The Arctic is comparatively clean. Due to the prevailing worldwide sea and air currents, the Arctic area is also the fallout region for long-range transport pollutants, and in some places the concentrations exceed the levels of densely populated urban areas. An example of this is the phenomenon of Arctic haze, which is commonly blamed on…

Omega 3 fatty acids are fats commonly found in marine and plant oils. The health effects of n-3 fatty acids supplementation are controversial. They are considered essential fatty acids, meaning that they cannot be synthesized by the human body but are vital for normal metabolism. A new study by the University of Oxford has shown…

On Mars’s poles there are ice caps of ice and dust with multiple layers that can tell us much about climate variations on Mars. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have related the layers in the ice cap on Mars’s north pole to variations in solar insolation on Mars, thus established the first dated climate…

Hurricane Isaac was a slow-moving tropical cyclone that caused severe damage along the northern Gulf Coast of the United States in late-August 2012. Isaac reached hurricane strength the morning of August 28. The storm made its first U.S. landfall at 6:45 p.m. CDT that evening (2345 UTC), near the mouth of the Mississippi River. As…

Perfluorooctanoic acid is a synthetic, stable perfluorinated carboxylic acid and fluorosurfactant. It has been used in the manufacture of such prominent consumer goods as Teflon and Gore-Tex. Exposure to perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a man made chemical used in the manufacture of some common household products, appears to be associated with cardiovascular disease and peripheral arterial…

There are many logical (and illogical) reasons to have a large or a small family. Scientists have taken a step closer to solving one of life’s mysteries – why family size generally falls as societies become richer. Evolutionary biologists have long puzzled over this because natural selection is expected to have selected for organisms that…

There is a lot of stored Methane in the environment and numerous natural sources. Well add a sort of new one that may be bigger than previously supposed. A new study demonstrates that old organic matter in sedimentary basins located beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet may have been converted to methane by micro-organisms living under…

A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping. There are none to see nearby but their effects are massive when they are found. NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has led to a bonanza of newfound supermassive black holes and extreme galaxies called hot DOGs, or…

When the Fourmile Canyon Fire erupted west of Boulder in 2010, smoke from the wildfire poured into parts of the city including a site housing scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Being scientists they then scrambled about to test what…

The Arctic is a polar region located at the northern-most part of the Earth. The Arctic consists of the Arctic Ocean and parts of Canada, Russia, Denmark (Greenland), Norway, the United States (Alaska), Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. The Arctic region consists of a vast, ice-covered ocean, surrounded by treeless permafrost. The blanket of sea ice…