Earth
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Earth
Inhaling your food—and its cooking fuel
Cooking emits easily inhaled pollutants that travel throughout a home and can linger for hours.
- Earth
Tales of the Undammed
Although destroying dams is often presumed to restore rivers, the results of such action are actually mixed, according to recent studies.
- Earth
Night space images show development
Scientists may have come up with a way to use satellite images taken at night to estimate the rate of population growth in fire-prone areas and thereby better assess fire risk to specific groups of residents.
- Earth
New U.N. treaty on toxic exports
The United Nations enacted a new treaty to ban exportation of any of a list of toxic chemicals without the prior informed consent of an importing nation.
- Earth
Diesel fumes suppress immune response
Recurring exposure to soot particles from diesel exhaust fumes reduces the immune system's capacity to fend off infection, tests on rodents indicate.
- Earth
Pompeii debris yields calamity clues
The magnetic characteristics of rocks and debris excavated from Pompeii reveal the changing temperatures of the volcanic ash cloud that smothered the Italian city in A.D. 79.
- Earth
Deep Pacific waters warmed in recent years
Oceanographic data gathered across the North Pacific in 1985 and again in 1999 indicate that the deepest waters there have been heating up.
- Agriculture
Fishy Alpha Males
As a way to protect wild fish stocks, raising genetically engineered fish may be futile should some of these modified fish escape into the environment.
- Earth
Lowering the Boom? Impact crater may predate extinction of the dinosaurs
Analyses of sediments from the Yucatán in Mexico suggest that an extraterrestrial impact there more than 65 million years ago actually happened about 300,000 years before mass extinctions of dinosaurs occurred.
- Earth
Killer Waves
Scientists are using sophisticated computer models, field studies of coastal geology, and data from tidal gauges to assess the tsunami risk for coastal residents.
- Earth
Nanosponges: Plastic particles pick up pollutants
Nanometer-scale polymer particles can extract pollutants from contaminated soil.
- Earth
Catching Waves: Ocean-surface changes may mark tsunamis
A new theoretical model that describes a tsunami's interaction with winds may explain enigmatic observations associated with the waves and could lead to a technique for spotting them long before they hit shore.
