disaster through electronic means: TV, radio, the internet or phone calls. As people across the country tracked the storm by listening to information broadcast through electromagnetic waves, a different kind of wave, produced by the storm itself, was traveling beneath their feet. Keith Koper and Oner Sufri, a pair of geologists at the University of Utah, recently determined that the crashing of massive waves against Long Island, New York and New Jersey—as well as wav

DNA Sequencing Reveals that Coelacanths Weren’t the Missing Link Between Sea and Land

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 06:01:58 GMT

The rare coealacanth’s genome is slowly evolving—and contrary to prior speculation, it probably isn’t the common ancestor of all land animals. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Amelia Guo On December 23, 1938, South African Hendrick Goosen, the captain of the fishing trawler Nerine, found an unusual fish in his net after a day of fishing in the Indian Ocean off of East London. He showed the creature to local museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who rinsed off a layer of slime and described it as “the most beautiful fish I had ever seen…five foot long, a pale mauvy blue with faint flecks of whitish spots; it had an iridescent silver-blue-green sheen all over. It

The Colorado: America’s Most Endangered River

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 03:21:38 GMT

Drought and an increased demand for water have stressed the Colorado River, which flows nearly 1,500 miles through seven states and Mexico. Photo by Flickr user Alex E. Proimos When Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of Jacques, recently went to Mexico to explore the southern terminus of the Colorado River, she found mud, sand and dust where water once raged. The expedition was videotaped for a short film (viewable below) produced in conjunction with Cousteau’s nonprofit, Blue Legacy, which raises awareness about water issues. The video was called Death of a River: The Colorado River Delta. That title, it turns out, is an apt one: Today, the conservation organization American Riv

Five Surprising Facts About the Common Cold

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 07:30:59 GMT

More than 1 billion cases of the common cold occur in the United States each year. Credit: Flickr user mcfarlandomo This year, prolonged extreme temperatures and seemingly never-ending snowstorms in the United States forced many inside, seeking shelter from what felt like an unusually long winter. This meant some of us were stuck in bed for a day or two clutching a box of Kleenex and downing cough syrup. That’s because viruses that cause the common cold love enclosed spaces with lots of people—the family room, the office, the gym. And though spring has arrived, cold-causing microbes haven’t slowed down. More than 200 viruses can trigger a runny nose, sore throat, sneezing and coughing

Where Are the Greenest Schools in the Country?

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The definition of being eco-conscious is so much more than having solar panels on a roof

Why Humidity Makes Your Hair Curl

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 03:36:00 GMT

Humid air causes hydrogen bonds to form between the proteins in your hair, triggering curls and frizz. Image via Flickr user Simon Gotz If you have long hair, you probably don’t need to look up a weather report to get an idea of how much humidity’s in the air: You can simply grab a fistful of hair and see how it feels. Human hair is extremely sensitive to humidity—so much that some hygrometers (devices that indicate humidity) use a hair as the measuring mechanism, because it changes in length based on the amount of moisture in the air. Straight hair goes wavy. If you have curly hair, humidity turns it frizzy or even curlier. Taming the frizz has become a mega indust

Where Have the Trees of Guam Gone?

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 03:32:05 GMT

Scientists believe the absence of seed-dispersing birds is thinning the forests on the island of Guam. Photo by Isaac Chellman Visitors to Guam’s forests find them quiet–eerily so: No chirping of birds can be heard overhead. But slithering in the shadows on the ground are snakes, each some six feet long. Brown tree snakes made their debut on Guam, the southernmost island in the Mariana Archipelago, when islanders were rebuilding after World War II. Most likely, they were stowaways in lumber shipments heading north through the Pacific Ocean from New Guinea. They quickly began feasting on the birds and small lizards they discovered in Guam’s dense forests, and–free to s

Bean Leaves Don’t Let the Bedbugs Bite by Using Tiny, Impaling Spikes

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:01:00 GMT

This adult male bedbug wants to suck your blood. Photo: Armed Forces Pest Management Board For thousands of years, humans have shared their beds with blood-sucking parasites. The ancient Greeks complained of bedbugs, as did the Romans. When the lights go off for those suffering from this parasitic infestation today, from under the mattress or behind the bedboard creeps up to 150,000 of the rice grain-sized insects (though average infestations are around 100 insects). While bedbugs are one of the few parasites that live closely with humans yet do not transmit a serious disease, they do cause nasty red rashes in some of their victims, not to mention the psychological terror of knowing t

New Web Tool Helps Avoid Flooding by Finding the Best Spots to Build Wetlands

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 05:12:50 GMT

Wetlands, such as this marsh above, buffer communities against flooding. Photo by Flickr user daryl_mitchell In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy last fall, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo joked to President Barack Obama that New York “has a 100-year flood every two years now.” On the heels of flooding from 2011′s Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee, it certainly seemed that way. Given that climate change has sparked multiple major storms and raised sea levels, and that urban and agricultural development have impeded our natural flood-management systems, chronic flooding could be here to stay. Wetlands, which include swamps, lagoons, marshes and mangroves, help mit

Do Wind Turbines Need a Rethink?

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:05:37 GMT

Imagine them without the blades. Photo courtesy of Flickr user “Caveman Chuck” Coker Bet you didn’t know that last year a record amount of wind power was installed around the planet. The U.S. set a record, too, and, once again, became the world leader in adding new wind power, pushing China into second place for the year. You’re not alone in being clueless about this. So was I. After all, this is a subject that gets about as much attention as 17-year-cicadas in a off year. What generally passes for energy coverage in the U.S. these days is the relentless cycle of gas-prices-up, gas-prices-down stories and the occasional foray into the natural-gas-fracking-is-a

19th Century Shark Tooth Weapons Reveal A Reef’s Missing Shark Species

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:01:00 GMT

Lashed to a spear made in the Gilbert Islands, researchers found a tooth from a dusky shark, a species previously unknown in the area. Image via PLOS ONE/Drew et. al. For decades, a total of 124 swords, tridents and spears taken from the Pacific Ocean’s Gilbert Islands in the mid-1800s sat untouched in vaults in Chicago’s Field Museum. The weapons—each made up of dozens of individual shark teeth that islanders lashed to a wooden core with coconut fibers—were primarily considered artifacts of anthropological value. Then, Joshua Drew, a marine conservation biologist at the museum, had an unusual idea: that the shark teeth lining the serrated blades could also se

Earthworms: A Nightmare for America’s Orchids?

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 06:53:00 GMT

Worms are great for your garden, but a recent study shows that non-native species may be wreaking havoc on orchids in forests along the east coast. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. Think twice before you order earthworms to improve the soil of your garden. A group of scientists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences recently published a study that shows the damage non-native earthworms, who creep their way into forests thanks to human activities like fishing and gardening, may cause to one of the world’s favorite flowers, the orchid. Goodyera pubes

What Makes Rain Smell So Good?

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 04:01:00 GMT

A mixture of plant oils, bacterial spores and ozone is responsible for the powerful scent of fresh rain. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Juni Step outside after the first storm after a dry spell and it invariably hits you: the sweet, fresh, powerfully evocative smell of fresh rain. If you’ve ever noticed this mysterious scent and wondered what’s responsible for it, you’re not alone. Back in 1964, a pair of Australian scientists (Isabel Joy Bear and R. G. Thomas) began the scientific study of rain’s aroma in earnest with an article in Nature titled “Nature of Agrillaceous Odor.” In it, they coined the term petrichor to help explain the phenomenon, comb

10 New Things We Know About Food and Diets

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:55:37 GMT

New research says olive oil is one healthy fat. Courtesy of Flickr user renedepaula Usually, when we talk about innovation, it has to do with some whizzy new invention, like a robot ant colony, or a novel approach to solving a problem, say a wind turbine that doesn’t wipe out bats and birds. Rarely does it have to do with something as ancient, or prosaic, as olive oil. Sometimes, though, research tells us something new about something old and it forces us to view it with fresh appreciation. So it is with olive oil. In this case, it’s two studies. The first, done by the German Research Center for Food Chemistry, focused on whether it’s possible to lower the fat co

The Greening of the Arctic is Underway

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 05:01:45 GMT

As the Arctic warms, more of it will be covered by shrubs (like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, above) and even by forest. Image via ANWR You probably think of the Arctic as a cold, frozen tundra—home to lichen, polar bears and scattered herds of reindeer. In many places, this view would be accurate, but in a few relatively southern areas in Canada, Alaska and Russia, warming temperatures over the past few decades have allowed new types of plants, such as shrubs, to take root. And by 2050—if current warming trends continue—we’ll see a dramatically different ecosystem across the Arctic, starting with something that’s largely unknown in the area currently: trees. Accord

Microbes Buried Deep in Ocean Crust May Form World’s Largest Ecosystem

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 05:17:29 GMT

Beneath the seafloor, there is an ecosystem of microbes living in the oceanic crust, independent of sunlight. Here, the seafloor of McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. NSF/USAP photo by Steve Clabuesch If you were to hit the seafloor and continue to travel down, you’d run into an ecosystem unlike any other on earth. Beneath several hundred meters of seafloor sediment is the Earth’s crust: thick layers of lava rock running with cracks that cover around 70% of the planet’s surface. Seawater flows through the cracks, and this system of rock-bound rivulets is enormous: it’s the largest aquifer on earth, containing 4% of global ocean volume, says Mark Lever, an ecologist who studies anaerobic (no-

Greenland’s Glaciers Are Hemorrhaging Ice, Best Seen By Photos from Space

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 01:30:00 GMT

An island of ice breaking away from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier (in the center of the photo) in the summer of 2010. By NASA On the morning of July 16, 2010, a hunk of ice four times the size of Manhattan cracked away from the tongue of Greenland’s Petermann Glacier and drifted to sea as the largest iceberg since 1962. Just two years later, another massive section of ice calved from the same glacier. Icebergs like these don’t stay put in the Arctic–they get picked up by currents and ushered to warmer climates, melting along the way. According to a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Greenland’s melting glaciers and ice caps

