Many of the animal species at risk of extinction in the United States have not been included in the country’s official Endangered Species Act (ESA) list, according to new research from the University of Adelaide. National “red lists” are used by many countries to evaluate and protect locally threatened species. The ESA is one of [...]
The current Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards created a financial incentive for auto companies to make bigger vehicles that are allowed to meet lower targets, according to a new University of Michigan study. Over their lifetimes, these larger vehicles would generate between three and ten 1,000-megawatt coal-fired power plants’ worth of excess carbon emissions. A [...]
A high-speed robotic screening system, aimed at protecting human health by improving how chemicals are tested in the United States, will test 10,000 compounds for potential toxicity. The compounds cover a wide variety of classifications, and include consumer products, food additives, chemicals found in industrial processes, and human and veterinary drugs. A complete list of [...]
A team of bioprocessing engineers from Kansas State University’s Advanced Manufacturing Institute has been issued a patent for a system that removes phosphorus from wastewater and addresses environmental regulations. Excess phosphate from both animal and human wastewater is an important environmental problem. It can pollute water resources and cause algae blooms, a problem that was [...]
Take a Petri dish containing crude petroleum and it will release a strong odor distinctive of the toxins that make up the fossil fuel. Sprinkle mushroom spores over the Petri dish and let it sit for two weeks in an incubator, and surprise, the petroleum and its smell will disappear. “The mushrooms consumed the petroleum!” [...]
Runoff from the Sierra Nevada, a critical source of California’s water supply, could be enhanced by thinning forests to historical conditions, according to a report from a team of scientists with the University of California, Merced, UC Berkeley and the Environmental Defense Fund. The team proposes to test the hypothesis that forest-management strategies that use [...]
A University of Adelaide scientist says much more could be done to predict the likelihood and spread of serious disease – such as tuberculosis (TB) or foot-and-mouth disease – in Australian wildlife and commercial stock. Professor Corey Bradshaw and colleagues have evaluated freely available software tools that provide a realistic prediction of the spread of [...]
Secure World Foundation has just released an informative and instructive publication: European Space Governance: The Outlook. This space policy report is based on a conference organized by Secure World Foundation and the Institut français des Relations Internationales in Brussels, Belgium. It reviewed the evolution of European space governance and convened almost two years after the [...]
A century has passed after a company in Knoxville, Tennessee received a shipment that contained packing materials. It did not take long before bushy Japanese Stiltgrass that cushioned the goods started to grow along a nearby stream bank and began to spread all over the country. To see the results of that long-ago event, area [...]
Abnormal levels of caffeine in water indicate human contamination Researchers led by Prof. Sebastien Sauve of the University of Montreal’s Department of Chemistry have discovered that traces of caffeine are a useful indicator of the contamination of our water by sewers. “E coli bacteria is commonly used to evaluate and regulate the levels of fecal [...]
