Biology
Breach
December 2, 2013, from Politico
Doing nothing often has a cost -- and when it comes to storing the nation's nuclear waste, the price is $38 billion and rising.
That's just the lowball estimate for how much taxpayers will wind up spending because of the government's decades of dithering about how to handle the radioactive leftovers sitting at dozens of sites in 38 states. The final price will be higher unless the government starts collecting the waste by 2020, which almost nobody who tracks the issue expects.
December 2, 2013, from Scientific American
Every time you wash your hair, a lot of shampoo goes down the drain. And if you're bothered by tiny white flakes, odds are you use a shampoo that deals with dandruff.
Such medicinal shampoos often include a fungicide. A fair amount of fungicide thus ends up at the local wastewater treatment plant. Those industrial facilities remove a lot of stinky stuff. But they mostly fail to grab the drugs in soaps, shampoos, toothpastes, perfumes, sunscreen and other skincare products that our daily habits add to wastewater.
Now a study has detected fungicides from anti-dandruff shampoos in the water. And even at concentrations as low as 0.5 micrograms per liter of H2O such fungicides can hurt many organisms, from tiny algae to big plants and fish.
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Climate
Chaos
December 2, 2014, from CNN
The first ten months of 2014 have been the hottest since record keeping began more than 130 years ago, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That may be hard to believe for people in places like Buffalo, New York, which saw a record early snowfall this year.
But NOAA says, despite the early bitter cold across parts of the United States in recent weeks, it's been a hot year so far for the Earth.
With two months left on the calendar, 2014 is shaping up to be the hottest year on record.
December 2, 2011, from UPI
The arctic polar region's climate has warmed up in the last five years and the change is likely to stick around as a "new normal," U.S. scientists say.
A team of 121 scientists from 14 nations concluded the arctic climate has reached a turning point, ScienceNews.org reported Thursday.
Enough data have been collected "to indicate a shift in the Arctic Ocean system since 2006," said Jacqueline Richter-Menge of the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H. "This shift is characterized by the persistent decline in the thickness and summer extent of sea-ice cover and by a warmer, less salty upper ocean."...
"We've got a new normal," Don Perovich of CRREL said.
"The past five years have had the five smallest September ice extents," Perovich said, "showing that Arctic sea ice has not recovered from the large decrease observed in 2007."
December 2, 2009, from London Daily Telegraph
An ambitious deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions needs to be agreed at the Copenhagen climate summit to give a 50/50 chance of keeping temperatures from rising more than 2C, Lord Stern has said. But failure to secure a new agreement could put the world at risk of temperature rises of more than 5C - a change in climate which he said "could only be described as catastrophic."
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Resource
Depletion
December 2, 2014, from Cincinnati Enquirer
... After running 10 kilometers, participants are greeted with energy bars, granola bars, yogurt, bagels, fruit and more. There's always enough to go around from first finisher to the last. In fact, there's often so much that the extras are packed up and donated to the Freestore Foodbank.
Not this year.... Early finishers of the Thanksgiving Day Race on Thursday wanted more of the post-race snacks than their hands and arms could hold.... After the plundering of the post-race snack zone, many finishers fled as fast as they finished...."All that was left was liquid," Isphording said. "There wasn't any food left for the walkers."
December 2, 2009, from SolveClimate
Falling pH levels are particularly harmful for calcifying organisms such as coral and shellfish, which have a harder time building and maintaining their calcium-based exteriors as the ocean grows more acidic.... In fact, some ocean researchers fear that acidification will obliterate Earth's coral reefs in as few as 50 years. That's why they have begun to design cryogenically cooled coral preservation "arks" where polyps can be stored to stave off total extinction.... Corals aren't the only species likely to be affected by the ongoing acidification of the world's oceans. According to marine ecologist Joanie Kleypas, ocean acidification could affect ocean life forms ranging from tiny algae to giant whales in unpredictable ways.... Damage to populations of the tiniest plants and creatures, whether through rising water temperature, greater acidity or loss of habitat, can spread through an entire food chain, throwing it out of balance.
Consider, for example, the tiny pterapod, a marine snail whose shell is affected by changing pH. The pterapod is an important food source for young salmon, mackerel, herring and cod, which are important food sources for larger animals and economic sources for humans.
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Recovery
December 2, 2013, from Springfield News-Leader
The new Sherwood Elementary will be built to use as little energy as possible.
The Springfield school board recently gave the go-ahead for architects and engineers to design a 450-student building at 2524 S. Golden Ave. that dramatically reduces energy usage.
That decision also leaves open the possibility of eventually adding a renewable energy source to transform Sherwood into the state's first school capable of achieving a "net zero" rating, meaning it generates as much energy as it consumes.