A Survey of the 161 Bacterial Families That Live on Your Fruits and Veggies

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:01:34 GMT

The first-ever sequencing of the produce microbiome reveals that grapes, peaches and sprouts host the largest diversity of harmless bacteria. Image via Wikimedia Commons In recent years, research has upended one of the most intuitive ideas of modern science: that bacteria simply make us sick. Scientists have discovered that many types of bacteria living in and on the human body play a crucial role in its healthy functioning—and that these colonies are remarkably populous, with an estimated ten times as many bacterial cells as human ones in the average person. Similarly, most research into the microorganisms living on fresh produce has focused on a few species of bacteria that cause di

Landslide “Quakes” Give Clues to the Location and Size of Debris Flows

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 05:32:14 GMT

Landslides can be both sudden and devastating to people living in the shadows of mountains. This one, which slid in 2006 in the Philippine province of Southern Leyte, killed more than 1000 people. Image via U.S. Marine Corps/Raymond D. Petersen III Imagine a 100-million-ton mass of rock, soil, mud and trees sliding off a mountain 30 miles from a major city, and no one knowing that it happened until days later. Such was the case after Typhoon Morakot hit Taiwan in 2009, dumping around 100 inches of rain in the southern regions of the island over the course of 24 hours. Known as the Xiaolin landslide, named for the village it hit and obliterated, the thick carpet of debris it left behin

Sea Monkeys, Ferns and Frozen Frogs: Nature’s Very Own Resurrecting Organisms

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 03:39:14 GMT

Tadpole shrimp eggs can remain dormant for years, then burst into life when elusive desert rains arrive. Photo by Flickr user theloushe As Easter draws near, we begin to notice signs of nature’s very own annual resurrection event. Warming weather begins “breeding lilacs out of the dead land,” as T.S. Elliot noted, and “stirring dull roots with spring rain.” Where a black and white wintery landscape just stood, now technicolor crocus buds peak through the earth and green shoots brighten up the azalea bushes. Aside from this grand show of rebirth, however, nature offers several cases of even more overtly stunning resurrections. From frozen animals jumping b

Brown Polar Bears, Beluga-Narwhals and Other Hybrids Brought to You by Climate Change

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 02:43:41 GMT

Polar bear-brown bear hybrids like this pair at Germany’s Osnabrück Zoo are becoming more common as melting sea ice forces the two species to cross paths. Photo by Corradox/Wikimedia Commons Scientists and science writers have created catchy monikers for hybrid species, much the way tabloid writers merge the names of celebrity couples (Kimye, Brangelina, anyone?). Lions and tigers make ligers. Narwhals meet beluga whales in the form of narlugas. And pizzlies and grolar bears are a cross between polar bears and grizzlies. In coming years, their creativity may get maxed out to meet an expected spike in the number of hybrids. A driving force? Climate change. A new study published

Untangling the Mysterious Genetic Tentacles of the Giant Squid

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:30:50 GMT

A model of a giant squid versus sperm whale. Photo taken at the American Museum of Natural History by Mike Goren from New York For centuries, monsters of the deep sea captivated the imagination of the public and terrified explorers–none more so than the many-tentacled kraken. In 13th century Icelandic sagas, the Vikings wrote of a terrifying monster that “swallows both men and ships and whales and everything that it can reach.” Eighteenth century accounts from Europe describe arms emerging from the ocean that could pull down the mightiest ships, attached to bodies the size of floating islands. Today, we’re fairly confident that a tentacled beast will not emerge

When an Iceberg Melts, Who Owns the Riches Beneath the Ocean?

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Global warming might be an environmental catastrophe, but countries eyeing the North Pole also see it as an opportunity. “We’ve never had a situation where an ocean has appeared overnight,” says Rob Huebert, a political scientist at the University of Calgary, who studies Arctic security issues. “The ice kept everybody out, and now all of a sudden the ice is going to be gone. So what happens?” Maybe a 21st-century version of the Great Game, which Russia and Britain played among the mountains and deserts of Central Asia in the 19th century. The prize then was the riches of India; today, it’s new shipping routes and untapped natural resources, including a

Nearly 8 Miles Down, Bacteria Thrive in the Oceans’ Deepest Trench

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 06:01:00 GMT

At the bottom of the Mariana Trench, nearly eight miles below the ocean’s surface, abundant communities of bacteria thrive. Image via PNAS/Yayanos et. al. The Challenger Deep, the deepest point on the entire seafloor, lies in the Mariana Trench off the coast of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Islands. It is nearly 36,000 feet—7.8 miles—below the ocean’s surface. If you were to stand at this remarkable depth, the column of water above your head would exert 1000 times the amount of pressure you normally experience at the surface, crushing you instantly. Even in this extreme environment, though, organisms can survive. One type, it turns out, can even prosper: b

14 Fun Facts about Marine Ribbon Worms

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 06:30:48 GMT

Ribbon worms come in all shapes and sizes. This one, with white stripes along the body, was found off the coast of Mexico. Photo by Chris Meyer and Allen Collins Whether they’re on a rain-soaked sidewalk, in the compost bin or on the end of a fish hook, the worms most people know are of the segmented variety. But what about all the other worms out there? With more than 1,000 species of ribbon worms (phylum Nemertea), most found in the ocean, there is a huge range of sizes and lifestyles among the various types. A defining characteristic of ribbon worms is the presence of a proboscis—a unique muscular structure inside the worm’s body. When attacking prey, they compress their bod

A New Meaning to Green Urban Design: Dyeing the Chicago River

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 04:11:26 GMT

A high resolution photo of the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day (image: Mike Boehmer via Wikimedia Commons) Every year on March 17, monuments around the world go green for 24 hours to celebrate St. Patrick’s day. The most famous of these temporary interventions is the dyeing of the Chicago River. The tradition started in 1961 when water pollution controls were first enforced in the Windy City and a Chicago plumber was trying to locate a pipe that was dumping waste into the Chicago River. In order to find the waste line in question, a green dye was dumped into several waste systems to determine which one was dumping into the city’s eponymous river. It’s a simp

Vanishing Marine Algae Can Be Monitored From a Boat With Your Smartphone

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 01:00:12 GMT

Warming oceans have caused levels of phytoplankton, like the mixed sample of single-celled and chain-forming diatoms pictured above, to decline 40 percent since 1950. Photo by Richard Kirby Two weeks ago, a group of sailors off the coast of New Zealand leaned over the side of their boat, dropped a contraption into the Pacific Ocean and watched it disappear. Using an app they’d downloaded to a smartphone, they logged a reading from the underwater device, along with their GPS location and the water temperature. In just a few minutes’ time, they had become the first participants in a new program launched by the UK’s Plymouth University Marine Institute which allows citizen scientists to h

Stressed Corals Dim Then Glow Brightly Before They Die

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 06:30:26 GMT

Fluorescent proteins all aglow in these corals. Photo by Michael Lesser and Charles Mazel, NOAA Ocean Explorer Anyone who has gone scuba diving or snorkeling in a coral reef will likely never forget the dazzling colors and other-worldly shapes of these underwater communities. Home to some of the world’s most diverse wildlife hotspots, reefs are worth an annual $400 billion in tourist dollars and in the ecosystem services they provide, such as buffering shores from storms and providing habitat for fish that people eat. Yet it’s a well known fact that coral reefs around the world are in decline thanks to pollution and rapidly warming oceans. However, determining just how ree

New Study Examines San Joaquin Valley, Home to America’s Dirtiest Air

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:54:48 GMT

The pollution in California’s San Joaquin Valley, including above this Norton cornfield, was tested by NASA as part of a program to monitor air quality from space. Photo by Flickr user mhall209 If you had to guess what part of the the U.S. has the very worst air pollution–where winds and topography conspire with fumes from gasoline-chugging vehicles to create an aerial cesspool–places like Los Angeles, Atlanta and as of late, Salt Lake City, would probably pop to mind. The reality may come as a bit of a surprise. According to the Environmental Protection agency, California’s bucolic San Joaquin Valley is “home of the worst air quality in the country.” Not coinc

16 Photographs That Capture the Best and Worst of 1970s America

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 08:22:56 GMT

A new exhibit at the National Archives highlights an interesting decade—one that gave rise to the environmental movement and some awkward fashion

Even Bees Get a Buzz When They Drink Caffeine

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 07:01:00 GMT

Caffiene, naturally present in some plant nectars, was shown to improve honeybees’ long-term memory in a new study. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Fir0002 Caffeine is likely the world’s most popular psychoactive drug. In the U.S., an estimated 90% of adults consume it daily, either in coffee, tea, soda or energy drinks. A new study published today in Science found that the drug isn’t just popular among humans. A group of scientists from Newcastle University in the UK and elsewhere found that low doses of caffeine are present in the nectar of coffee flowers and many types of citrus plants—and that when the honeybees imbibe the drug while foraging, they demonstrate

Which Major Cities Are Leaders in Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 03:31:08 GMT

New York City is a leader in lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Photo by Flickr user Andrew C Mace Cities are to greenhouse-gas emissions what Chernobyl was to nuclear power plant failures, which is to say, they’re the worst offenders out there. Cities consume two-thirds of the world’s energy and cough up 70 percent of global CO2 emissions. Some are even gaining notoriety: Air pollution in Beijing is so severe these days that residents can’t even escape it by going indoors, according to scientists at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. But many cities are making progress in shrinking their greenhouse-gas footprints, and a recent new study shows that they can make reductions of as m

A Plague of Locusts Descends Upon the Holy Land, Just in Time for Passover

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:02:33 GMT

A swarm of locusts descends upon Israel. Photo by Amir Ayali Locusts have plagued farmers for millennia. According to the Book of Exodus, around 1400 B.C. the Egyptians experienced an exceptionally unfortunate encounter with these ravenous pests when they struck as the eighth Biblical plague. As Exodus describes, “They covered the face of the whole land, so that the land was darkened, and they ate all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left. Not a green thing remained, neither tree nor plant of the field, through all the land of Egypt.” Locusts attacks still occur today, as farmers in Sudan and Egypt well know. Now, farmers in Israel ca

