Environment
If Americans adopted the recommendations the USDA's "Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010," diet-related greenhouse gas emissions would increase 12 percent, according to scholars, and if Americans reduced their daily caloric intake to the recommended level of about 2,000 calories while shifting to a healthier diet, greenhouse gas emissions would decrease by only 1 percent.
What must happen is that Americans must switch to no animal products, say Martin Heller and Gregory Keoleian of the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Systems, who looked at the greenhouse gas emissions…
California's water supply depends on a clean snow pack and healthy mountain lakes. Because of geography, California cities are conducive to air pollution and a similar effect can be found in lakes. The lakes in the Sierra Nevada are the most sensitive lakes in the U.S. to acid rain, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The lakes receive a large amount of runoff in the spring from the melting snowpack. If the snowpack is polluted, the lakes will be polluted.
Carbonaceous particles, formed by burning oil and coal, are an indicator of air pollution and acid rain.…
More than 15 million miles of new roads will be built worldwide by 2050, pushing back the frontiers of progress. Of course, progress may mean a loss of wilderness if it is not managed carefully, and authors have created a ‘global roadmap’ for prioritizing road building across the planet, to try to balance the competing demands of development and environmental protection.
The authors have created a ‘large-scale zoning plan’ that aims to maximize the benefits for human development while limiting the environmental costs of road expansion. Their map has two components: an ‘environmental…
It is Valentine’s Day and our thoughts naturally turn to yeasts. Okay well, love. But love can lead to sex, and that leads to reproduction. Yeasts may not know about love, but they do know about reproducing. So do we humans: our population here on planet earth has passed seven billion.
Yeast eat and eat and eat; burping carbon dioxide and excreting alcohol as they go. Their burping makes our bread dough rise, and their excreting ferments our adult beverages. Along with eating, belching, and excreting, they reproduce and reproduce and reproduce. Though the yeasts’ ability to double its…
A new analysis suggests the planet can produce much more land-plant biomass – the total material in leaves, stems, roots, fruits, grains and other terrestrial plant parts – than previous estimates showed.
In modeling, earth scientists tend to make a lot of simplifying assumptions, and one of those assumptions has been that biomass of now will be biomass of the future, which is in defiance of both science and history.
A new paper in Environmental Science and Technology recalculates the limit of terrestrial plant productivity and finds that it is much higher than many current estimates allow.
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Boron deficiency is a common cause of reduced crop yields in places like Missouri and the eastern half of the United States. It is common for corn and soybean farmers to supplement their soil with boron and now researchers at the University of Missouri have found that boron plays an integral role in development and reproduction in corn plants.
The researchers anticipate that understanding how corn uses the nutrient can help farmers make informed decisions in boron deficient areas and improve crop yields.
"Boron deficiency was already known to cause plants to stop growing, but our study…
Algae is a bad thing in your poor, but in the ocean they are the ultimate source of all organic matter that marine animals depend upon.
Using a combination of satellite imagery and laboratory experiments, researchers have evidence showing that algae is
sucking up climate-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sinking it to the bottom of the ocean.
And for that, we can thank one other thing people dislike: viruses.
Viruses infecting those algae are driving the life-and-death dynamics of the algae's blooms, even when all else stays essentially the same. According to results…
Hank |
No one knows why Hypospadias, a birth defect where the urethral opening is abnormally placed, became more common among Swedish boys in recent decades. Before 1990, it happened in 4.5 per 1,000 boys, and after that increased to 8 per 1,000 boys.
Researchers looked at past attributed causes (in epidemiology, they find two curves that go the same direction and attribute causation), such as low-birth weight, being born a twin, or being born from in vitro fertilization (IVF) to conceive, but the curves did not match.
Maybe it was less reported in 1973. No one can say. So they created a new cause…
Climate change has happened throughout history, there are abandoned cities in places we would consider inhospitable, but they weren't at the times. As the climate changed, it has altered habitats not just for birds and bees and everything in between, but humans as well.
1990 is not some special time in world history, despite some claims that fixing one greenhouse gas would prevent climate change. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Aarhus University in Denmark say that by looking at estimates of climate and land-use change speeds they can determine the potential combined…
Researchers are searching for a sustainable, environmentally-friendlier source of soil conditioner and crop fertilizer that could reduce costs to farmers - all from renewable energy waste.
A collaborative project between Stopford Energy and Environment Limited, the James Hutton Institute, Aqua Enviro Limited and the University of Lancaster builds upon Stopford research looking at using a mixture of digestates, derived from anaerobic digestion, and ash, from burnt biomass, as an alternative to existing crop fertilizers.
Fertilizers, such as phosphorous and nitrate-based products, are…