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Photo: Sharon Mollerus

When a fault slips and the Earth grinds against itself—an earthquake—veins of gold can suddenly appear in the cracks that form between slabs of rock, says new research by Australian scientists Dion Weatherley and Richard Henley.

In the Earth’s crust, gold makes up about two out of every billion atoms, a rare metal in a sea of sand and salt and rock. Normally, deep underground, the weight of the earth above and the strain of two tectonic plates locked against one another makes the pressure along a fault really, really high—thousands of times that it is on the surface. But when an earthquake strikes and parts of the fault open up, a sudden drop of pressure causes liquid that is flowing around in the fault to rapidly vaporize, says Nature, dumping the gold out of solution in small but highly purified deposits.

The idea of an earthquake-driven drop in pressure drawing gold and other materials out of the crustal mix is a new one, say the scientists, and could help explain why “the rocks in gold-bearing quartz deposits are often marbled with a spider web of tiny gold veins.”

“Isolated slips do not, of course, generate economically viable gold deposits,” the scientists write in the study. But, over time,“multiple earthquakes [can] progressively build economic-grade gold deposits.”

The earthquake-induced pressure drop and consequent “flash deposition” of minerals, say the scientists, could account for “the formation of more than 80% of the world’s gold deposits; a simple repetitive process related to the everyday occurrence of earthquakes.” They say that this process, repeating over and over in a highly active area like the Southern Alps or New Zealand could produce an 110-ton gold deposit in around 100,000 years.

As massively destructive surges in the very body of the Earth, earthquakes may seem like incredibly rare events. Though large earthquakes are indeed quite rare, their smaller brethren (more that strong enough to cause this process) are not: the USGS has counted 180 in the past week.

The knowledge of this new process, say the scientists, could help in finding new gold deposits worldwide. It could also help seismologists better understand the earthquakes themselves, says Nature.

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An artist’s rendering of methane hydrate’s small-scale structure, with a methane molecule in green and gold trapped within a blue and silver cage of water. Photo: Masakazu Matsumoto

Found deep underwater in coastal oceans worldwide, a slushy mix of natural gas and water ice is on path to becoming an energy source of future, reports the BBC. Japanese researchers announced that, for the first time, they have managed to successfully extract useful natural gas from the mix, known as a methane clathrate.

Previous work on methane clathrates found on land have been used to produce natural gas, but this is the first time that ocean floor deposits have been tapped. The stores of offshore methane clathrates around Japan, says the BBC, are estimated at around 1.1 trillion cubic metres of the mix, enough to supply “more than a decade of Japan’s gas consumption.” The United States Geological Survey, says The Washington Post, estimates that gas hydrates worldwide “could contain between 10,000 trillion cubic feet to more than 100,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.”

Some of that gas will never be accessible at reasonable prices. But if even a fraction of that total can be commercially extracted, that’s an enormous amount. To put this in context, U.S. shale reserves are estimated to contain 827 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Japan says that the technology to usefully produce natural gas from methane clathrates is still around five years off.

Burning natural gas emits less carbon dioxide than burning coal, and replacing coal or other fossil fuels with natural gas is often looked at as a a way to limit global warming. However, fossil fuels are still fossil fuels, and burning this new source of energy could do a wondrous amount of damage. The Washington Post:

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there’s more carbon trapped inside gas hydrates than is contained in all known reserves of fossil fuels.

…Bottom line: It could prove impossible to keep global warming below the goal of 2°C if a significant fraction of this natural gas gets burned.

The New York Times:

“Gas hydrates have always been seen as a potentially vast energy source, but the question was, how do we extract gas from under the ocean?” said Ryo Matsumoto, a professor in geology at Meiji University in Tokyo who has led research into Japan’s hydrate deposits. “Now we’ve cleared one big hurdle.”

The other big hurdle is deciding whether this is a path worth following.

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Image: dr_zoidberg

Moshers might have more to offer society than you once thought. It turns out that mosh pits behave a lot like a container of gas, with each individual acting as an atom. Researchers at Cornell University built a model of these metal heads and realized that they could use it not just to understand the behavior of fans but also, perhaps, the behavior of individuals in emergencies.

