New 'Sponge' Material Is Like a ShamWow for Oil Spills

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(Credit: jukurae/Shutterstock) When an oil tanker runs aground or a deep-sea well suffers a leak, millions of gallons of oil can flood into the ocean. Once there, oil slicks can be tremendously difficult to contain, and pose risks to ocean-dwellers and coastlines when they wash ashore in waves of sticky sludge.[embedded content] Normal containment measures involve burning or skimming the thin layer of oil off of the surface, but these aren’t perfect and pose their own risks. Materia ...read more

Brain Activity At The Moment of Death

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What happens in the brain when we die? Canadian researchers Loretta Norton and colleagues of the University of Western Ontario examine this grave question in a new paper: Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death Norton et al. examined frontal EEG recordings from four critically ill patients at the point where their life support was withdrawn. Here are some details on the four: Here’s the EEG recordings. No ...read more

Human-Caused Minerals: Another Sure Sign of the Anthropocene?

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Chalconatronite, a result of quarrying, Mont Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, Canada. (Credit: RRUFF) To the ever-growing list of uniquely human tweaks to the planet, we can add the creation of 208 minerals. A list compiled by researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science, the University of Maine and the University of Arizona provides the first assessment of how many unique compounds human activities have created. The collection is another piece of evidence in favor of the Anthropocene, the auth ...read more

NextGen Paleontologist: Egypt's Catfish Hunter Sanaa El-Sayed

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Egyptian paleontologist Sanaa El-Sayed, shown here in the field, is the first woman vertebrate paleontologist from the Middle East to be first author on a paper published internationally — and her colleagues at Mansoura University are not far behind her. (Photo courtesy Sanaa El-Sayed) Sometimes, paleontology is about looking forward. Sure, the field is focused on uncovering and understanding the past, but to continue to progress, like every other area of science, paleontology n ...read more

Building a Better Polar Ice Forecast

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A Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker pierces the Beaufort Sea ice pack in September. (Credit: Alek Petty/NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center) Watching Arctic sea ice shrink to record lows has become a summer tradition for climatologists. And while few would expect that long-term trend to reverse, it’s still a struggle to predict the annual highs and lows of polar sea ice. In fact, just looking at long-term statistics — how much the sea ice maximum and minimum usual ...read more

Reef Check Underwater Science

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“People protect what they love.” ~ Jacques Yves Cousteau When I was a kid, my family and I used to love watching “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.” Every week we’d set out the TV tables and share our dinner with the French marine explorer as he led us on underwater adventures and taught us to appreciate the beauty of science and the sea. His show is one of the main reasons I became an environmental reporter and earned my scuba diving certification in Monterey ...read more

Pushing the Theoretical Limits of DNA Data Storage

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Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski, associate scientist at the New York Genome Center, prepare to make trillions of of a DNA file. (Credit: New York Genome Center) By 2020, the volumes of data that humanity generates may reach 44 trillion gigabytes, according to information technology analyst firm International Data Corporation in Framingham, Massachusetts. That’s equivalent to over 6 towers of 128-gigabyte iPad Airs, each reaching from Earth to the moon. To make use of all this data, ...read more

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