Science

What sounds worse to you: fingernails dragged across a chalkboard or the incessant honking of a broken car alarm? It is this kind of distinction that Professor Trevor Cox of Manchester's Salford University is studying with his BadVibes site, which solicits votes from the public in "the hunt for the worst sound in the world."

Let the Midas and Goldfinger jokes abound: CNN is reporting that scientists believe they have found a microorganism capable of contributing to the formation of gold nuggets.

If there's gold already present, the bacterium known as Ralstonia metallidurans can make more, according to the team led by Frank Reith. The scientists came to this hypothesis while investigating gold grains from two mines in Australia, and consider it the strongest evidence yet that gold nuggets may owe their growth in part to microorganisms.

Several researchers are experimenting with naturally occurring, and genetically enhanced, microbes as tools in chip production, hydrogen production, … Read more

The average U.S. suburban house requires about 45 kilowatt hours of electricity per day. But according to this post by Treehugger, a model home on display at the National Building Museum in Washington can run on a miserly 800 watt hours a day. One of the many corner-cutting secrets: A stove with a built-in toaster.

Some of the most fascinating photography, as we have shown in this space, comes from deep beneath the sea. And no one knows this better than the people at a U.K. organization called SERPANT, which describes itself as a scientific and environmental partnership. So they began a competition for underwater photography and video, and it has drawn some amazing entries.

As you swelter in the mid-summer heat, it may (or may not) be of interest to know that humankind has been obsessed with the science of weather for centuries. The evidence can be found in this post by BibliOdyssey, which includes pages from reference books dating back to the 1600s from around the world that examine the origins of everything from lightning to hurricanes.

Radioactive venom from an Israeli scorpion species might not be the first thing one would think of to treat a form of brain cancer called glioma. A company called TransMolecular that's pushing the idea, though, announced "favorable safety results" from a second-phase trial of such a substance (click for PDF).

The substance, called 131I-TM-601, is actually a synthetic version of a chemical in the scorpion venom. It's coupled with a radioactive isotope of iodine with an atomic weight of 131. The 131I-TM-601 binds with receptors in the cancer cells but leaves healthy cells alone, TransMolecular said. … Read more

Haifa, Israel--There are a lot of nasty things in the water supply, but experts have begun to focus on something many didn't recognize as a problem a few years ago: medicines.

Drugs ingested by people or pets and then eliminated through digestion has become a significant concern, according to Carlos Dosoretz, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Technion, Israel's premier engineering university.

"Female hormones, all kinds of antibiotics, cholesterol regulators," he said. "It is a new problem because we now have the analytic instruments to detect it."

The increase in … Read more

A new computer model of the Antarctic ozone hole shows it's in worse condition than previously thought.

A hole in the upper atmosphere over Antarctica will not clear up before 2068, roughly 18 years later than earlier estimates, according to a new computer simulation developed by scientists at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Expectation for the hole to disappear has come from the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement adopted in 1987 that first limited and then banned production of ozone-depleting substances like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)--a chemical that causes … Read more

A couple of days ago we pointed to a blog entry that showed how to make an air conditioner. Coincidentally, we learned that Gizmodo had a posting of a "USB air-conditioned shirt" earlier this week. Blogma doesn't advise combining the two inventions.