Climate Change Could Allow Ships to Cross the North Pole by 2040

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 08:01:39 GMT

Rapidly melting sea ice will open up shipping lanes across the Arctic, potentially making the Northwest Passage (left) and North Pole (center) navigable during the summer. Image via PNAS/Smith and Stephenson Rapidly melting ice has already remade shipping possibilities in the Arctic. Over the past decade, commercial use of the Northern Sea Route (the blue shipping lane along the northern coast of Russia in the map above) during late summer has become commonplace, dramatically shortening the journey from Europe to the Far East. If present trends continue, though, the options for shipping goods across the Arctic will expand even more. According to a paper published today in the Proceedi

Trapped as Climate Changes, Giant Gusts of Hot Air Trigger Weather Extremes

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 04:35:52 GMT

Scientists have identified a link between global warming and extreme weather events such as heat waves. Photo by Flickr user perfectsnap During the month of July 2011, the United States was seized by a heat wave so severe that roughly 9,000 temperature records were set, 64 people were killed and a total of 200 million Americans were left very sweaty. Temperatures hit 117 degrees Fahrenheit in Shamrock, Texas, and residents of Dallas spent 34 consecutive days stewing in 100-plus-degree weather. For the past couple of years, we’ve heard that extreme weather like this is tied to climate change, but until now, scientists weren’t sure exactly how the two were related. A new study pub

Transforming Raw Scientific Data Into Sculpture and Song

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:15:00 GMT

For Nathalie Miebach, the stars aligned with this sculpture, inspired by a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. © Nathalie Miebach In 2000, Nathalie Miebach was studying both astronomy and basket weaving at the Harvard Extension School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was constantly lugging her shears and clamps with her into the room where she’d study projections of stars and nebulas on the wall. Understanding the science of space could be tricky, she found. “What was so frustrating to me, as a very kinesthetic learner, is that astronomy is so incredibly fascinating, but there’s nothing really tactile about it,” says Miebach. “You can’t go out and to

What Does the Unbelievably Bad Air Quality in Beijing Do to the Human Body?

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 05:26:00 GMT

The unprecedented levels of fine particulates that pollute Beijing’s air can cause lung cancer, heart attacks and other health problems. Image via Flickr user jaaron Beijing’s terrible air quality is currently in the news, and for good reason: The level of pollution present in the air there is unprecedented for a heavily populated area, and several times worse than what any U.S. resident has likely ever experienced. The New York Times recently reported on the air quality problems of Salt Lake City, Utah, and how the area’s geographical features and weather systems occasionally trap pollution in the city’s bowl-shaped basin. But the highest reading on the EPA&r

Dust from the Sahara Can Seed Rain and Snow Clouds Over the Western U.S.

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 09:46:04 GMT

Dust lofted up from the Sahara can be blown across the Pacific and seed clouds over California. NASA image courtesy MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center The fascinating idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia can change the path of a hurricane over the Pacific is, alas, probably not accurate. But slight changes in one part of the atmosphere can indeed have disproportionate effects elsewhere, a concept known as the butterfly effect. Just how slight one of these factors can be—and how incredibly far away their effects can reach—is vividly illustrated by a new finding by an international team of atmospheric scientists and chemists from the U.S. and Israel. As t

Could Disappearing Wild Insects Trigger a Global Crop Crisis?

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 07:24:00 GMT

Wild bees, such as this Andrena bee visiting highbush blueberry flowers, provide crucial pollination services to crops across the globe. Photo by Daniel Cariveau Insect pollination is crucial for the healthy development of our favorite foods, from apples and avocados to cucumbers and onions. Of the 100 crop species that provide 90 percent of the global population’s food, nearly three-quarters rely on pollination by bees. The rest need beetles, flies, butterflies, birds and bats to act as pollinators. It’s a mutually beneficial system—the flowers of most crops require pollen from another plant of the same crop to produce seeds or fruits, and bees and other critters tr

In 1989, Life Magazine Said Goodbye To Video Stores, Mailmen and Pennies…

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:25:00 GMT

Portion of the cover of the February 1989 issue of Life magazine The February 1989 issue of Life magazine predicted that, by the year 2000, many staples of modern American life might find themselves on the scrapheap of history. Life predicted that by the year 2000 people would need to say goodbye to everything from film (pretty much) to all-male clergy in the Catholic church (not so much). Bid ta-ta to LPs, fur coats and sugar. Toodle-oo to checkbooks, oil and swimming in the ocean. Happy trails to privacy, porno theaters and who knows, maybe even Democrats. It’s not just animals and vegetation that are departing the planet (currently one species every 15 minutes). With

How to Survive China’s Pollution Problem: Masks and Bubbles

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:51:38 GMT

The AirWaves mask by Frog Shanghai (image: Frog) Last January, air pollution reached new levels of toxicity in China. Just how bad did things get? According to the Chinese Air Quality Index (AQI), measurements of particulate matter in the air reached more than 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter the northeastern part of country. That probably doesn’t mean anything to you without context though, so here it is: anything above 300 is considered “hazardous” and citizens are warned that they “may experience more serious health effects.” For even more context, consider that the U.S. AQI only goes up to 500. Air quality in China is a constant concern and while the recent toxic cloud

Climate Change is Reducing Our Ability to Get Work Done

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 01:00:00 GMT

High temperatures and high levels of humidity reduce the human body’s ability to do work. Image via Flickr user zoonabar If you feel sluggish and have difficulty getting physical work done on very hot, humid days, it’s not your imagination. Our bodies are equipped with an adaptation to handle high temperatures—perspiration—but sweating becomes ineffective at cooling us down when the air around us is extremely humid. Add in the fact that climate change is projected to increase the average humidity of Earth as well as its temperature, and you could have a recipe for a rather unexpected consequence of greenhouse gas emissions: a reduced overall ability to get wor

Melting Polar Ice Will Spike Sea Levels at the Equator

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:27:42 GMT

Ice melt in Greenland will significantly affect water levels throughout the world, most of all the equatorial Pacific and South Africa. Photo by Christine Zenino If you live on the coast, watch out–the shoreline close to home is moving. The planet’s two largest ice sheets, in Antarctica and Greenland, have been melting at an unprecedented pace for the past decade, and ice melt is the biggest contributor to rising sea levels. But not all coasts will draw closer inland. Scientists have determined (PDF) that water levels will rise in some parts of the world and dip in others. Now, new research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and coordinated by the European org

Photos: The Uneasy Conflict Between Artificial and Natural Light

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Artist Kevin Cooley has traveled the world capturing landscapes where one light shines on the horizon

Introducing the Dom Pedro Aquamarine

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

You start with the stone, aquamarine, a word that means “seawater,” but not the deep-ocean blue that is the sea’s homage to the sky, nor the gray-green swells crashing on a shore, but the soft blue-green of a lagoon on a clear tropical morning. Chemically, it is almost identical to an emerald. What makes a stone one or the other is a handful of atoms scattered among the crystalline ranks: chromium for emerald, iron for aquamarine. Then you must have light. Aquamarine comes to life under the blues and cyans of daylight, as a ruby does near firelight. Next, consider the object itself, an obelisk of a little more than 10,000 carats, shot through with radiant starbursts of as

Will the Next Lake-Effect Snowstorm be Severe? Ask Mountains Far Far Away

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 03:49:16 GMT

Lake-effect snow, which can blanket communities downwind of lakes, is influenced by upwind geographic features, a new study finds. Photo by Flickr user singloud12 People who live by large, inland bodies of water have a phrase in their lexicon that describes the blizzards that hit them throughout the winter: “lake-effect snow.” When wintry winds blow over wide swaths of warmer lake water, they thirstily suck up water vapor that later freezes and drops as snow downwind, blanketing cities near lake shores. These storms are no joke: a severe one dumped nearly 11 feet of snow over the course of week in Montague, N.Y. before New Year’s Day, 2002; another week-long storm ar

Could Solar Panels on Your Roof Power Your Home?

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

The biggest obstacle to the widespread adoption of solar power is the simple homeowner question: Will I see a return on my investment? In response, major cities across America have unveiled online “solar maps” that allow residents to type in their address and receive estimates of how much money they would save on their electric bill per year. The most accurate solar map in the United States is one being used by residents of Cambridge, Massachusetts. According to the map’s creators, the MIT Sustainable Design Lab and the design workshop Modern Development Studio, their solar mapping tool can provide energy-saving estimates that fall within 4 to 10 percent of real-world me

What Can We Do About Big Rocks From Space?

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 03:09:00 GMT

Last week’s asteroid pass was the closest ever predicted. Computer graphic courtesy of NASA Last Friday was, astronomically speaking, one of those days that comes along every 40 years. Actually, a lot less frequently than that. That’s how often, according to NASA estimates, an asteroid the size of the one that flew by Friday gets that close to hitting the Earth–it passed 17,000 miles away. But when you throw in the considerably smaller meteorite that exploded over Russia the same day and injured more than 1,000 people–that’s never happened before–you’re talking about one extremely unique moment in space rock history. Most of us have moved o

Parched Middle East Faces Severe Water Crisis

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 07:30:05 GMT

The Tigris River basin is chief among the regions in the Middle East that have suffered massive groundwater depletion in recent years. Photo by Charles Fred Climate change, believed to have contributed to the decline of the Ottoman Empire (PDF) when drought forced villagers into a nomadic life in the late 16th century, is once again having an adverse affect on the Middle East. Precipitation has dropped off and temperatures have climbed for the past 40 years, with conditions growing especially severe in the last decade. A 2012 Yale study (PDF) showed that a drought from 2007 to 2010 so seriously stunted agriculture in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins that hundreds of thousands of p

Climate Change’s Latest Victim: Canada’s Outdoor Ice Rinks

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 03:38:01 GMT

A new project examines how a warming climate will effect Canada’s tradition of backyard skating rinks. Image via Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources Of all the harmful effects of climate change—bigger storms, more severe droughts and sea level rise, for starters—a group of Canadian scientists have focused on one that hits particularly close to home: melting outdoor ice rinks. Traditionally, Canada has been home to thousands of tiny backyard skating rinks; a huge number of hockey legends, including Wayne Gretzky, learned the game growing up on these rinks, which can either be custom-made or simply frozen-over ponds. But a report published last year by McGill University scientist

Flushing Your Anti-Anxiety Pills Down the Toilet Could Affect the Behavior of Wild Fish

