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Adidas new shoes are trash – literally. The German company has announced the creation of a new type of shoes made from recycled garbage pulled out of the ocean; the sustainable prototype has the upper part made entirely of yarns and filaments reclaimed from illegal deep-sea gillnets and other ocean waste, while the bottom part is […]
Germany is taking some serious strides in its attempt to reduce carbon emissions by 40 percent until 2020: the European country announced that it will shut down several coal-fired plants and move towards more sustainable energy sources. “Coal-fired plants with a capacity of 2.7 gigawatts will be shut down,” said the government sources, who declined to […]
Remember the Koch brothers? They're industrialists and businesspeople who own the second largest privately owned company in the United States (with 2013 revenues of $115 billion); their main business is in manufacturing, refining, and distribution of petroleum.
The Danish-based Lego is one of the big companies in the world that's actually making large scale efforts to lower its carbon footprint and run more sustainable business. They don't seem to be doing it out of a fake corporate responsibility ethos either. Lego is actually innovating. I mean, when a company says it wants to ditch the raw material its business is based on for something that's more expensive and which might not even exist yet, you know they actually mean it.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has rejected a proposal to list North American wild horses as threatened or endangered, arguing that a horse is a horse, wild or tame, and proponents have failed to show how the behaviour of wild horses differs from that of domestic ones. The number of North American wild stallions has […]
A team led by scientists at University of British Columbia highlights the impacts of climate change on the world's oceans and marine life. Two scenarios were analyzed. One followed the changes that would arise if the world banded together to significantly curb greenhouse gas emissions; the other summarized impacts 100 years from now if we'd go on with business as usual. The report outlines the consequences under each scenario and found immediate action is required if we're to avert at a catastrophic outcome, particularly regarding the planet's oceans.
Environmentalists and engineers have often argued against golf courses (especially abandoned golf courses), considering them a waste of space and resources, and for good reason. Golf courses cover huge areas of ground which could be used for something more productive. Now, Japanese company Kyocera is building a huge solar power plant on such an abandoned course.
Rising temperatures are fundamentally changing the way Australia's bearded lizards get their gender. Basically, the lizard's sex is not dependent on their genes as before, but on temperature. In time, the male chromosome could disappear, as more and more females are bred - the preferred sex. What this means is that if temperatures reach a critical level, then the lizards could become extinct due to lack of males. This has never happened before and it's as scary, as it is interesting.
As the US starts to thaw its relationship with Cuba, important economy, touristic and cultural prospects start to emerge; but as these prospects emerge, so to do environmental concerns. Cuban scientists are worried that as American tourists and money start flowing into their country, the environment will be the one to suffer. “We don’t have […]
Saber-tooth cats, the bane of early humans (and pretty much every creature that co-existed with them), roamed the Earth for 42 million years before going extinct at the end of the ice age. Now, a new study has found that their trademark teeth may have evolved later in their evolutionary stage, but when they grew, they grew […]
This little iron fish may look like a two bit souvenir, but what it can do is far more spectacular, not to mention useful. When added in boiling water, the fish-shaped object leaches just enough iron to offer up to 75 percent of daily iron needs of a person. Tests so far have proven that this simple, yet innovative the solution helped halve the cases of iron-deficiency anemia in Cambodian communities.
The Great Barrier Reef, which stretches 2,000km (1,200 miles) along the coast, is the world’s largest living ecosystem. Environmental groups are pushing to get the reef listed as “in danger” by the UNESCO, so that the Australian government would have to work harder to protect it from various dangers such as pollution, dredging, fishing and […]
It's so simple and incredibly useful I can't believe no one developed it before - a way to give leftover food from parties and meetings to homeless people who really need it.
