Environment

Some of the world's best coffee comes from the tropical highlands of Central and South America.  Recently these regions have experienced heavier rainfall.  This is probably due to climate…

The world produces a lot of food, enough to feed billions more than are living right now. There is a distribution issue, which will be solved as science engineers more crops that can grow in more…

If there is a contentious and politicized branch of science today it is climate science. Either it's global warming, or global cooling, but we have settled on climate change, just in case it goes in…

Globally existential threats due to ‘overpopulation momentum’ together with the top-heavy age structure leave by now no alternative to radical technological adaptation for anything that wants to…

And so here it is, the first public Landsat 8 image. The geographical honours goes to Wyoming and Colorado and the area where the Great Plains meets the Rocky Mountains in USA. I wrote about the…

The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon Oil spill dumped more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico yet government assessments have been unable to account for all of it. Microbes likely…

Unless we want continued runaway wildfires in dry regions like California, logging makes sense. But there is also an ecological upside, according to a new study.  Retaining moderate levels…

Evidence from Siberian caves suggests that a global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius could see permanently frozen ground thaw over a large area of Siberia, which would threaten to release…

2012 was the 40th anniversary since President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Water Act and established regulations for the discharge of pollutants to waterways - and even lets the government declare…

There is a good reason I was not a fan of Energy Secretary Steven Chu's nationalistic claim that we are in a 'race' to beat China in creating cheap solar panels.   It wasn't that we can't win…