Franklin Viola/Danita Delimont Photography/Newscom

The annual list of the cleanest — and dirtiest — beaches is out.

Before you head to the shore, click here to see how your beach ranks.

The Natural Resources Defense Council examined the water quality at more than 3,000 U.S. beaches along the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes. It then rated the 200 most popular sites.

The council, which has been reporting on the state of U.S. beaches for the last 23 years, found that in 2012, those sandy, sunny vacation spots had more than 20,000 closing and advisory days — for the third straight year.

According to the council, “the largest known contributor to beach closings or health advisory days was stormwater pollution.”

After analyzing the violation rates and practices regarding bacteria testing and public safety at the 200 popular U.S. beaches, the council awarded 13 with the highest rank of five stars.

Those beaches included Alabama’s Gulf State Park Pavilion, California’s Newport Beach, Rehoboth Beach in Delaware and Minnesota’s Lafayette Community Club.

                                                                         (Image Credit: Steve Lupton/Getty Images)

Next time you have a gin and tonic, you might appreciate it a bit more. Gin gets its prominent flavor from junipers, and the plant is now under attack.

A fungus-like organism called phytophthora austrocedrae has been spotted infecting juniper plants and spreading throughout Northern Britain and Scotland.

The pathogen, whose first name literally translates to “plant destroyer,” is part of the same family as the pest responsible for the 19th-century Irish potato famine. Sarah Green, a scientist working with the Research Agency of the Forest Commission in the U.K., says it typically spreads through either groundwater or via streams.

“It attacks primarily through the root or stem, but can also penetrate through the bark and branches, as well,” Green told ABC News.

While it relies on water as its main mode of transmission, the organism can also hitch a ride on both animals and people. The Lake District, one of Britain’s national parks, is one of the most badly affected areas because wandering visitors can inadvertently spread the disease.

Related: Bee Sperm Bank: Scientists Saving Bees by Freezing Their Semen

Juniper populations across the U.K. were already on the decline. The bushes themselves can be older than a century, but the seeds they produce don’t often sprout into new plants.  Eighty-five percent of juniper sites don’t have any plants younger than 5, according to Plantlife, a charity dedicated to preserving the country’s native vegetation.

This particular species of phytophthora has also been spotted in Argentina and Chile. Some people believe the juniper outbreak seen today originated in South America, but Green disagrees.

“[The two] have distinctly different DNA,” she said. “We think it came from another location.”

Where that other location might be is still unknown.

Gin companies apparently don’t often get their junipers from the U.K.,  but phytophthora could eventually make its way outside the country.

“Personally, I find it hard to imagine that we’re the only country in the world where this is coming on juniper,” Green said.

Determining how the organism first came to the country could be key in ensuring the safety of gimlets, martinis and, of course, gin and tonics worldwide.

In a macabre display of affection, the male dark fishing spider (Dolomedes tenebrosus) dies shortly after it mates with a female, a new study in the journal Biology Letters finds. But unlike black widows, whose females are infamous for eating the males once the deed is done, the male dies on its own. According to the study,  once the male transfers its sperm to the female, the clock starts ticking down until the male’s demise.

The male begins courting the female by touching her legs and jiggling his abdomen back and forth. After the female spider positions itself, the spider releases its sperm from one of its engorged pedipalps (an appendage located at the front of its head), and then immediately seizes up, curling its legs and lying still.

Although it appears dead, the spider is technically still alive at this point.

“We measured the heartbeat, and it’s still there,” says Steven Schwartz, the author of the study and a behavioral ecologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. However, it can’t move and does not respond to any poking, prodding  or other forms of physical stimulation. Less than three hours later, the heart stops beating and the male spider is officially declared dead.

Bee Sperm Bank: Scientists Saving Bees by Freezing Their Semen

The female spider does occasionally eat its catatonic partner in an act of sexual cannibalism before the male’s time is up. Schwartz says that this is not the only spider to sacrifice itself upon mating. “The male redback spider actually somersaults into female’s mouth parts to induce the female to eat him,” he says.

As to why these spiders engage in these bizarre behaviors, to kick the bucket then and there, Schwartz hypothesized that it’s  linked to the reproductive effects. “Females that eat their partners are less likely to mate with another spider,” he says. In addition, the female gives birth to more offspring that are bigger or survive better if it eats its mate.

Image Credit: Steven K. Schwartz/University of Nebraska-Lincoln

There are often more sexually mature male dark fishing spiders than females, so there’s pressure to mate. Any advantage to passing on your own genes is a good one, even if it spells doom for the male.  ”Mating is the beginning of the end,” said  Schwartz.

Imagine an artificial leaf that mimics photosynthesis, which lets plants harness energy from the sun. But this leaf would have the ability to power your homes and cars with clean energy using only sunlight and water.

