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An EPA report published Tuesday told residents near Pavillion, Wyoming to avoid drinking and cooking with well water after tests revealed petroleum hydrocarbons and other contaminants in 17 out of 19 wells near the town. Many residents worry that local drilling for natural gas is to blame. The EPA is still investigating.

“EPA has not reached any conclusions about how constituents of concern are occurring in domestic wells,” the report said. [Reuters]

As the agency continues its investigation, it along with other government organizations and the natural gas company EnCana, will provide alternative drinking water sources for affected residents. EnCana volunteered to provide the water, though a company representative told the AP that company’s tie to the contaminated the wells is unclear–since the chemicals appeared in earlier EPA tests, before the EnCana’s drilling started in 2005.

For Pavillion, which has around 250 nearby gas drilling sites, the report adds to findings from earlier well tests taken in the spring of 2009.

In spring 2008, residents of Pavillion–concerned about the quality of their drinking water–contacted the EPA in Denver, Colorado. The agency sampled 39 individual wells (37 residential wells and two municipal wells) in March 2009 and found nitrate, arsenic and methane gas. The agency conducted the second sampling in January 2010. [CNN]

The news adds to concerns about natural gas companies’ hydraulic fracturing, commonly called fracking. Though individual gas companies use different drilling techniques for different geological structures, the basics involve drilling around 1,000 to 8,000 feet underground and pumping in 50,000 to 350,ooo gallons of water to crack the underlying rock. After removing 15 to 80 percent of that then-contaminated water, the gas company can pump out the natural gas which flows from the cracks. The water usually comes from local surface water or groundwater; once contaminated, it can go back to surface water if filtered or into a new well underground.

As 80beats discussed in June, some believe natural gas could soon satisfy a large proportion of the United States energy needs, an estimated (pdf) 20 percent by 2020. As a result, more people are demanding a better understanding of hydraulic fracturing’s effects on drinking water sources. The EPA plans to conduct an extensive, two-year study on hydraulic fracturing starting later this year.

Image: flickr / AZAdam, EPA

Source: Is Natural Gas Drilling to Blame for Wyoming Town’s Undrinkable Water?

For two years, the Chinese science satellite SJ-06F flew solo orbits around the Earth (or, as solo as a machine could be in the expanding haze of space junk in orbit). But now it has a partner: Last month China executed the delicate maneuver of aligning another satellite launched this year, SJ-12, with its older counterpart.

Only the United States had executed such a satellite rendezvous before this, and it shows off China’s advancement in satellite sophistication. Three years ago the country blew one of its satellites to smithereens in a practice test—a test that created thousands of additional chunks of debris in orbit. The satellite meet-up is a more elegant trick, and one whose implications could be sinister or benign. Let’s explore both possibilities.

Don’t Worry

China’s game of catch-up, which has its space program closing in on America’s abilities in orbit, strikes fear into the hearts of some politicos. But malfeasance need not be the aim of the satellite maneuver.

“This set of skills serves a whole lot of purposes,” says Dean Cheng, a Chinese policy expert with the Heritage Foundation, a think tank in Washington DC. The most immediate application, Cheng says, may be testing sensors and control systems to help pave the way for docking procedures to be used with China’s first space station module, Tiangong-1, which is set to launch in 2011. “This sort of thing may very well be consistent with wanting to test drive the hardware and software before you test it on your space laboratory,” Cheng says. [New Scientist]

And speaking of space junk (as we were earlier), this kind of procedure could be used in the future to clear out the defunct equipment and debris that clogs the space around our planet and threatens useful machinery in orbit.

What of the worry that China could dock with our satellites and interfere with them? Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation, who I talked to for a story in the September issue of DISCOVER, tracked the rendezvous and says that’s unlikely. Weeden, whose organization is devoted to the peaceful use of space, says that there are easier ways to mess with enemy satellites, like shooting them with lasers from the ground.

OK, Worry

Whether or not China is pursuing space warfare in this instance, the country is certainly trying to measure up to whatever the United States can do.

“The Chinese would be absolutely incompetent to not be trying to reduce U.S advantage in space,” James Oberg, a former NASA space engineer specializing in orbital rendezvous, tells Danger Room. “No potential adversary in their right mind would give us permanent advantage in space operations.” [Wired.com]

China might not need rendezvous capability to tinker with another country’s satellites, but it would need that capability to spy on them—taking an up-close look at the competitor’s product. There may be no way to gauge true intentions.

