Archive for October 31, 2014

The secret life of the sea trout

Jan G. Davidsen and his graduate students are spies. They use listening stations and special tags they attach to their subjects to track their movements. They follow their subjects winter and summer, day and night. They are in pursuit of secrets. And they are relentless.

Master's student Anne Cathrine Flaten (left) and researcher Jan Davidsen from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology remove a listening device from Snillfjord in central Norway so they can download data on the movements of sea trout in the fjord.

Master’s student Anne Cathrine Flaten (left) and researcher Jan Davidsen from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology remove a listening device from Snillfjord in central Norway so they can download data on the movements of sea trout in the fjord.

Fortunately, this is not the Stasi, nor the KGB. Davidsen is a biologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s University Museum, and his subjects are 15 cm long slivers of silvery sea trout. Read more

Is Water a Mineral? – Is Ice a Mineral?

Is Water a Mineral?

If we compare the properties of water to the five requirements of the mineral definition we find that it fails to qualify as a mineral. Water is a liquid so it does not meet requirement #3 – being a solid.

water-ice-istockHowever, at temperatures below 32 degrees Fahrenheit or 0 degrees Celsius water becomes the solid material that we call “ice”. Read more

ISS Experiment Studying How To Use Water To Start Fires

While water is typically used to help put out fires, astronauts currently serving on the International Space Station (ISS) are working on a special type of H2O that actually has the opposite effect, NASA officials revealed on Friday.

fire-waterAccording to Mike Hicks of the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, the liquid is known as “supercritical water” and it is formed when ordinary water is compressed to a pressure of 217 atmospheres and heated to temperatures greater than 373 degrees Celsius – known as the critical point.

Under those conditions, regular water becomes something that does not fit into any of the three basic states of matter. Rather than being a pure solid, liquid or gas, Hicks explains that it becomes more of a “liquid-like gas,” and when it is mixed with organic materials, it undergoes a chemical reaction and oxidizes. Read more

Does Water Always Completely Wet Water?

The molecular scale behavior of water at a solid/liquid interface holds fundamental significance in a diverse set of technical and scientific contexts, ranging from the efficiency of oil mining to the activity of biological molecules. Recently, it has become recognized that both the physical interactions and the surface morphology have significant impact on the behavior of interfacial water, including the water structures and wetting properties of the surface.

01In a new review, Chunlei Wang, Yizhou Yang and Haiping Fang of the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics report recent advances in atom-level understanding of interfacial water that exhibits an ordered character on various solid surfaces at room or cryogenic temperature. Read more

New tracers can identify frack fluids in the environment

Scientists have developed new geochemical tracers that can identify hydraulic fracturing flowback fluids that have been spilled or released into the environment.

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Acid mine drainage flows through a stream in western Pennsylvania.

The tracers, which were created by a team of U.S. and French researchers, have been field-tested at a spill site in West Virginia and downstream from an oil and gas brine wastewater treatment plant in Pennsylvania.

“This gives us new forensic tools to detect if ‘frac fluids’ are escaping into our water supply and what risks, if any, they might pose,” said Duke University geochemist Avner Vengosh, who co-led the research. Read more