Environment

Soil Can Limit Ability Of Plants To Slow Climate Change

Many scientists assume that the growing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will accelerate plant growth but a new study suggests much of this growth will be curtailed by limited soil nutrients so that by the end of the century, there may be more 10 ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 23 2015 - 7:30am

Diabetes Drug Metformin Linked To Intersex Fish

Metformin, a medication commonly taken for Type II diabetes, is being found in freshwater systems worldwide, and a new study says that it causes physical changes in male fish exposed to doses similar to the amount in wastewater effluent. It causes interse ...

Article - News Staff - May 1 2015 - 8:50am

Cold Case Tibet: Climate Change Implicated In Collapse 4,000 Years Ago

Climate change may have been be responsible for the abrupt collapse of civilization on the fringes of the Tibetan Plateau around 2,000 B.C.- but it wasn't the modern political connotation of climate change, with man-made carbon dioxide causing warming ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 29 2015 - 7:28am

Create A Carbon Sink From Your Organic Farm

Agriculture is a breathtaking achievement of modern science. We are on the path to being able to feed the world for the first time in history and the upward trend in obesity is due to the fact that more food has been produced at lower cost with less envir ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 29 2015 - 11:55am

Airplane De-Icing Agents Linked To Reduced Oxygen In Groundwater

Spring is here and that means fewer airplanes need to be de-iced. That may be good, according to a new study which finds that de-icing agents accumulated during the winter, which end up on unpaved areas and infiltrate into the soils during snowmelt, could ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 30 2015 - 7:50am

Chlorophyll Fluorescence: Forest Glow Of Photosynthesis Activity Can Be Tracked From Space

A research team has provided ground-truth for a method of measuring plant photosynthesis on a global scale: from low-Earth orbit. ...

Article - News Staff - May 2 2015 - 8:33am

How To Responsibly Increase Edamame Acreage In The Midwest

Edamame- vegetable soybean- is not widely grown in the United States, but it is growing in popularity. Part of the reason only about 85 million acres of grain-type soybean were grown in the U.S. in 2014 is because Asia can do it cheaply and there has been ...

Article - News Staff - May 9 2015 - 8:30am

TBA Hormone Used In Beef Cattle Persists In The Environment, Says Model

A numerical model estimates the  potential impact of environmental processes on contaminant fate of growth-promoting hormones used in beef production and leads the authors to believe they may persist in the environment at higher concentrations and for lon ...

Article - News Staff - May 13 2015 - 8:47am

Sustainable Pest Management Systems Help Butterflies Too

Grape vineyards experimenting with sustainable pest management systems are seeing an unexpected benefit: an increase in butterflies. This method of conservation is easier in Washington, since vineyards in this state already face fewer pests and use fewer ...

Article - News Staff - May 15 2015 - 5:32pm

Cattle Ranchers And Policy Agreements In Brazil Lead To 10X Decline In Deforestation

Before 2009, nearly 4 in 10 cattle ranchers and slaughterhouse in Brazil reported recent deforestation but by 2013, this number dropped to 4 in 100, a 10-fold decrease. What changed? Policies that were not simply advocated by first world elites that told p ...

Article - News Staff - May 12 2015 - 12:51pm