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 07:01:00 GMT

A study shows that wild perch are less fearful, eat faster and are more anti-social when exposed to a common pharmaceutical pollutant. Image via Bent Christensen It’s obvious that anti-anxiety medicines and other types of mood-modifying drugs alter the behavior of humans—it’s what they’re designed to do. But their effects, it turns out, aren’t limited to our species. Over the past decade, researchers have repeatedly discovered high levels of many drug molecules in lakes and streams near wastewater treatment plants, and found evidence that rainbow trout and other fish subjected to these levels could absorb dangerous amounts of the medications over time. N

Is It Love? Why Some Ocean Animals (Sort Of) Mate For Life

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 05:45:00 GMT

Two waved albatrosses, the only tropical albatross species, courting one another on the Galapagos Islands. Photo by Flickr User James Preston We often hear stories of animal love—tales of rare monogamy in the animal kingdom where life-long love is implied. But there is a distinction between romantic love and an efficient mating system. Here’s a look at some ocean animals to see what is really going on. Albatrosses Get ‘Romantic’ to Increase Chick Survival Albatross relationships seem especially relatable to humans. These long-lived and highly-endangered birds will court each other through ritual dances for years. Albatrosses are slow to reach sexual maturity, and some spe

This Sea Slug Discards Its Penis After Sex and Grows Another

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:00:46 GMT

Chromodoris reticulata, native to the Pacific, engages in mating behavior unknown in the rest of the animal kingdom. Image via Stephen Childs Even in the utterly dry language of science, there is no way to describe the mating behavior of the sea slug Chromodoris reticulata as anything other than bizarre. The creature, native to the Pacific Ocean, engages in simultaneous hermaphroditic mating—that is, each slug has both a penis and a vagina, and when mating, both members of a couple inserts their penises into the other’s vagina at the same time—but that’s not nearly the strangest aspect of their reproduction efforts. As discovered by a group of Japanese scientists and revea

Trash Threatens Fragile Antarctic Environment

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 06:58:58 GMT

Trash dumped on Antarctica’s King George Island in the 2008/2009 field season mars its image as a pristine area. Photo by A. Nordt, included in a new report (PDF) Most people think of Antarctica as a harsh but pristine ice landscape where mountain tips poke through thick ice sheets and penguins lounge on ice shelves. But Antarctica, particularly the ice-free areas that serve as research hubs, have a darker, dirtier side. A report released Friday (PDF) called ‘”Current Ecological Situation of the Fildes Peninsula Region and Management Suggestions,” authored by scientists at Germany’s Jena University, shows that decaying field huts, piles of trash and oil-

An Asteroid Will Skim Right By the Earth on Friday Afternoon

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 03:38:00 GMT

A rendering of Asteroid 2012 DA14, which will pass within 17,200 miles of Earth’s surface. Image via NASA/JPL This Friday afternoon at approximately 2:26 Eastern time, an asteroid roughly half the size of a football field (147 feet) in diameter will pass extremely close to the Earth—just 17,200 miles from our planet’s surface. That said, there’s no need to worry, as NASA scientists confirmed with certainty nearly a year ago that the asteroid will not make an impact and poses absolutely no threat. Nevertheless, the proximity of the asteroid’s path is noteworthy: it will come within a distance 2 times the Earth’s diameter, passing us by even closer t

Photos of Starfish Up Close: What Are You Looking At?

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 08:14:15 GMT

A close-up photo of the common sunstar (Crossaster papposus), a starfish found in the North Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Photo: © Alexander Semenov Invertebrates close-up never fail to please: with their bright colors and strange structures, they begin to take on patterns that are more art than animal. So is true of this series of close-up photographs of starfish taken by researcher and photographer Alexander Semenov. But it isn’t enough to call them art: why are all those finger-like appendages waving around? And what are those bulbous spikes (or floral bouquets, if you’re feeling romantic)? Lucky for us, two floors up from the Ocean Portal office sits Dr. Chris Mah, an

Can Birds Survive Climate Change?

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 04:46:43 GMT

The Indian Peafowl may need help adapting to climate change. Photo by Sergiu Bacioiu In the coming years, the birds of Asia’s Eastern Himalaya and Lower Mekong Basin, considered biodiversity hotspots by scientists, will need to relocate within the region to find viable habitat, according to a new study published in the journal Global Change Biology. The reason? Climate change. Researchers at England’s Durham University tested 500 different climate-change scenarios for each of 370 Asian bird species and found that every possible climatic outcome–even the least extreme–would have an adverse effect on the birds. The researchers honed in on sensitive habitat in Bhutan, Laos, C

Salmon Swim Home Using Earth’s Magnetic Field as a GPS

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 05:18:00 GMT

Sockeye salmon rely on a magnetic map to navigate home after years spent at sea. Credit: Putman et al., Current Biology Scientists have long known that various marine animals use the earth’s magnetic forces to navigate waters during their life cycles. Such inherent navigational skills allow animals return to the same geographic area where they were born, with some migrating thousands of miles, to produce the next generation of their species. As hatchlings, sea turtles scuttle from their sandy birthplace to the open sea as if following an invisible map, and, as adults, the females return to that spot to lay their own eggs. Bluefin tuna home in on their natal beaches after years

Scientists See Insect Outbreaks From Space

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 09:38:00 GMT

Using new technology, scientists can study how infestations by insects like the western spruce budworm play a role in climate change. Photo by Paul Williams It’s become a destructive cycle in the western U.S.: Warmer temperatures and drought conditions prolong the life cycle of mountain pine beetles, allowing them to prey on the pine, spruce and fir trees that blanket the mountains. The trees turn reddish-brown before dying off–a phenomenon the National Park Service deemed “an epidemic stretching from Canada to Mexico.” There’s widespread concern that such tree mortality creates an excellent fuel source for wildfires. Until recently, scientists were left

Urban Heat Islands Can Alter Temperatures Thousands of Miles Away From a City

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 06:00:56 GMT

Ambient heat produced by a city’s buildings and cars often gets lifted into the jet stream and affects temperatures in places thousands of miles away. Image via Wikimedia Commons The urban heat island effect—in which heat trapped by large-scale construction and paving cause a city to be several degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside—is a well-documented phenomenon that’s been studied for decades. Now, though, a group of atmospheric researchers have discovered that through a different mechanism, cities can also alter the weather over a much wider area—causing temperatures to rise or fall by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit thousands of miles away. As described in a pape

Seven Must-See Art-Meets-Science Exhibitions in 2013

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 05:05:14 GMT

Courtesy of the Water Tank Project. This New Year’s Eve, in addition to the typical resolutions to exercise more or spend more time with family, consider resolving to take better advantage of the cultural offerings of America’s cities and towns. Whether you seek to attend concerts, listen to lectures by authors and visiting scholars or become regulars at area museums, a few exhibitions slated for 2013 on the intersection of art and science will be must-sees in the New Year. The Water Tank Project Courtesy of the Water Tank Project. The skyline of New York City will be transformed next summer when 300 water tanks in the five boroughs become public works of art, calling at

Lightning May Trigger Migraine Headaches

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 02:00:00 GMT

A new study suggests that lightning alone—even without the other elements of a thunderstorm—might trigger migraines. Image via Wikimedia Commons Migraine sufferers know that a variety of influences—everything from stress to hunger to a shift in the weather—can trigger a dreaded headache. A new study published yesterday in the journal Cephalalgia, though, suggests that another migraine trigger could be an unexpected atmospheric condition—a bolt of lightning. As part of the study, Geoffrey Martin of the University of Cincinnati and colleagues from elsewhere asked 90 chronic migraine sufferers in Ohio and Missouri to keep detailed daily diaries documenting

Scientists Dismiss Geo-Engineering as a Global Warming Quick Fix

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:29 GMT

A new study shows that dispersing minerals into oceans to stem global warming would be an inefficient and impractical process. By Kent Smith Installing a giant mirror in space to block sunlight, dispersing mass quantities of minerals into the oceans to suck carbon dioxide from the air and infusing the Earth’s upper atmosphere with sun-reflecting chemicals might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but they’re actual techniques that have been contemplated by scientists as possible quick solutions to climate change. More specifically, they’re examples of geo-engineering, a hotly contested subset of climate science whereby the Earth’s environment is intentionally manipulated in order

Learning From Nature How to Deal With Nature

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 05:50:23 GMT

The greening of Lower Manhattan. Image courtesy of Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio During his inaugural speech Monday, President Barack Obama uttered a phrase that during last year’s presidential campaign were The-Words-That-Shall-Not-Be-Spoken. He mentioned climate change. In fact, President Obama didn’t just mention it, he declared that a failure to deal with climate change “would betray our children and future generations.” But ask any Washington pundit if Congress will do anything meaningful on the subject and they’ll tell you that that’s as likely as D.C. freezing over in July. Also this week, as it turns out, a study was releas

Air Pollution Has Been a Problem Since the Days of Ancient Rome

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Before the Industrial Revolution, our planet’s atmosphere was still untainted by human-made pollutants. At least, that’s what scientists thought until recently, when bubbles trapped in Greenland’s ice revealed that we began emitting greenhouse gases at least 2,000 years ago. Célia Sapart of Utrecht University in the Netherlands led 15 scientists from Europe and the United States in a study that charted the chemical signature of methane in ice samples spanning 2,100 years. The gas methane naturally occurs in the atmosphere in low concentrations. But it’s now considered a greenhouse gas implicated in climate change because of emissions from landfills, la

How Climate Change Affects the Smithsonian

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 04:01:18 GMT

Watching Hurricane Sandy destroy parts of New York City and New Jersey last fall, I was transported back to those painful days spent witnessing Katrina pound the Gulf Coast in 2005. After Katrina killed more than 1,800 people in New Orleans and left the Ninth Ward submerged, I served on the National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council’s Committee on New Orleans Regional Hurricane Protection Projects. That gave me a firsthand view of the storm’s cost, both literal and psychological. Still, because of New Orleans’ uniqueness, lying under sea level, many Americans were able to distance themselves from the tragedy. With Sandy, no such distancing was possible

Plants Flower Nearly a Month Earlier Than They Did A Century Ago

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 10:00:00 GMT

The wild columbine, among other plants, now flowers nearly a month earlier than it did in the 1800s. Image via Wikimedia Commons Compared to extreme drought, blistering heat, massive wildfires and tropical cyclones, the latest indicator of climate change is unexpectedly attractive: early spring flowers. According to a study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, unusually warm spring weather in 2010 and 2012 at a pair of notable sites in the eastern U.S. led to the earliest spring flowering times on record—earlier than any other time in the last 161 years. The researchers involved, from Boston University, the University of Wisconsin and Harvard, examined the flowers at two si

Is Climate Change Strengthening El Niño?

