New Scientist: A compass that doesn’t need a magnetic needle? That might sound impossible, but the ancient Chinese worked out how to make one 4500 years ago. An ingenious combination of gears and wheels ensures that a “pointing chariot” features a needle that always points in the same direction. New Scientist includes a how-to video and links to a step-by-step guide, parts list, and kit.
Telegraph: Thousands of pounds are being spent on special grit for roads near London’s art galleries after experts warned that salt spreading is ruining some of the finest masterpieces. The substance, called sodium formate, costs about 10 times the price of normal rock salt. The experts discovered that visitors were tracking salt and grit into galleries, which causes a chemical reaction that leads to permanent damage to priceless paintings. Works most at risk are those containing the traditional red pigment vermilion, commonly used in old master paintings.
Daily Mail: Deep beneath the ice of Antarctica, the world’s strangest observatory has finally reached completion. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a gigantic telescope at the South Pole that is designed to detect elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos that travel through Earth at the speed of light. Although construction was not completed until 18 December, the telescope has been collecting data for several years. The Daily Mail’s Niall Firth writes about the science being conducted there and includes photographs and a diagram of the facility.
NPR: For six years, workers processed nuclear waste at a plant outside Buffalo, New York. In its short life, the West Valley Demonstration Project polluted soil, air and water, and may have sickened employees. Four decades later, hundreds of cleanup workers are still at the site decontaminating buildings that will eventually be torn down. Now, workers are preparing to install a massive underground wall designed to stop the spread of a radioactive plume that threatens the region’s groundwater. As the West Valley cleanup nears completion, reporter Daniel Robison looks at an environmental disaster that led to a new understanding of how to deal with nuclear waste.
New York Times: The feud between Texas and the Environmental Protection Agency reached a new level this week, with federal officials saying they will take over the granting of permits for new power plants and refineries in the state because Texas refuses to regulate its emissions of greenhouse gases, writes James C. McKinley Jr for the New York Times. Texas is the only state that has refused to enforce the new emissions rules through its state permitting program. It also produces the most carbon dioxide because it has scores of coal-fired power plants, refineries, and factories.
Nature: Nature’s Newsmaker of the Year is Jane Lubchenco, the first woman to serve as the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earlier this year she found herself at the center of the government’s response to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, one of the biggest environmental disasters in US history. Despite a series of communication missteps, Lubchenco has been acknowledged as a strong leader during a difficult time. Nature’s Richard Monastersky writes about Lubchenco’s actions during the oil spill and about her life and career leading up to it.
Space.com: A puzzlingly regular waxing and waning of Earth’s biodiversity may ultimately trace back to our solar system’s bobbing path around the Milky Way, a new study suggests. Every 60 million years or so, two things happen, roughly in sync: The solar system peeks its head to the north of the average plane of our galaxy’s disk, and the richness of life on Earth dips noticeably. The new study lends credence to a hypothesis by earlier researchers that the former process drives the latter, via an increased exposure to high-energy subatomic particles called cosmic rays coming from intergalactic space. That radiation might be helping to kill off large swaths of the creatures on Earth, scientists say.
Science: By sequencing the nuclear genome of an ancient finger bone, researchers have confirmed the discovery of a new type of human that lived in the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia more than 30 000 years ago. The long-lost group of people, which researchers are calling “Denisovans” after the Denisova cave in which the bone was found, lived at roughly the same time modern humans and Neandertals were in the region, and it appears to be more closely related to Neandertals than us. Although the Denisovans went extinct, they were widespread enough in Asia to interbreed with modern humans before they disappeared, writes Science’s Ann Gibbons.
New Scientist: Researchers in Germany have designed a tiny camera, inspired by an arthropod eye, that maximizes image resolution. Andreas Brückner, of the Fraunhofer Institute of Applied Optics and Precision Engineering, and colleagues constructed an electronic cluster eye that can take 221 miniature images, each 39 pixels to a side, that are then stitched together into a single image of 700 by 550 pixels, writes New Scientist’s Kate McAlpine. The tiny device, which can provide clear, high-resolution images, could be used in cell phones, in medical devices, or on the gripper hands of robots as a secondary eye.
