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Mediterranean oil spill cleaned by EU ambassadors

EU Ambassador to Israel Emanuele Giaufret was joined Friday morning by more than two dozen envoys from EU member states, including 10 ambassadors, at a large-scale beach clean-up operation at the Beit Yanai National Park near Netanya, Israel.  A suspicious and deadly bitumen oil spill appeared washing up on the Israeli and Lebanese coast a […]

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How Anaerobic Digestion Works

Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Gulf of Mexico. Microbes eat up the oil using aerobic digestion, or breaking it down with oxygen. There is another approach to breaking down unwanted materials which can be more efficient. It's called anaerobic, or without oil - in a sealed environment.

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How microbes find an oil spill

When containing a massive disaster like an oil spill, small microbes play a big role. Arezoo Ardekani, a Purdue University associate professor of mechanical engineering, has published research that describes the complex hydrodynamics of microorganisms at liquid-liquid and gas-liquid interfaces, showing that microbes may flock to areas where surfactant has been applied. This is important […]

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Negev oil spill will take years to clean up

Oil spills are bad enough themselves. When they occur in fragile ecological regions like Israel’s Arava desert, they can be catastrophic.  Such is the case of the recent Negev Desert-Arava oil spill, which occurred as a result of a break in a large oil pipeline during renovation work. This spill, occurring in early December, caused […]