Earth
- Earth
Lizards threatened by warming
Analysis suggests climate change could wipe out 20 percent of species, 39 percent of local populations.
- Earth
Earliest birds didn’t make a flap
The feathers of Archaeopteryx and Confuciusornis probably were not strong enough to support sustained flight.
- Ecosystems
Spill update: From booms to dispersants
Choppy seas prevailed in the northern Gulf of Mexico on May 13, with even protected waters hostingrough 4 to 5 foot waves, according to the Coast Guard. But three-plus weeks into the Deepwater Horizon explosion and ensuing spill from a BP exploratory well, measures to respond to the catastrophe continued ramping up.
- 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.
