| Are Our Big Brains the Reason Newborns Can't Walk? Compared with other animals, human babies take much longer to learn to walk. Does this have something to do with our big brains? --Mahmoud Dhaouadi, via e-mail [More] rss.sciam.com |
Natural Gas Drilling Produces Radioactive Wastewater As New York gears up for a massive expansion of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, state officials have made a potentially troubling discovery about the wastewater created by the process: It's radioactive. And they have yet to say how they'll deal with it.The information comes from New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation , which analyzed 13 samples of wastewater brought thousands of feet to the surface from drilling and found that they contain levels of radium 226, a derivative of uranium, as high as 267 times the limit safe for discharge into the environment and thousands of times the limit safe for people to drink. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Fungus May Be Cause of Die-Offs in Bats, Researchers Say Something is killing the little brown bats of the Northeast, and researchers may have fingered the culprit: a fungus. nytimes.com |
How Much Volcanic Ash Is Too Much for a Jet Engine? Air travel in Europe inched back to normal Wednesday, as officials estimated that newly opened flight routes would permit air traffic to approach 75 percent of its normal capacity. Ash plumes from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano had all but extinguished flight operations across the U.K. and mainland Europe for the better part of a week . [More] rss.sciam.com |
The bean test: Student stove goes head-to-head against Tanzanian three-stone stove to test efficiency Editor's Note: Students from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. The student-led group , known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), will file dispatches from the field during their trip. This is their 10th blog post for Scientific American.When we arrived, Jirani (Swahili for neighbor and the name we were told to call her) brought out a bench and smiled, " Karibuni (Welcome)!" As you may have noticed from our other posts , Tanzanians have a strong tradition of welcoming visitors into their homes. Once we sat down, Kevin explained the plan for the day: to cook beans. By measuring the amount of wood consumed during the two-to-three hour cooking process of a staple food, we are able to gauge the relative efficiencies of different stove designs. [More] Tanzania - Cooking - Energy - Thayer School of Engineering - Dartmouth College rss.sciam.com |