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 07:14:00 GMT

Coral from the Northern Line Islands reveals a link between climate change and El Niño. Photo by Forest Rohwe El Niño, the climate pattern that increases Pacific Ocean surface temperatures every three to seven years, has long been known to pummel the Sierra Nevada with snow, limit Peruvian anchovy fishermen’s harvest and bless the Hawaiian Islands with dry, beach-friendly weather. The question of whether the effects of El Niño have become more extreme in recent decades, as climate change has intensified, hasn’t accrued a consensus among scientists. But now, new research released last week, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and published in S

Drill, Baby, Drill: Sponges Bore Into Shells Twice as Fast in Acidic Seawater

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 03:12:00 GMT

Small red boring sponges embedded in star coral, killing the coral polyps immediately surrounding them. Image via Sean Nash, Flickr Whenever anyone talks about ocean acidification, they discuss vanishing corals and other shelled organisms. But these aren’t the only organisms affected—the organisms that interact with these vulnerable species will also change along with them. These changes won’t necessarily be for the good of the shell and skeleton builders. New research published in Marine Biology shows that boring sponges eroded scallop shells twice as fast under the more acidic conditions projected for the year 2100. This makes bad news for the scallops even worse:

Scorchingly Hot 2012 Riddled With Extreme Weather

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 05:29:00 GMT

New Mexico’s 2012 Gila Wildfire was the largest in the state’s history. By Gila Forest Earlier this week we learned that 2012 ranks as the hottest year on record, with an average temperature more than three degrees higher than the average for the 20th century. But a deeper look into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) annual climate report shows that, in the United States, 2012 was also riddled with extreme weather events. In fact, it was the second-most extreme year on record for weather, according to the U.S. Climate Extremes Index, which analyzes variations in precipitation, temperatures and land-falling tropical cyclones. There was a fre

The Transformation of Freshkills Park From Landfill to Landscape

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 02:46:00 GMT

Looking toward Manhattan from Freshkills Park on Staten Island (image: Jimmy Stamp) It’s like an old saying goes: One man’s trash is another man’s 2,200 acre park. In 2001, Freshkills was the biggest dump in the world. Hundreds of seagulls circled the detritus of 8 million lives. Slowly decomposing piles of garbage were pushed around by slow-moving bulldozers to make room for more of the same. More than times the size of Central Park, the Staten Island landfill was established in 1948 by Robert Moses, the self-proclaimed “master builder” of New York City, responsible for much of the city’s controversial infrastructure and urban development policies

The Secrets of Earth’s History May Be in Its Caves

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

A honeycombed cave formed untold millennia ago beneath what is now southeastern Minnesota. Larry Edwards is standing in a subterranean chamber, his headlamp illuminating a series of mineral formations. From the cathedral-like ceiling dangle tubes known as soda straws. Along a waist-high ledge squats a trio of stout stalagmites, their surfaces slick with ecru-colored ooze. “Now that’s the kind of thing we might be interested in,” Edwards says, bending to peer at one. I hear the plink, plink, plink of falling droplets. One hits the top of a stalagmite, then spreads out, laying down a thin film of the mineral calcium carbonate, or calcite, from rainwater seeping though lim

How Will the Wetlands Respond to Climate Change?

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In a tidal marsh on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, dozens of transparent enclosures jut above the reeds and grasses, looking like high-tech pods seeded by an alien spacecraft. Barely audible over the buzz of insects, motors power whirring fans, bathing the plants inside the chambers with carbon dioxide gas. To scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, Maryland, it’s the marsh of the future, a series of unusual experiments to simulate the effects of climate change and water pollution on a vital ecosystem. “What we’re doing out here is studying plant processes to predict the conditions of wetlands like this one—and tidal wetla

The Smithsonian Heads to Hawaii

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The Smithsonian has rich ties to the Hawaiian Islands, ties that date, in a sense, to before the Smithsonian even existed: The islands were one of the many stops for the U.S. South Seas Exploring Expedition, a venture commanded by Charles Wilkes from 1838 to 1842. Although Wilkes lost two ships and was court-martialed upon his return (partly for mistreatment of his men), the trip was a resounding scientific triumph: The tens of thousands of anthropological and biological samples that Wilkes’ scientists collected officially entered the Smithsonian in 1858, a dozen years after its founding, and they continue to be studied by scholars at our Museum of Natural History, Museum of the Amer

Are We Headed for Another Dust Bowl?

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 04:43:32 GMT

A West Texas thunderstorm on July 24 kicked up a dust cloud as the winds passed over ground parched and barren from a drought that began back in 2010. As the dust passed over Interstate 20 just before 8 p.m., drivers lost sight of the road before them and quickly slowed down, setting off a chain of collisions as 17 cars and trucks ran into one another. Two 18-wheelers sandwiched one car, killing its driver and passenger. Nearly 60 percent of the United States, mostly in the center and west of the country, is currently experiencing moderate to exceptional drought conditions, according to the National Drought Monitor, and the drought is expected to persist into 2013 for many of those alread

Take a Look at the World's Largest Solar Thermal Farm

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 06:30:00 GMT

The Mojave Desert is blooming. Construction crews are erecting mirrors —each measuring 70 square feet—at a rate of 500 per day across some 3,500 acres. When completed in late 2013, the $2.2 billion Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System—the largest of its type in the world—will power 140,000 California homes. Unlike photovoltaic technology, which converts solar radiation directly into electricity, the Ivanpah facility generates heat. More than 170,000 mirrors will gather tremendous amounts of sunlight and focus it on three towers filled with water, raising temperatures to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and producing steam that spins turbines that generate ele

How Do You Make a Building Invisible to an Earthquake?

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

An inventive mathematician has a new idea for protecting buildings from earthquake damage: hide them. William Parnell, of the University of Manchester in England, suggests wrapping a building’s base, or at least key components, in specialized rubber that diverts certain temblor shock waves, leaving the building virtually untouched by them. Parnell’s “elastodynamic cloak,” which engineers have just started testing, builds on a familiar concept: Waves headed directly for an object can be diffracted or bent so they miss it entirely. In the best-known example, scientists make objects appear invisible by encasing them within substances that have been engineered to alte

When Continental Drift Was Considered Pseudoscience

Mon, 21 May 2012 03:30:00 GMT

Six seismologists and a civil servant, charged with manslaughter for failing to predict a 2009 earthquake that killed 308 people in the Apennine Mountain city of L’Aquila, in Italy, will serve six years in prison. The charge is remarkable partly because it assumes that scientists can now see not merely beneath the surface of the earth, but also into the future. What’s even more extraordinary, though, is that the prosecutors based their case on a scientific insight that was, not long ago, the object of open ridicule. [Editor's Note: The story was updated on October 22, 2012, to reflect the decision.] It was a century ago this spring that a little-known German meteorologist na

A Little Independent Energy Experiment on the Prairie

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 04:25:09 GMT

In the middle of the Minnesota prairie sits Madelia, a town of a little more than 2300 people that is surrounded on all sides by miles upon miles of brown soil, tilled into neat rows. If you flew there in an airplane, Madelia would look like a button, sewn into the middle of a patchwork quilt—each farm divided into fields shaped like squares and circles, bordered by pale yellow gravel roads and by the narrow strips of bright green grass that grow alongside creeks and drainage ditches. When the residents of a town such as Madelia think about the future of energy, the solutions they come up with are unsurprisingly centered on the land and what it can grow. In Madelia, however, those s

Looking Back on the Limits of Growth

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 01:15:00 GMT

Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth. Written by MIT researchers for an international think tank, the Club of Rome, the study used computers to model several possible future scenarios. The business-as-usual scenario estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and precipitous population decline could occur by 2030. However, the study also noted that unlimited economic growth was

Is it Too Late for Sustainable Development?

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 01:15:00 GMT

On March 2, 1972, a team of experts from MIT presented a groundbreaking report called The Limits to Growth to scientists, journalists and others assembled at the Smithsonian Castle. Released days later in book form, the study was one of the first to use computer modeling to address a centuries-old question: When will the population outgrow the planet and the natural resources it has to offer? The researchers, led by scientist Dennis Meadows, warned that if current trends in population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion continued, that dark time—marked by a plummeting population, a contracting economy and environmental collapse—would come with

Meet Lucy Jones, "the Earthquake Lady"

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:00:00 GMT

One of Lucy Jones’ first memories is of an earthquake. It struck north of Los Angeles, not far from her family home in Ventura, and as the ground lurched, her mother guided 2-year-old Lucy and her older brother and sister into a hallway and shielded them with her body. Add that her great-great-grandparents are buried literally in the San Andreas fault and it’s hard not to think that her fate was preordained. Today Jones is among the world’s most influential seismologists—and perhaps the most recognizable. Her file cabinets bulge with fan letters, among them at least one marriage proposal. “The Earthquake Lady,” she’s called. A science adviser for

The World’s Muddiest Disaster

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 09:10:13 GMT

The newest landmark in Indonesia is a spectacular disaster. On May 29, 2006, mud and steaming hot water squirted up in a rice field in Sidoarjo, East Java, marking the birth of the world’s most destructive mud volcano. Since then, the volcano, nicknamed Lusi (a contraction of the Indonesian word lumpur, meaning mud, and Sidoarjo), has erupted almost nonstop, engulfing an area more than twice the size of New York City’s Central Park and belching as much as six million cubic feet of muck—enough to fill 800 railroad boxcars—in a single day. The ongoing disaster has displaced 13,000 families and closed 30 factories and hundreds of small businesses. Dozens of schools an

