Beyond the Light Switch, a Detroit Public Television two-part documentary hosted by Scientific American Associate Editor David Biello, has been awarded a Silver Baton 2012 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, it was announced today. Biello and the production team of Ed Moore, Bill Kubota, Paul Dzendzel, Genevieve Savage and Jordan Wingrove spent more than a year [...]

Some go to school to become journalists. Others hit the road with a notebook, camera and insatiable curiosity, while others have a shocking moment of awareness of the complexity of the human condition and want to document it. I decided to enter the field when a war journalist showed me a roll of images from [...]

Earthquakes have become more than 10 times more common in normally quiescent parts of the U.S., such as Ohio and Oklahoma, in the past few years. Given the simultaneous uptick in fracking—an oil and gas drilling technique that involves fracturing shale rock deep underground with the use of a high pressure water cocktail—it’s common to [...]

Ernest J. Moniz, a nuclear physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who serves on Scientific American’s board of advisors, will be President Barack Obama’s pick to replace Nobel laureate Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy. While Moniz has yet to win a Nobel, he served on the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear [...]

You won’t find any resolution about fracking in Promised Land, Matt Damon’s movie that went nationwide this weekend. But you will find condemnation, a very surprising plot twist and one egregious science scene. The timing couldn’t be better. New York State, the front lines in the political battle over whether to vastly expand the hydraulic [...]

President Barack Obama secured a second four-year term in yesterday’s vote. What is the likely outcome of that historic event on energy and environmental issues? Simply put: more of the same. Let me rephrase that slightly. Obama will likely stay the course on his current energy and environmental policies. That means more executive orders like [...]

Remember when climate change contrarians professed outrage over a few errors in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last report? One of their favorite such mistakes involved an overestimation of the pace at which glaciers would melt at the “Third Pole,” where the Indian subcontinent crashes into Asia. Some contrarians back in 2010 proceeded [...]

Of all the troubles with fracking, the biggest—and growing—challenge seems to be what to do with all those millions of gallons of water contaminated with frack chemicals, leached minerals and salts. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is the process of drilling sideways into subterranean shale and blasting it open with millions of gallons of water to [...]

VANCOUVER—Resistance to hydraulic fracturing in the U.S. has risen steadily in recent months. Citizens and politicians are worried that fracking deep shales to extract natural gas can contaminate groundwater, trigger earthquakes and release methane, the potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. But a panel of experts not tied to industry told a large audience at [...]

New York State is the key battleground that will determine the future of fracking in the U.S., and January 11, 2012, is a turning point. The date ends the public comment period on proposed state regulations that will govern the process: drilling into deep Marcellus shales, fracturing the rock with water and chemicals to release [...]

“There’s never been a documented case of contaminated water supply,” Ed Ireland, executive director of the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, an industry group, told me in 2010. It’s a line that has been repeated by various people in the energy industry—and quoted by reporters like me—as the practice of fracking (or using pressurized water [...]

It may be surprising to hear that hydraulic fracturing is not the cause of water contamination, but what may be even more surprising is that shale gas produced using fracking may have lower life cycle greenhouse gas emissions than conventional gas. According to a recent Environmental Science and Technology report, “shale gas life-cycle [greenhouse gas] [...]

I had a whole post prepared about how the Geographic Information Services people helped in the response to the April tornados that devastated Raleigh, which seemed like a good way to introduce the infrastructure-plus-connectivity-plus-how-do-they-DO-that? applied science take I hope to bring to this blog, but then I came back from vacation and opened the newspapers [...]