TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| How Does Deforestation Affect Orangutans? Dear EarthTalk: Aren't orangutans seriously threatened by the cutting down of forests? -- Nick Chermayeff, Greenwich, CT [More] rss.sciam.com |
Changing ocean chemistry might jam fish ears Just when you thought you’d heard it all about the effects of greenhouse gases, researchers have found that higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could lead to changes in fish anatomy involved in navigation. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Whatever Happened to the Mars Rovers? Natural Quasicrystals First cooked up in the lab in 1984, quasicrystals are unusual substances that lie somewhere between the crystalline and the amorphous. Specifically, they display ordered arrangements and symmetries but are not periodic--that is, they are not defined by a single unit cell (such as a cube) that repeats itself in three dimensions [see “Quasicrystals”; SciAm, August 1986]. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Uncharted waters: Blown fuses and other troubles send the New Clermont back to the docks as the team regroups Editor's Note: A team of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students was traveling up New York's Hudson River this week on the New Clermont , a 6.7-meter boat outfitted with a pair of 2.2-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cells to power the boat's motors. Their journey began September 21 from Manhattan's Pier 84 and was to cover 240 kilometers (at a projected speed of 8 kilometers per hour). After making several stops along the way, the crew originally expected to arrive back at Rensselaer Polytech's campus in Troy, N.Y., on September 25. This is the fourth of Scientific American.com's blogs chronicling this expedition, called the New Clermont Project . [More] rss.sciam.com |
Arctic Climate Threat--Methane from Thawing Permafrost (preview) Touchdown on the gravel runway at Cherskii in remote northeastern Siberia sent the steel toe of a rubber boot into my buttocks. The shoe had sprung free from gear stuffed between me and my three colleagues packed into a tiny prop plane. This was the last leg of my research team’s five-day journey from the University of Alaska Fairbanks across Russia to the Northeast Science Station in the land of a million lakes, which we were revisiting as part of our ongoing efforts to monitor a stirring giant that could greatly speed up global warming.These expeditions help us to understand how much of the perennially frozen ground, known as permafrost, in Siberia and across the Arctic is thawing, or close to thawing, and how much methane the process could generate. The question grips us--and many scientists and policy makers--because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, packing 25 times more heating power, molecule for molecule, than carbon dioxide. If the permafrost thaws rapidly because of global warming worldwide, the planet could get hotter more quickly than most models now predict. Our data, combined with complementary analyses by others, are revealing troubling trends. [More] rss.sciam.com |