Three Ohio State Research Teams Present Discoveries At Geological Society of America Meeting This Week
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Explanation Offered For Antarctica's "Blood Falls"
Researchers here have discovered that a reddish deposit seeping out from the face of a glacier in Antarctica's remote Taylor Valley is probably the last remnant of an ancient salt-water lake. The lake probably formed as much as 5 million years ago when the sea levels were higher and the ocean reached far inland. It is the best explanation to date for a strange, nearly-century-old discoloration halfway up the face of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica's Dry Valleys. Read more . . .
Computer Model Offers New Tool To Probe Woburn Toxic Waste Site
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A computer model developed at Ohio State University is giving researchers a new understanding of how municipal wells at a famous toxic waste site in Woburn, Massachusetts, came to be contaminated, and how much contamination was delivered to residents. As dramatized in the book and movie A Civil Action, a cluster of childhood leukemia cases in Woburn led to a lengthy court battle in the 1980s, during which three commercial companies were accused of dumping toxic chemicals that entered two of the towns water supply wells. Read more . . .
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Scientists Believe Ancient Arachnids May Have Spun Silk Like Modern Spiders
Geologists at Ohio State University have found evidence of silk spinning structures on the fossilized body of a long-extinct relative of modern spiders, one that lived 55 million years before the first dinosaurs. The 300-million-year-old penny-sized creature, called Aphantomartus pustulatus, is a trigonotarbid -- part of an ancient group of arachnids that were among the first animals to colonize land. The burly eight-legged predator had a hard, segmented exoskeleton like a modern beetle, and scientists never suspected that it could spin a web -- until now. Read more . . .