When the Exxon Valdez was wrecked off the coast of Alaska in 1989, cleanup crews were able to recover only about 14 percent of the spilled oil. Twenty-one years later, when the Deepwater Horizon disaster spilled oil into the Gulf of Mexico, recovery efforts had improved shockingly little: Responders were still burning, skimming, and directly trapping the oil coming out of the wellhead, and they captured just one quarter of the oil that spilled.
An Illinois-based company called Elastec/American Marine has something better. Its new rotating-disc design can recover a staggering 4670 gallons of oil per minute, more than three times what existing technology can do. Its design was also extremely efficient: What it sucked up was 89.5 percent oil (and just 10.5 percent water). And now the design has won them $1 million: Elastec was announced today as the winner of the Oil Cleanup X Challenge. 

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (KTLA) -- A Santa Monica homeowner, who recently unveiled his giant "Oceans at Risk" art installation live on KTLA, is in hot water with the city.