Oil Means More Arsenic In Seawater 168
oxi writes "Besides the oil already spilling into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of up to 60,000 barrels daily, a group of British scientists says one can expect to see elevated levels of arsenic as well. The research, published in the journal Water Research, showed that oil prevents naturally-occurring arsenic from being filtered out of the water by the sediment on the ocean floor."
OMG! (Score:3, Informative)
This is about as valuable insight as a story above without any meaningful interpretation of what the rising level of arsenic means. How much more arsenic will there be? Will the entire ocean die? Will just a few patches of the Gulf die? Or more likely will it not make the tiniest bit of difference?
Re:naturally-occurring arsenic (Score:2, Informative)
Some time ago someone was to play Arsenic and Old Lace. Not wanting to mispronounce the name, he contacted Alice Longworth. She said that there were two branches of the family, and they pronounced the name differently.
T.R. was Roo-za-velt and F.D.R. was Rosa-velt.
One of the news articles on Litvinenko claimed that the Polonium used to kill him cost a megabuck.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko [wikipedia.org]
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/News/PoloniumPoison.html [nuclearweaponarchive.org]
Re:And yet... (Score:3, Informative)
3.3 million barrels over 8 months is 275,000 barrels a month. The Deepwater Horizon spill is spewing more than that every 2 months.
60k barrels * 30 days = 1.8 million barrels
Re:In related news: Not much hope of making it sto (Score:1, Informative)
Wait, how the hell do you get oil up into the clouds?
It's about the dispersant, not the oil. Anyway, have you never seen desert sand getting washed out of the air by rain? Aerosols can travel with the wind, you don't need to vaporize the liquid.
Re:And yet... (Score:3, Informative)
interesting, so when the relief wells shut down the flow in august, it'll be larger than Ixtoc, but still in the same order of magnitude.
Re:And yet... (Score:2, Informative)
3.3 million barrels over 8 months is 412,500* barrels a month. The Deepwater Horizon spill is spewing more than that every 2 months.
60k barrels * 30 days = 1.8 million barrels
Adjusted that for you in case someone was going to use the math.
Re:A little arsenic.... (Score:3, Informative)
"Apple can plainly attest" ?
You mean I didn't buy my Macbook Pro because it had more memory, a faster processor and video card than contemporary notebooks in its price range/size. Also a gorgeous screen, a backlit keyboard, an accelerometer protecting my data by parking my hard drive's heads in the event of a fall, a magnetic breakaway power cord, awesome battery life, and a aluminum unibody holding it all together weighing in at only 5.5Lbs? Don't forget a UNIX-based OS with a largely consistent, beautiful and lean GPU-accelerated UI (read: doesn't require a ridiculous CPU+GPU combo to simply present my interface like some other UIs). Several aspects of the OS are empirically "better" than the competition- which is probably why the competition has spent the better part of the last 10 years duplicating functionality in OSX from the UI down through the frameworks. The OS + beautiful and capable hardware make an Apple computer a killer package.
I'm a software engineer with a computer engineering degree and I could hardly ask for a better development platform. Apple makes, on the whole, the best of the breed when it comes to personal computers and you need to compare the complete package (OS, build quality, tech specs, weight, battery life, etc) if you are to compare apples to Apples. Pun intended.
Re:Keeping the worlds media from the biggest story (Score:2, Informative)
Jeeze! Do you watch the news at all? The government stated that there will be $40,000 fines and possible felony charges to "violators". They are enforcing the blackout with police and private security, and the coast guard. Yes, you do sound like you're defending the crooks(BP) here. They should not be calling the shots. Doesn't really matter. Nobody gives a shit. So there they are, covering up as best they can. You are defending the indefensible.