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Science news and technology updates from Scientific American
Category Covered: Environment
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Fight to protect California condors from lead ammunition moves to Arizona
It has been 22 years since the last 22 California condors ( Gymnogyps californianus ) were collected from the wild and placed in captive breeding programs. The species, which nearly went extinct due to habitat loss, poaching, DDT and lead poisoning, ...
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Environment
California
Arizona
What to Do About Endocrine Disruptors? A Q&A with Linda Birnbaum
Nearly a year ago, toxicologist Linda Birnbaum was named director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program. She sat down with Environmental Health News journalist Jane Kay in San Francisco on ...
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Environment
Homes That Use Thermal Inertia to Maintain Comfortable Temperatures
Dear EarthTalk: I recently saw a reference to “Enertia houses” that require little in the way of external sources for heating or cooling. Do you have any information on this housing design? --Alan Marshfield, via e-mail ...
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
The Jellyfish Menace
A silent, blobbing menace swarming the seas , thanks to overfishing, climate change and even "dead zones." Jellyfish seem set to regain their dominance of the oceans in future. After all, the six foot jellyfish known as ...
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Environment
Japan
China
Cracked Corn: Scientists Solve Maize's Genetic Maze
The complex corn genome--coming in at a hearty two billion base pairs (compared with the human genome's 2.9 billion base pairs)--has been mapped by more than 150 researchers, who worked for years to decipher the grain's genetic code . It's the most ...
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Environment
Can Flywheels Help Balance Electricity Supply and Demand?
Beacon Power Corp. broke ground today on a 20-megawatt, energy-storage facility in southeastern New York. [More]
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
New York
Measuring the Daily Destruction of the World's Rainforests
Dear EarthTalk: Do you have current facts and figures about how much rainforest is being destroyed each day around the world, and for what purpose(s)? --Teri, via e-mail [More]
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Environment
Skate punk'd: Taxonomic 'oops' put rare fish species in danger of extinction
The common skate ( Dipturus batis ), a type of ray, isn't common at all. The rare fish species is already critically endangered , but now new research indicates that the common skate is actually two species , so both are more at risk than ...
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Environment
Sinking Global Warming: Is There a Reliable Way to Track Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Levels?
The planet soaks up excess carbon dioxide via oceans, plants and soils, among other natural systems, locking away some of the greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels . In fact, every year these natural "sinks" absorb a larger and ...
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Environment
Global Warming
Illuminating the Lilliputian: 10 Bioscapes Photo Contest Winners Revealed
We are approaching the millennial anniversary of the first meaningful written description of how lenses and light could be used to magnify objects. It was in 1011 that Arab scientist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) began writing the Book of Optics , which ...
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Environment
Getting Those Varmints to Vamoose without Lethal Measures
Dear EarthTalk: What would you recommend as a non-toxic/non-lethal way to keep squirrels, gophers and groundhogs away? --Faye Gillette, Coarsegold, CA [More]
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Environment
Tree Ring Science and Tomorrow's Water
Tree ring expert Kevin Anchukaitis, of the tree ring lab at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, talks about the information available in tree rings. And Colin Chartres, the director general of ...
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
Water Conservation
More important than Copenhagen? U.S.-China deal on energy and climate
When the presidents of two nations responsible together for 40 percent of Earth's climate-changing greenhouse gases sit down to talk, big things can happen. In the case of Barack Obama and Hu Jintao on Monday and Tuesday, that meant flatly stating ...
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
Climate Change
China
Barack Obama
Fish Kill: Nanosilver Mutates Fish Embryos
Smaller than a virus and used in more than 200 consumer products, silver nanoparticles can kill and mutate fish embryos, new research shows. Tiny particles of silver – potent anti-microbial agents that can kill bacteria on contact ...
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Environment
E-Transportation Jump-Start: Coalition Seeks to Pave the Way for Electric Vehicles
Although the widespread adoption of electric vehicles and their related infrastructure has always suffered from chicken-and-egg syndrome , Nissan and FedEx, along with several utilities and technology companies have formed a coalition to break the ...
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
Washington
Putting Madness in Its Place: Can the Environment Explain Schizophrenia's Hereditary Patterns?
Schizophrenia hides its heritability well. Although fewer than 1 percent of the general population will be diagnosed as schizophrenic based on symptoms such as hallucination and disorganized thought, for children of a schizophrenic parent, those odds ...
