Seaweed is versatile; it provides habitat for marine life, shelters coastlines, and absorbs carbon dioxide. But in the United States, scientists are setting out to see whether seaweed has another particularly valuable trick hidden up its proverbial sleeve: to act as a salty, slimy source of precious minerals. Within the US Department of Energy is the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a scientific branch devoted to tackling challenging, high-risk projects on energy technologies. ARPA-E takes big swings and looks for big rewards. And so far, the agency has awarded US $5-million ..read more

For decades, the world’s commercial ships have depended on a fossil fuel so sticky and thick that it needs to be heated to around 150 °C just to get it to flow through a vessel’s innards. Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) is one of the dirtiest fuels out there. “It’s the last step of the [oil] refining process,” says Morten Bo Christiansen, head of the energy transition team at Danish shipping giant Maersk. “You could say, the bottom of the barrel.” Yet now, as the International Maritime Organization (IMO)—the United Nations branch tasked with managing global shipping—implements new regulations intended to ..read more

When I was a teenager, my parents bought a home near an old farm pond in Bangor, Maine. A family of muskrats lived there and would go about their business as I lazed on the dock; I didn’t pay them close attention, as they were hardly glamorous creatures, and in retrospect, I took them for granted. Nevertheless, I did appreciate their presence. On warm-season evenings, the football-sized rodents—they resemble enormous voles or small, long-tailed beavers—would chug back and forth, harvesting cattails and carrying fronds to their den to eat in privacy. The sight of a whiskered nose held just abov ..read more

Twenty years ago, Geoff Plant, the then attorney general of British Columbia, made an offer to the Haida Nation. Many West Coast First Nations, including the Haida, had never signed treaties with the Canadian government ceding their traditional lands or resources, and Plant was trying to revive the faltering process of treaty making. He wanted to smooth over relations with Indigenous peoples, but he also wanted to help the province extract more resources from Indigenous lands. To entice the Haida—a nation known throughout Canada for its political savviness and resolve—he had what he thought wa ..read more

In March 2024, about a dozen scientists and crew members ventured into the Gulf of Mexico armed with an underwater rover, crab traps, and other research kit. Led by Craig McClain, a deep-sea biologist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the team set out to study the site where, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 workers and setting off one of the worst environmental disasters in US history. It was McClain’s third trip to the disaster’s ground zero, and despite the 14 years that have elapsed, he found that wildlife surrounding the exploded wellhead wa ..read more

Rebecca Cairns-Wicks looks up at the branches of a black cabbage tree. It’s growing at the edge of a grassy road along a sinuous ridge leading up the misty slopes of the cloud forest on Saint Helena Island. Umbels of small flowers, like bunched-up daisies, drape over the tree’s flat, leathery leaves, and a mat of ferns, lichens, mosses, and other organisms coat its trunk, giving it a strikingly black appearance. “This tree is iconic,” says Cairns-Wicks, a plant geneticist and head of the St Helena Research Institute. Saint Helena—part of the British overseas territory Saint Helena, Ascension ..read more

This story was originally published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When Maggie Reddy was growing up on the eastern coast of South Africa in the 1990s, the tiny oceanside town where her family lived offered just two recreational options for children: the library and the beach. Though Reddy had been born categorized as Asian because of her distant Indian heritage, the government policy of racial separation was abandoned when Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress party took over when Reddy was six. The two re ..read more

At around 11:30 a.m. on March 6, 2024, Houthi militants from Yemen fired a ballistic missile at a Barbados-flagged, Liberian-owned bulk carrier transiting the Gulf of Aden, a shipping route between the Arabian and Somali Peninsulas. A large fire broke out on the ship, and three people were killed. At least four others were injured. Since October 2023, Houthis have launched over 60 maritime attacks, claiming the strikes are an act of retaliation against Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip. The March 6 strike was the first to result in civilian deaths. This new slew of attacks on ships i ..read more

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. An unprecedented US federal effort to rescue and rehabilitate endangered smalltooth sawfish is getting underway this week in the Florida Keys, where unusual and concerning behavior has been documented, including spinning and whirling—signs the fish are in distress. Some 32 of the sawfish have been reported dead, although the number is believed to be higher, because the fish tend to sink after death. The smalltooth sawfish, in 2003, was the first marine fish to be liste ..read more

Douglas Wallace was on a research ship in the middle of Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence when he heard the news: Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau had met with Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, in nearby Stephenville, Newfoundland. At their meeting in August 2022, the two leaders locked in Canada’s commitment to supply Germany with hydrogen gas. They chose to declare the “Canada-Germany hydrogen alliance” in Stephenville because the town is the site of the proposed World Energy GH2 project, a facility that will use wind power to produce hydrogen gas. The announcement allowed the world lead ..read more