July 7, 2015

Video: This town has been on fire for 50 years

Credit: The American Chemical Society

In 1962, an underground fire started in the coal-mining town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. Fifty-three years later, that fire still burns. In this week's episode of Reactions, we explain the history and science behind the Centralia mine fire.

Does anyone still live there? How could the fire keep burning for so long, and why hasn't it been extinguished? From a chemical standpoint, what is fire, anyway?

It's all answered in our latest video:

Provided by American Chemical Society

Video: This town has been on fire for 50 years

Some plant-based steaks and cold cuts are lacking in protein, researchers find

Scientists develop new machine learning method for modeling chemical reactions

Trio wins Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on quantum dots, used in electronics and medical imaging

Researchers create 3D-printed vegan seafood

Danish masters prepped canvases with leftovers from brewing beer

New ways to measure curls and kinks could make it easier to care for natural hair

What do the elements sound like?

Study is first to describe and recreate lemurs' one-of-a-kind vocal structure

Only four G20 countries set for positive ecological footprint by 2050, study finds

Astronomers' simulations support dark matter theory

Clumps of an otherwise non-toxic molecule inhibit strep's DNA-cleaving enzymes, researchers discover

Engineered increase in mesophyll conductance improves photosynthetic efficiency in field trial

Adaptation of photosynthetic mechanism in air plants occurs through gene duplication, study finds

New tool decodes complex, single-cell genomic data

How the plant world shapes the climate cycle

First high-resolution 3D nanoscale chemical imaging achieved with multi-modal tomography

New research reveals terahertz waves' impact on dynamics of nanoconfined water molecules

Genetic adaptations have impacted the blood compositions of two populations from Papua New Guinea, finds study