Getting set for a black gold rush, Science News, February 14, 1970 — Nobody has ever done what the engineers designing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline are faced with: the need to carry hot oil through the Arctic. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, expected to be completed in 1972, will carry 600,000 barrels of oil a day across Alaska. […] More
Nearly a decade after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, computer simulations suggest that the toxic pollution extended much farther than satellite images first indicated. Those images, taken after the spill dumped nearly 800 million liters of oil into Gulf waters, helped to determine which areas would be temporarily closed […] More
Physicists’ fantasies of a future quantum internet are a bit closer to reality. Scientists entangled two quantum “hard drives” that were linked by fibers tens of kilometers long. Entanglement, a type of ethereal quantum connection, allows two particles to behave as if intertwined even when distantly separated. The new study entangled two devices called quantum […] More
The noise of shipping vessels traveling through northern Canadian waters is causing Arctic cod to sacrifice much of their foraging and feeding in order to flee the area until ships move away, researchers report. The findings — the first to gauge how shipping noise could affect Arctic fish — are cause for concern as climate […] More
Winds are picking up worldwide, and that is making the surface waters of the oceans swirl a bit faster, researchers report. A new analysis of the ocean’s kinetic energy, measured by thousands of floats around the world, suggests that surface ocean circulation has been accelerating since the early 1990s. Some of that sped-up circulation may […] More
Containers that the U.S. government plans to use to store dangerous nuclear waste underground may be more vulnerable to water damage than previously thought. Millions of liters of highly radioactive waste from the U.S. nuclear weapons program are currently held in temporary storage units across the country. The government’s game plan for permanently disposing of […] More
Despite growing concerns over tiny bits of plastic filling the world’s waterways, the long-term environmental effects of that debris remain murky. Now an experiment on freshwater sediment communities exposed to microplastics for over a year helps clarify how harmful this pollution can be. Researchers embedded trays of sediment littered with different amounts of polystyrene particles […] More
A tiny nanoparticle has been chilled to the max. Physicists cooled a nanoparticle to the lowest temperature allowed by quantum mechanics. The particle’s motion reached what’s known as the ground state, or lowest possible energy level. In a typical material, the amount that its atoms jostle around indicates its temperature. But in the case […] More