This is not some far-off idea of the future. It’s reality, and the subject of a jury-prize-winning film in the GE Focus Forward Film Competition.

Jared P. Scott and Kelly Nyks’ short film, “The Artificial Leaf,” showcases chemist Daniel Nocera, the inventor of the artificial leaf, a device that he says can power the world.

“The truth is stranger than fiction,” Kelly Nyks, a partner at PF Pictures, told ABC News. “What I think is so exciting is that Dan has taken this science and applied it in a way that makes bringing it to scale to solve the energy crisis for the planet real and possible.”

Nocera’s leaf is simply a silicon wafer coated with catalysts that use sunlight to split water to into hydrogen and oxygen components.

“Essentially, it mimics photosynthesis,” Nocera told ABC News.

The gases that bubble up from the water can be turned into a fuel to produce electricity in the form of fuel cells. The device may sound like science fiction fantasy, but Nocera said he hopes one day it will provide an alternative to the centralized energy system — the grid.

Worldwide, more than 1.6 billion people live without access to electricity and 2.6 billion people live without access to clean sources of fuel for cooking.

“This is the model: We’re going to have a very distributed energy system,” Nocera told ABC News. With the leaf, “using just sunlight and water, you can be off the grid. If you’re poor, you don’t have a grid, so this gives them a way to have energy in the day and at night.”

With just the artificial leaf, 1.5 bottles of drinking water and sunlight, you could have enough electricity to power a small home, but the cost is still a problem, though Nocera said he believes that will come down with time and research.

The artificial leaf is cheaper than solar panels but still expensive. Hydrogen from a solar panel and electrolysis unit can currently be made for about $7 per kilogram; the artificial leaf would come in at $6.50.

Nocera is looking for ways to drive down the costs make these devices more widely available. He recently replaced the platinum catalyst that produces hydrogen gas with a less-expensive nickel-molybdenum-zinc compound. He’s also looking for ways to reduce the amount of silicon needed.

In 2009, Nocera’s artificial leaf was selected as a recipient of funding by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E), which supports energy technologies that could create a more secure and affordable American future.

Nyks and Scott said they hope “The Artificial Leaf” will bring awareness to the public that sustainable energy solutions do exist.

“We make films for social action,” Scott, also a partner at PF Pictures, told ABC News. “We see films as a tool for social change. And what I think Dan sketches out is that we start with energy. And if we solve the energy crisis, we’ll solve the climate crisis, and then we’ll solve the water crisis, and then we’ll solve the food crisis. But it starts with energy.”

30 filmmaking teams were asked to make a movie that could highlight an innovation that could change the world as part of GE Focus Forward, a series of three-minute films created by award-winning documentary makers including Alex Gibney, Lucy Walker, Albert Maysles and Morgan Spurlock. Nyks and Scott won a jury prize in a related global competition.

Anyone with an Internet connection has access to the videos online. All the films are featured at focusforwardfilms.com.

So far, total media impressions for GE Focus Forward have exceeded 1.5 billion. In addition, the films are screening at all the major film festivals around the world and have played on every continent, including Antarctica.

Nyks and Scott said they hope to take the success of the short and turn it into a feature-length documentary.

(PF Pictures)

Image credit: 9b Hjallerup School

A Danish science experiment by a group of 9th-graders has gained worldwide interest and may have us rethinking the proliferation of wireless devices  in our homes.

Five girls from Hjallerup Skole, a primary education school in Denmark, began the experiment after noticing that when they slept with their cellphones near their heads overnight, they had trouble focusing the next day, according to Danish News site DR.

The resources weren’t available to conduct an experiment around wireless signals affecting brain activity, so instead the girls decided to monitor the growth of plants near WiFi routers – and the results were a bit shocking.

Six trays containing the seeds of a garden cress herb were placed in a room without a WiFi router, and six trays were placed in a different room and next to two WiFi routers which, according to the girls’ calculations, emitted about the same type of radiation as an ordinary cellphone, reports DR.

During the 12 days of the experiment, the seeds in the six trays away from the WiFi routers grew normally, while the seeds next to the routers did not. In fact, the project photos show that many of the seeds placed near the routers turned brown and died.

“This has sparked quite a lively debate in Denmark regarding the potential adverse health-effects from mobile phones and WiFi-equipment,” Kim Horsevad, biology teacher at Hjallerup Skole told ABC News.

Horsevad said that some of the local debate over the experiment has been over whether the negative effects were due to the cress seeds drying from the heat emitted by the computer/WiFi routers used in the experiment. But she explained that the students kept the cress seeds in both groups sufficiently moist during the whole experiment, and the temperatures were controlled thermostatically.

A similar study was conducted about three years ago in the Netherlands when researchers noticed that some trees in urban areas were showing “bark lumps,” according to Popular Science. The experiment, conducted by Wageningen University, involved exposing 20 ash trees to various kinds of radiation for three months. The trees chosen to test tolerance to heavy WiFi signals began to show typical signs of radiation sickness, including a “lead-like shine” on their leaves.

