Scientific American - Chemistry

First Look at Carbon Capture and Storage in a West Virginia Coal-Fired Power Plant [Slide Show]

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:01:00 EST

NEW HAVEN, W.Va.--A 100-story smokestack belches a roiling, white cloud of water vapor, carbon dioxide and other leftover gases after burning daily as much as 12,000 tons of coal at the Mountaineer Power Plant --a total of 3.5 million tons a year. The facility just outside the town of New Haven boasts a single 65-meter-high boiler capable of generating enough steam to pump out 1,300 megawatts of electricity--enough to power nearly one million average American homes a month--continuously. And now roughly 1.5 percent of the CO 2 billowing from its stack is being captured in an industrial unit rising from the concrete in its shadow and then pumped underground for storage. In case you were wondering, this last phase is called "clean coal". [More]

Can Closing the Ozone Hole Also Help Combat Climate Change?

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:31:00 EST

Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse culprit in human-generated global warming , most scientists agree, but CO 2 itself, and a handful of other substances, are now being promoted as good alternatives to commonly used refrigerants that threaten Earth's atmosphere and climate. [More]

How Threatened Are Killer Whales in the Wild?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Dear EarthTalk: How are populations of the world’s orca whales faring these days? Are we still in danger of losing them all in the wild? --J. Witham, Bangor, ME [More]

How Noise Can Help Quantum Entanglement

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:00:00 EST

Wouldn’t it be nice to be an electron? Then you, too, could take advantage of the marvels of quantum mechanics, such as being in two places at once--very handy for juggling the competing demands of modern life. Alas, physicists have long spoiled the fantasy by saying that quantum mechanics applies only to microscopic things.

Yet that is a myth. In the modern view that has gained traction in the past decade, you don’t see quantum effects in everyday life not because you are big, per se, but because those effects are camouflaged by their own sheer complexity. They are there if you know how to look, and physicists have been realizing that they show up in the macroscopic world more than they thought. “The standard arguments may be too pessimistic as to the survival of quantum effects,” says Nobel laureate physicist Anthony Leggett of the University of Illinois.

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EPA tests porous pavement to combat contaminated rain runoff

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:00:00 EST

In an effort to prevent polluted parking lot rain runoff from contaminating surrounding soil and underground water, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday said it has launched decadelong test of permeable materials to find one that can filter out impurities in rainwater before it flows to its final destination. [More]

Novel Analysis Confirms Climate "Hockey Stick" Graph

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:00:00 EST

The “hockey stick” graph has been both a linchpin and target in the climate change debate. As a plot of average Northern Hemisphere temperature from two millennia ago to the present, it stays relatively flat until the 20th century, when it rises up sharply, like the blade of an upturned hockey stick. Warming skeptics have long decried how the temperatures were inferred, but a new reconstruction of the past 600 years, using an entirely different method, finds similar results and may help remove lingering doubts.

The hockey stick came to life in 1998 thanks to the work of Michael Mann, now at Pennsylvania State University, and his colleagues (and many other climate scientists who subsequently refined the graph). Reconstructing historical temperatures is difficult: investigators must combine information from tree rings, coral drilling, pinecones, ice cores and other natural records and then convert them to temperatures at specific times and places in the past. Such proxies for temperature can be sparse or incomplete, both geographically and through time. Mann’s method used the overlap, where it exists, of recent proxy data and instrument data (such as from thermometers) to estimate relations between them. It calculates earlier temperatures using a mathematical extrapolation technique [see “ Behind the Hockey Stick ,” by David Appell, Insights; Scientific American, March 2005].

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Staying Out of a Jam: Air Force Looks at Nanotube Sheets for Electromagnetic Shielding

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:10:00 EST

Aerospace and aircraft companies as well as the military have been challenged to find ways of effectively shielding sensitive electronic equipment such as radar and radios from electromagnetic interference (EMI) without adding a lot of weight to aircraft and satellites (the more massive they are, the more fuel they need to stay in the air or achieve orbit, respectively). Whereas EMI can lead to headaches like erased data and loss of connectivity for casual computer and cell phone users, the problem is far more serious in aircraft, where interference can jam cockpit radio and radar signals, preventing pilots from sending and receiving crucial information. [More]

Nerd a Vacation?: Travel with The Geek Atlas

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:00:00 EST

After five years of gallivanting across the globe, Charles Darwin settled down at Down House in Downe, England. Other than day trips to London, he hardly left his neighborhood for the remaining 45 years of his life. After three days at a conference in London this past summer, I took a day trip to Downe to see Darwin’s house, which is now a small museum. What I did not know at the time was that I was visiting site number 043 in The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science & Technology Come Alive (O’Reilly Media, 2009).

Author John Graham-Cumming holds a doctorate in computer security and is described in the book as “a wandering programmer.” (That background probably explains the zeroes that give all his site numbers three digits. Not to mention the choice of 128 places--programmers can’t resist powers of 2.) Graham-Cumming secured his own geek status by contributing to Linux Magazine . And he became a supergeek with his previous book, published in 2008, a guide to the software program GNU Make. That’s right, Graham-Cumming is the author of GNU Make Unleashed , which, he notes, “saturated its target market of 100 readers.”

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Red Wine with Fish? Iron-ic Answer

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:23:08 EST

[ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]

It’s one of the most vexing problems in modern science: which wine to order with the Chilean sea bass. One thing’s for sure, though--you’d only ever order a white wine, never a red wine with fish. The flavors just clash. But now researchers have pinpointed the problem with red wine and seafood. And some reds may actually go fine with fish.

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Energy Out of the Blue: Generating Electric Power from the Clash of River and Sea Water

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:00:00 EST

In the hunt for alternatives to polluting and climate-warming fossil fuels, attention has turned to where rivers meet the sea. Here, freshwater and saltwater naturally settle their salinity difference, a phenomenon that two pioneering projects in Europe will try to harness to generate clean energy. [More]

New Software Could Smooth Supercomputing Speed Bumps

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:00:00 EST

Supercomputers have long been an indispensable, albeit expensive, tool for researchers who need to make sense of vast amounts of data. One way that researchers have begun to make high-speed computing more powerful and also more affordable is to build systems that split up workloads among fast, highly parallel graphics processing units (GPUs) and general-purpose central processing units (CPUs). [More]

Scabby knaves: Barnacles bind to ships using clotlike glue

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:16:00 EST

Hitchhiking on the surface of a boat hull can be a rough ride, but barnacles seem to do it with ease. How are they able to hang on so tightly? Researchers have been studying the composition of super-strong barnacle glue for years, and a new analysis of the cement reveals that it has many of the same properties as a human blood coagulant , factor XIII, which helps to form scabs. [More]

Carbonation Has a Taste

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:05:08 EST

[ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]

If you’ve ever craved an ice-cold soda, you know that sometimes you’re just looking for something that tastes…fizzy. If that sounds odd, scientists have discovered that carbonation actually has a flavor. And that our taste buds can sense CO2. [More]

Exotic Quasicrystal Structures May Be More Normal Than Assumed

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:45:00 EST

Quasicrystals are a relative newcomer to the field of materials science, having been discovered just 25 years ago. Nudging their way between amorphous solids such as glass and crystals such as quartz, the structures exhibit an ordered structure like crystals do, but their uniqueness lies in the fact that the ordered arrangement does not repeat--that is to say, it is not periodic. [More]

Brain Enhancement: October Issue of Scientific American

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:49:08 EST

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Ribosome Unraveled: A Q&A with Nobelist Thomas Steitz

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:20:00 EST