Sewage Part II: This seafood is making me emotional

It’s rare for the Scribbler to scribble about the same thing two evenings in a row (endocrine -disrupting chemicals in the water) …but I’ve just stumbled over a paper reporting, get this, the “estrogen-like activity of seafood.” Researchers in the Mediterranean caught 13 types of seafood including shrimp, cuttlefish, squid, and mackerel – all part [...]

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Hold onto that sewage water a little longer

Sewage treatment plants may hold a low-cost key to keeping household chemicals out of surface water, says a new study in Environmental Science and Technology. What we’re talking about here is a much more insidious problem than the occasional bleach spill. Pollution by pesticides and “personal care products” is coming to be understood as a [...]

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Finding (Captain) Nemo

Japanese researchers have finally caught on film a live giant squid. CNN has the video here. While the achievement brings to a close a decades-long effort, the actual video is actually a bit sorrowful to behold. The researchers caught the squid on a line and hauled it to the surface. So the video isn’t of [...]

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Trapdoor on the seafloor

Last February, the head Scribbler and some compatriots were sitting on the beach in Hawai’i (at the Banzai Pipeline, to be specific). One of us noticed that scattered amid the large, corn-colored grains of sand were lots of tiny, shiny white discs. On closer inspection, they were glossy spirals about the size of a pencil [...]

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OK, U.N.K.L.E. already

After about five days in intensive post-AGU recovery, I’d like to raise a plea for some mercy when it comes to those clever abbreviations scientists invent for their projects. Granted, stretching the English language is a venerated activity. It worked for James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, William S. Burroughs, etc. etc. But if you [...]

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Mac Users Gain Edge in Earthquake-Prone Regions

As if the Apple folks hadn’t made Macs cute and quirky enough straight out of the box, other people are writing freeware to turn your MacBook Pro into a seismograph. It all started in early 2005, when Apple decided to put motion sensors into the new laptops. Why, you ask? So that if you happen [...]

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Bouncing icebergs ride Alaskan swells

Alaskan storms are literally rocking the South Polar ice – jarring it about 5 mm vertically and sometimes bouncing icebergs along the sea floor. The image of house-sized waves detonating on a reef is a standard one in any surfing tale, but when the waves hit a “nascent iceberg” carrying a $7,000 seismometer there’s actually [...]

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The Al Gore Union

For brief minutes at lunchtime today, I was on the other side of a cavernous ballroom from the gray and blue pixels in the center of this photo. It was Al Gore, carrying his message of hope and responsibility to 5,000 scientists who don’t need to hear the dire part of the “Inconvenient Truth” talk. [...]

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Elephant seals refuel at mid-ocean eddies

Eddies the size of Eastern states spin like smoke rings in the north Pacific, drawing in elephant seals with the promise of food. The eddies peel off the Alaska gyre – a large current that circles the Gulf of Alaska – and linger in slow rotation for as long as a year at a time. [...]

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Cheers to Sir David

David Attenborough suggests the battle against climate change could start with a “moral change.” Such as, the BBC reports, the one Attenborough grew up with during World War II, when wasting resources was viewed as simply wrong. This shift in attitude might finally get us past that tired excuse that small differences can’t produce large [...]

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