Blogs / Discoblog

You eschew cars and planes, eat insects instead of meat, dedicate yourself to recycling, avoid plastic, and install CFLs in every socket within reach—but what about your carbon footprint after death?

Standard coffin burials are known environmental hazards, involving high levels of hazardous chemicals and metals at every step. The body is first embalmed with formaldehyde (arsenic and mercury, thankfully, are no longer used), then placed in either a wood coffin (covered in varnishes, sealers, and preservatives) or a metal coffin (full of lead, zinc, copper, and steel). In America, the casket is then placed inside a concrete liner before burial in the ground—using enough reinforced concrete every year to construct a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit.

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Every year, 935 million packs of gum are chewed by 28 million Britons, leaving millions of sticky, inconvenient lumps in their wake. The globs can only be removed with high pressure steam hoses, expensive freezing machines, or corrosive, environmentally unfriendly chemicals, costing taxpayers £150 ($300) million per year. The desperate state of affairs has attracted millions of dollars of research into non-stick chewing gum, but the country wants a quicker solution.

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Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at a record-breaking rate—but it’s not all tumbling straight into the sea. A significant portion of Greenland’s meltwater—which forms on the surface during the summertime and can pool into lakes—finds its way straight through the ice sheet to the bedrock. There, it disperses and lubes up the ice-bedrock interface, substantially accelerating the flow of ice to the sea which, theoretically, causes the sea level to rise and exposes more ice to melting.

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Keren Blankfeld Schultz at Scientific American has an interesting report on the effects of severe weather on the length of a single day, or the total time it takes Earth to rotate once on its axis. As it turns out, the speed of the planet’s rotation is determined by the amount of mass across its surface, which is made up of the “roiling aggregation of gases that comprise the atmosphere, the solid earth itself, its fluid core, and the sloshing ocean.”

So when an event that has the power to move a huge amount of mass—such as, say, an earthquake and/or tsunami—occurs, it can alter the earth’s rotation speed enough to lengthen or shorten a day by as much as several thousandths of a second.

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When life gives you 20 million pigs’ worth of urine, make pig-piss-flavored cigarettes. Or, if you’re not a smoker, use the pig pee to make plastic dinnerware and fuel your car, or smooth it over your body for soft, supple hair and skin. Agroplast, a Denmark-based company, hopes to use its country’s surfeit of pig waste—the cause of contaminated ground water, dying plants, noxious air, and pissed-off neighbors—to make useful household products, from plastics to hair conditioner.

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In a remote region in southern Texas, a horde of eight-legged creatures feasts on a flock of helpless prey. These tiny parasites are called fever ticks, and they’re threatening to invade the U.S. and decimate our cattle population. But not if the Tick Riders can stop them.

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• The hottest country code on teh Internets [sic]: .su—as in, the Soviet Union. Which, in case you somehow forgot, doesn’t exist anymore.

• Big prizes are spurring a new age in (and at least one blog about) space exploration. Now PETA hopes to do the same with a $1 million prize to the first mad scientists who can “produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012,” thereby sparing real animals from becoming meat. Note the stipulation about “commercially viable,” you home molecular gastronomists.

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I think it’s reasonable to assume that ever since the dawn of humankind, people have yearned to control lightning. (No, Halle Berry did not create this idea for her role in X-Men.) The first approach—rain dances, spells, and the like—proved marginally effective, at best, but there wasn’t much of an alternative. In the ’70s, scientists found out that if they launched rockets carrying long metal wires into thunderstorms, the wires would sometimes provide enough conductance to coax a lightning strike, much like Ben Franklin’s (probably apocryphal) kite string. But around the same time, they also thought it would be much, much cooler to use a laser to bring about lightning. Most things are cooler when accomplished by lasers, as any scientist can tell you.

A group of European researchers working at South Baldy Peak have finally realized this longstanding goal by successfully bringing about lightning by zapping lasers into thunderclouds in a recent experiment. The ultrashort laser bursts (only around a hundred femtoseconds) ionize some of the molecules in the air, forming a plasma, and these channels of plasma act can guide lightning strikes like the wires on a rocket. (more…)

• Are stars secretly zombie cannibals? A new study suggests that “dead” stars may consume their healthy neighbors, thus creating a large and mysterious cloud of antimatter in the center of the galaxy. Look for George Romero’s take, coming soon to a theater near you.

• A Bosnian man claims his home has been targeted by aliens, after the house was hit by meteorites five times. But before you write him off, consider this: Experts at Belgrade University have confirmed that the rocks are genuine. (more…)

Wild bacteria may scoff at our attempts at domination—but in the lab, we’re still in charge. Researchers at Emory University, led by Justin Gallivan, are creating bacteria that will hunt down Atrazine—one of the most widely-used herbicides in the U.S. The chemical has been banned in the E.U., shown to cause birth defects (including hermaphrotization) in frogs and made its way into our groundwater.

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Why are the cute animals always the ones that suck at mating, while vermin like pigeons, rats, and bacteria are breeding their brains out? To rectify the situation, many eager citizens have illegally taken matters into their own hands. But in Australia, where the poisonous, invasive cane toads that plague the country have evolved longer legs to expedite their conquering of the outback—lawmakers themselves are getting into the spirit of things.

