Planet Earth, features and articles | Educational Science

Apr 30, 2010

Methane Tracking Could Size Up Gulf Oil Slick

Sizing up the oil gusher from the Deepwater Horizon disaster has proven difficult so far, but one scientist suggests that measuring methane in the water could give a better idea of how much oil has spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. Methane makes up about 40 percent of the leaking...

Mar 31, 2010

How Are Oil Spills Cleaned?

On Monday, workers in Australia rushed to contain an oil spill from a grounded ship in the Great Barrier Reef. The Chinese-registered Shen Neng 1 ship was carrying 72,000 tons (65,000 metric tons) of coal, and was loaded with 1,000 tons (950 metric tons) of fuel when it collided into...

Mar 31, 2010

How Do Flowers Know When to Bloom?

Flower petals breaking through the snow, an early hint of spring's arrival, hides a very complex genetic process behind its floral façade. Flowers know when to bloom because of a gene named Apetala1. A lone master gene, Apetala1 triggers the reproductive development of a plant, telling it when it's time...

Mar 31, 2010

Ancient Supervolcano Created Giant Underwater Mountain Chain

A supervolcano on the ocean floor might have spewed massive amounts of lava in a rapid amount of time, new findings that could help reveal the mysterious origin of some of these ancient goliaths, which may have triggered mass extinctions through Earth's history. Roughly a dozen supervolcanoes currently exist. Some...

Mar 31, 2010

Scientists Race to Engineer a New Magnet for Electronics

A magnet at the heart of high-tech products such as cell phones and hybrid cars relies upon an increasingly scarce supply of the rare earth element known as neodymium. Now one of the original inventors of that magnet hopes to create a new generation of magnetic materials that can ease...

Mar 31, 2010

World's Deepest Undersea Vents Discovered

Beneath the Caribbean Sea a remotely controlled vehicle came upon the world's deepest hydrothermal vents, where super-heated mineral-rich water gushes from chimney structures onto the ocean floor. The black smokers, named for how they spew out an iron sulfide compound that's black, sit 3.1 miles (5 kilometers) deep in the...

Mar 31, 2010

Water-Cooled Supercomputers On the Way

Around the world, engineers are searching for energy-efficient ways to cool down racks of computers in warehouses that get as hot as an oven while powering the Internet. A new study suggests warm water might just be the wave of the future for cooling these energy-hogging data centers – and...

Mar 31, 2010

New Intel Sensor Could Cut Electricity Bill

A new sensor and personal energy management panel made by Intel could help combat global warming by cutting electricity use by one-third. In an address this week during Intel's Developer Forum in Beijing, China, Justin Rattner, chief technology officer, posed the question: What if we could make energy management personal?...

Mar 31, 2010

Another Iceland Volcano Under Watch

News reports earlier today that another volcano on Iceland had erupted just as Eyjafjallajokull was beginning to calm down turned out to be false. But scientists are warily keeping their eye on one of Eyjafjallajokull's neighbors, which has been known to erupt following its sister. An MSNBC Twitter feed and...

Mar 31, 2010

Can Cell Phones Get Viruses?

The popularity of smart phones is growing at a breakneck speed, raising concerns over cell phone viruses. Cell phone viruses first broke onto the scene in 2005 when hackers learned how to utilize Nokia's Symbian Series 60 phone's text messaging system. When a user of this phone received a text...

Feb 28, 2010

Mine Grows, Valleys Disappear

Below the densely forested slopes of southern West Virginia's Appalachian Mountains is a layer cake of thin coal seams. To uncover this coal profitably, mining companies engineer large, sometimes very large, surface mines. A new pair of images from NASA shows the growth of one of the largest surface mines...

Feb 28, 2010

'Doomsday' Seed Vault Stores 500,000 Crops

A mold-resistant bean, a German pink tomato and a wild strawberry plucked from the flanks of a Russian volcano are just some of the crops whose seeds are being tucked away this week in a giant vault dug out of a mountainside of the Norwegian island Svalbard. With these new...

Feb 28, 2010

A Disastrous Year: 2010 Death Toll Already Abnormally High

Just a few months into 2010, and Mother Nature has delivered a slew of costly and deadly natural disasters. From the catastrophic Haiti and Chilean earthquakes to the U.S. blizzard that descended on Washington, D.C., last month, which was mostly just inconvenient by comparison, 2010 is already above average in...

Feb 28, 2010

What Triggers an Avalanche?

The most common and deadly type of avalanche is called a slab avalanche, in which a cohesive plate of snow shatters like a pane of glass and slides as a unit off the mountainside, according to the Utah Avalanche Center. The event is typically triggered not by loud noise, as...

Feb 28, 2010

Can You See a Sonic Boom?

The breaking of the sound barrier is not just an audible phenomenon. In fact, Mach 1 can be beautiful. The visual counterpart to a sonic boom, which sometimes but not always accompanies the breaking of the sound barrier, has also been seen with Apollo 11 moon-landing mission rocketed skyward in...