As for the attention the girl’s science fair project is getting, Horsevad said neuroscience professor Olle Johanssen with the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has expressed great interest.

“[Johanssen] will probably be repeating the experiment in controlled, professional, scientific environments,” said Horsevad. “One would therefore generally be advised to await the results of his experiments before basing any important decisions on the outcome of the girls’ experiment.”

(NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI)

Usually, hurricanes on Earth have a small eye and much larger outer bands. But incredibly on Saturn 1,250 miles is the distance of the center eye only. The entire storm could be several thousand miles more.

As for the wind speed in the storm, usually in hurricanes the strongest wind is in the center of the storm around what is called “the eye wall” of the hurricane,  and tends to get weaker as you get to the edge of the hurricane. The wind speed on the outer edge of the cloud band of Saturn’s hurricane is 330 mph and the winds in the center eye are four times faster than some of the strongest hurricanes on Earth. To compare Saturn’s storm to hurricanes that affected the U.S., the strongest hurricane to hit the U.S. was Camille in 1969 with winds of 190 mph.

One of the interesting facts is that usual hurricanes on Earth feed off the water vapor from the warm ocean water. That gives it the needed energy for the hurricane to develop.  But on Saturn there is no body of water nearby for this storm to feed off. Instead it is feeding off of small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.

Another interesting fact: Hurricanes on Earth form usually in the tropical latitudes and move north due to the forces acting on them. But Saturn’s storm is located at the planet’s north pole that has made it stationary with nowhere further north to go. Because of this discovery, NASA scientists believe that it could have been there for years.

Only in 2009 sun began reaching the northern Hemisphere allowing Cassini spacecraft to capture these images.  This is because Saturn’s seasons last nine years each, therefore their north pole is dark nine years at a time.  So when the space craft first reached Saturn in 2004, the north pole was in the middle of winter.

NASA scientists will study this terrestrial hurricane-like storm because even though there are differences in size, strength and source of energy, it does carry similar characteristics such a central eye that has no clouds, counter clockwise spin in the northern Hemisphere, and high clouds circling the eye.

Researchers have made a new discovery in the field of adorable dancing animals. In a University of California Santa Cruz study, Ronan the California sea lion has learned to bob her head in rhythm to several songs, a capability once believed to be only possessed by humans and some birds.

According to an article published on the University of California Santa Cruz’s Newscenter, Ronan’s favorite song is currently Earth Wind & Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland,” but it took Ph.D. student Peter Cook and his colleagues a few months to show her how to boogie.

Cook became interested in studies and presentations that featured birds engaged in what scientists call “rhythmic entrainment,” or simply keeping rhythmic beat.

“The idea was that beat keeping is a fortuitous side effect of adaptations for vocal mimicry, which requires matching incoming auditory signals with outgoing vocal behavior,” Cook told the Newscenter. “It’s understandable why that theory was attractive. But the fact is our sea lion has gotten really good at keeping the beat.”

Image credit: University of California Santa Cruz

Ronan was a rescued sea lion that Cook had used as a control in other studies. He said Ronan showed higher than average intelligence, so Cook decided to pursue the rhythmic entrainment experiment with her, with the results recently published to the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

“From my first interactions with her, it was clear that Ronan was a particularly bright sea lion,” Cook said. “I figured training a mammal to move in time to music would be hard, but Ronan seemed like an ideal subject.”

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Her training began with a simple metronome and fish treats as rewards, but Ronan was eventually able to bob her head in synchronization with songs by the Backstreet Boys and Earth Wind & Fire.

Cook also explained why Ronan’s behavior will likely make for more than just another cute video.

“Ronan’s success poses a real problem for the theory that vocal mimicry is a necessary precondition for rhythmic entrainment,” he said. “Human musical ability may in fact have foundations that are shared with animals.”

In fact, from what they can tell, Ronan actually shows stronger rhythm than most birds.

“[The birds I've seen] fall off the beat a lot. They’re good at finding the tempo in music, but don’t seem to maintain the behavior as reliably as Ronan. She stays right on the beat,” Cook said.

Of course, you can also decide who you think is better. Up top we’ve got a video of Ronan and below a video of Snowball the Cockatoo. The beat is on.

Spring is in air at the  Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, Calif., and while many penguins are preparing for mating season, two coming-of-age birds found another form of entertainment: An iPad game.

Still too young to mate, Jeremy and Newsom seem to have taken quite a liking to the free iPad app called, “Game for Cats,” the aquarium said in a blog post.

The game, which the aquarium said is used as “enrichment” for the youngsters, shows a virtual mouse that darts up and down and all around on the screen. When the mouse is hit — by paw or by beak — it squeaks.

