With the AGU meeting in town, it was a great week for science news! We covered several topics on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday—and we’ll highlight a few more of them here for you.

Monday’s sessions included several discussions about the 2011 Tohoku tsunami in Japan—its effects on the local population and on far-reaching areas as well as how we can forecast future events.

One of the biggest surprises came during a presentation by Satoko Oki of the Earthquake Research Institute. She collected data from Japanese residents before and after the 2011 tsunami and found them less prepared for tsunamis after the Tohoku hit! When polled post 2011, they misidentified the minimum wave height from which to evacuate. They had correctly identified the minimum height less than a year before. The 80beats blog in Discover identifies the problem succinctly:

The Tohoku tsunami was so large–about 130 feet–that it may have dragged people’s expectations of what’s dangerous higher.

Another presentation revealed why the tsunami was so devastating—it was a “merging tsunami.” NASA researchers found that the tsunami doubled in intensity over rugged ocean ridges, amplifying its destructive power at landfall. This animation on NASA’s website illustrates the direction and power quite well.

The discovery helps explain how tsunamis can cross ocean basins to cause massive destruction at some locations while leaving others unscathed. The data raise hope that scientists may be able to improve tsunami forecasts.

Switching perspective from the oceans to outer space… NASA and NOAA held a joint workshop Tuesday on preparing for the solar max. As solar storms increase over the next 20 months or so, we can be prepared for what might and might not happen. This might remind you of a press briefing held earlier this year at the AAAS meeting that we covered here. It certainly reminded us how active the Sun can be, even during quiet times, as shown in this beautiful NASA video of SDO’s first year in space.

Finally, the Academy’s own Peter Roopnarine presented at the meeting on his research on oysters in the Gulf of Mexico. With colleagues, Peter has been testing for contaminants in the shells of oysters before and after the spill and hopes to model the spread of contaminants to other species through the food web. Check out this Science in Action video to learn more.

Image: Samuel Morse/US Air Force/Wikipedia

Hazen, on the other hand, believes that most of the oil is gone due to degradation and dilution. He is the lead author of a paper in Science about the amazing microbes that ate much of the oil. In his team’s continuous sampling of 120 sites in the Gulf from May through October 2010, he hasn’t seen much oil– only seven sites that have oil above EPA standards. He admits he may have missed some areas.

While they started the conference by saying they agreed about much, they seemed to disagree about everything brought up: the southeast plume that came out of the well; the oil on the surface, shore, sea floor and water column; the amount of oil that naturally seeps into the Gulf; what did or didn’t happen with the way the oil dispersed after the riser was removed on June 3rd.

Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, spoke after the conference and said that indeed, they were both right, “It’s not a contradiction to say that most of the oil is gone but some still lingers out there.”

(Her conference was actually an announcement of the next step of restoration in the Gulf– you can read more about that here.)

But remember, the press conference was supposed to be on “Deepwater Drilling: Worth the Risk?” Rao did address this issue. He thinks it’s worth it if there were better support onshore for these deepwater wells– with real time data available to experts and regulators, who would be perhaps monitoring several wells at the same time.

Lubchenco was not so certain it was worth the risk, “We must further evaluate the trade-off.”

Two smart reporters, trying to steer the original press conference back on course, asked Hazen if the oil-eating (and Gulf-saving) microbes were present near other sites of deepwater drilling. Some of the bacteria are found in the Arctic, and possibly the Atlantic, as well, Hazen said.

What do you think? Worth the risk? Oil there or gone? Share your thoughts.

(To learn more, you can check out the recent report on the monitoring of the Gulf or Samantha Joye’s blog. Science News also posted an interview with Joye over the weekend.)

If only BP had consulted a few preschoolers first, they may have been more successful.

Last week, physicists published a paper in Physical Review Letters on the power of oobleck, that magic mixture of two-parts cornstarch and one-part water often found surrounding the grubby hands of toddlers.

Scientists were skeptical of the top kill method to begin with, even though BP thought it would be 60-70% successful. At the time, Jonathan Katz, PhD, of Washington University, suggested a simple fix, changing the mud recipe to the cornstarch and water oobleck mixture. His reasoning:

It can flow slowly as a liquid, but turns stiff and elastic when flow is rapid. If an instability were to occur, this stiffness would suppress it, and it would sink in the well, accumulating at the bottom until its pressure became sufficient to stop the leak.

