Science Glance
‘This would have been a wild dream a year ago,” says Andrea Ceccolini, standing on Arctic sea ice just a 4-mile snowmobile ride from the Inuit town of Cambridge Bay, northern Canada. To his left are sky blue ponds of meltwater created in the last few days by a sun that no longer sets in the high north summer. To his right, the sea ice is still a brilliant white, the light dusting of snow on top continuing to sparkle.
“It’s incredibly different, the boundary – I mean, you can point to it,” he says. The difference is the result of a bold geoengineering experiment being conducted by Ceccolini’s company, Real Ice, funded by the UK government.
Five months earlier, the team had braved temperatures of -40C on the sea ice to drill holes and pump 50,000 tonnes of ocean water up on to its surface. It froze almost immediately, thickening the 1.5-metre-deep ice by about 50cm, according to the new measurements.
That has protected the ice, at the start of the melt season at least, and is an early sign that one day, perhaps, it may be possible to refreeze a significant part of the Arctic.
Time to look up, stargazers – there’s going to be a planetary "kiss" on June 9.
Standing in his laboratory, Harvard professor Sean Eddy gazes at a row of vacant work stations. More than a year ago, this lab was filled with over a dozen researchers. On a given day they might be working independently on analyzing genomic sequencing or gathered around the group table, drinking coffee and helping each other troubleshoot questions about genomic data from different species.
Brilliant splashes of green, purple and pink will streak the night sky for many stargazers in North America on Saturday and Sunday night, as energized particles from space collide with the Earth's atmosphere to create the dazzling effect, known as the Northern Lights or aurora borealis.
Officials are investigating whether a huge fire that destroyed a top marine science laboratory at the University of South Florida may have been caused by a lightning strike.
The highest levels of the federal government are paying attention to a list of people who have gone missing or died, citing concerns about their connections to scientific research, some of it potentially classified.
The US military said it killed four more people in a boat strike in the eastern Pacific ocean on Tuesday, marking the third deadly attack on vessels in the region in four days.
