All-purpose detergents remove lead-contaminated dust from household surfaces just as effectively as high phosphate detergents and lead-specific cleaning products, according to new research scheduled for publication in the Jan. 15 issue of the American Chemical Society’s Environmental Science & Technology journal.

The researchers, led by Roger D. Lewis, Ph.D., CIH, of the Saint Louis University School of Public Health, tested how well various detergents removed lead from three

Long after the disappearance of the glaciers that once covered much of North America, the land they rested upon is still recovering from their weight – and the slow movement of this recovery includes horizontal motion never seen before, say Purdue scientists.

The research team, led by Eric A. Calais, has found that a large swath of territory in the Northeast is slowly moving southward in relation to the rest of the continent. This region, once covered with massive ice sheets

The second satellite in the Meteosat Second Generation family is due to be launched on 21 December at 23:33 CET onboard an Ariane 5 (generic version) from Europe’s spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana. The launch window will last 28 minutes.

This is the second launch for the Meteosat Second Generation series of satellites operated by Arianespace and provided to Eumetsat by ESA. The second passenger onboard Ariane 5 will be the Insat4A multipurpose satellite (telecom, broadcasting an

In the first-ever poll of European consumers, supermarkets, chefs and restaurateurs on attitudes toward seafood and the ocean, 79% said that the environmental impact of seafood is an important factor in their purchasing decisions.

The new study, commissioned by the Seafood Choices Alliance in partnership with Greenpeace, the Marine Conservation Society, WWF and the North Sea Foundation, reveals that 86% of consumers would prefer to buy seafood that is labelled as environmentally re

When oil is produced, water accounts for about 60 per cent of the pumped volume. Today, a high percentage of this briny water is polluted. In response to the authorities’ target of pollution-free produced water, a new cleaning technology will be developed over the next three years.

Water volumes are increasing, and purification requirements are becoming far more stringent. In response, we are making broad-based efforts to develop a whole new technology, comments the project man

According to a letter published in Nature, widespread culling of badgers caused a 19 per cent reduction in the incidence of cattle TB in the areas culled, but also led to a 29 per cent increase of TB in surrounding areas. The researchers suggest the increase is caused by the remaining badgers roaming more widely.

The team had previously found that localised ’reactive’ culling increased TB incidence in cattle by 27 per cent. Ecological data suggests that increased badger

Unsafe levels of lead have been found in soil and sediments left behind in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and could pose a heightened health threat to returning residents, particularly children, according to a new study published in the American Chemical Society’s journal Environmental Science & Technology. In some soil samples collected from the area, lead levels were as much as two-thirds higher than what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers safe, according to rese

Older trees may have less capacity for taking in carbon dioxide

Trees in the Amazon tropical forests are old. Really old, in fact, which comes as a surprise to a team of American and Brazilian researchers studying tree growth in the world’s largest tropical region.

Using radiocarbon dating methods, the team, which includes UC Irvine’s Susan Trumbore, found that up to half of all trees greater than 10 centimeters in diameter are more than 300 years old. Some of the tree

New tomato research has its roots in yielding more food to feed more people, according to Dr. Kendal Hirschi about results announced today.

His team’s study appears in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team made tomato plants over-express the gene, AVP1, which resulted in stronger, larger root systems and that resulted in roots making better use of limited water, said Hirschi, a researcher at Texas A&M University’s Vegetable and Fruit Improvemen

The NAPOLEÓN Integrated Project has been recently launched under the leadership of Professor José María Asua of the University Institute of Polymeric Materials (POLYMAT) at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).

Over a period of four years, 21 European participants, including large and small business enterprises as well as universities, will work on the development of radically new products through the technological process for the production of controlled nanostructured

The Chemical Industries Association (CIA) today commended the Trade & Industry Committee’s report on its inquiry into ‘Security of Gas Supply’ and strongly agrees with the Committee’s assessment that the UK does not have a properly functioning forward gas market.

The CIA also shares its concern – acutely – over problems of uncertain supply and the high prices caused by dependence of the liberalised UK market on the largely unreformed European one. As the Committee observes, “It is fa

The outer core of the Earth, whose composition until now has been a mystery, may consist of an alloy of iron and magnesium. This discovery by an international team of scientists with members from Linköping University in Sweden, being published in the journal Physical Review Letters, is, among other things, a major step toward being able to predict earthquakes.

In theoretical and experimental studies under extremely high pressure, the team has succeeded in mixing iron and magnesium.

With the amount of shopping days until Christmas fast running out, consumers who would like to make ‘green’ choices are often helpless to change their behaviour, according to research at the University of Surrey. The project, which was funded by ESRC, warns policymakers that eco-taxes and information campaigns have only a limited impact on how people behave. ‘Many people care about the environment but they are stuck in unsustainable patterns of behaviour because they just don’t have access to

Ultraviolet flashes associated with surface crustal fields, not poles

Auroras similar to Earth’s Northern Lights appear to be common on Mars, according to physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, who have analyzed six years’ worth of data from the Mars Global Surveyor.

The discovery of hundreds of auroras over the past six years comes as a surprise, since Mars does not have the global magnetic field that on Earth is the source of the aurora

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced today support of a new program that will include development of an instrument for testing deep soil samples on Mars in a European mission called ExoMars. A researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara will direct the development of the instrument.

“We are very excited about this,” said Luann Becker, research scientist with the Institute of Crustal Studies at UC Santa Barbara. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” Testing by

London is completely blanketed by the black plume of smoke from Europe’s worst peacetime fire in this Envisat image, taken within five hours of the blaze beginning.

This image was acquired at 10:45 GMT on Sunday morning by the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS), one of ten instruments aboard Envisat, Europe’s largest satellite for environmental monitoring. This Reduced Resolution mode image has a spatial resolution of 1200 metres, and shows the cloud spread across a span