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If you feel immobilized by the latest bump in gas prices, just follow these five simple steps:

1. scour through the rotting dregs of your kitchen’s garbage cans, collect all animal and plant products (the fouler the better)
2. toss a few billion garbage-loving bacteria into the decaying sludge
3. give the microbes a few days to breed and ferment
4. discard gelatinous muck, save all gases emitted
5. enjoy your environmentally friendly energy!

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You might not have heard this from other Web sites out there, but today has been the biggest science news day in history. Truly, the events that have befallen our planet—and our universe—over the past 17 hours have been remarkable. So we here at DiscoBlog have rounded up the most important headlines from around the Internet. Here they are:

— Fungus with a Sweet Tooth Breathes Nectar of the Gods
— German Doc Prescribes Arsenic for Scare “Down There”
— Physicist’s Creepy Photos Show Wife’s Wedding Ring—and Skeleton!
— Animal-Lover Adopts Gaggle of Geese, Leads Them on Walks and Swims
— Cryptic Poetry Book Reveals Greater Truth About … Nothing
— Biology Lab Invaded by Unidentified Pest; Valuable Bacteria Sample Destroyed
— Physicist’s Cat Is Stuck in a Tree—and Not Stuck in a Tree
— Living Blob Devours Bystanders, Transforms Into New Form of Life
— Cyclist Becomes Possessed by Demons As Furniture Explodes into Colored Fountains
— Bicycle Maker Makes Apparent Suicide Leap on North Carolina Beach; Brother, Friends Bring Him Back to Earth
— Stuff Now Exists! (But What Came Before?)
— Shy Professor Injured by Falling Apple; Says He Knows Why

Hat tip to Overcoming Bias for pointing out the impressive magnitude of what’s going on.

When cafés place signs that boast “Free Wi-Fi” in their windows, they usually intend to lure patrons in—not drive them away. But in response to Sonic.net’s offer to provide free Wi-Fi to the small town of Sebastopol, California, its residents whipped out their tinfoil hats and rejected the offer due to “potential risks to the health of our community” (although they thanked Sonic for the “very nice gesture”).

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The Friends-inspired rumor that urine can relieve a jellyfish sting provided more comedic value than useful first-aid advice, but there are actually many practical applications for that yellow waste product. Ancient Egyptians and Aztecs rubbed urine on their skin to treat cuts and burns, while the Romans used it as a bleaching agent for cleaning clothes and teeth. And now, it may help fight global warming.

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The annual migration of the American shad just got a helping hand from Philadelphia, the city that sees the unsung, bony fish as a symbol of hope for its formerly polluted waterways.

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Picture the last chimpanzee you saw on television… There’s a high probability that it was wearing suspenders and a hat or was smoking a cigar. Of course, it could also have been playing pranks in an ad for CareerBuilder.com (video), or dancing in a commercial for Arby’s (video) or ETrade (video), or giving a high five to Matt LeBlanc from Friends. We’re habituated to seeing chimps anthropomorphized on television, but are there any downsides to all this alleged fun besides hackneyed, mediocre humor?

Apparently so. Last week, a group of primatologists, including the distinguished Jane Goodall, wrote a letter to Science magazine (subscription required) that criticized the entertainment and media industry for their portrayal of chimpanzees, stating that “such inappropriate portrayals are viewed by millions of people annually,” leading people to mistakenly perceive “chimpanzees as frivolous subhumans that are not in danger of extinction.”

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The original seven deadly sins laid out by the Catholic Church—pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath, and sloth—are the classics of immorality, the same basic flaws humans have evinced since coming out of the trees (and, perhaps, even before). But in our booming, globalized, highly networked world, there are some new and very harmful errors at our disposal. And while the Vatican doesn’t have a Facebook page yet (unlike Discover), they do recognize that modern times call for modern vices.

In an interview headlined “New Forms of Social Sin,” Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Vatican’s Apostolic Penitentiary, insisted that “new sins have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalization.” The list of “mortal sins,” as they have now been classified, came at the end of a week-long seminar in Rome that intended to deal with the dismal turnout at recent confessions. Seems logical: If a wider range of souls are in danger of eternal damnation, more will seek absolution. So, what are the new ways to fall from grace?

Girotti devotes some space to a familiar type of don’t-treat-your-brother-poorly admonitions—like social injustice that causes poverty or “the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few”—but many of the new rules concern modern science, stuff that the sixth-century pope Gregory the Great never dreamed of.

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The dramatic thriller involving our drug-contaminated drinking water, starring a 2,500-word article by the Associated Press, has been taking over the headlines today (that is, at least, until the Feds found out how much Spitzer paid for hookers) . During the AP’s investigation, they reviewed published scientific reports, analyzed federal drinking water databases, visited environmental study sites and treatment plants, and interviewed hundreds of officials, academics, and scientists. The results: trace amounts of pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers, and sex hormones contaminate the drinking water of 41 million Americans, including the watersheds of 28 metropolitan areas.

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The climate blog Celsias offers some intriguing insight into geoengineering. Recently spotlighted on DISCOVER’s website, geoengineering involves drastic, planet-scale alterations to the climate so Earth remains habitable for humans, despite our impressive negligence. The geoengineering schemes highlighted in the DISCOVER slideshow include blocking the sun with trillions of space-based shields and shading ourselves with stratospheric sulfur injections—but these are not the only innovative ways to help our climate.

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