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Environment
Are lower catch limits enough to save the bluefin tuna from extinction?
Bluefin tuna fishing in the Atlantic will be reduced nearly 40 percent in 2010, but will that be enough to save this threatened species from extinction? [More]
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Environment
Climate Treaty Delayed Past Copenhagen Meeting
COPENHAGEN -- Denmark's prime minister, the host of next month's U.N. climate change conference, has proposed pushing back the deadline for binding greenhouse gas emission targets until next year in hopes of salvaging a political agreement at the ...
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Environment
Climate Change
Denmark
Singapore
Grizzly Details: Salmon Collapse Could Be Bad News for Bears [Slide Show]
For most of May Chris Darimont, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz , poured liters of fermented cattle blood mixed with pureed rotten fish guts on 3,000 square kilometers of British Columbia's coastal wilderness. ...
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Environment
California
Hive and Seek: Where Have the Honeybees Gone?
Dear EarthTalk: Not long ago there were concerns about honey bees disappearing. Are the bees still disappearing, and if so do we know why and do we have a solution? --David, Grand Rapids, MI [More]
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Environment
Why Bangladesh Water Contains Arsenic
It seemed like a good idea--because rivers and ponds in Bangladesh were contaminated with bacteria, Bangladeshis switched to wells. But soon after, in the early ‘80s, researchers realized those wells were harming Bangladeshis with a new ...
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Environment
Bangladesh
Water Conservation
Growing Skyscrapers: The Rise of Vertical Farms (preview)
Together the world’s 6.8 billion people use land equal in size to South America to grow food and raise livestock--an astounding agricultural footprint. And demographers predict the planet will host 9.5 billion people by 2050. Because each of us ...
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Environment
Eco-Dos: Green Beauty Salons and Hair Products Are a Growing Business
Dear EarthTalk: As I understand it, hair salons are pretty toxic enterprises on many counts. Are there any efforts underway to green up that industry? --Paula Howe, San Francisco, CA [More]
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Environment
Eco Goats
Green Grid
No Kidding: Getting Goats to Graze on Tinder Puts a Damper on Fires
Dear EarthTalk: I heard that goats are being used to prevent some of those catastrophic fires that seem to happen increasingly. What’s the story with that? --Ali B., New Canaan, CT [More]
...
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Environment
Eco Goats
New recipe looks back for how to feed the world
When it comes to feeding Earth's masses of people who regularly go hungry, a few things are clear: communism's large-scale, collective farms don't work and breeding for specific traits in staple crops can boost yields, sometimes significantly. ...
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Environment
China
Nearly extinct giraffe subspecies enjoys conservation success
The rarest of the nine giraffe subspecies, the West African giraffe ( Giraffa camelopardalis peralta ), almost didn't make it to the 21st century. After years of being poached and losing habitat to development, only 50 of these animals were left in ...
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Environment
Water Conservation
Niger
Taking the Rains: How to Harvest Precipitation for Home and Garden
Dear EarthTalk How can I make good use of the rainwater that runs down my roof and into my gutters? --Brian Smith, Nashua, NH [More]
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Environment
Are Algae Mass Murderers?
Algae seem harmless enough. These precursors to plants thrive throughout the world's waters. But these single-celled plants have global consequences. We can thank them for oxygen in the atmosphere, oil in the lithosphere as well as dead zones in ...
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Environment
France
Hope for Copenhagen: Campaign inspires public to call for climate action
Politicians and journalists tend to be jaded about international agreements aimed at improving society. And already too many of them are saying the global climate summit that begins December 7 in Copenhagen will not produce tangible instruments that ...
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Environment
Climate Change
Can Alternative Energy Save the Economy and the Climate?
BRIGHTON, Colo. - The low-carbon economy has already arrived on the windy prairie north of this fast-growing Denver 'burb. It's here that Danish wind-turbine giant Vestas converted 298 acres of hayfield into the West's largest turbine factory - and ...
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
Climate Change
Readers Respond on "Grassoline"
Feed the World As a retired farmer, I know that the information in “Grassoline at the Pump,” by George W. Huber and Bruce E. Dale, about agricultural residues is false in a most dangerous way. There is NO extra residue from the corn ...
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
George Will
Heavy Metal: Researchers Try to Get the Lead out of Piezoelectronics
Gadget makers often rely on piezoelectricity --the ability that some solids have to produce voltage when pressure is applied to them--to power tiny embedded systems, such as a BlackBerry Storm 2's touch screen or a car's airbag sensor . Whereas ...