December 2, 2013, from New York Times
... With any uneaten food, the plates, made from sugar cane, can be thrown away and turned into a product prized by gardeners and farmers everywhere: compost. If all goes as planned, compostable plates will replace plastic foam lunch trays by September not just for the 345,000 students in the Miami-Dade County school system, but also for more than 2.6 million others nationwide.
That would be some 271 million plates a year, replacing enough foam trays to create a stack of plastic several hundred miles tall.
December 2, 2013, from Quartz
The boom in solar energy in the US in recent years? You haven't seen anything yet. The pipeline of photovoltaic projects has grown 7 percent over the past 12 months and now stands at 2,400 solar installations that would generate 43,000 megawatts (MW), according to a report released today by market research firm NPD Solarbuzz. If all these projects are built, their peak electricity output would be equivalent to that of 43 big nuclear power plants, and enough to keep the lights on in six million American homes.
Only 8.5 percent of the pipeline is currently being installed, with most of it still in the planning stages. Some projects will inevitably get canceled or fail to raise financing... But there's reason to believe that a good chunk of these solar power plants and rooftop installations will get built over the next two years. That's because a crucial US tax break for renewable energy projects is set to fall from 30 percent to 10 percent at the end of 2016.
December 2, 2013, from Politico
In Appalachia, greens are banding together with the Tennessee Conservative Union to oppose mountaintop mining. In Georgia, the Sierra Club and Atlanta's tea party have formed a Green Tea Coalition that is demanding a bigger role for solar power in the state's energy market. Elsewhere, veterans of the George W. Bush administration are working with the Environmental Defense Fund on market-based ideas for protecting endangered species... some activists -- particularly outside the Beltway -- see potential for the kinds of coalitions that used to get big things done, back in the days when Theodore Roosevelt was creating national parks and George H.W. Bush's administration was taking on acid rain.
December 2, 2011, from BBC
The calendar used by the ancient Mayan civilisation does not predict the end of the world in December 2012 as some believe, according to experts.
A new reading of a Mayan tablet mentioning the 2012 date suggests that it refers to the end of an era in the calendar, and not an apocalypse.
The date was "a reflection of the day of creation", Mayan codes researcher Sven Gronemeyer told AP....
Only two out of 15,000 registered Mayan texts mention the date 2012, according to the Institute, and no Mayan text predicts the end of the world.
"There is no prophecy for 2012. It is a marketing fallacy," Erik Velasquez, etchings specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told Reuters.
December 2, 2009, from Reuters
...A standard cremation spews into the air about 400 kilograms (880 pounds) of carbon dioxide -- a greenhouse gas blamed for global warming -- along with other pollutants like dioxins and mercury vapor if the deceased had silver tooth fillings.
On top of that each cremation guzzles as much energy, in the form of natural gas and electricity, as a 500-mile (800 kilometer) car trip.
Enter alkaline hydrolysis, a chemical body-disposal process its proponents call "bio-cremation" and say uses one-tenth the natural gas of fire-based cremation and one-third the electricity.
C02 emissions are cut by almost 90 percent and no mercury escapes as fillings and other metal objects, such as hip or knee replacements, can be recovered intact and recycled.
December 2, 2009, from USA Today
On the combination plate of problems plaguing the USA's public schools, few are as intractable as this: Can you serve fresh, healthful meals each day to millions of kids without breaking the bank, or must you resort to serving up deep-fried, processed, less expensive junk?... For the first time, a small, privately held start-up is pushing to do just that: producing what are by all accounts fresh, healthful, all-natural school meals for just under $3 apiece. Starting with just one school in spring 2006, Revolution Foods has quietly grown year by year and now delivers about 45,000 breakfasts, lunches and snacks daily to 235 public and private schools in California, Colorado and the District of Columbia...Revolution shuns high-fructose corn syrup, artificial colors and flavors, trans fats and deep-frying. Its meats and milk are hormone- and antibiotic-free, and many of its ingredients are organic and locally sourced.
December 2, 2009, from BusinessGreen
German solar cell start-up Heliatek GmbH has announced that it has secured... a second round of financing that will allow it to begin work on a manufacturing facility near its Dresden headquarters.
The company, which was founded in 2006 as a spin-off from the Universities of Dresden and Ulm, specialises in the development of so-called organic solar cells that use carbon and other organic materials to create dyes that convert sunlight to electricity.
Advocates of the technology predict that the use of organic materials means it will ultimately prove more cost effective than both traditional silicon-based photovoltaic cells and emerging thin-film technologies.
Organic solar cells are also extremely lightweight, with Heliatek claiming that its cells weigh just 500 grams per square metre, compared to about 20 kilograms per square metre for typical PV solar cells. The company predicts that as a result, the technology will prove well suited to building integrated and even mobile applications such as vehicles.
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