When aquarium officials placed an old iPad inside the June Keyes Penguin Exhibit, Jeremy and Newsom, curious, waddled over to it.  Jeremy was the first to try pecking at the mouse with his beak, the aquarium said, but it was Newsom who put on his game beak and really took a liking to the app.

Jeremy playing on the iPad. Credit: Hugh Ryono/Aquarium of the Pacific

Newsom playing on the iPad. Credit: Hugh Ryono/Aquarium of the Pacific

In a video the aquarium posted, Newsom could be seen cocking his head as he stalked the virtual mouse, pecking away and increasing his gaming fervor when he made the mouse squeak.

“Newsom set the penguin high score of 1,600 for the game,” the aquarium wrote.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the $1.5-million, 3,000-square-foot penguin exhibit debuted last year and features a colony of Magellanic penguins.

iPad shows Newsom's high score. Credit: Hugh Ryono/Aquarium of the Pacific

Michael J.Tyler/University of Adelaide

Researchers in Australia have reached a major milestone in resurrecting a unique species of frog that gives birth through its mouth, and vanished into extinction 30 years ago.

In what became known as the ” Lazarus Project” at the University of Newcastle in Australia, scientists have resurrected the genome of a gastric-brooding frog, which became extinct in 1983. Also knows as Platypus frogs, the female amphibian, after external fertilization by the male, would swallow its eggs, brood its young in its stomach and gave birth through its mouth.

“We are watching Lazarus arise from the dead, step by exciting step,” Professor Mike Archer, a Lazarus Project team leader, said in a statement. “We’ve reactivated dead cells into living ones and revived the extinct frog’s genome in the process. Now we have fresh cryo preserved cells of the extinct frog to use in future cloning experiments.”

The team recovered cell nuclei from tissues collected in 1970 that were kept in a freezer, according to the university. Researchers took donor eggs from the distantly related great barred frog, and replaced their nuclei with dead nuclei from the gastric-brooding frog.

The embryos only lived for a few days, but researchers were able to confirm that the cells contain the gastric-brooding frog’s genetic material. Archer said that he is confident that the hurdles the Lararus Project team faces are “technological and not biological.”

“Importantly, we’ve demonstrated already the great promise this technology has as a conservation tool when hundreds of the world’s amphibian species are in catastrophic decline,” he said.

The gastric-brooding frog was native to Australia. Though it isn’t clear why they became extinct, loss of habitat, pollution, and parasites have been suggested as causes.

To donate to the research fund, contact the University of Adelaide here.

By LAUREN EFFRON and DAN MILANO

Well, it’s not a cardinal.

But two birds made themselves international stars at the papal Conclave, lighting the Internet aflame with comments and jokes.

The birds, which appeared to be seagulls, chose this historic moment to land atop the chimney of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Yes, the chimney that millions of eyes and cameras from around the world have been fixated on for two days now, awaiting signs of smoke that will announce the election (or not) of a new pope.

In church literature and images, the Holy Spirit is represented as a bird, but as a dove or Paraclete. Not a seagull.

As the first bird swooped onto the chimney at around 4:30 p.m. Rome time, it perched for almost half an hour.

Naturally, Twitter, Reddit and other social outlets just couldn’t help themselves. A Twitter account, @SistineSeagull, was created. It has over 7,000 followers and counting.

Its first tweet:

Hanging out on the Sistine Chapel Chimney, livetweeting #conclave #newpope

— SistineSeagull (@SistineSeagull) March 13, 2013

By the time the second bird flew in and took over for the first, “seagull” was trending nationwide in the United States.

A second Twitter account, @SmokeStackBird, who goes by the name Pope Seagullus IV, appeared shortly after. One of its tweets:

Had to go, Dennis Rodman wanted to meet me.

— Pope Seagullus IV (@SmokeStackBird) March 13, 2013

So were the birds a sign from God? Were they warming their toes? Or did they just want a high-profile Conclave seat? One meme showed a picture of a bird with the words: “This Bird Does Not Give a F— About The Conclave.”

Here’s how a few others saw the moment:

Seagull symbolizing the Holy Spirit got bumped by another seagull symbolizing…um…the way one pope replaces another? #SymbolsAreFun

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) March 13, 2013

When asked his papal opinion, the Vatican seagull declared that the papacy was, in fact,”mine, mine, mine”. #pope #conclave

— Courtney Theriault (@cspotweet) March 13, 2013

Officially cannot focus on grading essays because there’s a seagull on the Vatican chimney. #thisismylife

— kaya oakes (@kayaoakes) March 13, 2013

If the seagull poops white, it means a new pope has been elected. If it poops black, it means it has an ulcer.

— Andres Almeida (@andresdavid) March 13, 2013

Sorry seagulls, only cardinals are allowed to vote in the conclave.

— Juan Crespo (@Air_Force_Juan) March 13, 2013