Building a Better World With Green Cement

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT

“You know, cement is everywhere,” Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, an environmental engineer at Imperial College in London, says while sitting in a brightly lit college conference room in a hulking seven-story building held up by the topic of conversation. “It’s all around us.” Last year, the world produced 3.6 billion tons of cement—the mineral mixture that solidifies into concrete when added to water, sand and other materials—and that amount could increase by a billion tons by 2050. Globally, the only substance people use more of than concrete, in total volume, is water. Cement’s virtues, Vlasopoulos says, have long been plain: It is inexpensive, po

The Great Midwest Earthquake of 1811

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT

At 2:15 a.m. on December 16, 1811, residents of the frontier town of New Madrid, in what is now Missouri, were jolted from their beds by a violent earthquake. The ground heaved and pitched, hurling furniture, snapping trees and destroying barns and homesteads. The shaking rang church bells in Charleston, South Carolina, and toppled chimneys as far as Cincinnati, Ohio. “The screams of the affrighted inhabitants running to and fro, not knowing where to go, or what to do—the cries of the fowls and beasts of every species—the cracking of trees falling...formed a scene truly horrible,” wrote one resident. As people were starting to rebuild that winter, two more major q

The Great Pumpkin

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Quinn Werner’s backyard pumpkin patch overlooks a wooded creek. In the winter, when the maples and oaks stand like toothpicks and snow coats the western Pennsylvania valley, Werner gazes out his kitchen window and caresses his prizewinning seeds. The topsoil is frozen solid and his orange Kubota tractor gleams in the garage like a showroom floor model. He is not a big talker, but every Thursday his buddy Dave Stelts phones, and their conversation always comes back to springtime, to the patch and the weigh-off. In April, Werner germinates his seeds, each one as long as a quarter, by soaking them in a mix of hydrogen peroxide and water. He pots them and incubates them in a cooler with

Q and A: Smithsonian's Elizabeth Cottrell on the Virginia Earthquake

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 06:58:45 GMT

In March, Elizabeth Cottrell, a geologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and director of the Institution’s Global Volcanism Program, created a helpful video explanation of Japan’s devastating Sendai Earthquake. So when a magnitude 5.8 quake occurred in Mineral, Virginia, yesterday, just 84 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., we went to her with our questions. Why was the earthquake felt over such a broad geographic range? The East Coast has much more contiguous bedrock that is less broken up by faults and other kinds of tectonic boundaries. On the West Coast, there are just a lot more faults, which damp the energy. On the East Coast, energy can

Dazzling Photographs of Earth From Above

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 06:57:11 GMT

Satellite images of mountains, glaciers, deserts and other landscapes become incredible works of art

How to Turn 8,000 Plastic Bottles Into a Building

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Laura Kutner wants your trash—specifically, your plastic bottles. And, if you can spare some time, she’d like your help using those bottles to build a wall. The construction project, which will commence at this summer’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival (June 30-July 4 and July 7-11), is part of a celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps. Kutner, 26, will be giving visitors to the National Mall an opportunity to recreate a project she led in Granados, a poor community in the mountainous region of Baja Verapaz, Guatemala. When Kutner arrived there as a volunteer in July 2007, the area was known for three things: its marble production, ample fields of corn

Fifty Years of Arctic National Wildlife Preservation

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 06:17:23 GMT

This winter marks the 50th anniversary of the designation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), a 19-million-acre refuge in Alaska that runs for 190 miles along the state’s eastern border with Canada before meeting the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea. The refuge is home to one the United States’ most contentious conservation battles, over a region known as the 1002 Area. Making up less than 8 percent of the refuge, the 1002 Area contains vital habitat for an international cast of migratory birds and other animals, like polar bears, that rely on the border of terrestrial and marine ecosystems. At the root of the controversy is the fact that the section of coastal plain hos

Devastation From Above

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 07:00:00 GMT

J. Henry Fair was stumped. He couldn’t figure out how to photograph whatever might be hiding behind the walls and fences of industrial plants. Then, on a cross-country flight about 15 years ago, he looked out the window and saw a series of cooling towers poking through a low-lying fog. “Just get a plane!” he recalls thinking. Today Fair, 51, is known in ecological as well as art circles for his strangely beautiful photographs of environmental degradation, most of them made out the open windows of small airplanes at about 1,000 feet. Fair has flown over oil refineries in Texas, paper mills in Ontario, ravaged West Virginia mountaintops, the oil-slicked Gulf of Mexico and

The Waterway That Brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 08:24:01 GMT

In the spring of 1621, Plymouth Colony’s Town Brook—the main water supply for the newly arrived Pilgrims—filled with silvery river herring swimming upstream to spawn. Squanto, the Indian interpreter, famously used the fish to teach the hungry colonists how to fertilize corn, by layering dead herring in with the seed. The resulting crop fueled festivities the following fall, at a celebration now known as the first Thanksgiving. “That story that everyone learns as a kid?” says David Gould, environmental manager of Plymouth, Massachusetts, who oversees modern-day Town Brook. “This was that brook. These were those fish.” But Town Brook—which he

The Origins of Life

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 06:26:25 GMT

A hilly green campus in Washington, D.C. houses two departments of the Carnegie Institution for Science: the Geophysical Laboratory and the quaintly named Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. When the institution was founded, in 1902, measuring the earth’s magnetic field was a pressing scientific need for makers of nautical maps. Now, the people who work here—people like Bob Hazen—have more fundamental concerns. Hazen and his colleagues are using the institution’s “pressure bombs”—breadbox-size metal cylinders that squeeze and heat minerals to the insanely high temperatures and pressures found inside the earth—to decipher nothing less than th

The Colorado River Runs Dry

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 06:00:00 GMT

From its source high in the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River channels water south nearly 1,500 miles, over falls, through deserts and canyons, to the lush wetlands of a vast delta in Mexico and into the Gulf of California. That is, it did so for six million years. Then, beginning in the 1920s, Western states began divvying up the Colorado’s water, building dams and diverting the flow hundreds of miles, to Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and other fast-growing cities. The river now serves 30 million people in seven U.S. states and Mexico, with 70 percent or more of its water siphoned off to irrigate 3.5 million acres of cropland. The damming and diverting of the Colorado, the na

A Crude Awakening in the Gulf of Mexico

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Life seems almost normal along the highway that runs the length of Grand Isle, a narrow curl of land near the toe of Louisiana’s tattered boot. Customers line up for snow cones and po’ boys, graceful live oaks stand along the island’s central ridge, and sea breezes blow in from the Gulf of Mexico. But there are few tourists here this summer. The island is filled with cleanup crews and locals bracing for the next wave of anguish to wash ashore from the crippled well 100 miles to the southeast. Behind Grand Isle, in the enormous patchwork of water and salt marsh called Barataria Bay, tar balls as big as manhole covers float at the surface. Oily sheens, some hundreds of yar

A Spanish Breakthrough in Harnessing Solar Power

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Amid the green wheat fields, oak groves and ancient olive trees of Andalusia, a giant solar energy farm shimmers like a silver sea. Even under cloudy skies, the arrays of mirrors and massive towers sprawling over three square miles are an arresting sight. Twenty miles west of Seville, the Solúcar solar farm, built by the company Abengoa, is part of Spain’s push to produce more energy from renewable sources. The nation currently produces up to 3.65 gigawatts of power from the sun, second in the world after Germany. Those gigawatts make up about 3 percent of the country’s power, the highest percentage in the world. (The United States generates less than 1 percent of its e

The Rise of Urban Farming

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

More people than ever are growing food in cities, which happen to be where most of the world’s people now live. In windowsills, on rooftops and in community gardens, they’re burying seeds in Havana, Kinshasa and Hanoi—and in Chicago, Milwaukee and Atlanta. Novella Carpenter’s 2009 memoir, Farm City, trumpets the value of raising chickens, pigs and bees—in Oakland. Urban farming is a response to a variety of pressures. Large parts of the developing world are facing shortages of water and arable land, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says. Governments and other sponsors have supported urban food-growing projects in Cuba, Colombia, Botswana and Egypt.

Rising Seas Endanger Wetland Wildlife

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

When a buttermilk moon rises over Alligator River, listen for red wolves. It’s the only spot in the world where they still howl in the wild. Finer boned than gray wolves, with foxier coloring and a floating gait, they once roamed North America from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. By the mid-1970s, because of overhunting and habitat loss, just a few survived. Biologists captured 17 and bred them in captivity, and in 1987 released four pairs in North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. Today more than 100 red wolves inhabit the refuge and the surrounding peninsula—the world’s first successful wolf reintroduction, eight years ahead of the bett

Embedded Technologies: Power From the People

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Sensor-studded clothing worn by a soldier tracks his movements and vital signs. A disposable electrocardiogram machine the size of a Band-Aid monitors a heart patient. A cellphone is implanted in a tooth. Scientists and engineers are trying to develop such “embedded” devices: miniature electronics that plug people into computer and communication networks. Consider contact lenses that function as computer screens. A University of Washington research team, led by electrical engineering professor Babak Parviz, has developed a prototype lens fitted with a tiny radio (for receiving data) and a light-emitting diode, or LED (for displaying data to its wearer). The technology has pro

Rosamond Naylor on Feeding the World

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Rosamond Naylor directs the Program on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. An economist by training, she studies the world food economy and sustainable agriculture. Though she says she is deeply worried about climate change and population growth, she described herself as “optimistic” in a conversation with Smithsonian’s Amanda Bensen. By 2050, there will be an estimated nine billion people in the world. Do we have the land and water to feed them? The arable land area is certainly not enough to meet those demands unless there are major breakthroughs in terms of crop yields. Agriculture and livestock are by far the largest water users in the world. W

Five Game-Changing Crops That Could Help Feed the Hungry

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Fonio (Digitaria exilis) A type of millet prized in West Africa—the Dogon people of Mali say the universe sprang from a fonio seed—it thrives in poor soil, is rich in amino acid nutrients and provides a tasty base for bread, porridge, pasta and beer. What’s Next? Develop a more efficient way to harvest the tiny seeds. Fortified Cassava (Manihot esculenta) These starchy roots, the source of tapioca, are the primary food for 250 million Africans. Scientists have endowed the traditional plant with new genes that pack the equivalent of a daily multivitamin into each serving. Next: Field trials in Nigeria, where the added nutrients could save up to 30,000 lives a year. Brea

Peak Energy

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Asked to imagine life in 2050, the artist Guy Billout, author of the mind-bending book Something's Not Quite Right, wonders why the quest for alternative energy has overlooked the volcano.

