Environment

The common practice of adding nitrogen fertilizer is believed to benefit the soil by building organic carbon, but four University of Illinois soil scientists used analyses of soil samples from the University of Illinois Morrow Plots that date back to before the current practice began to show that too much nitrogen actually does the opposite. "We don't question the importance of nitrogen fertilizers for crop production," said Tim Ellsworth. "But, excessive application rates cut profits and are bad for soils and the environment. The loss of soil carbon has many adverse consequences for…

A campaign by conservationists has helped save one of Africa’s unspoilt forests from massive development for biofuel. Mabira Forest Reserve is about eight miles north of Lake Victoria. Logging began in 1906 and damage from intensive coffee, banana cultivation and charcoal production continued until 1988 when many people were evicted from the forest. The illegal collection of plants and timber, and charcoal burning, continues on a reduced scale. More recently the Ugandan government was considering making some of the land developers, as much as one third of the Reserve, that was desired by…

In political polling, as the same questions are asked of more and more people the uncertainty (expressed as margin of error) declines and the results become a clearer snapshot of public opinion - yet with climate issues additional research does not substantially reduce the uncertainty. "Uncertainty and sensitivity have to go hand in hand. They're inextricable," said Gerard Roe, a University of Washington associate professor of Earth and space sciences. "We're used to systems in which reducing the uncertainty in the physics means reducing the uncertainty in the response by about the same…

Mankind’s closest living relatives – the world’s apes, monkeys, lemurs and other primates – are under unprecedented threat from destruction of tropical forests, illegal wildlife trade and commercial bushmeat hunting, with 29 percent of all species in danger of going extinct, according to a new report by the Primate Specialist Group of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission (SSC) and the International Primatological Society (IPS), in collaboration with Conservation International (CI). Titled "Primates in Peril: The World’s 25 Most Endangered Primates—2006–2008", the report compiled by 60 experts…

Nearly a third of the world’s 6,000 amphibian species are threatened with extinction and more than 120 species have already vanished from the planet. Across the globe, conservation organisations and professionals are mobilising efforts to help save as many of these species as possible. A brightly coloured tropical frog under threat of extinction is the focus of a new research project hoping to better understand how environment and diet influence its development and behavior. Credit: University of Manchester Biologists from The University of Manchester have teamed up with experts at Chester…

Hopes are rising for one of the world’s rarest birds after the discovery of the largest flock seen for more than 100 years. More than 3,000 critically endangered sociable lapwings have been found in the Ceylanpinar district of south-eastern Turkey after a satellite tag was fitted to one of the birds migrating from breeding grounds in Kazakhstan. The tracked lapwing had flown more than 2,000 miles from its nesting site, where numbers of the species have plunged following the collapse of Soviet farming. The bird flew north of the Caspian Sea, then down through the Caucasus and south into Turkey…

The presence in the environment of large quantities of toxic metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium, zinc or others, poses serious health risks to humans, and this threat puts the scientific community under pressure to develop new methods to detect and eliminate toxic contaminants from wastewaters in efficient and economically viable ways. Resulting from the combination of water treatment investigations with the latest in material science, a new type of nanomaterial called nanostructured silica has been found to fulfill the requisites necessary for these applications. With its large surface…

The cow as killer of the climate: this more recent portrayal of our bovine friends is because their digestion causes them to produce methane almost continuously and pound for pound methane has a much larger impact on global warming than carbon dioxide. Now a team of German and Czech scientists say these animals also boost the production of methane from soil. Grass lands that are not used for crops generally act as sinks for greenhouse gases like methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. However, once these grasslands become pastures for cattle a change occurs. This was especially…

If you grew up on a farm, the first thing you were taught about fertilizer is that you can't use waste from anything that eats meat. Cows okay. Humans bad. Researchers in Finland disagree and say that human urine is virtually sterile, free of bacteria or viruses and naturally rich in nitrogen and other nutrients. Urine fertilization is rare today though they say it was common in ancient times. Maybe in Finland. In the new study, Surendra K. Pradhan and colleagues collected human urine from private homes and used it to fertilize cabbage crops. Then they compared the urine-fertilized crops…

Most of us think of solar power as coming from glass panels on rooftops, and increasingly large arrays in the middle of some sun-drenched desert. Now it can come from green, slimy ponds and bioreactors filled with algae that soak up the rays to make oil. Some species of algae contain as much as 50% oil, and out-produce other biofuels. An acre of soybean produces around 70 gallons of biodiesel. The same area of corn makes roughly 420 gallons of ethanol. Algae can produce about 5,000 gallons of biodiesel per acre. Not too shabby! Another plus is that algae don’t compete with our food…