According to Oberg, the satellite meet-up occurred in an orbit almost exclusively devoted to earth observation — spy and weather satellites, for example — where “a potential adversary would be most interested in rendezvousing. On the other hand, it’s also where a satellite might need refueling,” he adds. “It’s like you could be changing a screwdriver for a hammer, or you could be turning a peaceful ‘bot into a killer one.” [Wired.com]

Image: ESA

Source: Close Encounters of the Worrisome Kind? Chinese Satellites Meet in Space

Mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium, nickel, zinc—they’re all getting into the waters of northern Canada in dangerous amounts because of mining in the oil sands, according to a study coming out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Canada’s oil sands hold an estimated 13 percent of the proven oil reserves in the world, and the United States grows increasingly reliant upon them to meet our petroleum needs. However, the process of extracting and refining the oil is energy-intensive, and dirty. An industry-led group called Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program (RAMP) oversees the pollution coming from oil sands exploration, and it has maintained that elevated levels of toxins in the nearby Athabasca River system come from natural oil seepage. However, the University of Alberta’s Erin Kelly and David Schindler say in their study that no, it’s the oil exploration that’s increasing the concentration of these elements in the water.

The researchers collected water from more than 35 sites in February and June 2008 along the Athabasca River, its tributaries, the Athabasca Delta and Lake Athabasca. They accumulated winter snowpack from 31 other sites in the region in March 2008. The researchers chose sampling sites upstream and downstream from oilsands mining, with both within 50 kilometres of oilsands developments and near undeveloped oilsands sites [CBC].

The upstream samples and the samples from spots that weren’t exposed to oil sands mining didn’t show the same rise in toxic pollutants. But the concentrations the scientists found downstream are higher than the maximum levels that Canada and the Province of Alberta set to protect marine life. The problem, Schindler says, in that those toxins can accumulate in animals.

“I don’t think the concentrations alone are dangerous. I worry about some of them, like mercury, because there, parts per trillion translate into parts per million in fish,” he said [Reuters].

Meanwhile, some of the companies that mine in the oil sands region are trying to devise new ways to keep their operations within regulation, given the billions to be made in oil exploration there. Shell last week announced a plan to tackle tailings ponds, a toxic byproduct of extracting and refining oil there.

Tailings ponds are expansive man-made lakes that hold water, leftover bitumen, clay and heavy metals from the oil sands production process. They are a major source of friction in the battle over the environmental impact of developing Canada’s oil sands, the largest crude source outside the Middle East [Reuters].

Energy companies are testing Shell’s clean-up method, as well as several other prospective ways to reclaim the material from tailings ponds.

For more about the oil sands, check out the September issue of DISCOVER, now on newsstands.

Image: Wikimedia Commons / NormanEinstein

Source: Study: Canada’s Oil Sands Mining Sends Toxins Into Rivers

The city of New Orleans’ defenses are certainly better than they were five years ago, when Hurricane Katrina breached the levees and flooded the city. With the five-year anniversary of that disaster upon us, however, the question that hangs in the air is: Would those refurbished barriers stand up to another Katrina, or something worse?

Better Barricades

In the last five years, the federal government has invested about $15 billion to revamp the New Orleans levee system.

This time, tougher foundation material like a mixture of construction clay and cement, is being used in the soil to hold structural sections of wall designed as an inverted T instead of their previous I-shape. The new design is considered stronger, allowing steel pillars to bracket each end into the ground. Total completion is expected in June 2011. [Christian Science Monitor]

The levee system stretches about 350 miles around the city, and its walls stand about 30 feet high (Katrina’s storm surge rose to about 28 feet).

Bigger Storms?

Gregory Gunter of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers trumpets the new systems as a defense against the so-called “100-year storm”—a tempest so bad it has only a 1 percent chance of striking in a given year.

The system shouldn’t fail in a “400-year” Katrina-strength storm either, although Gunter says such a surge would probably flow over the barriers. This would lead to some flooding, but nothing like the scale of Katrina, which pushed over walls and breached levees. [New Scientist]

However, flood experts point out, the people who really know about keeping flood waters at bay—the Dutch—build their levees with a much larger investment, intending them to withstand a “10,000-year” event. In addition, because our hurricane records go back only so far, and because the past may not be an accurate picture of future storms, those year designations may be misleading anyway.

