Environment

Fast and green. That’s what it takes to get to the winner’s circle in a new type of auto racing.
Called green racing, it’s a meshing of the fast and furious world of auto racing with the quest for cleaner-burning fuels and more energy efficient engines. But make no mistake about it, being green does not [...]

With millions of people in the United States eagerly awaiting those July 4 fireworks displays — and our Canadian neighbors doing likewise for their July 1 Canada Day celebrations — here’s a prospect for those light shows of the future likely to ignite a smile on Mother Nature’s face: A new generation of “green” fireworks [...]

Modern glaciers, such as those making up the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, are capable of undergoing periods of rapid shrinkage or retreat, according to new findings by paleoclimatologists at the University at Buffalo.
The paper, published on June 21 in Nature Geoscience, describes fieldwork demonstrating that a prehistoric glacier in the Canadian Arctic rapidly retreated [...]

Clearing the Amazon rainforest increases Brazilian communities’ wealth and quality of life, but these improvements are short-lived, according to new research published this month in Science. The study, by an international team including researchers at the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, shows that levels of development revert back to well below national average [...]

More and more, scientists are getting a better grip on the nitrogen cycle. They are learning about sources of nitrogen and how this element changes as it loops from the nonliving, such as the atmosphere, soil or water, to the living, whether plants or animals. Scientists have determined that humans are disrupting the nitrogen cycle [...]

A species of bacteria, isolated from sediments deep under the Pacific Ocean, could provide a powerful clean-up tool for heavy metal pollution. Writing in the current issue of the journal, Microbiology, Professor Gejiao Wang and his colleagues from Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, PR China describe how a particular strain of Brachybacterium, strain Mn32, proved [...]

Trains, planes, buses and automobiles do not only effect the environment via their exhaust pipes. There is a full life-cycle of processes associated with getting from a to b that we rarely acknowledge.
Published today in IOP Publishing’s Environmental Research Letters, Monday, June 8, 2009, researchers from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the [...]

The secret of a successful sandcastle could aid the revival of an ancient eco-friendly building technique, according to research led by Durham University.
Researchers, led by experts at Durham’s School of Engineering, have carried out a study into the strength of rammed earth, which is growing in popularity as a sustainable building method.
Just as a sandcastle [...]

Author and democracy activist Frances Moore Lappe says we already know how to solve the pressing issues of our time, such as climate change and world hunger.
But she says our own pre-conceived ideas about how things should work — our mental map of the world — is actually preventing us from taking action.
In a speech [...]

For one international community — the 165,000 strong Inuit community dispersed across the Arctic coastline in small, remote coastal settlements in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia — it is already too late to prevent some of the negative effects of climate change.
James D. Ford from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, is today, Thursday, 28 May, [...]

A previously unknown giant volcanic eruption that led to global mass extinction 260 million years ago has been uncovered by scientists at the University of Leeds.
The eruption in the Emeishan province of south-west China unleashed around half a million cubic kilometres of lava, covering an area 5 times the size of Wales, and wiping out [...]

The melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet this century may drive more water than previously thought toward the already threatened coastlines of New York, Boston, Halifax and other cities in the northeastern United States and Canada, according to new research.
Results of the study are being published this week in Geophysical Research Letters. They suggest that [...]

Most polluted or damaged ecosystems worldwide can recover within a lifetime if societies commit to their cleanup or restoration, according to an analysis of 240 independent studies by researchers at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Their findings will appear in the June edition of the journal PLoS ONE.
The Yale researchers found that [...]

Scientists are, for the first time, objectively evaluating ways to help species adapt to rapid climate change and other environmental threats via strategies that were considered too radical for serious consideration as recently as five or 10 years ago. Among these radical strategies currently being considered is so-called “managed relocation.” Managed relocation, which is also [...]

A team of atmospheric chemists has moved closer to what’s considered the “holy grail” of climate change science: the first-ever direct detections of biological particles within ice clouds.
The team, led by Kimberly Prather and Kerri Pratt of the University of California at San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, sampled water droplet and ice crystal residues [...]

Beef farmers can breathe easier thanks to University of Alberta researchers who have developed a formula to reduce methane gas in cattle.
By developing equations that balance starch, sugar, cellulose, ash, fat and other elements of feed, a Canada-wide team of scientists has given beef producers the tools to lessen the methane gas their cattle produce [...]

The notion that a decline in pollinators may threaten the human food supply — producing a situation that has been referred to as a “pollination crisis” — can be considered a myth, at least where honey bees are concerned, say researchers reporting online on May 7th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. First of [...]

The Wildlife Conservation Society announced today a study showing that some coral reefs off East Africa are unusually resilient to climate change due to improved fisheries management and a combination of geophysical factors. WCS announced the results of the study at the International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI), which is meeting this week in Phuket, Thailand.
The [...]

Rare plant and animal species are like rare stamps or coins: they are perceived to be inherently more valuable to people, whatever they look like. Researchers Elena Angulo and Franck Courchamp, from Université de Paris-Sud, have found that people are more attracted to species labeled “rare” than those labeled “common” even when they do not [...]

Dartmouth researchers have determined that the presence of the rare element osmium is on the rise globally. They trace this increase to the consumption of refined platinum, the primary ingredient in catalytic converters, the equipment commonly installed in cars to reduce smog. A volatile form of osmium is generated during platinum refinement and also during [...]