ScienceBlog.com

Oh Boy. Oh Joy. I live in Cincinnati, home of the “Creation Museum”. In case you didn’t know, it is a “museum” dedicated to a literal interpretation of the bible. Earth is only a few thousand years old. God created all life on earth as we see it today. Evolution is wrong, never happened. The [...]

AMARILLO — Biofuel feedstock production in the Texas High Plains could significantly change the crop mix, which could affect regional income and groundwater consumption, according to Texas AgriLife Research and Texas AgriLife Extension Service eco…

JUPITER, FL, March 3, 2011 — Borrowing a page from modern manufacturing, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have built a microscopic assembly line that mass produces synthetic cell-like compartments.
The new com…

SOUTH VERONA, MS — When essential oils are extracted from plants through the process of steam distillation, wastewater is produced and subsequently released into rivers and streams. Finding new uses for these unused by-products could benefit …

Sea-ice algae — the important first rung of the food web each spring in places like the Arctic Ocean — can engineer ice to its advantage, according to the first published findings about this ability.
The same gel-like mucus secreted by sea-i…

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — – Simply by eating the leaves of an invasive tree that soaks up river water, an Asian beetle may help to slow down water loss in the Southwestern United States.
Two scientists from UC Santa Barbara, working with coll…

Existing plans for antiviral and antibiotic use during a severe influenza pandemic could reduce wastewater treatment efficiency prior to discharge into receiving rivers, resulting in water quality deterioration at drinking water abstraction points.
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What should you do when you really, REALLY have to “go”? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in Ps…

Famed especially for the excellence of its peacekeepers and ice hockey players, Canada’s water experts are now increasingly needed to help countries elsewhere brace for drought, flood and unsafe water problems looming on a 15 to 20 year horizon.
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A group of researchers have studied the history of drought in the Pacific Northwest during the last 6,000 years, a time that spans the mid-Holocene geological epoch to the present. The goal of the research was to improve the understanding of d…

Disasters such as floods, tsunamis, and earthquakes often result in the spread of diseases like gastroenteritis, giardiasis and even cholera because of an immediate shortage of clean drinking water. Now, chemistry researchers at McGill Universi…

HOUSTON — (Feb. 23, 2011) — A lab at Rice University has stepped forward with an efficient method to disperse nanotubes in a way that preserves their unique properties — and adds more.
The new technique allows inorganic metal complexes with …

“The presence of two resistent forms of protozoons, the oocysts from the Cryptosporidium genus and cysts of the Giardia genus, is one of the greatest public health problems in water supply, because these parasites can easily survive our water tr…

WASHINGTON, Feb. 22, 2011 — The latest episode in the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) award-winning podcast series, “Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions,” focuses on a widespread public misconception about the estrogen hormones detected in mi…

(Jena, Germany) Professor Dr. Michael Ristow’s team along with Japanese colleagues from universities in Oita and Hiroshima have demonstrated by two independent approaches that even a low concentration of lithium leads to an increased life expectan…

Let algae do the dirty work.
Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology are developing biodiesel from microalgae grown in wastewater. The project is doubly “green” because algae consume nitrates and phosphates and reduce bacteria and toxins …

Frogs appear to be very sensitive to progestogens, a kind of pharmaceutical that is released into the environment. Female tadpoles that swim in water containing a specific progestogen, levonorgestrel, are subject to abnormal ovarian and oviduct deve…

Scientists have discovered that insects contain atomic clues as to the habitats in which they are most able to survive. The research has important implications for predicting the effects of climate change on the insects, which make up three-quar…

MADISON — Recalculating the global use of phosphorous, a fertilizer linchpin of modern agriculture, a team of researchers warns that the world’s stocks may soon be in short supply and that overuse in the industrialized world has become a leading …

Scientists aboard the Royal Research Ship James Cook have discovered a new set of deep-sea volcanic vents in the chilly waters of the Southern Ocean. The discovery is the fourth made by the research team in three years, which suggests that de…