Oldest Tree in the World

GREAT BASIN NATIONAL PARK -  Thousands of feet above the Nevada desert, in a part of Great Basin National Park that tourists rarely see, park ecologist Gretchen Baker neared the top of Mount Washington and raised her binoculars. There just below, sprouting directly from the limestone, grew some of the oldest living things on Earth.

Great Basin bristlecone pines, their dense pale trunks twisted like thick rope by centuries of gusting wind and rain, thrive here in part because so little else does. At altitudes near 11,000 feet along Nevada’s rocky Snake Range there are no grasses, no brush, few pests, no competition. No people to start wildfires. No nearby trees to spread pathogens.

With nothing around to kill them, these ancient beasts are left alone year after year to simply do what they do: store water in needles that can live for decades and pack on the teensiest bit of heft at a time. The wood grows so slowly it gets too dense for beetles or disease to penetrate.  READ MORE...

Triassic Sea Monster

An illustration of Cymbospondylus youngorum in a Triassic ocean teeming with life. Ammonites and squid were abundant in this open ocean environment. (Image credit: Illustration by Stephanie Abramowicz, courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM).)

A sea monster that lived during the early dinosaur age is so unexpectedly colossal, it reveals that its kind grew to gigantic sizes extremely quickly, evolutionarily speaking at least.

The discovery suggests that such ichthyosaurs — a group of fish-shaped marine reptiles that inhabited the dinosaur-era seas — grew to enormous sizes in a span of only 2.5 million years, the new study finds. 

To put that in context, it took whales about 90% of their 55 million-year history to reach the huge sizes that ichthyosaurs evolved to in the first 1% of their 150 million-year history, the researchers said.

"We have discovered that ichthyosaurs evolved gigantism much faster than whales, in a time where the world was recovering from devastating extinction [at the end of the Permian period]," study senior researcher Lars Schmitz, an associate professor of biology at Scripps College in Claremont, California, told Live Science in an email. 

"It is a nice glimmer of hope and a sign of the resilience of life — if environmental conditions are right, evolution can happen very fast, and life can bounce back."  READ MORE...

US Nuclear Waste Dump

The federal government has more than $44 billion collected from energy customers since the 1980s specifically to be spent on a permanent nuclear waste disposal in the United States.

Currently, nuclear waste is mostly stored in dry casks on the locations of current and former nuclear power plants around the country.

On Nov. 30, the Office of Nuclear Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy took a preliminary step towards establishing an interim repository for nuclear waste. Some see this as a reason for optimism, others as kicking the can down the road.

This undated image obtained 22 February, 2004 shows the entrance to the Yucca Mountain 

nuclear waste repository located in Nye County, Nevada, about 100 miles northwest of 

Las Vegas.AFP | AFP | Getty Images

The federal government has a fund of $44.3 billion earmarked for spending on a permanent nuclear waste disposal facility in the United States.

It began collecting money from energy customers for the fund in the 1980s, and the money is now earning about $1.4 billion in interest each year.

But plans to build a site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, were scuttled by state and federal politics, and there’s been a lack of political will to find other solutions. The result is that the U.S. does not have the infrastructure to dispose of radioactive nuclear waste in a deep geologic repository, where it can slowly lose its radioactivity over the course of thousands of years without causing harm.

However, with the effects of climate change becoming more obvious, investors and some political activists are renewing interest in nuclear as a source of energy that does not emit climate-warming carbon dioxide. That is forcing proponents to confront the thorny problem of waste again.

How Nevada became the nexus of the waste story
Congress established the Nuclear Waste Fund in 1982, requiring anyone who was getting some of their electricity from nuclear energy to pay a small amount of money to deal with the waste.

From 1982 through 1987, the Department of Energy explored nine sites for permanent waste disposal, and eventually whittled that list down to three. Yucca Mountain in Nevada was the first choice, with sites in Washington and Texas rounding out the top of the list. Some members of Congress were concerned that analyzing multiple sites would cost too much, and so in 1987, Congress amended its 1982 law to focus all of its attention on Yucca Mountain.  READ MORE...