Environment

Biodiversity conservation: in situ and ex situ.

I had a chance to witness plant conservation sites in Sweden, Japan  Germany and India. Almost all the plant species are conserved in cold storage, in liquid nitrogen, and in different methods of storage so that if mankind looses all plants on earth in th ...

Blog Post - Ashwani Kumar - Oct 21 2012 - 7:08pm

Green Walls: Vertical Gardens Flip Parks On Their Sides

When visitors arrive at Edmonton International Airport in Alberta, Canada, they are greeted by a 1,440 square foot living wall; a “green wall” arranged like a modern art canvas with 8,000 plants encompassing 32 different species. “It is the largest living ...

Article - Brita Belli - Oct 25 2012 - 6:00am

Does American Exceptionalism Apply To The US SuperFund Law?

Can you be liable for damages if you didn't mean to do it? Can the pollution laws of one country be enforced in another? When it comes to politics and the environment, laws really only count when they are on your side, as we saw when Germans ironicall ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Oct 24 2012 - 4:30am

The Days Of The Dead

With Halloween just around the corner, storefronts, lawn ornaments, and general décor have adjusted to reflect our temporary obsession with creepy-crawlies, scary monsters, and death.  The latter topic is something that we – college and graduate students ...

Article - Holly Moeller - Oct 26 2012 - 11:38am

China Faces A Looming Nitrogen Problem

Perhaps China could use some genetically modified food.  Otherwise, meeting the food demands of 22 percent of the world's population while maintaining their over-reliance on nitrogen-based fertilizer will continue to dramatically increase their emissi ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 4 2012 - 4:10am

Zombie Carbon In The Soil Rises Again

Erosion can bury carbon in the soil, acting as a carbon sin but a new study has found that part of that sink is only temporary. The researchers estimated that roughly half of the carbon buried in soil by erosion will be re-released into the atmosphere with ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 6 2012 - 12:00pm

Biosphere 2: World's Largest Artificial Watershed Gets Its First Rain

Rain in Southern Arizona is usually scarce- but on November 29th, 25 miles north of Tucson, the soil was soaked. Spouting from a network of pipes, thousands of gallons of water drizzled down onto the world's only and largest man-made experimental wat ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 4 2012 - 1:23pm

Soot: The Little-Discussed Impact Of Wildfires In Greenland Snowpack Melting

Smoke from Arctic wildfires have been drifting over the Greenland ice sheet, tarnishing the ice with soot and making it more likely to melt under the sun, according to satellite observations. NASA's Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satelli ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 13 2012 - 12:11pm

Good Soil Doesn't Just Fall From The Sky, You Know

Soil organic matter makes up the bulk of terrestrially bound carbon in our biosphere. Those compounds play an important role, not only for soil fertility and agricultural yields but also for controlling the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmospher ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 15 2012 - 12:00pm

Care About Sustainable Food? Add Bug Larvae To Your Diet

When people talk about sustainable food in 2013, they really mean something with an 'organic' label that they can attribute all kinds of other ethical and environmental traits to- sustainable food the way those people mean it is not sustainable ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Jan 6 2013 - 11:28am