Earth
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- 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.
- Earth
Archaeopteryx fossil seen in new light
X-ray technique reveals original tissue in the feathers of a primitive bird fossil.
- Earth
Gravity lows mark burial sites of ancient tectonic plates
Dips in Earth's gravitational field are tied to 'slab graveyards'
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- Earth
Atrazine paper’s challenge: Who’s responsible for accuracy?
As a new critique of a review paper on atrazine suggests, some papers may simply overtax a journal’s fact-vetting enterprise. Which would be bad for science. And bad for society.
- 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.
- Tech
A Gulf spill news review
Oil companies have said it's possible the gusher could grow substantially before its capped.
- Tech
Preventing disastrous offshore spills may require space-program diligence
As crude oil continues to spew from the Gulf of Mexico seafloor — two weeks now after the Deepwater Horizon accident and sinking — questions continue to surface about what went wrong. To my mind, what went wrong was almost blind optimism on the part of industry, regulators, the states and the public. And any niggling doubt about the wisdom of that optimism was likely assuaged by at least a little greed.
- Earth
Gulf oil spill a slow-motion hurricane
The accident’s timing could determine how badly it damages coastal marshes.
- Earth
BP oil rig’s sinking and gushing crude raise questions
Around 10 p.m. local time on April 20, the Deepwater Horizon — a floating oil-drilling platform leased to British Petroleum — suffered an explosion and fire about 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. While the aftermath of that devastating accident is now being observed and chronicled in painful detail, even the most basic features of what triggered it remain sketchy.
- Earth
Wringing hope from crashing biodiversity
Biodiversity losses have not slowed despite a treaty designed to protect variety in the natural world.
