Biology
Breach
April 25, 2014, from Associated Press
A major supplier to the oil and gas industry says it will begin disclosing 100 percent of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing fluid, with no exemptions for trade secrets. The move by Baker Hughes of Houston is a shift for a major firm; it's unclear if others will follow suit...
"This really good news. It's a step in the right direction," said Dr. Bernard Goldstein, the former dean of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. "One hopes that the entire industry goes along with it."
But Goldstein noted one "major hedge" in the Baker Hughes position, since the company said it will provide complete lists of the products and chemical ingredients used in frack fluids "where accepted by our customers and relevant governmental authorities."
April 25, 2011, from London Guardian
Britain could be fined up to £175m by the International Olympic Committee if it continues to break air pollution laws by the time the Games begin next August.
The prospect of the air pollution penalty is becoming a major source of embarrassment to the government and Olympic organisers who set a goal of making the Games "the greenest ever" but have already watered down green measures planned for the event.
To meet the legally binding agreement, London may have to reduce traffic levels by more than 30 percent over a period of nearly a month, raising the possibility of draconian measures such as banning cars with number plates ending in odd and even numbers on alternate days.
April 25, 2009, from Greenwire
Coal trucks rumbling through neighborhoods in southwest Virginia are trailing dust clouds that violate federal pollution standards, according to a report that advocacy groups released yesterday.
The study (pdf) conducted by North Carolina State University for the Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards and the Sierra Club analyzed airborne dust along the roads of Roda in Wise County, where trucks haul coal from several mining operations.
The trucks track coal, mud and debris from the mines to the road, where it dries and turns to dust that is stirred up by other vehicles. That dust coats houses and is thought to cause respiratory and other health ailments, researchers found.
April 25, 2009, from London Daily Telegraph
...The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has now been tentatively mapped into an east and west section and the combined weight of plastic there is estimated at three million tons and increasing steadily. It appears to be the big daddy of them all, but we do not know for sure.
Dr Pearn Niiler of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in San Diego, the world's leading authority on ocean currents, thinks that there is an even bigger garbage patch in the South Pacific, in the vicinity of Easter Island, but no scientists have yet gone to look.
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Climate
Chaos
April 25, 2014, from The Nation
In an unprecedented federal court case that has made it to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, young people from California are suing the EPA and Departments of Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Energy and Defense under the historic public trust doctrine for failing to devise a climate change recovery plan. In their legal brief, they argue, "Failure to rapidly reduce CO2 emissions and protect and restore the balance of the atmosphere is a violation of Youth's constitutionally protected rights and is redressable by the Courts."... Conventional efforts to harness climate change through litigation have failed. The public's trust in government to tackle climate change has been squashed. The agencies the youth are suing have come up short on the issue of the millennium. We're clearly in need of some precedent-setting litigation.
April 25, 2014, from Northern Arizona University
Research published in Science today found that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cause soil microbes to produce more carbon dioxide, accelerating climate change. Two Northern Arizona University researchers led the study, which challenges previous understanding about how carbon accumulates in soil. Increased levels of CO2 accelerate plant growth, which causes more absorption of CO2 through photosynthesis.
Until now, the accepted belief was that carbon is then stored in wood and soil for a long time, slowing climate change. Yet this new research suggests that the extra carbon provides fuel to microorganisms in the soil whose byproducts (such as CO2) are released into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change.
April 25, 2014, from Environmental News Service
Africa's Congo rainforest, the second-largest tropical rainforest in the world, has lost its much greenness over the past decade, a new analysis of satellite data shows.
The study demonstrates that a persistent drought in the Congo region since 2000 has affected the greenness of an increasing amount of forest area and that the browning trend has intensified over the 13 years of the study.
April 25, 2014, from Los Angeles Times
In the ongoing battle over offshore drilling, a federal judge in Alaska told regulators Thursday to redo an environmental impact study that underestimated the amount of recoverable oil and, potentially, the risks to delicate Arctic habitat.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Ralph Beistline stopped short of scrapping the $2.6 billion in leases, however. His ruling followed an appeals court decision in January that federal officials had arbitrarily decided drilling companies could extract 1 billion barrels of oil from the shallow waters off the northwest coast of Alaska. That figure led to a misguided environmental study, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said.
April 25, 2014, from St. Louis Business Journal
Peabody Energy's revenue declined 6.9 percent in the first quarter, falling to $1.63 billion on lower coal pricing... "U.S. coal demand continues to rebound, resulting in one of the largest inventory drawdowns on record," Chairman and CEO Gregory Boyce said in a statement. "And while current seaborne markets remain challenged, we look for fundamentals to improve as demand continues to increase and supply growth moderates. Peabody's position in the low-cost U.S. basins and high-growth Asian markets allows us to navigate current market pressures and benefit from long-term demand trends."
April 25, 2011, from Columbia University via ScienceDaily
In a study to be published in the April 21st issue of Science, researchers at Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science report their findings that the ozone hole, which is located over the South Pole, has affected the entire circulation of the Southern Hemisphere all the way to the equator. While previous work has shown that the ozone hole is changing the atmospheric flow in the high latitudes, the new Columbia Engineering paper demonstrates that the ozone hole is able to influence the tropical circulation and increase rainfall at low latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere. This is the first time that ozone depletion, an upper atmospheric phenomenon confined to the polar regions, has been linked to climate change from the Pole to the equator.
April 25, 2009, from NOAA, via ScienceDaily
Two of the most important climate change gases increased last year, according to a preliminary analysis for NOAA’s annual greenhouse gas index, which tracks data from 60 sites around the world. Researchers measured an additional 16.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) -- a byproduct of fossil fuel burning -- and 12.2 million tons of methane in the atmosphere at the end of December 2008. This increase is despite the global economic downturn, with its decrease in a wide range of activities that depend on fossil fuel use.
