Environment

Remember that old expression about your fence, "the grass is always greener on the other side?" Although this may not be entirely true, a recent study shows that a daily dose of the green stuff may actually prove beneficial to both your mental and physical health.  Students attending college in San Marcos, Texas are taking advantage of their luscious green surroundings and are feeling quite good about it. A.L. McFarland, a graduate student at Texas State University's Department of Agriculture, is head of a new "green" study which created data on the effects of outdoor interaction on a…

Cities are unfairly blamed for greenhouse gas emissions by misguided politicians and well-meaning people who listen to them, and this threatens efforts to truly impact climate change, warns a study in the October 2008 issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization. The paper says cities are commonly blamed for 75 to 80 percent of emissions but that the true value is around half that and the potential for cities to help address climate change is being overlooked because of this error. United Nations agencies, former US President Bill Clinton’s climate change initiative and New York Mayor…

What happened to my jugs? They’re huge! I’m talking about my milk jugs, of course. No, seriously -- those large, plastic, gallon-sized jugs that you buy at the store that are filled with milk. It seems that they’ve gone through quite a growth spurt all of the sudden. Why the sudden design change? Transitioning to the new “squared off” jugs saves money, materials, time, and fuel… all things that are good for businesses, consumers, and the environment. The new-fangled jugs started showing up in selected Costco, WalMart, and Sam’s Club stores last fall. But because of the savings they…

Just when you think modern technology reveals all, Mother Nature throws out a few surprises. According to a Wildlife Conservation Society(WCS) report, two surprisingly large populations of globally threatened primates have been found in Cambodia. The report counted 42,000 black-shanked douc langurs along with 2,500 yellow-cheeked crested gibbons in Cambodia's Seima Biodiversity Conservation Area, an estimate that represents the largest known populations for both species in the world. The two primate species are found in much lower numbers at other sites in Cambodia and in Vietnam. Prior to…

Rogue prefers his steak medium-well. But when it comes to sniffing out a rare plant, this dog performs work that’s very well done, indeed. The 4-year-old Belgian sheepdog is part of a Nature Conservancy collaborative project to test the efficacy of using dogs to sniff out the threatened Kincaid’s lupine . The plant is host to the endangered Fender’s blue butterfly, found only in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.   Using detector dogs for such inventory work is new territory: No one’s tried it before. Watch a video of Rogue at work in the field . But since dogs use their remarkable sense of…

WADDINXVEEN, The Netherlands, August 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Exactly 40 years after Woodstock, a "Rock for Nature" rock concert will be held in the Schwabisch Hall in Germany from August 22 through 24. The concert's theme will be organic, genetic-manipulation free agriculture. Eosta's sister organization "Soil & More" will fully compensate all CO2 emissions arising from the concert with "carbon credits" obtained through composting projects for organic agriculture. The concert will feature world-famous artists and bands such as Scorpions, Nena, Joe Cocker and Roger Hodgson (formerly with…

Noise can be irritating and possibly harmful for everything from mice to humans – and maybe even 60-foot whales in the Gulf of Mexico. That's why in recent years, there has been concern that man-made noise may be a cause of stress for dolphins, whales and other marine mammals, but the results of a five-year study show that noise pollution – especially noise generated by seismic airguns during geophysical exploration for oil and gas – seems to have minimal effect on endangered sperm whales in the Gulf of Mexico, say researchers from Texas A&M University who led the project and released…

According to 2007 U.S. Census Bureau data, there are approximately 20 million children below the age of five in the United States, the age range of greatest susceptibility to the harmful affects of lead poisoning. Gabriel M. Filippelli, Ph.D., professor of earth sciences and department chair at Indiana University, says that about 2 percent of these children (approximately 400,000) have lead poisoning, many in epidemic proportions. Writing in the August issue of the journal Applied Geochemistry, Filippelli conducted a literature review of studies of urban soils as a persistent source of lead…

Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, is not an optimistic guy about the future. He says human activities are cumulatively driving the health of the world's oceans down a rapid spiral and the result will be mass extinctions in the oceans on par with vast ecological upheavals of the past. He cites the synergistic effects of habitat destruction, overfishing, ocean warming, increased acidification and massive nutrient runoff as culprits in a grand transformation of once complex ocean ecosystems. Areas that had featured intricate…

The prospect of climate change sparking food and water shortages in the Middle East is less likely than previously thought, with new research by an Australian climate scientist suggesting that rainfall will be significantly higher in key parts of the region. Recent projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) raised fears that storm activity in the eastern Mediterranean would decline this century (if global warming continues on the predicted curve) and that would reduce rainfall by between 15 and 25 per cent over a large part of the so-called Fertile Crescent, the…