Science

As geologists probe the world's rocky sediments for spots to safely store carbon dioxide underground, engineers are working on the first step of the process: separating pure CO₂ from noxious smokestack emissions. An enzyme in our blood already has the trick down, however, and it captures two pounds of CO₂ every day. Now a New Jersey company is trying to replicate the method.

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Each issue of Popular Science opens with Megapixels--two of the most amazing images from the world of science and technology that month. Here, we've compiled them all from 2009 for your viewing pleasure, with some additional images from years past and present added to the mix.

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President Obama lifted the Bush-era restrictions on embryonic stem cell lines last spring, but hundreds of cell lines have remained locked away undergoing review. Now the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has finally deemed 13 embryonic lines ready for use, and could make a decision on 20 or more by Friday, the Associated Press reports.

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Stars don't tend to go quietly, and the most massive of them all create a supernova explosion 50 to 100 times brighter than normal. Now astronomers have confirmed the existence of rare but huge stars that contain 200 times the mass of our sun, after spotting one unusually bright cosmic explosion in 2007.

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While the fate of America's Yucca Mountain appears to be sealed, Finnish company Posiva is moving forward with a cutting-edge nuclear waste storage facility that it claims will safely store radioactive waste in drums deep in the ground for 100,000 years. While challenges abound, a green light from the Finnish government expected by 2012 will make the site on Finland's Olkiluoto Island the first permanent nuclear waste repository in the world, opening the door for more to follow.

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So far, the search for extraterrestrial life beyond our solar system has focused on finding Earth-like planets. And sure, planets are great, since we know at least one of them harbors life. But David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics thinks that search might be a tad too narrow. In a new paper, Kipping described how current technology can be re-tasked to search for another life-bearing body: moons.

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In 1985, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey found a giant hole in the ozone layer of Earth's atmosphere over the South Pole. This discovery prompted a largely successful international effort to ban CFCs, the chemicals largely responsible for man-made thinning of the ozone layer.

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Plasma plays quite a large role in the universe, making up the high-energy centers of stars like our sun. But researchers are finding that plasma can carry out very small tasks just as well, like killing MSRA and other drug-resistant bacteria both on the skin’s surface and in chronic, non-healing wounds.

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A person with normal clotting ability would have to lose nearly 40 percent of his blood immediately to die of blood loss. The arteries with this bloodletting potential, though, such as the radial artery in the arm and femoral artery in the leg, are buried under too much flesh to be nicked by even the heaviest manila cardstock. “It would be tough to kill yourself on a paper cut,” says Beau Mitchell, a bleeding-disorder specialist at the New York Blood Center, an organization that supplies blood to hospitals.

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