Paul Kemp, director of the National Audubon Society’s Louisiana Coastal Initiative in Baton Rouge, and former storm surge modeller, says the new designs presume that future storms will resemble past ones. He points out that climate change may increase hurricane strength. [New Scientist]

Don’t Forget the Wetlands

The Corps of Engineers has taken its share about abuse for Katrina failures (including by New Orleans resident Harry Shearer of The Simpsons and This Is Spinal Tap fame, whose new Katrina documentary is out now). The levees weren’t the only problem, though: New Orleans’ degraded wetlands put the city in added danger.

According to the Army Corps, all of the levees that failed during Katrina lacked wetland protection; the levees with a wetland buffer remained intact. Scientists have estimated that storm surge is diminished by one foot for every square-mile of wetland it travels through [National Geographic].

Now, groups like the Sierra Club are trying to revive the cypress ecosystem that once thrived in the shallow waters, and are doing so with a plan that actually requires pumping in partially treated sewage. With a high enough volume of biosolids—semi-treated sewage—they could add up to four feet of new material in which plants could take root.

The swamp has been killed primarily through saltwater intrusion from the various surrounding canals that connect the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. A pulse of freshwater sewage could make the site more suitable for wetland species. In return, those species would help filter and clean the effluent [National Geographic].

Unknown Toll

President Obama spoke at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans yesterday to mark the Katrina anniversary, praising the growth of small business and announcing that the federal government was finally ready to dole out its promised $2 billion investment in the city school system. But one thing still remains unsettled: Just how many people we lost, and who they are.

The Houston Chronicle reports that about 500 of the 1,500 people in Louisiana’s recognized death toll remain unidentified. And that official count could be a lowball figure, some argue:

John Mutter, a Columbia University professor, has been gathering personal testimonials and public records of those killed in Katrina for an effort he calls Katrinalist. Mutter estimates the true death toll will top 3,500 if those killed by the storm and by its many after-effects are accurately tallied. And yet other counts put the toll at an estimated 1,800 [Houston Chronicle].

Image: Office of the President of the United States

Source: Five Years Later, Could New Orleans Withstand Another Major Hurricane?

Google took its two newest steps on the march toward world domination this week, first rolling out a feature that lets people make free phone calls from Gmail, and then introducing real-time searching of fast-updating information, like tweets.

The first initiative is off to a hot start. Gmail users placed more than a million phone calls through Google on the service’s first day Wednesday.

Calling from within Gmail, by contrast, requires nothing more than installing a small plug-in program (available for Windows XP or newer, Mac OS X 10.4 or newer and some versions of Linux) and logging into Gmail. Click the “Call phone” link to the left of your inbox, type in a number, click the big blue “Call” button and things proceed as if you had just finished spinning a Bell System phone’s rotary dial [Washington Post].

And more importantly, the phone service is free as long as you dial within the United States or Canada (it costs a few cents per minute to dial elsewhere). Google hasn’t said whether the service will remain that way (though they did promise not to record or listen to phone conversations).

With its new Realtime Search, the search engine giant is trying to keep pace with the blistering rate that information moves on networks like Twitter.

Conventional search engines, such as Google’s, aren’t very good at capturing down-to-the-second postings on such sites. Google and other search engines “know these are the sources people are going to” and they want to keep them on their pages longer, said Larry Cornett, a former executive overseeing Yahoo’s search engine and now product-strategy consultant at Brilliant FORGE. The challenge for Google and others it to organize the real-time information so it’s more relevant to users, rather than just a blast of messages “without meaning on top of it,” he said [Wall Street Journal].

Follow DISCOVER on Twitter and .

Image: Flickr/ Manfrys

Source: Google’s Latest Moves: Free Phone Calls & Real-Time Search

Six patients’ eyes have connected with “biosynthetic” replacement corneas, growing nerves and cells into the fakes as if they were real human tissue. With more trials and improvements in implant technique, researchers say the biosynthetic corneas might replace the expensive, rejection-prone, and scarce cadaver corneas that are currently used in transplants. This is good news for people who have lost vision due to inflamed or scarred corneas, and who are hoping to bring the world back into focus.

