Environment

Wood or concrete for a cleaner environment? Wood seems like the obvious answer because it is natural, biodegradeable and renewable but  in the railway industry it isn't so simple.   Railroads around the world face environmental decisions as they replace millions of deteriorating cross ties, also known as railway sleepers - the rectangular objects used as a base for railroad tracks. A new report concludes that emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases contributing to global warming, from production of concrete sleepers are up to six times less than emissions…

A team of scientists from Canada, Spain and the United States has identified a key gene that allows plants to defend themselves against environmental stresses like drought, freezing and heat.  "Plants have stress hormones that they produce naturally and that signal adverse conditions and help them adapt," says team member Peter McCourt, a professor of cell and systems biology at the University of Toronto. "If we can control these hormones we should be able to protect crops from adverse environmental conditions which is very important in this day and age of global climate change." The…

The Wildlife Conservation Society announced at the International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI), which is meeting this week in Phuket, Thailand, results showing that some coral reefs off East Africa are unusually resilient to climate change due to improved fisheries management and a combination of geophysical factors. The study published in Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems provides additional evidence that globally important "super reefs" exist in the triangle from Northern Madagascar across to northern Mozambique to southern Kenya, they say, and should be a high priority…

Take that, Taliban.   Western decadence, in the form of caring about beauty and nature, has infested your fundamentalist madness and it's here to stay. We are talking about Band-i-Amir national park in Afghanistan, which opens today. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) provided key funding that led to the park's creation, including support of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) to conduct preliminary wildlife surveys, identify and delineate the park's boundaries, and work with local communities and the provincial government. WCS also developed the park…

Fat people require more food and that requires more farming and greenhouse gas emissions.  Therefore, maintaining a healthy body weight is also good for the environment, according to a study which appears today in the International Journal of Epidemiology. They highlight poor, third world countries like Vietnam as a model because they they can't afford food so they consume almost 20% less of it (and therefore cause fewer greenhouse gases to be produced) than a population in which over 40% of people are obese, where the USA and a few nations in Europe are heading by 2020. According to…

What?  NASA wants to make Earth Day about space? Not at all, NASA is instead asking the public to vote for the most important contribution the space agency has made to exploring and understanding Earth and improving the way we live on our home planet.  That's right, they call this our home planet, which means there may be a vacation planet on the way.  That's thinking big, people. Since the beginning of the space age, NASA has been at the forefront of using Earth orbit to get a better view of how weather systems develop. And now the world is a safer place to live in when it…

Is it a weapon? Is it a tool? Is it a form of protest? Can it make your city pretty? Then it must be a seed ball! Screening criteria for use: are you able to throw, drop, give to someone else to throw or otherwise deposit a small seed ball onto a patch of urban ugliness? Congratulations, you're approved. A Japanese pioneer in "natural farming" developed the seed ball, a technique for planting seeds in abandoned places and often inhospitable land, says NPR. And anyone can make one and join in the fun. Mix some mulch and a seed mixture, one that is native to the area and…

Widespread die-off of piñon pine across the southwestern United States during future droughts will occur at least five times faster if climate warms by 4 degrees Celsius, even if future droughts are no worse than droughts of the past century, scientists have discovered in experiments conducted at the University of Arizona's Biosphere 2. Their study is the first to isolate the impact of just temperature on tree mortality during drought. The temperature effect is usually confounded by varying weather and bark beetle and other pest attacks. Quantitative information on how sensitive drought-…

SALT LAKE CITY, April 13, 2009 – Two weeks after the rains begin, an elephant family named "the Royals" usually switches to a grass diet to bulk up for pregnancy and birth. But when they wandered off their African reserve one rainy season, cattle grazed the grass so short that elephants couldn't eat it, according to a University of Utah study. The research – which suggests how climate change and human encroachment may affect endangered elephants – was led by Thure Cerling, a distinguished professor of geology and geophysics, and biology. He used Global Positioning System (GPS)…

A recently released British film The Age of Stupid, uses good science to good effect in a projection of a possible future.  The theme is that if we do nothing about global climate change, then we are not living in an age of reason, but in an age of stupid.  In another blog, I posed the question: Is this the age of stupid? I propose to name the not stupid, and shame the stupid. Rachel Carson "There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings ... Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change ...…