Environment

Green Roofs And Cool Roofs: Do They Work?

Cool roofs, green roofs and hybrids of the two are all of the rage for city planners who want to do something about greenhouse-gas induced warming. They sound great but is it going to work, or is it another idealized wish that incurs cost but has little b ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 10 2014 - 2:42pm

Hack The Environment: Bringing Biodiversity Hardware Into The Open

New technologies are changing the way we collect biodiversity data. What once required taking expensive, bulky and fragile equipment on field trips can now be collected on cheap, compact and robust devices. A recent paper in the Biodiversity Data Journal ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 1 2014 - 10:55am

Cities Have More Native Biodiversity Than You Think

Conversion landscapes to cement-dominated urban centers would seem to cause great losses in biodiversity, yet nature i heartier than you might think. According to a new study involving 147 cities worldwide, surprisingly high numbers of plant and animal sp ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 12 2014 - 2:20pm

Wastewater Biosolids And Environmental Contaminants

Waste treatment facilities in the United States process more than 8,000,000 tons of biosolids- semi-solid sewage- about half of which is recycled into fertilizer and spread on crop land and which helps solve storage issues and produces revenue to support ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 15 2014 - 3:04am

After A Tsunami, Where Does All Of The Debris Go? The Answer Is...

In 2011, a tsunami hit Japan. While the damage to a nuclear power plant got all of the media attention, with activists claiming mutant pregnancies in California a short while later, the environmental damage caused by the tsunami itself should be more of a ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 21 2014 - 1:20pm

GMO Tobacco Discovery Could Lead To Safer Insecticides

Genetic engineering of tobacco plants so that they produce moth pheromones demonstrates the potential of genetically modified plants to act as factories for the synthesis of insect pheromones, write the authors of a Nature Communications paper. Pheromones ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 25 2014 - 11:00am

Garbage Ecology: The Secret World Of That Floating Ocean Plastisphere

You may not know it but on our biosphere- Earth- there is also a relatively unknown world hiding in plain sight. It is composed of microbes that live on floating pieces of plastic floating on the ocean.  This "Plastisphere" of microbial organism ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 24 2014 - 9:48pm

Genghis Khan Benefited From Climate Change

  How did small bands of nomadic Mongol horsemen unite to conquer much of the world within a span of decades? A whole book could be written on that, and it probably will be, if a new "Indiana Jones" movie gets made using Genghis Khan. The reason ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 10 2014 - 7:09pm

Homogenization Hypothesis: First World Problems Of Urban Lawn Care

What do people living in Boston, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles have in common? From coast to coast, prairie to desert, people love their lawns.   If only there was a study that dug deeper, like examining differences in fertilization and irrigation practices. ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 10 2014 - 11:15pm

Will Keeping Your Wiener Cleaner Prevent Autism?

Life is just packed full of surprises. You just never know when you'll get stuck in an elevator with the finalists for the new Victoria's Secret Catalog (all of whom just happen to be in estrus).  You never know when you open your door if Ed McMa ...

Article - Josh Bloom - Mar 22 2014 - 4:01pm