The findings appeared yesterday in Science Translational Medicine. The corneas allowed six out of a total of ten trial patients with advanced keratoconus, a condition which causes corneal scarring, to see just as well as if they had a traditional cadaver cornea replacement. Natural corneas, which refract light coming into the eye and help it to focus, consist of parallel strands of collagen; the biosynthetic corneas used collagen made in a lab by the biotech company Fibrogen.

“This study … is the first to show that an artificially fabricated cornea can integrate with the human eye and stimulate regeneration,” said May Griffith of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, who led the study. “With further research, this approach could help restore sight to millions of people who are waiting for a donated human cornea for transplantation.” [Reuters]

The biosynthetic cornea, which mimicked typical tissue’s appearance,  integrated with natural cells and nerves to allow tear production and touch sensitivity. As shown in this (somewhat graphic) New Scientist video, doctors first sutured the corneas in place. After two years, the neighboring cells’ natural growth anchored the biosynthetics down.

[The collagen is] moulded to the shape and size of a natural human cornea. “It looks like a contact lens,” says Griffith. The difference is that this “biosynthetic” cornea encourages the person’s own cells to grow into its matrix, since it is made out of a similar substance to a natural one. [New Scientist]

Although the lenses helped six of the patients see normally, the sutures’ scarring left four with “haze”–a problem that the researchers hope to overcome in stage 2 and 3 clinical trials. They also hope to extend testing of the biosynthetic corneas to people suffering from other corneal conditions.

Cadaver transplants can cost $2,500 each before surgery and are scarce in countries other than the United States. Testing for viruses and other contaminants adds to that cost, ScienceNOW reports, so mass produced biosynthetic corneas that would require much less testing might provide a cheaper and more plentiful alternative for restoring vision to people worldwide.

The new results are “very impressive,” said Shukti Chakravarti, a professor at Johns Hopkins Medical Institute who was not involved in the study. “There is always a dearth of donor tissue, and this would help bypass that.” [Discovery News]

Images: Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, May Griffith et al. / Science Translational Medicine

Source: The Eyes Have It: Lab-Made Corneas Restore Vision

The United States currently holds around half of the world’s helium supply and we’re selling it, for cheap.

We’ve known this for a while. We started stockpiling the stuff near Amarillo, Texas in 1925, in part for dirigible use, and stepped up reserves in the 1960s as a Cold War asset. In 1996, Congress passed the Helium Privatization Act mandating that the United States sell the gas at artificially low prices to get rid of the stockpile by 2015. This February, the National Research Council published a report estimating that, given increasing consumption, the world may run out of helium in 40 years. That’s bad news given helium’s current applications in science, technology, and party decorations–and possible future applications in fusion energy.

Now physicist Robert Richardson, who won a 1996 Nobel Prize for work using helium-3 to make superfluids, has come forward to stress the folly of underselling our supply of the natural resource. He suggested in several interviews that the gas’s price should mirror its actual demand and scarcity. He estimates that typical party balloons should cost $100 a pop.

“They couldn’t sell it fast enough and the world price for helium gas is ridiculously cheap,” Professor Richardson told a summer meeting of Nobel laureates…. “Once helium is released into the atmosphere in the form of party balloons or boiling helium it is lost to the Earth forever, lost to the Earth forever,” he emphasised. [The Independent]

If we don’t heed Richardson’s warning, here are some sources the United States might have to tap when we run out:

The Air

The current U.S. helium supply formed from billions of years worth of radioactive decay and accrued near uranium and thorium deposits. Though it’s possible to separate helium out of the air, Richardson warns that it will cost a lot more. He told New Scientist:

“There is no chemical means to make helium. The supplies we have on Earth come from radioactive alpha decay in rocks. Right now it’s not commercially viable to recover helium from the air, so we have to rely on extracting it from rocks. But if we do run out altogether, we will have to recover helium from the air and it will cost 10,000 times what it does today.” [New Scientist]

Other Countries

If we sell off all of our helium that means we’ll likely have to import it later–and c0mpetition could be fierce. China and India’s developing science and tech industries will also likely want a piece of the He pie.

