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 submitted by Albert Gomez

Daniel Robison/WNED  After being delivered to JBI's Plastic2Oil facility, shredded plastic is melted down in a large tank before being vaporized and formed into fuel. John Bordynuik releases some of the substance to check for quality.

by Daniel Robison - npr.org - March 19, 2012

Only 7 percent of plastic waste in the United States is recycled each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. A startup company in Niagara Falls says it can increase that amount and reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil at the same time.

It all starts with a machine known as the Plastic-Eating Monster.

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submitted by Samuel Bendett

Homeland Security News Wire - March 2, 2012

Following the massive 11 March earthquake and tsunami that rocked Japan, residents and experts there have grown increasingly skeptical of quake forecasts.

Last month two University of Tokyo seismologists released a study that predicted a major earthquake would hit Japan’s capital city within the next four years. Their study was sharply criticized by those who said their claims were likely incorrect.

Bowing to pressure, the university’s Earthquake Research Institute posted a notice on its site that stated the latest earthquake forecast was the opinion of two researchers and noted the study’s “large margin of error.”

“Many seismologists think this kind of study is too simple,” said Naoyuki Kato, a seismologist at the institute, in an interview with the Washington Post.

Japan, which has been frequently rocked by powerful earthquakes in the past, invests more money than any other nation in the world on earthquake prediction, yet despite spending more than $100 million annually, the art of predicting earthquakes remains elusive.

submitted by Linton Wells

sciencemag.org - January 20, 2012

Earthquakes are a collective experience. Citizens have long participated in earthquake science through the reporting, collection, and analysis of individual experiences. The value of citizen-generated status reports was clear after the 1995 Kobe, Japan, earthquake (1). Today's communications infrastructure has taken citizen engagement to a new level: Earthquake-related Twitter messages can outrun the shaking (2), Internet traffic detects earthquakes (3–7) and maps the distribution of shaking in minutes (8–10), and accelerometers in consumer electronic devices record seismic waveforms (11–16). What are we learning from this flood of data, and what are the limitations? How do we harness these new capabilities for scientific discovery, and what is the role of education?

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