Bacteria may have an important role to play in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A group of researchers at the University of Alberta are genetically engineering non-hazardous bacteria that consume methane and turn it into fuel.
Researchers at Washington State University have developed a low-cost, portable device that works with a smartphone to detect common viral and bacterial infections nearly as well as clinical laboratories. Such a system could lead to faster and lower-cost lab results for fast-moving epidemics, especially in rural or lower-resource regions where laboratory equipment and medical personnel are not readily available.
Global sea levels are rising by about a tenth of an inch per year, but in some places, the rise is faster… much faster. From 2011 to 2015, sea levels rose up to 5 inches – an inch per year – in some locales along the Eastern Seaboard. Places like Norfolk, Virginia and Miami are experiencing so-called sunny day flooding, something that had not been expected for decades according to climate projections. So, what is going on?
Deserts are barren areas of land where little precipitation occurs, resulting in living conditions that are hostile for plant and animal life. These regions are typically defined by low average annual rainfall—usually 100 millimeters (less than 4 inches) of rain per year or less.
A group of scientists and engineers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, has developed a new technology that could replace traditional “best before” dates on food and beverages with a definitive indication of the safety of the product.
It sure seems like extreme weather is increasingly common: floods, droughts, extreme rainfall, powerful snowstorms, hurricanes and so on. But we tend to focus on recent events and often give them undue emphasis. So, it is reasonable to ask whether extreme weather really is more common these days.
Burning natural gas instead of coal is considered to be an important way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In principle, it is. Gas combustion produces much less carbon dioxide than coal combustion.
Almost everyone everywhere comes into contact with plastic everyday. Its use has increased 20-fold in the past half-century, and production is expected to double again in the next 20 years. But is plastic so ubiquitous that we are unwittingly drinking the stuff?
Resistance to antibiotics is a rising problem that costs an estimated 700,000 lives each year. Some experts predict that if the problem can’t be solved, that number could grow to 10 million deaths annually by 2050. As a result, researchers around the world are investigating multiple ways to help fight antibiotic resistance.
Herbicide-resistant weeds are becoming a more and more common problem for farmers growing grain and vegetable crops. As a result, the farmers are looking for alternatives to herbicides to control weeds. One promising approach is the use of cover crops, which are planted in the off season to protect the soil. Thick cover crop growth can often compete well with weeds during the cover crop growth period, and can prevent most germinated weed seeds from completing their life cycle and reproducing.
Pollution particles emitted by diesel cars and trucks, coal-fired power plants, factories, primitive cook stoves, and the burning of forests are major contributors to the pervasive air pollution that plagues many cities and regions of the world. In India and China, such pollution leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. And countries around the world are working hard to reduce pollution.
A comprehensive study has confirmed what has been widely believed in the scientific community and in popular reports for years: spring is arriving earlier and the further north you go, the more pronounced is the effect.
Orangutans are some of the planet’s most intelligent animals. In fact, orangutans and human beings share 97% of their DNA sequence. Orangutans can only be found in the wild in Southeast Asia on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and the island of Borneo, which is a landmass shared by Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. And while all orangutans are endangered, the critically-endangered Bornean orangutans are under exceptional duress.
Climate change continues to pose a major threat to polar bear survival. Polar bears, whose native range largely lies within the Arctic Circle, depend on sea ice for nearly all of their life cycle functions. And rising global temperatures are causing that sea ice to disappear.
Predators and scavengers are widely persecuted by people because they are often harmful to property, livestock, and human beings. Nonetheless, research has shown that many of these animals play important roles in ecosystems and their removal can be quite harmful.
When considering the greenhouse gas emissions associated with any energy source, it is important to look at the total life cycle emissions both from the direct use of the energy source and from the indirect emissions associated with building the system, producing and transporting fuels and other supplies and, ultimately, decommissioning the system. Taking all of this into consideration is necessary in order to have a full accounting of the carbon impact of power sources.
Plants are the world’s great storehouse of carbon dioxide. That is why deforestation is a major contributor to climate change. If only there were more trees and plants, more of the CO2 in the atmosphere would be absorbed and could no longer trap heat in the atmosphere.
Biomimicry is learning from and then emulating nature’s forms, processes, and ecosystems to create more sustainable designs. Mother Nature is already the inspiration for countless products and designs ranging from Velcro copied from plant burs to the shape of wind turbines modeled after whale fins. There are wetsuits inspired by beaver pelts and office buildings that copy termite dens. Increasingly, innovators are looking at nature for designs in architecture, chemistry, agriculture, energy, health, transportation, computing, and even for the structure of organizations and cities.
The Greenland Ice Sheet is the second largest ice body in the world, after the Antarctic ice sheet. It is about 1,500 miles long, nearly 900 miles across at its widest point, and averages more than a mile in thickness. It has experienced record melting in recent years and is a source of great concern as the climate continues to warm. The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing an estimated 270 billion tons of ice each year. If the entire sheet were to melt, global sea levels would rise by 24 feet which, of course, would be a world-wide catastrophe.
Plug-in hybrid vehicles are ones that can run both on electricity provided by a power outlet as well as on gasoline. There are many of them on the market these days built by quite a few car makers. But these vehicles have an undeserved reputation as being the fig leaf of electric mobility. Many environmental organizations and political decision-makers don’t consider them to be “real electric cars.”
