Students at the University of Washington have teamed up on a startup that promises to turn slash piles of forest refuse into biochar, a crumbly charcoal-like product for farmers that helps their soil hold water and nutrients. They received an Innovation Corps award from the Nat’l Science Foundation.
New research indicates that simple life in the form of photosynthetic algae could have survived a "snowball Earth" event, living in a narrow body of water with characteristics similar to today’s Red Sea.
UC Riverside Chancellor Timothy P. White said today it is the university community that must lead the way to a more sustainable nation during today’s keynote speech at The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) conference in Pittsburgh.
September 2011 was the fifth warmest September in the past 34 years — fifth warmest globally and in both hemispheres. Last winter’s La Niña Pacific Ocean cooling event has faded and a new one appears to be forming, the tropics continue to be warmer than seasonal norms.
What caused water levels to drop in immense yet long-vanished Lake Agassiz? Research by a University of Cincinnati geologist suggests that conditions 12,000 years ago encouraged evaporation.
Scientists and students at Drexel University are studying the largest biowall in North America and the only one at a U.S. university, to get a better understanding of how it works as an active living filter that removes volatile organic compounds from the air.
After the last ice age peaked about 18,000 years ago, levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide rose about 30 percent. Scientists believe that the additional carbon dioxide---a heat-trapping greenhouse gas---played a key role in warming the planet and melting the continental ice sheets. They have long hypothesized that the source of the gas was the deep ocean.
Changing human activities coupled with a dynamic environment over the past few centuries have caused fluctuating periods of decline and recovery of corals reefs in the Hawaiian Islands, according to a study sponsored in part by the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University. Using the reefs and island societies as a model social-ecological system, a team of scientists reconstructed 700 years of human-environment interactions in two different regions of the Hawaiian archipelago to identify the key factors that contributed to degradation or recovery of coral reefs.
When a species recovers enough to be removed from the federal endangered species list, the public trust doctrine – the principle that government must conserve natural resources for the public good – should guide state management of wildlife, scientists say.
The invasive sea squirt, Styela clava, has now been discovered along the Eastern Seaboard as far south as Bridgeport Harbor and poses a significant danger to Connecticut’s $30 million shellfish business, according to field research conducted by Carmela Cuomo, head of the marine biology program at the University of New Haven, and several of her students.
A University of Arkansas study suggests that “lifetime” savings claims on product labels are not the most effective method to reach consumers regarding the benefits and potential savings from using energy-efficient products.
A system that uses data from satellites to predict “pop up” thunderstorms has been incorporated into the weather forecasting software used to plan thousands of airline and commercial airplane flights in the U.S. every day.
People head to the beach to escape the stress of everyday life, but a new study out of the Brown School at Washington University In St. Louis finds that there are peak times to reap the restorative benefit. “Mild temperature days and low tides offer the most restorative environments when visiting the beach,” says J. Aaron Hipp, PhD, environmental health expert and assistant professor at the Brown School.
It is no longer hump day, according to new research in the current issue of the journal Science. Research that included Stanley Harpole of Iowa State University challenges a widely-accepted idea from the 1970s showing as plant biomass produced in a system increased, so did the number of plant species, to a point. After that point, the number of plant species is thought to decline. When plotted on a graph, the result is a hump shape, with maximum species richness occurring at the point of intermediate productivity. But, now it's time to get over the hump.
Relatively accurate predictions for summer sea ice extent in the Arctic can be made the previous autumn, but forecasting more than five years into the future requires understanding of the impact of climate trends on the ice pack.
An international team of researchers will begin gathering in the Indian Ocean next month to study an atmospheric pattern that affects weather worldwide. The six-month field campaign, supported in part by NCAR, will help improve long-range weather forecasts and computer models of climate change.
-A strain of genetically enhanced bacteria developed by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies may pave the way for new synthetic drugs and new ways of manufacturing medicines and biofuels, according to a paper published September 18 in Nature Chemical Biology.
In the not too distant future, trash cans and recycling bins may bear scannable identification codes in an effort to reduce the volume of trash discarded while increasing the amount of recycled materials, says an expert in radio frequency identification.
The Warming Papers, a book co-edited by geophysical sciences professors David Archer and Ray Pierrehumbert, contains 32 classic scientific papers that laid the foundations of global-warming science, starting with Joseph Fourier’s 1824 work establishing what later was named the greenhouse effect.
Gulf War Illness (GWI)—the chronic health condition that affects about one in four military veterans of the 1991 Gulf War—appears to be the result of several factors, which differed in importance depending upon the locations where veterans served during the war, according to a Baylor University study.
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