China’s Three Gorges Dam, the largest dam project ever, has been seen by ecologists as an environmental disaster in the making. With construction scheduled to be completed later this year, little can be done to stop it, but some Chinese and American ecologists point out that the dark cloud of the environmental consequences does have a silver lining – an unprecedented opportunity to do environmental science.

In an article forthcoming in the May 23 issue of Science, Arizona State Univers

A crucial part in the battle to prevent outbreaks of deadly disease across the world lies with ecologists, an MSU professor says.

Preserving biodiversity and wildlife habitats are at the foundation of global health, says Jianguo “Jack” Liu, an ecologist who is the lead author for a Policy Forum in the May 23 issue of Science magazine.

The article outlines ways to protect biodiversity in China’s vast system of nature reserves. But Liu said the issues span farther than China, and

It has long been known that tropical climate – by redistributing vast amounts of solar energy through welling hot air and the formation of towering cumulous clouds – influences weather in other parts of the world.

It remains unclear, however, how much the tropics can be affected by higher latitudes.
Now, with the help of a sophisticated computer model, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have shown that vast atmospheric “bridges” and oceanic “tunnels,” created by overturn

A team of researchers, led by NASA and Columbia University scientists, found airborne, microscopic, black- carbon (soot) particles are even more plentiful around the world, and contribute more to climate change, than was previously assumed by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC).

The researchers concluded if these soot particles are not reduced, at least as rapidly as light-colored pollutants, the world could warm more quickly.

The findings appear in the latest issu

Penn State environmental engineers estimate, based on tests with wastewater from small Pennsylvania food processors, that typical large food manufacturers could use their starch-rich wastewater to produce hydrogen gas worth close to $5 million or more each year. They present their findings today at the 103rd General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

Steven Van Ginkel, doctoral candidate, and Dr. Sang-Eun Oh, post-doctoral researcher in environmental engineering, conducted th

For the first time, scientists have incorporated multiple human and natural factors into a climate projection model. They predict that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, due to changes in the carbon cycle, combined with a decrease in human-produced sulphates, may cause accelerated global warming during the 21st century, as compared with simulations without these feedback effects. Results of the study, completed by Chris D. Jones and colleagues at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre

After almost 50 years of nuclear materials production at the 586-square-mile Hanford Site in southeastern Washington, there are more than 700 waste sites with the potential to release contaminants to the soil and groundwater. These sites vary significantly in their inventories of radioactive and chemical contaminants and potential for contaminants to migrate through the soil to the groundwater and the Columbia River. Understanding which waste sites have the most significant impact and the cumulative

In the same way dishwashing detergents clean greasy dishes, scientists are using detergent-like surfactants to clean contaminated regions underground.

Cleaning up contaminated soil and groundwater is estimated to cost trillions of dollars in North America. The problem requires many different approaches because there are hundreds of different types of contaminants and the soils and geology differ from place to place. One approach that has shown promise for some situations can be viewed

Dust from China’s Takla-Makan desert traveled more than 20,000 kilometers [12,000 miles] in about two weeks, crossing the Pacific Ocean, North America, and the Atlantic Ocean, before settling atop the French Alps. Chinese dust plumes had been known to reach North America and even Greenland, but had never before been reported in Europe.

An international team of scientists, using atmospheric computer models, studied dust that traveled the globe from February 25 to March 7, 1990. Their findin

A serendipitous discovery by a University of Colorado at Boulder-led team has shown for the first time that satellite signals from the Global Positioning System are a valuable new tool for studying seismic activity.

CU-Boulder Associate Professor Kristine Larson of aerospace engineering sciences said seismic waves from a 7.9 magnitude earthquake in Alaska’s Denali National Park in November 2002 were detected using Global Positioning Satellite, or GPS, receivers as far away as 2,350 mil

A technique for studying the magnetic properties of rocks developed by earth scientists at UC Davis is drawing attention from other scientists and the magnetic recording industry.

An international group of scientists recently met in Davis to discuss the First Order Reversal Curve (FORC) method and its applications for studying million-year old rocks, thousand-year old lake sediments, modern hard drives and wholly new kinds of materials made in the lab.

Magnetic materials are made

New list spotlights most endangered turtles and action plan to save them

The Turtle Conservation Fund (TCF) today released its first-ever list of the World’s Top 25 Most Endangered Turtles to highlight the survival crisis facing the world’s tortoises and freshwater turtles and to unveil a Global Action Plan to prevent further extinctions. Fully 200 of the 300 living species of tortoises and freshwater turtles are threatened and require conservation action.

The TCF

90 % of all large fish including tuna, marlin, swordfish, sharks, cod and halibut are gone – leading scientists say need to attempt restoration on a global scale is urgent

The cover story of the May 15th issue of the international journal Nature reveals that we have only 10% of all large fish– both open ocean species including tuna, swordfish, marlin and the large groundfish such as cod, halibut, skates and flounder– left in the sea. Most strikingly, the study shows that industrial

Taken from a microbe that thrives in the depths of a Yellowstone National Park hot springs pool, a newly discovered enzyme may be the key to transforming industrial bleaching from environmentally problematic to environmentally green.

Chemical engineer Vicki Thompson and biologists William Apel and Kastli Schaller from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory discovered that the catalase enzyme from a Thermus brockianus microbe flourishes i

Your local weather forecaster uses Doppler radar systems, covering U.S. regions, to estimate rainfall and flooding, but NASA research satellites can see rainfall worldwide.

Data from NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM)satellite, along with information from other satellites, allows researchers to see how much rain is falling over most of the world every three hours. This capability enables scientists to daily map areas of potential flooding.

These maps, available

Cassava is the third-most important food source in tropical countries, but it has one major problem: The roots and leaves of poorly processed cassava plants contain a substance that, when eaten, can trigger the production of cyanide.

That’s a serious problem for the 500 million people who rely on cassava as their main source of calories, among them subsistence farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, said Richard Sayre, a professor of plant biology at Ohio State University. He and his colleague Dimuth