A small bioremediation company in San Antonio is offering the use of its oil-eating microbes to help reduce the impact of the Horizon Deepwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The government is also looking for credible suggestions to sop up oil on facebook.

After over a month of spewing millions of gallons of oil deep into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has begun it’s “top kill” approach which requires jamming mud into the hole created on April 20. The trick is that the pressure of the mud being pushed into the pipe to stem the oil flow must exceed the pressure of the oil pouring out.

Scientists estimate that pressure to be about 5,000 psi (pounds per square inch)–more pressure than a scuba tank. And this procedure may force the oil to find new ways to escape through rock formations or by blowing a new hole in the pipe.

Gary Wesche is counting the days. It’s down to 14 now before he heads to Antarctica as part of a scientific expedition. KMBC’s Bev Chapman reports from St. Regis Catholic School in Kansas City.

Wesche’s expedition to study ice sheets is organized by PolarTREC where you can follow Gary’s adventure.

Other teachers are embarking on similar adventures, Sarah Diers to study dissolved organic matter on the Cotton Glacier and Casey O’Hara will participate in cutting edge physics at the IceCube Neutrino Lab.

Members of the Surui tribe in Brazil test Open Data Kit, photo courtesy of Carl Hartung, UW

Cell phones are coming to the aid of international health workers, environmental monitors and even citizen scientists. Now loaded with a data collection tool, Open Data Kit is the brainchild of some doctoral students at University of Washington.

But early deployment into the Amazon Rainforest and Tanzania will give the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December better information when it comes to global deforestation.

Measuring of the size of rainforests is helping to deter illegal logging practices that so often escape the watchful eye of satellites. Now on the ground monitoring is turning members of the Surui tribe into citizen scientists and helping them break into the emerging carbon market in Brazil.

They call William Kamkwamba “the boy who harnessed the wind.” At 14, after dropping out of school, the African boy in a rural Malawi village taught himself how electricity works, and built a windmill from scraps and pieces of a bicycle.

Now 22, Kamkwmaba has a book, detailing how he built his windmill and he outlines his plan for his next invention–a steam engine run by a solar oven.

Here’s an interview with the author at Amazon.com.

A little green frog is causing big problems across Hawaii, where the coqui has become the latest invasive species to get a strong foothold.

But Hawaii may be the only place experiencing a surging frog population. Around the world, frogs are dying in droves from a fungus called a chytrid.

What can we learn from the little coqui?

Evidence of global warming is hitting the Arctic harder than anywhere else. The rate of climate change is twice that of the rest of the world.

And, now scientists are discovering the Arctic region plays an important role in capturing atmospheric carbon, both in the ocean and on land.

But that delicate system might be in jeopardy as the polar ice caps melt, triggering a feedback loop of increased warming and melting.

As permafrost melts for the first time ever, there might be a big threat looming–methane–which could help convert the Arctic carbon sink into a big greenhouse gas emitter.

Visualization of a river bed created using VisTrails, a system developed by University of Utah computer scientists Photo by: Juliana Freire and Claudio Silva, University of Utah

A two-year experiment to build a framework to analyze the massive amount of data scientists are collecting will push research to better understand our planet, our bodies and the limits of the Internet.

The National Science Foundation initiative called Cluster Exploratory or the CLuE program is a partnership between I.B.M. and Google to put scientists to work solving the problem of how to deal with so much information.

The answer? Cloud computing. Using virtual locations online to cope with the large data stream will allow science to answer some big and complex questions.

Top 8 in the Science Cloud:

Sloan Digital Sky Survey–obtained deep, multi-color images covering more than a quarter of the sky and created 3-dimensional maps containing more than 930,000 galaxies and more than 120,000 quasars.

Visible Human–is an anatomical data set licensed from the National Library of Medicine, Visible Human Project.

IRIS Seismology Database–allows you to monitor global earthquakes in near real-time, visit seismic stations around the world, and search the web for earthquake or region-related information.

Protein Data Bank–contains information about experimentally-determined structures of proteins, nucleic acids, and complex assemblies.

Linguistic Data Consortium–supports language-related education, research and technology development by creating and sharing linguistic resources.

TerraFly–View images and data anywhere in the United States and in much of the World.

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope–A large aperture, wide field survey telescope and 3200 Megapixel camera to image faint astronomical objects across the sky.

Open Topography–provides integrated access to high-resolution topographic data and web-based processing tools as well as enables its user community to share knowledge, resources and build science collaborations.

There is a lot of buzz about biodiversity these days. But new wasp research is showing it’s not just the number of species present that indicates a healthy system. But there also must be diversity in what each species can do.

Washington State University researchers looked to parasitic wasps (the ones that inspired the creature in Alien) to help prove the theory.

Among all the options to help tame carbon dioxide emissions, few people can see the forest for the trees.

But a team of ecologists at Ohio State University is quantifying how much carbon can be stored in North American forests.