TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Estrogen in Waterways Worse Than Thought Exposure to estrogen puts fish at greater risk of disease and premature death, according to a new federal study.The U.S. Geological Survey study showed that estrogen exposure reduces a fish's ability to produce proteins that help it ward off disease and pointed to a possible link between the occurrence of intersex fish and recent fish kills in the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Smart spiders spy on Mount Saint Helens A dozen stainless steel spiders descended from a helicopter into the crater of Mount Saint Helens yesterday. As Seattle’s KOMO News reported, the “pods are small and tough enough to reach places no man dares” to go. Scientists hope that data collected by the monitoring machines could one day help them to better predict volcanic eruptions. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Disappearing Bees Have Devastated Ribosomes [ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]A big clue about what’s behind the disappearing honeybees, also known as colony collapse disorder, or CCD: May Berenbaum’s team at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign found that bees’ ribosomes were torn up. [More] rss.sciam.com |
A Clunker of a Climate Policy The Cash for Clunkers program offers a cautionarytale for the future of climate change control. The federal program paid individuals up to $4,500 to replace their “clunker” automobiles with new, higher-mileage vehicles. Part of the purpose was to give a lift to the ailing auto industry. Another part, at least it was claimed, was to mitigate climate change by getting old high-carbon-emissions vehicles off the road. But billions of dollars were spent quickly without clear answers on what we were getting for our money.The broad principle of climate change mitigation is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) from the combustion of fossil fuels, to target levels at the minimum net cost to society. There are many ways to reduce emissions: drive more efficient or electrically powered vehicles; produce electricity with renewable energy sources; capture CO 2 from power plants and store it geologically; restart the nuclear power sector; weatherproof homes to reduce energy for heating and cooling.... The list is long, with different time horizons, costs and uncertainties. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Is Coal Ash Hazardous? More than a year after 1 billion or so gallons of water polluted by ash spilled from a coal-burning power plant in Tennessee , the Obama administration is struggling to decide whether to declare such waste "hazardous."Slapping a hazardous label on coal ash and other coal byproducts would trigger the writing of a federal disposal standard to replace a patchwork of state regulations. The standard could outright ban wet storage ponds -- such as the one that ruptured in December 2008 in Kingston, Tenn. -- and require landfill liners, leak controls and groundwater monitoring at ash dumps. [More] rss.sciam.com |