New York City has been turning tidal wetlands into urban development for centuries. In his new book Gotham Unbound, Ted Steinberg says Hurricane Sandy showed the peril of ignoring the city's true ecological footprint....
If you're planning a road trip this summer, you might want to add one or all of these great science destinations to your itinerary. ...
Last November, a gargantuan iceberg broke free from the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica. Six times larger than Manhattan and possibly 1,600 feet thick, iceberg B31 is now drifting slowly toward the Southern Ocean. The time-lapse video above, posted by NASA's Earth Observatory this week, consists of images from the Terra and Aqua satellites. It starts in early November, just as the iceberg was calving...
Biofuel created from corn waste may not be the clean, eco-friendly oil alternative the United States government is hoping for. A new study has found that fuel generated from harvested corn leftovers creates more greenhouse gases than conventional gasoline — at least in the short term. The fuel under study, called cellulosic ethanol, has been touted in recent years as a promising successor to current...
In Discover Magazine's June print edition, the article "Light Makes Flight" chronicles the story of two pilots who developed brand new solar cells to circumnavigate the globe via a fossil fuel-free plane. NOVA's Energy Lab is a citizen science project you can do now to learn about and contribute to the future of sustainability. It might seem strange that one of the world’s most well known adventurers...
Severe drought continues in a large portion of the West, according to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor report, issued yesterday. In California, already particularly hard hit by drought, the situation is worsening. Temperatures there were 9 to 12 degrees above normal, which caused breathtakingly rapid melt of the California snowpack. Some areas of the Sierra Nevada lost half of the water locked up in...
Here we are in mid-April and the Midwest is experiencing yet another unusual wintry blast. No wonder there's still quite a lot of ice in the Great Lakes, as you can see in the remarkable image above, captured under a full moon at night by the Suomi NPP satellite. Click on it to enlarge it. The ice is particularly evident in Lake Superior at upper left. Meanwhile, warm and dry conditions continue in...
The globe overall might have been quite warm in March, but here in the United States the picture was quite different. Following yesterday's release by NASA of data showing that this past March was the fourth warmest globally in 134 years of record-keeping, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration today announced that the United States experienced its 43rd coldest March in a record stretching...
The odds that an El Niño will develop by summer appear to be getting stronger. In a report released yesterday, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology raised the odds of an El Niño developing by summer (winter in the Southern Hemisphere) to greater than 70 percent. And in his monthly analysis, Klaus Wolter of NOAA's Earth Systems Research Laboratory noted that the evolution of conditions over the past...
Move over Brawny, there’s a new product in the works with the strength to get the job done, and it comes from the sea. Cine’al Ltd., an Israeli nanotechnology start-up, is developing a line of super-absorbing products made from jellyfish. Jellyfish populations worldwide have been exploding in recent years, and the creatures are expected to be one of the few winners of the warming oceans brought about...
An agricultural chemical disrupting fish habitats exhibits strange nocturnal behavior. ...
Papermaking is a notoriously messy — and smelly — affair. Roughly 200 chemicals are used to break down tree fiber so it can be used to make the myriad paper products we use daily. But researchers have now genetically engineered trees that are easier to break down, which could reduce the amount of chemicals and energy used in the papermaking process. The archenemy of the papermaker is lignin, which...
A biologist recruited the glassy-winged sharpshooter's sworn enemy, microscopic wasps, to decimate their population....
The collapse of a polar ice shelf is one of the most impressive sights on Earth – and for those with an eye on our rising seas, one of the most worrying. And now, new research suggests that the disappearance of these frozen platforms could be even more hazardous than we thought. German climatologists have shown that when an ice shelf collapses, its demise can trigger a chain reaction leading to the...
When surveyors for California's Department of Water Resources skied back down from sites high in California's Sierra Nevada range yesterday, they brought sobering news: Although late-season storms have boosted the snowpack, it is still shockingly below average as the melt season looms. According to a DWR report issued yesterday, the water content of the snowpack is only 32 percent of average for this...
Here's my take-away on the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was released today: Regardless of what you may hear on radio and television shout-fests masquerading as journalism, the best science leads to one simple conclusion: If we want to reduce the risks of significant climate change that would challenge our ability to adapt, we need to act now. Time is running out....
The doom and gloom of climate change is well-documented: Rising sea levels; infectious diseases on the march; more frequent droughts. But a new study suggests that for olive oil production, climate change will be both a blessing and a curse. In the Mediterranean Basin, which produces 97 percent of the world's olive oil, average temperatures are expected to increase 2°C (3.6°F) between 2030 and 2060....
A day after a major scientific organization released an embarrassingly ineffective report aimed at communicating the realities of climate change, the White House has launched something entirely different — and better. For now, it is a web portal that serves as a kind of clearinghouse for all manner of information on how sea level rise is remaking our coasts and posing risks to those who live and work...
An ant is not exactly the picture you see in the dictionary next to “rule-breaker." Colonial ants work together to collect food and generally act in the best interest of the group. Yet certain enormous ants in South America break a basic rule in biology: as you move up the food chain, you should find a smaller group of organisms at each step. These ants are top predators that take up far more than...
Just a week ago, I posted some imagery of an intense dust storm sweeping south through the High Plains. Well, here we go again... Today, high winds triggered two dust storms, one in Colorado stretching into Kansas and the Oklahoma Panhandle, and the other in the Texas Panhandle — the same region as last week's storm. They were so big that they are clearly visible in a mosaic of images from NASA's...