A never-before-published data set from the Cold War could help scientists unravel the mysterious western Arctic Ocean.
cool tools
New Tool Reveals That Soils Are Teeming with Active Microbes
BONCAT, a new type of amino acid tagging, highlights and categorizes active soil microbes in situ.
Monitoring the Environment in the Northwestern Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Ocean Observing System for the Environment (MOOSE) network integrates a range of platforms to detect and identify long-term environmental anomalies.
Apollo’s Legacy: 50 Years of Lunar Geology
Samples of the Moon’s surface brought back by Apollo astronauts ushered in a new era of planetary science. Scientists today continue the legacy.
Monitoring Volcanic Craters with Infrasound “Music”
Volcanic craters act as giant horns that emit intense low-frequency sounds. Changes in this infrasound may be used to track rising lava lakes and identify signals of future eruptions.
Ordinary Security Cameras Could Keep an Eye on Rainfall
A new opportunistic sensing strategy could use existing closed-circuit television networks to accurately capture rainfall intensity, despite low-cost equipment and visually complex scenes.
Gauging in the Rain
Measuring how much water falls from the sky is more complicated than it seems. To improve measurements, researchers are looking at umbrellas, hydrophones, and gamma ray detectors.
Underground Robots: How Robotics Is Changing the Mining Industry
From exploring flooded sites to providing alerts, use of robotics aims to “increase the arsenal of tools that can help miners work more safely and efficiently.”
X-Ray Computed Tomography Detects Resolution Scale Gold Grains
A method combining partial-volume and blurring effects can be used to measure small features in computed tomography data volumes.
A New Way of Visualizing Iceland’s Crustal Deformation
A novel method of calculating strain rates from GPS data shows the South Iceland Seismic Zone is experiencing rapid deformation, including inflation near the island’s most active volcano.