But the top kill mud had worked previously, during the first Gulf War, and Katz’s suggestion was ignored.

Despite the brush-off, and perhaps because of the top kill failure, Katz worked with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers in testing his theory in the lab:

We poured cornstarch ‘mud’ into the top of the oil column and observed that, as predicted, the instability was suppressed. The surrogate ’mud’ sank rapidly through the oil to the bottom of the tube.

Based on this experiment, the addition of a shear-thickening polymer like cornstarch to a dense top-kill mud might have allowed slugs of mud to descend against the upwelling oil instead of being ripped up and spat out of the well. Eventually, the column of mud would have prevented any further infiltration from the oil reservoir, killing the well.

Katz hopes there will never be an opportunity to repeat the experiment at full scale and under field conditions, but if there is, perhaps his advice will reach beyond the ears of preschoolers.

Image by eyspahn/flickr

Despite being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, we were able to catch incredible glimpses of the solar eclipse this week through photos throughout the web.

DNA sequencing started the year off right. Popular Science reported that “For the First Time, DNA Sequencing Technology Saves A Child’s Life.” Doctors, desperate to find the cause of a boy’s severe illness, sequenced his genes, discovered a mutation and were able to prescribe a treatment that appears to be working. A new machine could make this practice more common. An article in the New York Times this week described a more affordable sequencing machine. At $50,000, the Personal Genome Machine is significantly less than standard machines and “could expand the use of DNA sequencing from specialized centers to smaller university and industrial labs, and into hospitals and doctors’ offices.”

What is causing birds to fall out of the sky and fish to die from Arkansas to Maryland and Brazil to Sweden? Cold weather? Hail storms? Fireworks? The end of the world? There’s been much hype and speculation, but scientists don’t appear to be worried. The Academy’s own Jack Dumbacher is getting samples from the southern occurrences—he’s planning on testing the corpses for viruses. You can track these deaths yourself through Google maps or the US Geological Survey.

Finally, after topping the science news headlines last year, oil in the Gulf reappeared this week, at least on news sites. Have bacteria consumed nearly all of the methane from the spill? A study published in Science this week suggests that’s the case. Ed Yong finds a lot of support for the paper in his blog on Discover; Samantha Joye tells Science News, “Just because you can’t find methane in the spot where you lowered your [instruments] doesn’t mean there’s no methane out there somewhere.”

Also, the president’s oil spill commission released the first chapter of its report this week. (The entire report will be available next week.) An excerpt from the chapter in Science Insider reports that the blame for the disaster can be shared among the companies responsible for the well.

Most of the mistakes and oversights at Macondo can be traced back to a single overarching failure—a failure of management.

And sadly, this may not be an unusual event, according to the New York Times:

The commission warned that without major changes, another such accident was likely.

If you want a front seat on a Gulf of Mexico recovery expedition, follow Sylvia Earle and others on National Geographic News Watch this month.

What science news did you dive into this week? Share with us!

Image by Brydzo/Wikimedia

Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia

“I don’t imagine you’ll ever hear the phrase ‘seal the deal’ again, unless perhaps the worst worst-case scenarios unfold and the climate system comes utterly unglued.” That’s Andrew Revkin’s reaction to the closing of the Cancun climate talks in today’s New York Times. Heads of States seemed to be missing, debates continue to rage over the Kyoto Protocol and developing nations’ and climate-affected island states’ shouts were not heard. From New Scientist:

…on the platform, the chairman of the African Union Commission, Jean Ping, noted that “Africa’s billion people are polluting roughly as much as Texas, which has 25 million people.” But Barack Obama was not there to answer.

The talks end today… don’t expect too much, says Nature’s The Great Beyond blog:

Contrary to Copenhagen, the goal going into Cancun was to make incremental progress. That seemed doable at the time, but nobody is taking anything for granted today.

Now for some fun! Through Twitter, we found this great defense of the existence of Santa… in the Multiverse. Yes, Virginia…

Follow that frog! Did you know that frogs’ bladders can hunt and remove foreign objects in their bodies? In their attempts to track frogs in Australia, scientists were implanting the amphibians with bead-sized transmitters. Within a few weeks, the transmitters had moved to their bladders and/or had simply been expelled (peed) out and left behind. Lab tests followed and results published. Read more here or here.

Bio-Inspiration: Ants travels could lead to better computer networks. According to Nature News, Argentine ants are so adept at finding the shortest routes to food and changing those routes when necessary (high traffic, obstacles), that systems engineers are hoping to learn from their behavior and build more efficient networks.