What We Know From the Icelandic Volcano

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 07:41:52 GMT

Smithsonian’s Global Volcanism Program has been following the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull. Elizabeth Cottrell, a geologist at the National Museum of Natural History, spoke with Smithsonian magazine’s Erica R. Hendry about the nature of the volcano and the possible consequences of its eruption. Could you give us a sense of how big this volcano is? And how long could the eruption go on? I would say we don’t know how long the eruption could go on. The last eruption started in 1821 and went until 1823. This volcano is not one of the well-known volcanic centers of Iceland. Its neighbors—Katla, Hekla, Krafla—those are what we think of as

Air Pollution as Seen From the Skies

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 07:40:27 GMT

From Mt. Etna to China to the Sahara, these striking satellite images of air pollution are from both natural and man-made causes

The History of Air

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 07:40:16 GMT

The earth’s atmosphere is made up of a lot of nitrogen (78 percent), a bit of oxygen (21 percent), a splash of argon (0.93 percent), a small amount of carbon dioxide (0.038 percent) and trace amounts of other gases. But it has not always been so. The composition of gases in the atmosphere can change (and is changing now as we burn fossil fuels), and the fossil record reveals how something as deceptively simple as air can influence the history of life. If you visited what is now North America 300 million years ago, near the close of the Carboniferous period, you would have been greeted by a very unfamiliar scene. The landscape was dominated by vast swamps filled with huge lycopods (r

The Long Fight Against Air Pollution

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 07:40:16 GMT

In December 1952, a deadly smog settled over London. Trapped by cooler air above, the dirty cloud enveloped the city for four days. Rich with soot from factories and low-quality home-burned coal, the Great Smog, as it came to be known, caused some 12,000 deaths that winter. Similar, though smaller, lethal clouds choked Liege, Belgium, in 1930, killing at least 60 people, and Donora, Pennsylvania, in 1948, accounting for a score of deaths. These disasters forced the world to face the dangers of air pollution and inspired an ongoing movement for cleaner air. The United Kingdom adopted broad air pollution regulations in 1956, the first country to do so. In 1970, the United States created th

Acid Rain and Our Ecosystem

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 07:40:16 GMT

Geologist Rich April climbs the small hill behind Colgate University and makes his way into the cemetery. He stops before a white marble pillar erected in 1852. The inscription is nearly illegible. Over time, any stone exposed to the elements will weather, April explains, but this marble has weathered unnaturally fast. The culprit? Acid rain. April pulls a vial of acid from his pocket to demonstrate. He unscrews the cap and lets a few drops leak onto the stone, where they fizz and bubble. The rain that fell throughout the Northeast in the latter half of the 20th century wasn’t as acidic as the liquid in April’s vial, but the principle is the same. Acid eats marble. Given enoug

Barrow, Alaska: Ground Zero for Climate Change

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:00:00 GMT

No roads lead to Barrow, Alaska. To reach America’s northernmost city (pop. 4,500), you must fly or, sea ice permitting, take a ship. Barrow’s residents use cars or four-wheel-drive ATVs in town and have been known to hunt caribou on snowmobiles, even in summer. The treads leave dark trails in the tundra, the blanket of spongy brown and green vegetation that stretches south for hundreds of miles. I was coming in on a U.S. Coast Guard C-130 transport plane. Looking down through a small window I saw a triangular-shaped town hugging the edge of the continent at the junction of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. It was August, and the ocean looked as black as anthracite. The city&rsqu

From Close Up or Far Away, Amazing Volcano Photos

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 08:50:56 GMT

Geologist Bernhard Edmaier has been photographing the majestic beauty of active and dormant volcanoes for over 15 years

Evolution in the Deepest River in the World

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:40:42 GMT

Ned Gardiner, a scientist who specializes in mapping ecosystems, is fiddling with an instrument floating over the side of our wooden pirogue when the boat emerges from an eddy into the main stream of the Congo River. The transition from the still water to the turbulent flow swings the bow downstream and nearly knocks Gardiner into the water. "Almost fell into the drink, eh?" he says with a laugh, though he knows a swim here could be dangerous, even deadly. The Congo is flowing at 1.25 million cubic feet of water per second, enough to fill 13 Olympic-size swimming pools every second. Gardiner, who works for the National Climatic Data Center, in Asheville, North Carolina, is here b

A Swim Through the Ocean's Future

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:29:07 GMT

I drop the dinghy’s anchor below the red-streaked cliffs of Maug. The uninhabited island group is among the most remote of the Mariana Islands, which are territories of the United States in the Western Pacific. Maug's three steep, parentheses-shaped islands are the top of an underwater volcano. Maug, part of the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument, is one of a string of underwater volcanoes—some active and spewing mud, sulfur and carbon dioxide—that boasts some of the world’s most spectacular geology. A nearby seamount hosts the only known sulfur lake this side of Jupiter. And Maug is the only place in the world where underwater volcanic vents emit carbon diox

The Political History of Cap and Trade

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 08:37:30 GMT

John B. Henry was hiking in Maine's Acadia National Park one August in the 1980s when he first heard his friend C. Boyden Gray talk about cleaning up the environment by letting people buy and sell the right to pollute. Gray, a tall, lanky heir to a tobacco fortune, was then working as a lawyer in the Reagan White House, where environmental ideas were only slightly more popular than godless Communism. "I thought he was smoking dope," recalls Henry, a Washington, D.C. entrepreneur. But if the system Gray had in mind now looks like a politically acceptable way to slow climate change—an approach being hotly debated in Congress—you could say that it got its start on the gl

Climbing the Tallest Trees

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:21:44 GMT

“Watch out! Boomer hole!” someone shouted, and I narrowly avoided twisting my ankle in the burrow of a mountain beaver. These primitive rodents, nicknamed for the booming grunts they produce, have dug a network of tunnels through this patch of old-growth forest that would be the envy of any World War I general. After a treacherous two-hour march along steep elk trails near the Siuslaw National Forest in Oregon, our eight-person group reached base camp like so many exhausted pack mules. With only a few hours of sunlight left, we set to work immediately. One man loaded a bolt into his crossbow and took aim—not at the rodents below, but at the giants that surrounded us. The

Steering Ships Through a Treacherous Waterway

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:00:00 GMT

At first light on a winter morning off the Oregon coast, the sky begins to luminesce the same creepy shade of doom you might expect at the Apocalypse. A gathering storm is chasing crab boats back to port, but the Chinook is running out to sea. Long as a locomotive and painted rubber-ducky yellow, it powers through the angry water with a thunderous boozh-boozh-babooozh! that sends explosions of spray hurtling past the pilothouse. "She's built stout," yells Ken Olson, the boat's operator, and I want to believe. It feels as if we're riding a mechanical bull through a dunk tank, and I'm fighting the odd urge to yodel and retch simultaneously. But this is just the morning commute fo

Mining the Mountains

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:57:29 GMT

Editor's Note -- On April 1, 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency released new guidelines on mountaintop mining. For more on this update, check out our Surprising Science blog. For most of its route through the hardscrabble towns of West Virginia's central Appalachian highlands, U.S. Highway 60 follows riverbanks and valleys. But as it approaches Gauley Mountain, it swoops dramatically upward, making switchbacks over steep wooded ridges. It goes by the Mystery Hole, a kitschy tourist stop that claims to defy the law of gravity. Then the road abruptly straightens and you're in Ansted, a town of about 1,600 people. There's an auto dealership, an Episcopal church and a Tudor's Biscuit W

What's Killing the Aspen?

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:00:00 GMT

It's a relentlessly sunny day in the Rocky Mountains, and here at 9,000 feet, on the Grand Mesa in western Colorado, the aspen trees should be casting a shadow. But something is wrong in this stand: the treetops are nearly bare, their branches twisting starkly into the blue sky. Sarah Tharp, a wiry biologist for the U.S. Forest Service, hoists a small ax, takes aim and delivers an angled blow to an aspen trunk, peeling off a sample of diseased bark. "Sometimes," she says, "I feel like a coroner." Aspen, one of the few broad-leaved trees to grow at high altitude in Western mountains, are emblems of the Rockies. Their lean, chalky trunks are instantly recognizable on an

Sea Glass: The Search on the Shore

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Nancy LaMotte's eyes are a clear blue-green, the color of antique Coca-Cola bottles, but brighter. She scans the sand at her feet: gritty knots of seaweed, smashed oyster shells, driftwood – wait! There, by that barnacled log! She bends to pluck a perfect turquoise lozenge of sea glass; while she's reaching for it, she also spots an arrowhead. "Oh, look," she coos. Though her smile is modest, the double whammy is a bit much for me, since the only treasure I've spotted so far on this Chesapeake Bay beach is a grimy scrap of plastic. For what it's worth, LaMotte and her husband, Richard, are among America's sea glass hunting elite; she makes sea glass jewelry in their Cheste

For Salmon Fishermen, It’s Fall Chum to the Rescue

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:19:06 GMT

I've flown 1,800 miles to a remote part of western Alaska but I still have 140 to go before I hit the wild salmon jackpot. I climb into an Amelia Earhart-style Cessna that soars across the nearly treeless tundra and over the mighty Yukon River Delta, in the direction of the Bering Sea. From 10,000 feet, the view is the stuff of nature documentaries, a breathtaking early autumn palette that includes marigold yellows and oranges with splashes of chartreuse that bring to mind the bold brushstrokes of a post-Impressionist painting. From my window, I see flock after flock of swans; the spectacular scenery fails to bore the pilot, who holds a digital camera in one hand and is intent on showing

On California's Coast, Farewell to the King Salmon

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:00:00 GMT

The salmon-boat cemetery in Fort Bragg, a fishing port tucked into shaggy pines about 150 miles north of San Francisco, is full of bleached and peeling hulls. Over the years many California vessels have landed in Bruce Abernathy's front yard, pitched at steep angles among the weeds, some still rigged with trolling poles. The Anita II, the Dag. Eventually Abernathy's son David takes them apart with a tractor and chain saw and sells what he can for parts. Sometimes all that's left is a scrap with a painted-on name: My Pet. Bruce Abernathy himself doesn't watch the demolitions. He finds somewhere else to be, or he stays inside his house, with its many framed prints of trim little ships atop

