A bold plan to bring every person on Earth sustainable energy within 18 years will face its first test of international acceptance at the Rio+20 Earth Summit – the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in June. The Sustainable Energy For All initiative is a flagship programme launched by UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon. Its goals…
Researchers believe the nation’s food supply may be vulnerable to rapid groundwater depletion from irrigated agriculture. The study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paints the highest resolution picture yet of how groundwater depletion varies across space and time in California’s Central Valley and the High Plains of the…
The Sequoia National Park forest contains the biggest and among the oldest living things on earth – the giant Sequoia redwoods. But it also boasts the worst air pollution of any national park in the country. Already this year, the level of ozone in Sequoia park has exceeded federal health standards, even though it’s early in the summer ozone season.
As hydraulic fracturing unlocks new gas reserves, researchers struggle to understand its health implications.
As the number of species at risk of extinction soars, zoos are increasingly being called upon to rescue and sustain animals, and not just for marquee breeds like pandas and rhinos but also for all manner of mammals, frogs, birds and insects whose populations are suddenly crashing. To conserve animals effectively, however, zoo officials have…
When three American astronomers won the Nobel Prize in Physics last year, for discovering that the expansion of the universe was speeding up in defiance of cosmic gravity, it reaffirmed dark energy, and it underscored the case, long urged by American astronomers, for a NASA mission to measure dark energy — to determine, for example,…
Crop diseases could be detected earlier and more easily if a new method that stamps a leaf with a colour-changing biosensor is successful. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $100,000 to Hideaki Tsutsui of the University of California, Riverside, to develop the early warning system for crop diseases. Tsutsui’s idea is to print biosensors…
This spring the World Health Organization (WHO) celebrated the early completion the 2015 development goal of bringing improved drinking water to an additional two billion people since 1990. The feat was a landmark in securing what the U.N. General Assembly declared in 2010 was a universal human right: “access to safe and clean water.” In…
Earth’s ecosystems keep soaking up more carbon as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, new measurements find. The research contradicts several recent studies suggesting that “carbon sinks” have reached or passed their capacity. By looking at global measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the new work, presented at an annual conference on global monitoring, calculates instead…
Global Biodiversity Down 30 Percent in 40 Years: Humanity is essentially using the resources of one and a half Earths every year.