If there was a tougher moment over the last 40 years to be a leader in the American environmental movement, it would be hard to put your finger on it.
Large wind farms slightly increase temperatures near the ground as the turbines’ rotor blades pull down warm air, according to researchers who analyzed nine years of satellite readings around four of the world’s biggest wind farms. The study showed for the first time that wind farms of a certain scale, while producing clean, renewable energy,…
An ambitious plan to provide 15% of Europe’s power needs from solar plants in North Africa has run into trouble. The Desertec initiative hoped to deliver electricity from a network of renewable energy sources to Europe via cables under the sea. But in recent weeks, two big industrial backers have pulled out. And the Spanish…
A study last year found unusually high levels of the isotope carbon-14 in ancient rings of Japanese cedar trees and a corresponding spike in beryllium-10 in Antarctic ice. The readings were traced back to a point in AD 774 or 775, suggesting that during that period the Earth was hit by an intense burst of…
In the 1940s, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield found his patients would recall seemingly random information – the smell of cookies for instance – when he stimulated different brain areas with electric shocks. Two studies have now found evidence to support the memory storage theory that Penfield stumbled across. The research, in mice, even demonstrates that it…
If our universe slammed into a neighboring one during a growth spurt in its first second, the collision would have left a mark. And Matthew Kleban thinks he sees it in the most detailed snapshot yet taken of the dawn of the universe. The satellite image, released by astronomers in March, confirmed what an earlier…
Biological diversity—something that’s now imperiled by human appetites—may be a sustaining, stabilizing force on planetary scales, and its disruption self-perpetuating. “Earlier interpretations have looked at the Permian-Triassic extinction as purely the result of external physical processes,” said paleobiologist Jessica Whiteside of Brown University. “But low diversity itself can be a feedback.” Author Metanexus Editors