| Melting Sea Ice Complicates Polar Bear Habitat Protection? The Interior Department moved closer to establishing habitat protections for the polar bear yesterday by sending its proposed rule to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review.The habitat protections will add another layer in what has become a complicated process for protecting the bear , fraught with concerns and legal complaints from environmentalists and industry groups. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Looking for Life in the Multiverse The typical Hollywood action hero skirts death for a living. Time and again, scores of bad guys shoot at him from multiple directions but miss by a hair. Cars explode just a fraction of a second too late for the fireball to catch him before he finds cover. And friends come to the rescue just before a villain’s knife slits his throat. If any one of those things happened just a little differently, the hero would be hasta la vista, baby . Yet even if we have not seen the movie before, something tells us that he will make it to the end in one piece.In some respects, the story of our universe resembles a Hollywood action movie. Several physicists have argued that a slight change to one of the laws of physics would cause some disaster that would disrupt the normal evolution of the universe and make our existence impossible. For example, if the strong nuclear force that binds together atomic nuclei had been slightly stronger or weaker, stars would have forged very little of the carbon and other elements that seem necessary to form planets, let alone life. If the proton were just 0.2 percent heavier than it is, all primordial hydrogen would have decayed almost immediately into neutrons, and no atoms would have formed. The list goes on. [More] rss.sciam.com |
IPCC Errors Prompt Review by International Science Academies African crop yields wither, along with the Amazon rainforest; Himalayan glaciers disappear by 2035. These are the erroneous predictions ascribed to the most recent report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--a document reviewed by some 2,500 scientists and other experts as well as vetted by more than 190 countries. So does the fact that a few errors crept into a more than 3,000 page report merit a revision of IPCC processes? [More] rss.sciam.com |
History and Nature on Delaware and Raritan Canal The Delaware and Raritan hasn’t been a working canal since the 1930s, but it’s still earning its keep as a very long state park. nytimes.com |
The Truth About the Risks to Freshwater Aquifers Posed by Underground Carbon Sequestration It could take decades, at least, to replace cheap, abundant fossil fuels with low-carbon energy sources. In the meantime, many scientists and government officials around the world think the next best option for keeping Earth's rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in check is to prevent the gas from escaping in the first place . This can be done by using a chemical solvent to separate it from the emitted byproducts of power plants and other high-polluting facilities like aluminum manufacturing plants and then burying (technically injecting) it deep underground--a process known as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Ideal storage areas include depleted oil and gas reservoirs, unmineable coal seams or deep saline formations, because they are all under sufficient pressure to force the greenhouse gas to stay put and are made of porous rock that can soak up CO2 like a sponge. [More] rss.sciam.com |