Emerging powers such as China and India are ramping up helium-hungry activities like chipset fabrication, space programs, and cryogenic research…. Now, the NRC report warns, if the US does not soon cease selling off its reserves, within 10 to 15 years the country will be forced to import most of its helium from the only other near-term sources, gas fields in the Middle East and Russia. [Seed]

Other Planets

Another place where helium occurs naturally is, of course, in the gas balls we call stars. Researchers think that the solar wind from our sun may have deposited some helium-3 on the moon’s surface. If we use that up too, we could look a little further, say Uranus or Neptune, which have helium-rich atmospheres. We’re guessing that the party balloon prices will suffer accordingly.

“The moon is the El Dorado of helium-3,” says [futurist Marshall] Savage, and he’s right: Every star, including our sun, emits helium constantly. Implanted in the lunar soil by the solar wind, the all-important gas can be found on the moon by the bucketful. Associate professor Tim Swindle and his colleagues at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona have already begun prospecting. Swindle has mapped likely helium-3 deposits on the moon by charting the parts of the lunar landscape most exposed to solar wind against the locations of mineral deposits that best trap the element. [Wired]

Image: flickr / Shiny Things

Source: Nobel Prize Winner Warns World: We’re Running Out of Helium

The fourth nation to put a person in space, after Russia/USSR, the United States, and China, could be… Denmark?

Denmark indeed. Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen, the leaders of Copenhagen Suborbitals, plan to fire a test flight of their HEAT-1X rocket from the European nation early next week.

This upcoming flight will be an unmanned test flight, but if all goes well, Madsen hopes to be inside the single-passenger capsule named Tycho Brahe for a manned flight in the near future [Universe Today].

The capsule stands about 10 yards tall, and its top is a clear glass dome through which the standing passenger can enjoy the trip to space. (Or at least, try to enjoy it: The cramped passenger will have only minimal arm movement, just enough to operate necessities like a camera, escape hatch, and vomit bag.) The rocket would carry the capsule to the edge of space, where the passenger will be temporarily weightless, and then it will fall in a parachute-slowed descent.

Madsen and von Bengtson are both engineers, and the latter used to work for NASA. But their rocket project didn’t receive government funding; instead they built on a budget of about $63,000 brought in by donation. Says von Bengtson:

“I think our entire budget would barely cover the cost of the key hole on the shuttle. We want to show people that space doesn’t need to be the exclusive domain of big money investments where everything is made out of titanium in clean rooms by people wearing white slippers. We want to give space another face” [The Independent].

OK, but what about safety when you’re building on a non-profit’s budget?

The creators are members of the SomethingAwful web community, and have been posting pictures and answering questions there. In response to one question asking what the chances of the person inside dying are, they replied: “Unlike Columbia we’re not moving at orbital speeds so ‘dying a gruesome death burning up on re-entry’ with our kit has a very low outcome probability” [Wired.com].

(If you’re wondering about the capsule’s namesake, Tycho Brahe, he was a 16th century aristocrat who famously identified a supernova. Some Tycho trivia: He also reportedly lost part of his nose in a duel and lived the rest of his life with a metal replacement. We wish his namesake capsule and its builders a better fate.)

Image: Copenhagen Suborbitals

Source: Amateur Danish Rocket Builders Plan to Send a Human to Space

This CNN article discusses a new breed of mobile “check-in” apps for people who aren’t particularly mobile. The news apps were borne from the popularity of Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places, but instead of focusing on locations you’ve been, they spotlight movies and TV shows you watch, as well as books you read and video games you play.
“These apps let users earn virtual rewards and meet fans with similar interests. Users also can push their check-ins to other sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, to keep the conversation going. They each have their own benefits on top of that, from giving users recommendations based on the things they already like to letting them unlock videos and other extras when they’ve become ‘super fans’ of a show. … While people in the United States may all have different hobbies and engage in different activities away from home, ‘we know most people do three things — they eat, they sleep and they watch TV,’ [Miso's CEO, Somrat Niyogi said.] ‘We think the market is massive. We think this is going to be a much bigger market’ than location-based apps, he added.”

Source: Foursquare-Style Checking In For Couch Potatoes

spopepro writes “While un-captioned cats might be of limited interest to the /. community, I found this column on how a fabricated statistic takes on a life of its own interesting. Starting with the Humane Society of the United States’ (HSUS) claim that the unsterilized offspring of a cat will ‘…result in 420,000 cats in 5 years,’ the author looks at other erroneous numbers, where they came from and why they won’t go away.”

Source: Lies, Damned Lies and Cat Statistics