Lake Esieh is spewing vast amounts of methane — a potent greenhouse gas
September 8, 2017, was an exciting date for Katey Walter Anthony. On this cool, windless evening she first visited Alaska’s Lake Esieh. Few people visit this remote stretch of wilderness. It is covered in tundra and scraggly spruce trees. Thousands of lakes dot the region. But Walter Anthony quickly realized that this lake was strange. As her boat glided across it, she came to a place where the water seemed to be boiling.
The water wasn’t warm. But it roiled and fizzed. Bubbles of all sizes streamed up, popping at the surface. One bubble, as large as a softball, gave off a loud bloonk as it ruptured. The bubbles covered a swath of the lake larger than a football field. And they rose with such force that they slowly pushed her boat to the side.
Walter Anthony leaned over the edge of the boat and collected some bubbles in a bottle. Then she struck a match and opened the bottle to release the gas she had just collected. The gas caught fire! Read more.
When the landmass that is now the Indian subcontinent slammed into Asia about 50 million years ago, the collision changed the configuration of the continents, the landscape, global climate and more. Now a team of Princeton University scientists has identified one more effect: the oxygen in the world’s oceans increased, altering the conditions for life. Read more.
In terms of longevity, the universe has nothing on xenon-124. Theory predicts the isotope’s radioactive decay has a half-life that surpasses the age of the universe “by many orders of magnitude,” but no evidence of the process has appeared until now. Read more.
Estimates suggest up to 1.3 billion, or one in six of the world’s population, could be suffering from zinc deficiency.
Zinc is a component in many bodily proteins, including over 300 enzymes – so it plays an important role in all our cells and affects growth, hormones, the immune system, the brain, and other organs. Read more.
5000 years before the modern rise of millet as a popular grain, this Chinese crop was spread far and wide by ancient food aficionados, not for their plates but instead for their animals, suggests new research from an international collaboration led by Kiel University (Germany) and Washington University in St. Louis. Read more.
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