• Loss of summer rains lead to long droughts in southwest U.S.

    Long-term droughts in southwestern North America often mean failure of both winter and summer rains, according to new research. The finding contradicts a commonly held belief regarding the region — that a dry winter rainy season is generally followed by a wet summer season, and vice versa. In fact, when severe, decades-long droughts have struck the area in centuries past, both winter and summer rains generally were sparse year after year.

  • Does warmer climate mean stormier, or only wetter, weather?

    Many scientists argue that the climate has warmed since people began to release massive amounts greenhouse gases to the atmosphere during the Industrial Revolution. These scientists, however, are less sure that warming climate creates stormier weather. The reason: nobody has done the quantitative analysis needed to show this is indeed happening. Until now.

  • Petroleum use, greenhouse gas emissions of U.S. automobiles could drop 80 percent by 2050

    A new National Research Council study finds that by the year 2050, the United States may be able to reduce petroleum consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent for light-duty vehicles — cars and small trucks — via a combination of more efficient vehicles; the use of alternative fuels like biofuels, electricity, and hydrogen; and strong government policies to overcome high costs and influence consumer choices.

  • Helping coal miners escape underground disasters

    Recent advances in mining research and practices have improved the safety and health of underground coal miners and extensive rescue strategies are in place, but more coordinated planning and training are needed better to prepare miners to escape in the event of a mine emergency, says a new report from the National Research Council.

  • “Dirty blizzard” accounts for missing Deepwater Horizon oil

    The Deepwater Horizon disaster spilled more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Microbes likely processed most of the oil within months of the spill, but these microbes do not account for all of the spilled oil. Scientists have now found what happened to the oil not processed by microbes: the oil acted as a catalyst for plankton and other surface materials to clump together and fall to the sea floor in a massive sedimentation event that researchers are calling a “dirty blizzard.” The oily sediments deposited on the sea floor could cause significant damage to ecosystems and may affect commercial fisheries in the future.

  • 2012 economic losses from disasters set new record at $138 billion

    The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) reported that for the first time in history, the world has experienced three consecutive years in which annual economic losses have exceeded $100 billion. The losses are the result of an enormous increase in exposure of industrial assets and private property to extreme disaster events.

  • Building stronger, greener concrete with biofuel byproducts

    The world uses nearly seven billion cubic meters of concrete a year, making concrete the most-used industrial material after water. Even though making concrete is less energy intensive than making steel or other building materials, we use so much of it that concrete production accounts for between 3 to 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

  • New structure for regulation of geoengineering research needed: experts

    Geoengineering, the use of human technologies to alter the Earth’s climate system — such as injecting reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to scatter incoming sunlight back to space — has emerged as a potentially promising way to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Such efforts, however, could present unforeseen new risks. This inherent tension has thwarted both scientific advances and the development of an international framework for regulating and guiding geoengineering research.

  • Budget cuts lead to uncertainty for military schools

    The sequestration has hit many federal agencies, but Defense Department schools and other military education programs  have more questions than  answers as to how the federal budget cuts will affect them.

  • The infrastructure of asteroid-mining economy

    An asteroid-mining space economy would be easier to build if there were the equivalent of a few Stuckey’s around out there. As is the case with other enterprises, a space economy will need fuel, liquids, and supplies, and these could be stored in outposts on dwarf planets like Ceres.

  • Urgent need to find asteroids that threaten Earth: expert

    The impact from a 100-meter long asteroid hitting Earth would be equal to detonating a 100-megaton hydrogen bomb. Several large asteroids have zipped dangerously close to Earth in the past month. There are millions of these near-Earth-orbit (NEOs) asteroids longer than 100 meters. Because they are relatively small, and because they spend so much time far from Earth, scientists tend to find them only by chance.

  • Russia embarking on a program to thwart asteroid threat

    Officials from Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear agency, and from Russia’s space agency, yesterday (Tuesday) told a special conference at the Russian Federation Council, the Russian upper house, that Russia was embarking on an ambitious program – estimated to cost about $2 billion – to shield Russia from the threat of asteroids and meteors. The first steps will be taken by the end of the year, but the comprehensive set of measures will not be available until 2018-20. The officials discussed various possible measures, ranging from planting beacon transmitters on asteroids to megaton-sized nuclear strikes to destroy asteroid or divert them from a course which would lead to a collision with the Earth.

  • New radioactive waste repackaging facility in Los Alamos

    The Los Alamos National Laboratory has brought a third waste repackaging facility online to increase its capability to process nuclear waste for permanent disposal. The box line facility is largest of its kind ever built.

  • Making future sea-level predictions more accurate

    Sea-level rise is a major issue facing those in charge of infrastructure protection in coastal communities. New research into radiocarbon dates of tiny fossilized marine animals found in Antarctica’s seabed sediments offers new clues about the recent rapid ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and helps scientists make better predictions about future sea-level rise. 

  • Grid-scale batteries for storing renewable energy have large carbon footprint

    Most of the electricity produced in the United States comes from coal- and natural gas-fired power plants. Only about 3 percent is generated from wind, solar, hydroelectric, and other renewable sources.  A key problem is that the U.S. electrical grid has virtually no storage capacity, so grid operators cannot stockpile surplus clean energy and deliver it at night, or when the wind is not blowing. Stanford scientists have developed a novel way to calculate the energetic cost of building large batteries and other storage technologies for the electrical grid. The found that the fossil fuel required to build these technologies could negate some of the environmental benefits of installing new solar and wind farms.