• Responding to future oil spills: lessons learned from Deepwater Horizon

    A special collection of articles about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill provides the first comprehensive analysis and synthesis of the science used in the unprecedented response effort by the government, academia, and industry;with the benefit of hindsight and additional analyses, these papers evaluate the accuracy of the information that was used in real-time to inform the response team and the public

  • Below Russian Far East there is a seismic hazards that could threaten Pacific Basin

    For decades, a source of powerful earthquakes and volcanic activity on the Pacific Rim was shrouded in secrecy, as the Soviet government kept outsiders away from what is now referred to as the Russian Far East; research in the last twenty years, however, has shown that the Kamchatka Peninsula and Kuril Islands are a seismic and volcanic hotbed, with a potential to trigger tsunamis that pose a risk to the rest of the Pacific Basin

  • Fabric for military uniforms to repel chemical and biological agents

    Military uniforms of the future may offer a new layer of critical protection to wearers; the fabric will be able to switch reversibly from a highly breathable state to a protective one in response to the presence of the environmental threat without the need for an external control system; in the protective state, the uniform material will block the chemical threat while maintaining a good breathability level

  • Mixing oil with dispersant increased toxicity to Gulf’s ecosystems

    If the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010 Deep Water Horizon spill was an ecological disaster, the two million gallons of dispersant used to clean it up apparently made it even worse – fifty-two-times more toxic

  • Fracking in Michigan

    In hydraulic fracturing, large amounts of water, sand and chemicals are injected deep underground to break apart rock and free trapped natural gas; though the process has been used for decades, recent technical advances have helped unlock vast stores of previously inaccessible natural gas, resulting in a fracking boom; researchers are examining the benefits of fracking for Michigan

  • Post-Sandy insurance rates increase may make coastal living unaffordable

    Residents of New York and New Jersey are still coping with the destruction Hurricane Sandy caused, but home and business owners alike will soon face another burden: rising insurance rates and new building codes and requirements that could threaten many that live and work in the coastal areas of the two states

  • Lloyd’s says countries are under insured against natural disasters

    Lloyd’s of London, the world’s largest insurance company, has warned seventeen countries that a $165 billion global insurance deficit leaves them vulnerable to long-term natural disaster costs; Lloyds says the world may not be able to afford another year like 2011, when natural disasters such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the floods in Thailand caused $4.6 trillion dollars of damage to infrastructure, homes, and businesses, and which resulted in the largest disaster claims ever

  • The debate over radon as an earthquake predictor continues

    Scientists have been interested in using radon emissions to predict earthquakes since the 1980s, but no solid evidence ever came to support it and the idea was abandoned by most in the field during the 1990s; now, scientists are looking again at radon as an earthquake predictor

  • Increase in negative messages about Muslims in the media: study

    Organizations using fear and anger to spread negative messages about Muslims have moved from the fringes of public discourse into the mainstream media since the 9/ 11 attacks; to reach these conclusions, a University of North Carolina sociologist used textual detection software to track the influence of 1,084 press releases about Muslims from 120 organizations on more than 50,000 television transcripts and newspaper articles produced from 2001 to 2008

  • Hard choices to be made on adapting infrastructure to climate change

    The costs of adapting to climate change, sea-level, and flooding include the upfront expenses of upgrading infrastructure, installing early-warning systems, and effective organizations, as well as the costs of reducing risk, such as not building on flood plains

  • Scientists identify a human-caused climate change signal in the noise

    By comparing simulations from twenty different computer models to satellite observations, Lawrence Livermore climate scientists and colleagues from sixteen other organizations have found that tropospheric and stratospheric temperature changes are clearly related to human activities; “No known mode of natural climate variability can cause sustained, global-scale warming of the troposphere and cooling of the lower stratosphere,” says Livernore atmospheric scientist Benjamin Santer

  • Innovative method to capture CO2

    The carbonate-looping method for capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) could reduce power-plant CO2 emissions by more than 90 percent, while utilizing less energy and incurring less expense than former approaches

  • Technology transfer from U.S. federal laboratories to private entities, other governments

    In 2010 the eleven U.S. federal laboratories had more than 18,000 active collaborative relationships with private entities and other government agencies, disclosed more than 4,700 inventions, submitted 1,830 patent applications, and received 1,143 patents

  • Detection aircraft surveys 600 miles of PG&E California pipeline for gas leaks

    PG&E’s transmission pipeline is routinely surveyed each year, typically by ground crews; accessing rural areas with difficult terrain, however, can be time consuming, expensive, and unsafe for crews on the ground; aerial surveys often look for dead vegetation as an indicator of gas leaks

  • Sea-levels rising faster than IPCC projections

    Sea-levels are rising 60 percent faster than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) central projections, new research suggests; the study involved an analysis of global temperatures and sea-level data over the past two decades, comparing them both to projections made in the IPCC’s third and fourth assessment reports