World Problems

In the 1980s a report described how a ginormous patch of plastic trash was guided by currents and concentrated right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in an area that some estimated as being roughly two times the size of Texas. Naturally, people all over the world were outraged, but I guess it didn’t last too [...]

Just 9% of the millions of tonnes of fish caught by China’s giant fishing fleet in international waters (most notably in Africa) is reported to the UN. Overfishing is one of the most serious issues mankind is facing – people don’t really understand that aquatic resources are not neverending, and this is probably the kind [...]

In the past few years a relatively new field of science has surfaced into mainstream discussions, especially those concerning biodiversity and nature conservation – synthetic biology. Some are simply ecstatic of its progress and findings, while others are simply terrified by some of its potential consequences. In an attempt to address the issue, albeit from [...]

A new study stresses the overlooked hazards that dumped pharmaceuticals found in wastewater pose to the world’s freshwater streams. So far, the impacts and consequences on water quality and aquatic life are unknown or under researched, and the authors hope their findings might warrant more work in this direction. Dr. Emma Rosi-Marshall, lead author of [...]

It’s important to understand that our planet’s climate consists of so much interconnected elements, that what happens someplace affects virtually the entire Earth. Thing is, few people realize the huge impact the warming in the Arctic has on global climate. At a news conference held on Tuesday, several researchers said that the melting ice may [...]

The Iberian lynx is the only wild cat listed as  critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), numbering no more than 200 specimens, all of whom are entirely confined to southern Spain. Researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) in Berlin recently salvaged embryos and egg cells from a pair of captive [...]

A new study sheds new light on the impact humans had on the local aviary fauna in the Pacific, after the authors conclude that human colonization of the Pacific Islands is the main driving factor that wiped out some 1,300 bird species in the area or roughly 10% of the entire bird population on the [...]

You’ve probably heard it a few times: the climate is indeed warming up, but it’s all good, because the rate at which it is warming up is slowing down. But a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters analyzing ocean warming (which represents 90% of global warming) claims otherwise. Accelerating global warming Contrary to the [...]

The current leading theory that explains the mass extinction of the dinosaurs – once the dominant group of animals on Earth for millions of years – states that an asteroid impact some 65 million years ago brought their demise, wiping them out along with 70% of all life on the planet. A new study, however, [...]

A NOAA paper published 4 years ago showed, almost beyond the shadow of a doubt, that climate change is irreversible for approximately for approximately 1000 years. Despite this and several other papers that had pretty much the same conclusions, people still believe that climate change is reversible in the near future; it’s not. We’ve reached [...]