Continue to follow Science Today’s efficient science news network and lead us down some new paths by adding your comments below!

The scientists were in the middle of a multi-year expedition studying coral reefs and natural oil seeps in the Gulf. Even after the disaster struck last spring, they never expected to find what they saw via an automated submersible last Tuesday—corals covered with brown material, probably not oil, but likely tissue and sediment caused by something toxic.

According to National Geographic Daily News,

About 90 percent of 40 large groups of severely damaged soft coral were discolored and either dead or dying, the researchers say.

In addition to the coral, Nature News reports that:

The brittle sea stars that commonly intertwine these soft corals, which are normally seen waving their arms, were discolored and immobile.

The coral community resides about 4,500 feet below the surface (about the same depth as the now capped well) and smack-dab in the path of an oil plume spotted last May.

Samples of the coral will now be tested for signs of oil, dispersant, and other materials to determine the exact cause of the damage. The researchers also plan on returning in December for further study at this site and others.

Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of NOAA, had this to say in a statement:

Given the toxic nature of oil and the unprecedented amount of oil spilled, it would be surprising if we did not find damage.

But the chief scientist from the expedition, Charles Fisher from Pennsylvania State University, expressed surprise (as quoted in Nature):

Honestly, we went out there expecting to find subtle effects. I don’t think any of us really expected to be slapped in the face with it like this.

Image credit: Lophelia II 2010, NOAA OER and BOEMRE

As if Saturn wasn’t already considered drop-dead gorgeous. And as if Cassini wasn’t already the luckiest satellite in the skies. Using Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument (VIMS), scientists gathered data to create beautiful images and even a video of auroras on the ringed planet. Released just today, these are truly a must see!

Also published today, in the journal Science, independent researchers have calculated the vastness of the BP oil spill by viewing videos of the underwater oil gushing. From Science News:

Crone and Tolstoy used an optical technique known as flow velocimetry. In this approach, the volume of a roiling plume is estimated by using video or a series of photos to measure the movements of a host of distinguishing features over a short period of time. Computers can then calculate likely flow volumes based on the plume’s size and density.

And their numbers exceed the government estimate by about 300,000 barrels (or 12.6 million gallons) of oil.

Earlier this week, scientists published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) describing the affect of dust on Colorado’s snowpack. According to Reuters and Yale Environment 360:

Dust created by intensifying human activities in the southwestern United States has caused snow in the Rocky Mountains to melt earlier over the last 150 years and has reduced runoff into the Colorado River basin by about 5 percent, according to a new study.

For a drought-prone area, this makes a potentially bad situation worse.

So, now for a bit of good news. A month ago, we reported on Conservation International’s launch of a worldwide search for 100 species or so of amphibians that were possibly extinct. This week, they announced three of those species were spotted—two in Africa and one in Mexico. You can read more at the 80beats blog on Discover.

Which science news items caught your eye this week? Let us know!

After five months of and a total of 205.8 million gallons of oil leaked into the gulf, the death of the well may be cause for celebration…

Or, maybe not. It’s true that many reports do appear upbeat about the damage done—taking the stand that it could have been a lot worse. Marsh grasses are coming back and there were fewer birds harmed in this oil disaster than the much smaller Exxon Valdez spill twenty years ago. From the New York Times:

…as the weeks pass, evidence is increasing that through a combination of luck (a fortunate shift in ocean currents that kept much of the oil away from shore) and ecological circumstance (the relatively warm waters that increased the breakdown rate of the oil), the gulf region appears to have escaped the direst predictions of the spring.

However, oil sediments continue to be found on the gulf floor. And it may be years before scientists are able to measure the total destruction to the region. The Ocean Conservancy’s Stan Senner, told Discovery News that

it will take scientists at least three years to understand the ecological damage from the Gulf spill, and that it will last anywhere from 10 to 20 years.

Hopefully, we can learn from this disaster sooner than that and perhaps prevent future spills. According to the 80beats blog in Discover:

Offshore oil drilling will go on, eventually. But the ongoing fallout from the BP disaster means that when drilling resumes, oil companies will have to figure out not only how to do it more safely, but also how to convince the public they’re doing it more safely.

So, if we’re not celebrating, let’s at least let out a sigh of relief, if not more. Ding Dong the well is dead, the wicked well…