Environment

There are concerns about climate emissions because of resistance to clean technologies like nuclear power that have led to increased use of coal. Solar power will be the best solution in the future, if it does not fall victim to too much hype and subsidies now.  There is also a water problem. Only slightly more than one percent of the world's water is potable, making clean water a priority - but one that is easily solved by energy.   A new process decomposes waste desalination brine using solar energy, which neutralizes ocean acidity and also reduces environmental impact.…

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska has been a center of debate on the trade-offs between environmental protection and oil drilling for decades. Alaska Region US Fish&Wildlife Service, CC BY-SA By David Konisky, Georgetown University In a few months, we will mark the five-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The accident released millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, causing extensive impacts on the marine ecosystem, wildlife habitat, and the fishing and tourism industries in Louisiana and other Gulf states. Like the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in…

Peak Oil, which was supposed to have happened in 1992, set off the craze of declaring 'peak' everything, to such an extent it is a running joke now.(1) The good news for Peak Oil believers is that they are going to be right eventually. Oil is a 'fossil' fuel and we aren't making any more giant dinosaurs. Even in the 1970s, when the peak oil date was floated, no one outside environmental doomsday prophets believed it, because it fell victim to the plight of most advocacy-based projections; it created a curve of demand but assumed technology and science, and therefore the supply, would be…

Put innovative farming techniques in the right hands. CGIAR Climate, CC BY-NC-SA By Sayed Azam-Ali, University of Nottingham Africa will be able to feed itself in the next 15 years. That’s one of the big “bets on the future” that Bill and Melinda Gates have made in their foundation’s latest annual letter. Helped by other breakthroughs in health, mobile banking and education, they argue that the lives of people in poor countries “will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history”. Their “bet” is good news for African agriculture: agronomy and its natural twin,…

There are tens of thousands of human-made chemicals circulating today and some have been bad despite studies that didn't initially find harm, yet almost every chemical is under siege by environmental groups, and they all claim science is on their side. Everything from bisphenol A used in plastics to neonicotinoid pesticides to glyphosate weed-killers are criticized by lawyers at environmental groups despite the science consensus. How can the public know which ones really pose threats to our health and environment and which ones are just studies designed to keep poisoning lab animals until…

Crops genetically engineered to produce proteins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) to control insect pests have been planted on a cumulative total of more than a billion acres worldwide since 1996 and they have been very successful. But pests evolve just like everything else and to avoid that, companies recommend a variety of strategies to avoid 'herd immunity'. Biotech companies have also introduced Bt crops called "pyramids" that produce two or more Bt toxins active against the same pest. They have been adopted in many countries since 2003, including the United States, India…

One of the biggest struggles in toxicology is creating the correct parameters so you are modeling the real world as closely as possible. It's an enormous task to model the environment with its millions of factors, so controlled studies are done using animals. Scientists design experiments that give an animal a lot of something at once and that can tell them 'this is the threshold where more analysis is a waste of time' and perhaps also find an effect that may be worth studying in more detail. It's a time-honored technique but it's also a technique that can be exploited. Imagine you read a…

A new paper says that human civilization has crossed four of nine so-called planetary boundaries as the result of human activity that put humanity in a "safe operating space."  The four that are already beyond that point-of-no-return are climate change, the loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, and altered biogeochemical cycles like phosphorus and nitrogen runoff. That makes us 44 percent of the way on the path to doom. It should be a wake-up call to policymakers that "we're running up to and beyond the biophysical boundaries that enable human civilization as we know…

A 21st century gold rush has led to a significant increase of deforestation in the tropical forests of South America. Researchers from the University of Puerto Rico have shown that between 2001 and 2013, around 1680 km2 of tropical forest was lost in South America as a result of gold mining, which increased from around 377 km2 to 1303km2 since 2007, which increased in the global economic crisis of 2008 and on. Around 90 percent of this forest loss occurred in just four areas and a large proportion occurred within the vicinity of conservation areas. When economies started collapsing and while…

A new research project has identified a specific gene in soybean that has great potential for soybean crop improvement because it can be bred to better tolerate soil salinity - that means less changes to soil and the ecosystem while still getting more food. The researchers from the University of Adelaide in Australia and the Institute of Crop Sciences in the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing pinpointed a candidate salt tolerance gene after examining the genetic sequence of several hundred soybean varieties.  What can make a no-till soybean field even better for…