Trash is loaded with the energy trapped in its chemical bonds. Plasma gasification, a technology that has been in development for decades, could finally be ready to extract it. In theory, the process is simple. Torches pass an electric current through a gas (often ordinary air) in a chamber to create a superheated plasma—an ionized gas with a temperature upward of 7,000 degrees Celsius, hotter than the surface of the sun....
Markarian 231 won’t win any galactic beauty contests. Seen through the Hubble Space Telescope, it’s a bit lopsided and dull. But boy, what a personality. This galaxy near the tail of the Big Dipper is, at a distance of 581 million light-years, the closest that contains a quasar—an ultraluminous region powered by the ravenous appetite of a single, giant black hole. Or so it was thought. In August, Chinese astronomers, working with collaborators at the University of Oklahoma, reported that intense beams of optical and ultraviolet light shining from Markarian 231’s center are best explained by not one but two invisible black holes, locked in fast orbit around each other....
2020 has been a historic year— and mostly not in a good way. Among many things, we saw a historic level of disregard of scientific advice with respect to the COVID-19 virus, a disregard that made the pandemic worse in the U.S. than in many other countries. But while the events of 2020 may feel unprecedented, the social pattern of rejecting scientific evidence did not suddenly appear this year. There was never any good scientific reason for rejecting the expert advice on COVID, just as there has never been any good scientific reason for doubting that humans evolved, that vaccines save lives, and that greenhouse gases are driving disruptive climate change....
The pattern is depressingly familiar by now: a Black man dies at the hands of police; the entire nation bears witness through social media; protests sweep the nation crying out at this injustice and the systemic issues that guarantee similar deaths to come—and demonstrators are met with tear gas in a show of the very sort of violence they are protesting. It’s shocking enough to watch this unfold on a screen, but it’s entirely different to witness the community trauma, the anger, the grief firsthand....
Few denizens of the East Coast were familiar with the term “super derecho” before its hurricane-like winds carved a devastating path through the mid-Atlantic on June 29. It snapped off trees and triggered sprawling power outages as it went. Since then, the term has become ubiquitous, tossed around easily as news anchors rattle off the storm’s mounting toll: 13 dead, more than 2 million without power at the storm’s peak and yet-untold billions of dollars in damages....
A gigantic ocean current, which transports heat around the globe and helps regulate weather patterns throughout the North Atlantic, appears to be slowing down. In fact, recent research has found that it’s currently at its weakest point in the last 1,000 years. The big question: Is climate change causing the slowdown? Or is it just a natural fluctuation? For now, scientists say, it’s probably some of both. A new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, finds that the current is indeed slowing and that climate change is likely playing at least a small part....
It’s something most of us do every morning without a second thought. We wake up, stumble to the bathroom and glance at ourselves in the mirror as we wipe the sleep from our eyes. It may not seem like much, but the simple act of looking at that mirror—and understanding that the eye-rubbing person staring back is really one’s own reflection—demonstrates a remarkably sophisticated level of understanding. Only a handful of the world’s other brainiest species have proved capable of this: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, magpies and at least one Asian elephant....
Three makes a trend, or so the saying goes. If that’s the case, events this week suggest the outlook for America’s coal industry is even bleaker than initially thought. The first bit of bad news trickled out Monday, when PacifiCorp released a study showing that the majority of its 22 coal units are uneconomical. The utility, based in Portland, Ore., operates a six-state power system and is one of the country’s largest coal burners....
This year’s Arctic sea ice cover currently is the sixth-lowest on modern record, a ranking that raises ongoing concerns about the speed of ice melt and the effects of ice loss on global weather patterns, geopolitical fights, indigenous peoples and wildlife, scientists said yesterday. In an analysis, the National Snow and Ice Data Center said the sea ice extent as of Sept. 16 was 2 million square miles, an amount just below revised estimates for 2009, the former sixth place finisher, said Julienen Stroeve, a scientist at the center....
For the Perseverance rover team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the early predawn hours of August 6 were like the night before Christmas. Hours earlier, the scientists had ordered the rover to drill into a rock within Mars’s Jezero Crater to extract and store the mission’s very first sample of Martian geology—one of up to 43 specimens that will one day be delivered to Earth and examined for signs of ancient life....