Christopher Pala on "Victory at Sea"

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Christopher Pala is based in Hawaii and has been working as a reporter since he graduated from the University of Geneva in 1974. He has covered stories in New Jersey, California, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, West Africa, Russia and Central Asia. Pala is also the author of The Oddest Place on Earth: Rediscovering the North Pole. What made you want to write about Kiribati's marine reserve? I heard a tiny report from Radio New Zealand announcing that Kiribati had decided to expand its Phoenix Islands Protected Area and thus make it the largest in the world. At the time, I was already planning to go to Tarawa to write a story on invasive algae for the New York Times, with a grant from the Fund

Our Imperiled Oceans: Victory at Sea

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:00:00 GMT

At first sight, the people of Kiribati, a nation of tiny islands in the central Pacific, would not appear to be model conservationists. Trash is abundant all along Tarawa, the capital island, a skinny atoll shaped like a backward L and crammed with 40,000 people. (It was the site of one of the costliest landings in World War II, in which 1,000 U.S. marines were killed.) The rustic charm of the traditional thatched houses, which have raised platform floors and no walls, is offset by the smell of human waste wafting from the beaches. The groundwater is contaminated. Infant mortality is high, life expectancy low. And yet this past January impoverished Kiribati established the world's largest

Preserving Silence in National Parks

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 08:00:00 GMT

The preservation of natural sounds in our national parks is a relatively new and still evolving project. The same can be said of our national parks. What Wallace Stegner called "the best idea we ever had"* did not spring full grown from the American mind. The painter George Catlin first proposed the park idea in 1832, but it was not until 1872 that Yellowstone became the first of our current 391 parks. Only much later did the public recognize the park's ecological value; the setting aside of Yellowstone had more to do with the preservation of visually stunning natural monuments than with any nascent environmentalism. Not until 1934, with the establishment of Everglades, was a nat

A Passion for Tomatoes

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:40:08 GMT

Nothing quite showcases the industrial bounty of California agriculture like a vast field of tomatoes baking in the August sun. A rich, dusky red emanates from beneath the curled, dying leaves. A nearly two-story-tall mechanical harvester run by the Morning Star tomato-processing company clatters through the Sacramento Valley field. As the machine hums along at about three miles per hour, it uproots two rows of plants and lays them on a belt that conveys them to the top of the harvester, where the vines are sucked through a shredder and blown back onto the field as the tomatoes cascade onto other belts. Electronic eyes send signals to plastic fingers that pop out anything not red or green.

Tainted Tomatoes

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:54:10 GMT

The salmonella outbreak that began in April and was linked to raw tomatoes was the largest of about a dozen such outbreaks since 1990, sickening more than 800 people in 36 states and the District of Columbia as of late June. The outbreak involved consumers of raw red plum, red Roma or red round tomatoes suspected of carrying the rare "saintpaul" strain of salmonella bacteria. As many as 20,000 cases of illness may have gone unreported, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. News of the outbreak prompted many consumers, restaurants and markets to shun tomatoes. A Food and Drug Administration (FDA) probe eventually focused on tomatoes grown in Mexico and Flor

Wallace Broecker Geochemist, Palisades, New York

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 08:38:50 GMT

Wallace Broecker, of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, first warned in the 1970s that the earth would warm because of a buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases released by burning fossil fuels. In his new book, Fixing Climate (co-authored by Robert Kunzig), Broecker, 76, argues that we must not only reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) but also remove it from the atmosphere on a massive scale to avert environmental ruin. He is an unpaid adviser to Global Research Technologies, a Tucson firm developing devices to capture CO2 from the air. By the 1970s, you already believed that CO2 from emissions was causing global warming. Looking at the earth's past climate to

Patricia Zaradic, Conservation Ecologist, Pennsylvania

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 06:07:03 GMT

Nature just isn't as entertaining as it used to be, according to new research by Patricia Zaradic, an Environmental Leadership Program fellow in Bryn Mawr, and Oliver Pergams of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Their studies of Americans' recreational habits found a nearly 25 percent per capita decline in camping, fishing, hunting and visits to state and national parks since the mid-1980s. You've coined the term "videophilia." What is it? It's this increasing love and fascination that the American public has with electronic recreation—the Internet, e-mail, video games, DVDs, PDAs, podcasts. How is videophilia linked to the decline in outdoor recreation? What culturally has ch

EcoCenter: The Land

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 11:10:05 GMT

We are excited to present a special editorial section about The Land. Please visit www.smithsonian.com/ecocenter for the full feature.

The Coldest Place in the Universe

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:02:15 GMT

Where's the coldest spot in the universe? Not on the moon, where the temperature plunges to a mere minus 378 Fahrenheit. Not even in deepest outer space, which has an estimated background temperature of about minus 455°F. As far as scientists can tell, the lowest temperatures ever attained were recently observed right here on earth. The record-breaking lows were among the latest feats of ultracold physics, the laboratory study of matter at temperatures so mind-bogglingly frigid that atoms and even light itself behave in highly unusual ways. Electrical resistance in some elements disappears below about minus 440°F, a phenomenon called superconductivity. At even lower temperatures,

Dreaming of a Green Christmas

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 03:28:09 GMT

When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Radio City Rockettes lit the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center this year, more than 30,000 multi-colored bulbs sparkled on the 84-foot-tall Norway Spruce. But instead of the usual incandescent bulbs, they were LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, which emit more light per watt—ultimately saving the same amount of energy consumed by a typical 2,000-square-foot house in one month. City officials hope that this energy-saving technique will inspire others to have a truly green Christmas tree this season. Experts say it is not that difficult to make holiday trees eco-friendly. "You can make simple changes that don't affect the way you

Up in Smoke

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 03:05:55 GMT

In Brazil, the Amazon rain forest extends across 1.3 million square miles—and yet patches of land measuring just 386 square miles might be the best hope for ensuring the survival of the vast ecosystem, one of the world's largest and most diverse. The site is home to the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP), operated jointly by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and Brazil's National Institute for Amazonian Research. For nearly 30 years, scientists and students at BDFFP have been gathering crucial data on the environmental impact of farming, logging and human settlements. Now, however, the study area is threatened by those very same activities. &quo

The World After Oil

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:58:07 GMT

On a calm, chilly morning in late March, the four challengers pulled up to the first leg of the 3,500-mile pilgrimage that would, at best, rally awareness for alternative fuels between Washington, D.C. and Costa Rica and, at worst, leave them stranded somewhere in between. Already they were an hour behind schedule. Emily Horgan, the leader of this renewable rat pack, this carbon-neutral crew, inspected her entry: a 1976 mustard-colored Mercedes Benz, splotched with equal parts rust and bumper stickers, that had not been running days earlier. Another Benz, a cargo van and a Volkswagen Rabbit—each flashing bumper stickers of the same quality and quantity—parked behind Horgan. (Th

A Return to the Reefs

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:17:22 GMT

I couldn’t have been more than 5 years old when my father fitted me with my first pair of swim goggles. I waded out from the beach until the silky cool water reached my chest, and then I bent my knees until my head was below the surface. As if I’d passed through the looking glass like Alice, I was suddenly inside our living room aquarium with its colony of bright, tiny sea creatures. My smiling, similarly begoggled father was beckoning in dreamlike slow motion. Easing through the silvery ceiling of the sea, through clouds of minnows, over the dancing white sand bottom, I swam out with him until the world changed from bright sand to beige-colored rocks fringed with plants and s

Mystery at Sea

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:15:45 GMT

In the United States and many places around the world, people get a majority of their mercury intake from ocean fish—particularly tuna. Fish has some health benefits, but too much mercury consumption can cause developmental defects in young children. Scientists understand how mercury makes its way into freshwater species, but because oceans are so much larger and deeper, they aren't sure the process is the same. This uncertainty was underscored in May of 2006, when the San Francisco Superior Court ruled that tuna companies do not have to include mercury warnings on cans. In large part, the decision hinged on whether mercury found in ocean fish originated from man-made industry, such

Teaming up with Thoreau

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 08:33:47 GMT

The upright citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, didn't think much of young Henry David Thoreau. The cabin on Walden Pond, the night in jail for tax evasion, the constant scribbling in journals—it all seemed like a waste of a perfectly good Harvard education. Even more mysterious was his passion for flowers. "I soon found myself observing when plants first blossomed and leafed," Thoreau confided to his journal in 1856, "and I followed it up early and late, far and near, several years in succession, running to different sides of the town and into the neighboring towns, often between twenty and thirty miles in a day." Watch a video of Concord's flora Thoreau planned to turn his vast b

Who's Fueling Whom?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:58:45 GMT

I first started to think that the biofuels movement might be slipping into la-la land when I spotted a news item early this year about a 78-foot powerboat named Earthrace. In the photographs, the boat looked like a cross between Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose and a Las Vegas showgirl. Skipper Pete Bethune, a former oil industry engineer from New Zealand, was trying to set a round-the-world speed record running his 540-horsepower engine solely on biodiesel. Along the way, he spread the word that, as one report put it, "it's easy to be environmentally friendly, even in the ostentatious world of powerboating." Well, it depends on what you mean by "easy." Bethune's biodiesel

Yellowstone Grumbles

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 04:55:43 GMT

Yellowstone National Park is a land of many perils. Occasionally, one of the three million yearly visitors strolls up to a 2,000-pound bison and is gored. Others eat poisonous plants, snowmobile on avalanche-prone slopes, or plunge off a cliff on that last step backward to frame the perfect photograph. And at Yellowstone's 10,000 volcanically driven hot springs, geysers, bubbling mud pots and fumaroles—earth's largest concentration of hydrothermal features—about two dozen people have been boiled alive after falling or jumping in. "People do a lot of crazy things," says Lisa Morgan, a volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) who conducts research

Untapped Reserves: Energy Innovations

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 06:05:11 GMT

Hear what energy expert Bruce Piasecki has to say about oil and gas conservation policies.