June 4, 2020 By James Gorman The New York Times
Modern medicine still depends on this animal’s blood to test for bacteria in vaccines. And an alternative test requires further study.
May 31, 2020 By Allison Hirschlag The Washington Post
The Great Barrier Reef covers nearly 865 million acres off the coast of Australia, which means approximately 350 billion starfish inhabit it. The starfish, the most fertile invertebrate in the world, stripped 150 reefs of coral within the Great Barrier system and damaged 500 more in just a few years.
May 27, 2020 By Liz Kimbrough Mongabay
European spiny lobsters create quite the rumble. By rubbing an antenna across its face, a spiny lobster can create a sound that might, under the right underwater conditions, be detectable up to 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) away. The sound, known as an antennal rasp, occurs when an extension of a lobster’s antennae moves across a rough patch under its eye. Lobsters likely make this sound for communication or to scare away predators. In a recently published study in Scientific Reports, researchers asked, how far does the sound of a rasp travel? And can these sounds be used in a non-invasive way to monitor lobster populations?
May 14, 2020 By Afdhel Aziz Forbes
Deloitte has calculated the annual cost of marine plastic pollution to be $6-19 billion a year to key economic sectors for coastal communities. One of the most innovative solutions to tackling the problem of plastic in the world’s oceans has been The Ocean Cleanup Project.
May 13, 2020 By Michael Allen Hakai Magazine
Rapid proliferation of satellites in orbit is raising a number of concerns: astronomers fear the tiny craft will mar their observations, while Starlink satellites have already proved to be a possible collision risk for other spacecraft. And Nicola Pirrone, research director at the National Research Council of Italy’s Institute of Atmospheric Pollution Research, is worried about what would happen if one of these satellite manufacturers were to switch to using mercury as a fuel—a cheap and readily available alternative.