By Toru Hanai HIROSHIMA (Reuters) - Heavy rain delayed a search on Friday for more than 50 people believed buried under a deadly landslide on the edge of the Japanese city of Hiroshima, as opposition politicians rounded on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for his handling of the disaster. Rescue workers feared the continuing rain could set off further landslides in the area after a month’s worth of rain fell in one night on Wednesday, loosening slopes already saturated by heavy rain over the past few weeks....
LEARN Google Ocean Google Earth now lets you tour the oceans. Explore surface and seafloor features, including the depths of the Mariana Trench. You can also learn about ocean programs or trace a whale shark’s path. http://earth.google.com/ocean Current Climate The U.S. Climate Change Science Program Web site features up-to-date research on climate change carried out by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and 11 other federal agencies. www.climatescience.gov Extinction Revival Species loss might sound depressing but not on Scientific American’s 60-Second Extinction Countdown blog....
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Environmental Protection Agency will propose, later on Friday, a new federal target for U.S. biofuel use in 2014, attempting to prevent a projected fuel-blending crunch next year.Market watchers will likely scan the proposal to see if it contains as deep a cut in the amount of ethanol that must be blended into U.S. gasoline next year as seen in an agency document leaked last month and seen by Reuters....
By Alex Dobuzinskis LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The mayor of Los Angeles aims to reduce local water use by 20 percent over the next three years to address a record drought through a mix of voluntary measures for residents and mandatory restrictions for city departments, the city said on Tuesday. Mayor Eric Garcetti, in an executive order, asked residents in the city of 3.9 million people to limit watering their lawn to twice a week and ordered city departments to reduce watering of municipal lawns....
The discovery put the Peruvians on a short list of people who have survived rabies without a vaccine. The best-known member of that select group is Jeanna Giese, a Wisconsin teenager who lived through the disease in 2004, also after contact with a bat. Out of desperation, Giese’s physician improvised a risky treatment that included putting the girl into a controlled coma, which apparently allowed her body enough time to destroy the microscopic intruder....
The risk of death from carbon dioxide leaking from an underground storage site is far less than the risk of getting struck by lightning or killed in a car accident, according to a new study. The research, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on naturally occurring CO2 seeping through the ground in Italy, but the study authors say their analysis holds broad implications for industrially captured carbon dioxide that would be injected thousands of feet underneath the earth....
One warm evening this fall a pair of U.S. Army UH-60M Blackhawk helicopters cruised low over New York City’s Staten Island, providing security for the United Nations General Assembly’s annual meeting in nearby Manhattan. Just after sunset a shoe box–size airborne object collided with one of the choppers, damaging its main rotor blade, window frame and transmission system. Inspection at a nearby airfield revealed evidence of something that had never happened before—a civilian drone had plowed into a crewed craft in U....
Although millions of women use hormone therapy, those who try it in hopes of maintaining sharp memory and preventing the fuzzy thinking sometimes associated with menopause may be disappointed. A new study indicates that taking estrogen does not significantly affect verbal memory and other mental skills. “There is no change in cognitive abilities associated with estrogen therapy for postmenopausal women, regardless of their age,” says Victor Henderson, a neurologist at Stanford University and the study’s lead author....
Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. By Michael D.J. Lynch, University of Waterloo Despite their small size, organisms smaller than thousandth of a meter (1 mm) contribute greatly to biodiversity and ecosystem function. Unfortunately, categorizing small organisms, even defining those categories, is difficult. Do small organisms form discrete species? Advances in DNA sequencing combined with large surveys of small organisms suggest that this may not be the case....
A new “super-emitter” provision in EPA’s proposal to regulate methane emissions would empower third parties to identify large leaks of the greenhouse gas, putting more pressure on oil and gas operators to quickly fix any problems. EPA released the updated proposal on Friday, coinciding with President Joe Biden’s remarks at the U.N. climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt (Climatewire, Nov. 11). The new proposal, which updates the methane draft rule unveiled at last year’s U....
