Dept. of Energy extracts hydrocarbons from sea, sequesters CO2 in Davy Jones’ locker
Today, the US Department of Energy announced it had successfully completed a test project that extracted a usable fuel (methane) from its resting place in ocean sediments. The test, performed in conjunction with ConocoPhill......
Turning up the heat: windfarms lead to local nighttime warming
Relative to most other forms of energy, windfarms have a pretty minimal environmental impact, with the deaths of birds and bats generally capturing the most attention. But as a new...
Weird Science turns to rugby to protect all its popes
When it comes to Welsh rugby, define "pope" broadly: Most of the stuff we cover here at Weird Science is inadvertently amusing, but researchers aren't beyond using the literature to have a bit of...
The week in science is counterintuitive
This past week, our biggest story was a scoop that we got to ahead of most major news outlets: a bunch of billionaires were backing a company that planned to...
Small objects blasting a path through Saturn’s F ring
From a distance, Saturn's rings look flawlessly smooth, as if they've been in their current state indefinitely. But as the Voyager and Cassini probes have witnessed, the rings are incredibly...
Harvard Library advises its faculty to go open access
The problems with state funding may be hitting public schools hard, but even some parts of elite private institutions are feeling the sting of rising prices. That was the message sent by the Harvard...
Synthetic DNA substitute gets its own enzymes, undergoes evolution
On Earth, all life is dependent upon the nucleic acids, DNA and RNA. But researchers Including those who are wondering how to detect life somewhere other than Earth, have wondered...
The week in science, with an extra helping of optical illusions
Some rather unusual stories topped this week in science news. For starters, a physicist described how he convinced a judge that his apparent running of a stop sign was an...
Evolution in motion: organisms once stuck to rocks can now evade predators
Not to belittle sharks—they have their own week, after all—but the most voracious eaters in the oceans may not even have a spine. Sea urchins are omnivores and, when they...
Weird science learns the more exotic, the better, when it comes to dung
Dung beetles have no customer loyalty: This paper just grabs you with the first sentence: "Although the preference of dung beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) for specific types and conditions of...
This week in science, the lights did not go out
In a somewhat unusual occurrence, a book review was our most popular story this past week: Before the Lights Go Out, which focuses on renewable energy, efficiency, and our electric...
Tennessee governor allows bill targeting science education to become law
After the US Supreme Court's 1987 decision forbidding the teaching of creationism in science classes, those who objected to the teaching of evolution modified their ideas slightly. They relabeled these ideas "Intelligent Des...