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
Engineering the Planet to Dodge Global Warming
Failure to make difficult choices to cut greenhouse gas emissions exposes humanity to an increasingly dire set of climate scenarios. But there is a way to buy time: Geoengineering. [More]
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
Global Warming
Searching for Greener Gadgets: How to Size Up Energy Efficiency in Household Appliances
Dear EarthTalk: I am considering upgrading some older appliances in my home. Where can I find information on which models are the most energy efficient? --Jonathan Duda, Olivebridge, NY [More]
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
Can Local Governments Solve Global Warming?
BOULDER, Colo. Here's what this affluent Rocky Mountain city of 100,000 does about a revenue shortfall in the darkest economic hour since the Great Depression: [More]
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Environment
Global Warming
Study estimates hot air released by the U.S. health care system
What does the U.S. health care system have in common with cattle farms and power plants ? It is responsible for a fair chunk of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. The system, especially via hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry, ...
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Environment
Intolerable Beauty: Plastic Garbage Kills the Albatross
Each year thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway Atoll from starvation, toxicity and choking. The culprit: plastic trash accumulating across a vast area of ocean known as the Pacific Gyre . The nesting babies on the tiny, remote island are fed ...
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Environment
Jordan
Baked Australia: Water Management Lessons for the World from Down Under
Another summer is heating up Down Under, and the forecast looks as worrisome and as potentially deadly as last summer's. A decade of drought is parching landscapes, devastating farmers , killing gum trees, and forcing a new definition of ...
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Environment
Australia
Water Conservation
Pollution's Toll on the Brain
In these days of hybrid cars and carbon credits, it is common knowledge that substances exhaled by autos and coal plants are harmful to our respiratory system. What may be surprising is the degree to which they may harm the brain--in some instances, ...
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Environment
What Would Failure at Copenhagen Mean for Climate Change?
This is the consequence of failure at Copenhagen: A marked shift in scientific effort from solving global warming to adapting to its consequences, a hodge-podge of uncoordinated local efforts to trim emissions - none of which deliver the necessary ...
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Environment
Climate Change
Invest Trillions Today to Keep Climate Change at Bay: IEA
Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels and meet energy needs, the International Energy Agency warned today. IEA's "World Energy Outlook" raises the ...
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
Climate Change
Denmark
Tuna fishing kills an albatross every five minutes
Every time you open a can of tuna, an albatross dies. [More]
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Environment
Does Hunting Help or Hurt the Environment?
Dear EarthTalk: Hunting seems to be a real controversy among environmental advocates. Can you set the record straight: Is hunting good or bad for the environment? --Bill Davis, New York, NY [More]
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Environment
New York
Sicilian Curse: People Living Near Volcanic Mount Etna Could Face Increased Risk of Thyroid Cancer
At nearly 11,000 feet, Mount Etna in eastern Sicily is one of the world's most active volcanoes. And while the peak erupts at a slow enough rate for people to escape a lava burial, the gentle giant could put people at an increased risk of a ...
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Environment
Sewage Industry Fights Phosphorus Pollution
Tucked away in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, three massive metal cones could help address the world’s dwindling supply of phosphorus, the crucial ingredient of fertilizers that has made modern agriculture possible. The cones make ...
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
50 Years Ago: The Nutcracker Man
NOVEMBER 1959 NERVE GROWTH -- “No longer do physicians encourage the patient with a regenerated facial nerve to try to regain control of facial expression by training; their advice today is to inhibit all expression, to practice a ...
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
Can Scrap Paper Save Haiti's Remaining Forests?
Two years ago, the Carrefour Feuilles (pronounced "kar-ah-fur fay") neighborhood was considered too dangerous for U.N. peacekeepers who were not protected by armored vehicles. And even today, a dozen or so Sri Lankan troops garrisoned here ...
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
Haiti
Natural Gas Drilling Produces Radioactive Wastewater
As New York gears up for a massive expansion of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, state officials have made a potentially troubling discovery about the wastewater created by the process: It's radioactive. And they have yet to say how they'll ...
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Environment
Energy Efficiency
Oil Drilling
Methane Gas
New York
Recreational Boat Motors Get Greener with New EPA Emission Standards
Dear EarthTalk: I’ve heard that hybrid engine technology is now being used to power boats. What’s happening with that? --D. Smith, Portland, ME [More]
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