Chemistry
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Earth
Gulf spill: BP gets go ahead for full-scale underwater use of dispersants
All week, U.S. federal agencies have been evaluating an unprecedented use of oil dispersants: to break up crude spewing from the seafloor. BP won preliminary approval to try them in limited tests against an ongoing torrent of oil spewing from the base of a devastated exploration rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Late morning on May 15, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Coast Guard issued their joint approval for a scale-up of the novel subsea application of these chemicals.
- Animals
Fight or flee, it’s in the pee
Researchers get a better understanding of how mice smell a rat, or a cat, and maybe even a snake.
- Chemistry
EPA issues greenhouse-gas rules for new factories and more
EPA released new rules on greenhouse-gas emissions for new power plants, factories and oil refineries — any big new facility, really that emits huge amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, or any of several other classes of chemicals. Existing facilities can continue to spew greenhouse gases at current levels.
- Chemistry
Chinese would turn cigarette butts into steel’s guardian
People smoke a lot of cigarettes, which leads to a lot of trash. Tom Novotny has done the math: An estimated 5.6 trillion butts each year end up littering the global environment. But Chinese researchers have a solution: recycling. Their new data indicate that an aqueous extract of stinky butts makes a great corrosion inhibitor for steel.
- Chemistry
Another plastics ingredient raises safety concerns
Bisphenol A’s ‘twin’ may be more potent at perturbing estrogen signals.
- Chemistry
Decon Green can clean up the most toxic messes, developers claim
A new decontaminant could be a more benign alternative for cleaning up after chemical and biological accidents.
- Materials Science
Infection, kill thyself
Scientists devise wound dressings that trick bacteria into suicide.
- Health & Medicine
Chili pepper holds hot prospects for painfree dieting
A cousin of the chemical that packs the heat in chilis not only can rev up the body’s metabolism but actually encourage it to preferentially burn fat, according to a new trial in obese men and women. And the kicker: The molecule is itself so fat that it can’t fit into the receptors that would ordinarily register pain.
- Health & Medicine
Body makes its own morphine
A study in mice suggests other mammals, including humans, can produce the painkiller in their bodies.
- Agriculture
Rural ozone can be fed by feed (as in silage)
Livestock operations take a lot of flak for polluting. Researchers are now linking ozone to livestock, at least in one of the nation's most agriculturally intense centers. And here the pollution source is not what comes out the back end of an animal but what’s destined to go in the front.
- Chemistry
From movies you’ll love to drugs you’ll take
A new method picks out promising drug compounds by computer, in much the same way Netflix recommends DVDs to its customers.
- Materials Science
Physicists untangle the geometry of rope
Equations explain why winding fibers together does the job, no matter what they’re made of.
