| Research teams spend the summer picking through the "Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch" It isn't the most picturesque of locations, but a number of scientists spent their summer taking in the 25.9-million-square-kilometer oval of the Pacific Ocean known as the North Subtropical Gyre, or "Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch," located about 1,600 kilometers off California's coast. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Frozen Antarctic lakes yield new viruses In the chilly depths of one of Antarctica's freshwater lakes, a surprising number of novel viruses thrive. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Scrutinizing Swamp Gas: Model Helps Predict Global Wetland Greenhouse Emissions Methane ranks only behind water vapor and carbon dioxide among principal greenhouse gases , in terms of its abundance and global warming potential. Even though it is less abundant and has a shorter lifetime in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, methane in the atmosphere accounts for nearly 20 percent of the heating effect of greenhouse gases compared with carbon dioxide's 50 percent. And similar to CO2, methane in the atmosphere emanates from both anthropogenic and natural sources. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Don't eat that: Endangered quolls my benefit from aversion therapy Eat something that's bad for you and you get sick, effectively teaching you to never eat that thing again. But if you eat something that kills you, there's not much room left for learning, is there?That's the problem in Australia, where the endangered northern quoll ( Dasyurus hallucatus ), a small, cat-sized marsupial , has been driven to near-extinction by eating poisonous cane toads ( Bufo marinus ). Now some scientists are trying to help quolls, and maybe other species, by teaching them that cane toads are not food and should be avoided. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Lunar Pencil Lead: Graphite Found in Moon Rock Collected During Apollo 17 Humans have not set foot on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, but those missions are still producing surprises. An analysis of a collected rock has produced the first solid evidence for graphite, the form of carbon commonly used as pencil lead, in a lunar sample.Andrew Steele, an astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and his colleagues reported in the July 2 Science that they found dozens of graphite particles in a small, dark patch on the sample--a region just 0.1 square millimeter in area--as well as seven needle-shaped rolls of carbon called graphite whiskers. Other samples have yielded traces of the element implanted by the solar wind or locked up in carbide compounds, but discrete pockets of graphite of this relatively large size appear to be a unique find. [More] Moon - Carbon - Apollo 17 - Carnegie Institution for Science - Solar wind rss.sciam.com |