"Only by reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and increasing energy production from renewable resources will we start to see improvements and begin to lessen the effects of climate change," said scientist Pieter Tans of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. "At NOAA we have monitored carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouses gases for decades and will continue to do so to help assess the situation and advise decision makers."
April 25, 2009, from Daily Wildcat (Arizona)
Researchers at the UA Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department, successfully isolated the impact of increasing temperature on the pinon pine, one of North America's most abundant species of pine tree, and the experiment produced some worrisome results.
"Widespread die-off of pinon pine throughout the southwest will occur five times faster in future droughts if the climate warms by four degrees Celsius," said Henry Adams, the lead researcher of the experiment.
This equates to a 28 percent higher die-off rate than trees that were used as a control at cooler temperatures.
"The increased mortality rate of pinon pines due to higher temperatures will increase the release of carbon into the atmosphere, affect erosion rates and increase the likelihood of forest fires in the southwestern United States," Adams said.
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Resource
Depletion
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Recovery
April 25, 2014, from CNN
A company in China has used giant 3D printers to make 10 full-sized, detached single-storey houses in a day, it appears.
A private firm, WinSun, used four 10m x 6.6m printers to spray a mixture of cement and construction waste to build the walls, layer by layer, official Xinhua news agency reported.
The cheap materials used during the printing process and the lack of manual labour means that each house can be printed for under $5,000, the 3dprinterplans website says.
"We can print buildings to any digital design our customers bring us. It's fast and cheap," says WinSun chief executive Ma Yihe.
April 25, 2014, from Scientific American
Driven by an explosion in photovoltaics, the U.S. solar sector has emerged "from a relatively small contributor to the nation's total electric capacity into a one of comparative significance," the Energy Information Administration reported this week in its latest Electricity Monthly Update.
Since 2010, EIA said, U.S. solar capacity increased 418 percent from 2,326 megawatts, accounting for 0.2 percent of total U.S. electric generation, to today's 12,057 MW, or 1.13 percent of U.S. generation.
April 25, 2013, from PhysOrg
The EU appears set to impose a two-year ban on the use of insecticides blamed for a sharp and worrying decline in bee populations, an EU source said Thursday....
Under EU procedure, if Monday's vote is the same, the Commission has the authority to proceed on its own with the ban.
"The most likely outcome will be the same as last time ... and in that case, the Commission will decide to put the ban into operation," the source said.
The Commission wants the insecticides banned for use on four major crops--maize (corn), rape seed, sunflowers and cotton--in a bid to protect the bee population....
Experts have isolated three compounds causing concern--clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam, known as neonicotinoids--which are present in insecticides produced by pharmaceutical giants Bayer of Germany and Switzerland's Syngenta.
April 25, 2013, from Stanford, via EurekAlert
... Currently the electrical grid cannot tolerate large and sudden power fluctuations caused by wide swings in sunlight and wind. As solar and wind's combined contributions to an electrical grid approach 20 percent, energy storage systems must be available to smooth out the peaks and valleys of this "intermittent" power - storing excess energy and discharging when input drops....
When discharging, the molecules, called lithium polysulfides, absorb lithium ions; when charging, they lose them back into the liquid. The entire molecular stream is dissolved in an organic solvent, which doesn't have the corrosion issues of water-based flow batteries....
"In initial lab tests, the new battery also retained excellent energy-storage performance through more than 2,000 charges and discharges, equivalent to more than 5.5 years of daily cycles," Cui said....
A utility version of the new battery would be scaled up to store many megawatt-hours of energy.
April 25, 2012, from Michigan Technical University, via EurekAlert
The coolest new nanomaterial of the 21st century could boost the efficiency of the next generation of solar panels, a team of Michigan Technological University materials scientists has discovered.
Graphene, a two-dimensional honeycomb of carbon atoms, is a rising star in the materials community for its radical properties....
In dye-sensitized solar cells, photons knock electrons from the dye into a thin layer of titanium dioxide, which relays them to the anode. Hu's group found that adding graphene to the titanium dioxide increased its conductivity, bringing 52.4 percent more current into the circuit....
The team also developed a comparably foolproof method for creating sheets of titanium dioxide embedded with graphene. It first made graphite oxide powder, then mixed it with titanium dioxide to form a paste, spread it on a substrate (such as glass) and then baked it a high temperatures.
"It's low-cost and very easy to prepare," said Hu.
April 25, 2009, from Chester Chronicle
A SCIENTIST is hoping to save the planet with poo.
Research scientist Ruyi Hu, 24, from Chester, is at the cutting edge of experimental technologies with the potential to cut thousands of tons of carbon emissions and save millions of pounds.
His work on Inverted Phase Fermentation might be a conversation killer at dinner parties but could enable the billions of litres of waste water generated in the North West every year to be treated in a much more environmentally friendly way.
April 25, 2009, from Scripps Institution of Oceanography / UC San Diego via ScienceDaily
An expansion of wetlands and not a large-scale melting of frozen methane deposits is the likely cause of a spike in atmospheric methane gas that took place some 11,600 years ago, according to an international research team led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego... "This is good news for global warming because it suggests that methane clathrates do not respond to warming by releasing large amounts of methane into the atmosphere," said Vasilii Petrenko, a postdoctoral fellow at University of Colorado, Boulder, who led the analysis while a graduate student at Scripps.... "This study is important because it confirms that wetlands and moisture availability change dramatically along with abrupt climate change," said [co-author Jeff] Severinghaus. "This highlights in a general way the fact that the largest impacts of future climate change may be on water resources and drought, rather than temperature per se."
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