Science News

At least 12,000 critically endangered saiga antelopes ( Saiga tatarica ) have been found dead in Kazakhstan in the past two weeks, victims of a mysterious epidemic. The deaths represent about 15 percent of the species' worldwide population.

Saiga antelopes used to number above one million, but the breakup of the Soviet Union led to rampant poaching throughout the species' range and 95 percent of the animals were killed off. Just 81,000 of the antelopes remained in five isolated populations in Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Mongolia. Until this outbreak, the Kazakh population numbered 26,000 animals, almost half of which have now died.

BP et al. have burned through more than five weeks and at least as many failed attempts to get control of the Mississippi Canyon 252 well spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Now the arrival of hurricane season--officially June 1 to November 30--threatens to make the difficulties worse. [More]

Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .

In the first installment of this post, Arnold Mckinley of Xslent Energy Technologies described how "reactive power" -- that is, power stored momentarily by electrical appliances and then released -- destabilizes the electrical grid. Here he explains how home solar arrays can help.

Wyoming's largest source of carbon dioxide emissions stands above a geological formation considered one of the nation's best potential carbon storage sites, but because of technological hurdles, coal-fired power plants like PacifiCorp 's Jim Bridger facility remain decades away from rerouting their emissions into the ground.

The Rock Springs Uplift geological formation has enough capacity to accommodate 100 years' worth of carbon dioxide from the Rock Springs, Wyo., power plant, which produces about 18 million tons of the greenhouse gas each year. But because current carbon capture technology would consume about 20 percent of a pulverized-coal plant's power and would produce a substantial amount of waste materials, that geographical proximity is currently nothing but a coincidence.

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Mmm, sticky rice. It’s a glutinous side dish that’s perfect for practicing your chopstick skills, for sopping up curry sauce and, amazingly, for building really strong pagodas. [More]

The world cannot afford to dump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Yet it is not cutting back. All indications are that the concentration of CO 2 will continue to rise for decades. Despite great support for renewable energy, developed and developing countries will probably burn more oil, coal and natural gas in the future.

For transportation, the alternatives to petroleum appear especially far off. Onboard energy storage for electric vehicles is difficult; for a given mass, batteries hold less than 1 percent of the energy stored in gasoline. Carrying hydrogen on vehicles requires 10 times the storage volume of gasoline, and the high-pressure tank needed to hold it is very heavy. Although a few maiden flights of airplanes powered by jet fuel derived from biomass have taken place, it is unclear that biofuels can be produced at the quantities and low prices required by airliners ... or by ships for that matter.

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