Feature Channels: Environmental Science

• share
• favorite_border

The impacts of climate change on the world’s land and sea will become more pronounced in the years to come. According to the authors of a new book, the impacts of this change will fall hardest on poor communities that are highly dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods, but much can be done to protect the environment and maintain human well-being in the face of climate change.

• share
• favorite_border

According to a University of Illinois at Chicago study, canoeing, kayaking, rowing, boating and fishing on the Chicago River pose the same risk of gastrointestinal illness as performing these same activities on other local waters -- a risk that turns out to be higher than that intended for swimmers at Lake Michigan beaches.

• share
• favorite_border

California’s goal of 33% renewable energy by 2020 could receive a significant boost if the state built large-scale solar plants on degraded farmland. A new report explains how to expedite these projects, while protecting prime farmland and natural habitats.

• share
• favorite_border

From the brownstones of New York to the favelas of Brazil, the health of women is inextricably linked to the cities in which they live.

• share
• favorite_border

Two houses on campus have been designated as "green" residences. Students will compete to see which group can lower its carbon footprint per resident the most. Houses will be retrofitted with solar or wind power by Jan. 1.

• share
• favorite_border

Controversial, complicated and crucial - the development of biofuels on a commercial scale in the US poses an enormous challenge. A National Research Council study committee including Michigan Tech Professor Kathleen Halvorsen has released a report that helps define the questions and next steps.

• share
• favorite_border

Environmental engineering professor Dan Oerther and his family want to show others how to live intentionally. And they have the perfect place for it: in one of four student-designed solar homes at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

• share
• favorite_border

ornell University Sustainable Design will host the “Interdisciplinary Sustainability Student Summit” at General Assembly, 902 Broadway in the Flatiron District, on Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The event is free, registration is required as space is limited.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology have developed a method to detect the presence of soil and groundwater contamination without turning a shovel or touching the water. Instead, they’re using trees.

• share
• favorite_border

The first scientists to witness molten lava from a deep sea volcano now report that the eruption was near a tear in the Earth’s crust that is mimicking the birth of a subduction zone. Earth’s current subduction zones are continually evolving but most formed 5 million to 200 million years ago.

• share
• favorite_border

In a new camera trap survey in the world’s most biologically diverse landscape, researchers for the Wildlife Conservation Society have identified more individual jaguars than ever before.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists for the first time have identified and mapped the chemical structure of molecules used by certain species of marine seaweed to kill or inhibit the growth of reef-building coral.

• share
• favorite_border

A scholarly article on cell phone safety to be published online October 17 in the journal Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine reports the finding that cell phones used in the shirt or pants pocket exceed FCC exposure guidelines and that children absorb twice as much microwave radiation from phones as do adults.

• share
• favorite_border

North American forests appear to have a greater capacity to soak up heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas than researchers had previously anticipated.

• share
• favorite_border

Ecologists have identified factors other than climate that affect whether grasslands or forests grow. In a Perspectives piece in the journal Science, a Michigan Tech researcher urges future studies to consider human activities and grazing patterns too.

• share
• favorite_border

New information on the role of insoluble dust particles in forming cloud droplets could improve the accuracy of regional climate models, especially in areas of the world that have significant amounts of mineral aerosols in the atmosphere.

• share
• favorite_border

A method of monitoring roots rarely used in wetlands will help researchers effectively study the response of a high-carbon ecosystem to elevated temperatures and levels of carbon dioxide.

• share
• favorite_border

Trade and foreign direct investment can have a positive effect on the serious environmental degradation in China, according to political scientist Ka Zeng at the University of Arkansas.

• share
• favorite_border

With a cutting-edge solar car, an advanced strategy and an intrepid 16-student race crew, the University of Michigan's national champion solar car team is ready for the upcoming World Solar Challenge. The 1,800-mile international contest starts on the north shore of Australia in Darwin on Oct. 16.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers at the University of Montreal have developed a computer programme that enables regulators to evaluate the ecological and economic tradeoffs between marine mammal conservation, whale watching and marine transportation activities in the Saint Lawrence Estuary.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

-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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

The planet’s deep oceans at times may absorb enough heat to flatten the rate of global warming for periods of as long as a decade even in the midst of longer-term warming, according to a new analysis led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

• share
• favorite_border

A team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology is using the Aquarius underwater laboratory off the coast of Florida to study how the diversity of seaweed-eating fish affects endangered coral reefs. The research mission began September 13.

• share
• favorite_border

A "hidden" code linked to the DNA of plants allows them to develop and pass down new biological traits far more rapidly than previously thought, according to the findings of a groundbreaking study by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

• share
• favorite_border

The past decade has seen 77,951 fires burn about 6.7 million acres in the United States. One condition that facilitates the spread of wildfires is invasive plant species. Nonnative weeds can modify the vegetation of a landscape and provide a source of fuel that did not previously exist.

• share
• favorite_border

David W. Wolfe, professor of plant and soil ecology and co-author of the upcoming NYSERDA study focused on preparing New York for climate change, talks about the security of food, water and city subways at the next Inside Cornell media luncheon.

• share
• favorite_border

Florida has the world’s worst invasive amphibian and reptile problem, and a new 20-year study led by a University of Florida researcher verifies the pet trade as the No. 1 cause of the species’ introductions.

• share
• favorite_border

Helicopters that service the drilling platforms and vessels in the Gulf of Mexico crash on average more than six times per year resulting in an average of 5 deaths per year.

• share
• favorite_border

Experts can discuss dangers after floodwaters recede.

• share
• favorite_border

New study reveals: Exposure to the light of white LED bulbs suppresses melatonin 5 times more than exposure to the light of High Pressure Sodium bulbs that give off an orange-yellow light.

• share
• favorite_border

Preliminary research on Fusarium, a group of fungi that includes devastating pathogens of plants and animals, shows how these microbes travel through the air. Researchers at Virginia Tech now believe that with improvements on this preliminary research, there will be a better understanding about crop security, disease spread, and climate change.