The whole thing started when a graduate student, Jesse Silverberg, took his girlfriend to a metal concert. He told New Scientist:

“I didn’t want to put her in harm’s way, so we stood off to the side,” he says. “I’m usually in the mosh pit, but for the first time I was off to the side and watching. I was amazed at what I saw.”

From the sidelines, he realized that the mosh pit looked a lot like a mass of atoms. Individuals bash into one another, bounce off and fly around in a seemingly random pattern. Then they took videos of mosh pits off YouTube and built a model of the behavior. Here it is:

New Scientist explains what we’re seeing here:

They found that by tweaking their model parameters – decreasing noise or increasing the tendency to flock, for instance – they could make the pit shift between the random-gas-like moshing and a circular vortex called a circle pit, which is exactly what they saw in the YouTube videos of real mosh pits.

Which is interesting for connoisseurs of mosh pits, but perhaps more useful in situations where crowds need help, like earthquakes or fires. Scientists can’t really study how people behave in those situations without raising ethical questions. But perhaps, Stromberg told New Scientist, you could use this model to see how people behave and use that information to better design emergency exits or aid.

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A man sorts through rubbish in Guiyu, the world’s largest center for electronic waste. Photo: Bert van Dijk

After several years of speculation, China’s environment ministry just acknowledged the existence of so-called “cancer villages,” France24 reports. Rumors of these cancer hot spots first began in 2009 after a Chinese journalist posted a map pinpointing areas that seemed to suffer from higher incidences of disease. But this is most likely the first that authorities dubbed the pollution-laden problem locations “cancer villages” in an official report.

Across China, there is growing discontent over the levels of industrial waste, smog and other environmental problems that have resulted from rapid, sometimes unregulated development. The new five-year plan points out: ”Poisonous and harmful chemical materials have brought about many water and atmosphere emergencies… certain places are even seeing ‘cancer villages.’”

The report doesn’t get into too many specifics or potential solutions, but it does acknowledge that China uses “poisonous and harmful chemical products,” many of which are banned in developed countries around the world. These chemicals, they write, “post long-term or potential harm to human health and the ecology.”

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Image: Steven Depolo

If you’ve ever examined a bottle of water, you might notice that it has an expiration date. This is kind of weird—water doesn’t really expire, right? But, really, you shouldn’t be worried about the water, but about the bottle.

Mental Floss explains why anyone bothered starting labeling bottled water to begin with :

A 1987 NJ state law required all food products sold there to display an expiration date of two years or less from the date of manufacture. Labeling, separating and shipping batches of expiration-dated water to the Garden State seemed a little inefficient to bottled water producers, so most of them simply started giving every bottle a two-year expiration date, no matter where it was going.

The regulation is no longer there, but everybody still prints the date since it’s built into their production process. Life’s Little Mysteries writes:

Furthermore, many companies bottle water using the same machines they use to bottlesodas and other beverages which do expire and should carry an expiration date. It’s easier and more efficient to simply put a stamp on all the bottles (whether needed or not) rather than dedicating a special machine just for bottled water.

So the water inside isn’t going to go bad on its own. What might ruin things is the plastic that it’s wrapped in. Here’s Mental Floss again:

The plastic that water is packaged in — usually polyethylene terephthalate (PET) for retail bottles and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) for water cooler jugs – is slightly porous, so the water can pick up smells and tastes from the outside world. Keep a case of bottled water in the basement for a year or so and it’s going to pick up some interesting flavors. There’s nothing better on a hot summer day than a 2007 Evian, with hints of dust and a crisp kitty litter finish!

At About.com’s Chemistry section, they explain that just because it’s been sitting there for a while doesn’t make it any more dangerous than a fresh bottle:

Leaching of chemicals from packaging is a health concern, but as far as toxic chemicals go, you can get exposure to most of those chemicals from freshly bottled water as well as bottled water that has been on the shelf a while. A ‘plastic’ taste is not necessarily an indicator that the water is bad; absence of an unpleasant flavor does not mean the water is free from contaminants.

But as long as you store the bottles, unopened, like you would any other sealed food product, you’re probably fine.

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