Environment

When I look at my children at play, I am fascinated by the ways in which they learn. Learning is a brain event and there are times I imagine I can almost see my kids’ brains working and developing as they play and learn. Everything that we do, whether motor, sensory or cognitive, requires networks of neurons to generate new activity patterns in our brains. These newpatterns are how we experience learning. A team of researchers from the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh were able to provide a theoretical representation for…

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory have created a new simulator to more accurately estimate the greenhouse gases likely to be released from Arctic peatlands if they warm. Their model is based on how oxygen filters through soil and it estimates that previous models probably underestimated methane emissions and overrepresented carbon dioxide emissions from those regions.  Peatlands, common in the Arctic, are wetlands filled with dead and decaying organic matter. They are the result of millions of years of plants dying and breaking down into rich soil, so they contain a massive…

When you take a shower and use soap and then lather, rinse and repeat twice with that shampoo, it gets washed off your body and goes down the drain. Environmentalists have claimed these soaps and shampoos and washing machine detergents - surfactants - seep into groundwater, lakes and streams, where they could pose a risk to fish and frogs. But do they? Not likely, finds a new report of the potential impact on the environment of the enormous amounts of common surfactants used day in and day out by consumers all over the world.  Senior researcher Hans Sanderson keeps an eye on…

Americans love their dogs, and most people clean up after their pets when they are out on a walk, but some do not: people who claim they wouldn't pour toxic chemicals or medicines onto the ground because they recognize it gets into waterways delude themselves into believing dog excrement is "natural" and will be okay in waterways. But it isn't. Bacteria and anti-bacterial strains from dogs can make people sick from dogs just like it does humans, and we recognize that humans should not go to the bathroom on the ground near a lake. A new genetic test helps quantify how much dogs are…

Permafrost thaw kills forests in Canada, while drought kills trees in India and Borneo. In the U.S., in Virginia, over-abundant deer eat trees before they reach maturity, while nitrogen pollution has changed soil chemistry in Panama.  Continents apart, trees have many similar ways to die. Many of the changes occurring in forests worldwide are attributable to human impacts on climate, atmospheric chemistry, land use and animal populations - no surprise, writing papers lamenting humanity is why many conservation groups exist. And hyperbolic cultural pandering has led to calls for a new…

A review in the Journal of Animal Science has found that feeding livestock diets containing genetically engineered crops has no impact on the health or productivity of those animals. The article documents 30 years worth of livestock-feeding studies, representing more than 100 billion animals, finding that the performance and health of food-producing animals fed GE crops are comparable with those of animals fed non-GE crops.  Since their introduction in 1996, GE feed crops have become an increasing component of livestock diets. Today, more than 95 percent of U.S. food-producing animals…

Vermont recently passed a law putting warning labels on GMOs, but they made sure to have lots of important exemptions - restaurants were exempt, any prepared food was exempt, alcohol was exempt - and milk from cows that had GMO feed also don't need a label. Organic bread made from wheat that was milled (which is to say all of it) cannot be "natural" but milk from cows that ate GMO feed can still be "organic"? Scientifically, of course it can be organic, but it also helped that Gary Hirshberg, the big name behind the Just Label It campaign to stigmatize GMOs, is co-founder…

Outside the developed world, global population continues to rise but all of the best agricultural locations are in use. If we want people to be self-sufficient (and we do) science is going to need to be able to help the developing world with innovative and sustainable solutions. Modern agriculture has not reached any kind of limit, we can easily boost food production by as much as 70-100% in the next few decades. To grow in more difficult areas, and to be resistant to swings in weather, more drought-tolerant food crops are essential.   Study co-authors Roel Rabara and Paul…

Mother Nature may be out to kill us but we shouldn't take it personally. She is out to kill everything. We just never noticed in the past.  Today, thanks to long-term science projects, we can see how nature pits species off against each other. And biologists are studying streams to optimize how to prevent tallgrass prairies from turning into shrublands and forests. Forests are bad? No, but they are different and they are popular in the environmental movement, Grasslands in North America and across the globe are rapidly disappearing and woody plants are expanding, including converting…

In our hyperactive media climate, where every incident is proof or not proof of something, it has become common to see claims that wildfires have become worse due to global warming even as American CO2 emissions have dropped. Scientists have put a fire retardant on claims that Colorado's Front Range wildfires are becoming increasingly severe. The study authors looked at 1.3 million acres of ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forest from Teller County west of Colorado Springs through Larimer County west and north of Fort Collins, reconstructed the timing and severity of past fires using…