Science News

By Mark Schrope

With oil still gushing from an offshore well in the Gulf of Mexico, some scientists and environmentalists worry that US federal agencies have not done enough to gather precious data on the spill, now into its second month. [More]

The last (and only) defense against the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is tiny--billions of hydrocarbon-chewing microbes, such as Alcanivorax borkumensis . In fact, the primary motive for using the more than 830,000 gallons of chemical dispersants on the oil slick both above and below the surface of the sea is to break the oil into smaller droplets that bacteria can more easily consume. [More]

Dear EarthTalk: How effective have plastic bag bans and restrictions been on reducing plastic litter and other problems associated with their proliferation? And is it really better to use paper bags, which will just lead to more deforestation? --Peter Lindsey, New Canaan, Conn.

By Kristen Hays and Sarah Irwin

HOUSTON/VENICE, Louisiana (Reuters) - Facing growing calls to take charge of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill response, the White House insisted on Tuesday that only BP Plc had the tools to plug the energy giant's gushing well.

A new generation of medical devices using wireless communications, sophisticated software and data center-driven "cloud" computing promises to deliver health care in ways previously limited to the confines of fancy hospital rooms. [More]

I’ll admit it. I am partial to neutrinos. And I always have been.

Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fictionlike contraptions to unravel their mysteries.

It’s often said we know more about the moon than we do about the depths of the ocean. There is a lot we don’t know about the H2O that covers much of the planet. Now we’re getting closer, though, to an important understanding: Just how deep are the oceans, and what’s the volume of all that water? The latest, best estimate is 1.332 billion cubic kilometers, according to research published in the journal Oceanography . [Matthew Charette and Walter Smith, http://bit.ly/diOgbh ]

That’s actually lower than previous estimates by about five Gulf of Mexicos. It’s not that there’s less water out there. Rather, new satelite images have presented a clearer image of all the mountain ranges strewn across the ocean floor. Those peaks displace what we’d thought of as space for water.