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Last September, five days before Hurricane Ike pulverized the Texas coast, the National Hurricane Center pegged a point near Corpus Christi as the storm’s most likely landfall. Residents of the low-lying region around Galveston, some 250 miles north, breathed a sigh of relief.

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Boldly going where no man has gone before doesn’t take a spaceship—just a big boat and powerful sonar equipment. We know the altitude of every mountain and canyon on Mars, but 95 percent of the world’s oceans—including huge swaths of submerged land that the U.S. claims as sovereign territory—remain totally unexplored.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced yesterday that 2008 could be a busy hurricane season. Between twelve and 16 storms may be big enough to earn names, and six to nine should be intense enough to be qualified as hurricanes. And of those, two to five could be major.

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The good news is that the ozone hole over Antarctica is slowly healing, thanks to controls on ozone-depleting substances that were once widely used in products such as refrigerators and aerosol cans. Stratospheric ozone protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation that can cause problems such as skin cancer and crop damage.

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A metal that reacts with seawater to produce an electric field may help keep sharks at bay. But the idea isn't to protect humans from shark attacks. Just the opposite: scientists hope the metal will save sharks from senseless deaths in fishing nets.

An estimated 11 million to 13 million sharks die each year as "bycatch," collateral damage in the hunt for other fish. Sharks grow slowly and can take many years to reach reproductive age, so their populations are being severely impacted by fishing.

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While attending a conference in Phuket, Thailand, earlier this year, Eddie Bernard, the developer of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)s tsunami-monitoring network, was surprised to find that most residents had returned to the coastal city after the devastating tsunami of 2004, which killed 8,000 people in Thailand. Not only that, but they seemed prepared for the next one. Speaker towers loomed over the beach, ready to blast a warning in case a wave approached. Signs everywhere told people which way to flee.

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