A new paper by Natural Resources Defense Council says hydraulic fracturing (fracking) generates massive amounts of polluted wastewater in in the Marcellus Shale that threatens the health of drinking water supplies, rivers, streams, and groundwater - and that federal and state regulations have not kept pace with the dramatic growth of fracking and must be strengthened to reduce the risks of health issues throughout the Marcellus region.

Every once in a while, I like to go for a run on the beach. One of my favorite spots to hit the sand is San Gregorio State Beach – it lies just across the Santa Cruz range, is invariably quiet early on weekday mornings, and offers a good stretch of hard-packed sand along a southern route toward Pomponio State Beach.

At least, when the tide is out.

Whether you are concerned about Mayans, a worldwide infrastructure collapse or an exploding supervolcano, science has some good news for your doomsday preparation - sunlight and a twist of lime are an inexpensive and effective way to quickly improve the quality of your drinking water.

Researchers have found that adding lime juice to water while using a solar disinfection method removed detectable levels of harmful bacteria such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) significantly faster than solar disinfection alone. 

Rice and wheat take a lot of water to grow and no one eats more than China.  That also means no one contributes more to global warming from irrigation than China - a whopping 30 million tons of CO2 per year just from the pumping systems China uses.

Like everywhere, water usage has gone up in China with the surge in population. Groundwater used for crop irrigation in China has grown from 10 billion cubic meters in 1950 to more than 100 billion today. The pumping systems which support this immense irrigation network annually produce 33.1 MtCO2e (33.1 mega tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent), claims a new study.

The old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.  In this case, a picture is worth millions.  Millions of tons of carbon dioxide that could be saved if we stopped throwing food into landfills, that is.

Food waste is a pet peeve of mine. Yes, we do it at my house, probably way too much, but there is only so much nagging one can do.  I don't have the yard space to do composting - yes, I know, smelly hippies will insist I do it anyway but it isn't always practical. However, there is a 100% chance is it better to put it in the garbage disposal than in the garbage, so I do that whenever practical (so, not bones).

Check out the graphic below.  Some of it we can all easily do, some of it is not so easy.

Even one year after the disaster at the Daiichi nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan, it is still unfolding. It was locally surpassing the severity of Chernobyl relatively soon in the first few weeks. Four out of the six facilities were already no more than a pile of radioactive trash just like Chernobyl and it was clear since then that the future will be also similar to that of Chernobyl: A radioactive monument, still for our grand children’s grandchildren to be concerned about.

Scientists have reported the discovery of the floor of the world's oldest forest. They are now piecing together a view of this ancient site, dating back about 385 million years and - because virtually all studies have to reference global warming these days - they note their research could shed new light on the role of modern-day forests and their impact on climate change.

The recent discovery was made in the same area in Schoharie County, New York where fossils of the Earth's oldest trees, the Gilboa stumps, were discovered in the 1850s, 1920 and again in 2010 and were brought to the New York State Museum. The Museum has the world's largest and best collection of Gilboa fossil tree stumps.

These days it's common to hear about "ecosystem services," but what are they, really? According to G.C. Daily, who coined the phrase in 1997, ecosystem services are "the conditions and processes through which natural ecosystems, and the species that make them up, sustain and fulfill human life." Various authors have tweaked the definition over the years, sometimes to make it more accurate or specific to particular ecosystems. Recently, for instance, researchers amended the idea of ecosystem services to be more applicable to forests; their proposed definition referred to the "components of forests that are enjoyed, consumed, or used to produce specific measurable human benefits."