Whether it’s Meatless Monday, Weekday Vegetarianism or simply cutting down meat consumption – people from developed countries are eating less meat, and it’s already making a difference. Even though some argue that cutting-back-consumption campaigns don’t push enough of a paradigm-shift, we’re already seeing the changes: 400 million animals were spared in the US alone in 2014 because […]
Today, ray-finned fish make up 99% of all fish species, but it wasn't always like this. In an attempt to find out what triggered this spectacular multi-niche dominance, paleontologists traveled back in time sort of speak and analyzed ancient fossils to see what the fish diversity makeup looked like millions of years ago. Intriguing enough, the ray fish practically exploded in their diversity right after the last great mass extinction which occurred 65 million years ago. An asteroid impact wiped out thousands of species, including all dinosaurs. But there was now enough room for other creatures to take their place. On land, mammals started filling in the large-scale niches eventually reaching a dominant position. In the water, it was the ray-finned fish that seized the opportunity.
The effects of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are great and long reaching - a new study has found that pink salmon in the Pacific Ocean are threatened by increasing ocean acidification.
You wouldn’t expect a dog and a turtle to be best friends, but as we’ve learned on the Internet, the animal kingdom can create some surprising friendship relationships. It all started when Christine Hilberg, a 29-year-old photography retoucher and animal Instagrammer rescued Puka, a 4-year-old mixed breed with a cleft lip from a homeless man in Los […]
Despite what you might have seen or not seen, there are actually some fireflies living west of the Rocky Mountains, though they mostly keep to themselves and are rarely spotted by humans. Every once in a while, people spot some. This time, one undergrad who was busy insect hunting in the Los Angeles County hit the jackpot after he discovered a new firefly species.
A new study has found that monarch butterfly populations have went down at alarming rates in the past couple of decades, going down on average by 80%. In the forests of Mexico, they went down by as much as 90%.
In the last couple of months, Japanese women flocked in unusual numbers to the Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens in Japan to see the main attraction in the flesh: a western lowland gorilla named Shabani. Apparently, the young Japanese women are going crazy after the gorilla's alleged good looks.
We seem to be losing the war on elephant poachers, but a new toolset that involves tracing slaughter hotspots in Africa based on DNA taken from ivory might be exactly what law enforcement needed all these years. This way, researchers at University of Washington, in collaboration with INTERPOL, found that most of the ivory seized since 2006 originates in just two areas.
Rwanda's Akagera national park will soon be home to seven lions flown in from South Africa. This is the first time in 15 years that lions will set foot in the country after the entire population was wiped out by cattle herders in the chaos that followed the 1994 genocide. The predators will hopefully mate and steadily replenish lion numbers back to a historical level.
National Geographic invites photographers from around the world to enter the 2015 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest – but hurry up, the final submission date is 30 June! Eligible contestants can visit natgeo.com/travelerphotocontest to submit photographs in any or all of four categories: Travel Portraits; Outdoor Scenes; Sense of Place; and Spontaneous Moments. The entry fee […]
Coral reefs are as important to oceanic ecosystems as they are vulnerable to global warming and ocean acidification. Coral reefs are being destroyed around the world, not only because of risint temperatures, but also due to coral mining, agricultural and urban runoff, pollution (organic and inorganic), overfishing, blast fishing, disease, and the digging of canals and access […]
The team looked at 15-years worth of data on California's grasslands, and documented declining plant diversity from 2000 to 2014 at both the local community (5 m2) and landscape (27 km2) scales, across multiple functional groups and soil environments. They found a link between wildflower diversity decline to significant decreases in midwinter precipitation.
When the freakish Hallucigenia was first discovered in the 1970s, paleontologists found it nearly impossible to distinguish heads from tail. Now, the bizarre creature - an ancestor to molding animals like crabs, worms or krill - had its features identified with unprecedented precision, but that doesn't mean it's less freakish looking: worm-like with a mouth adorned with a ring of teeth, bearing seven pairs of legs ending in claws, and three pairs of tentacles along its neck. To finish it off, its back was covered with enormous spikes. Yes, it looks weird, but so were most animals that lived 500 million years ago during the so-called Cambrian explosion - a period of massive bloom in terms of diversity of life and evolution. Most creatures of those times were somewhat primitive, but remarkably Hallucigenia was quite advanced for its age.
Taking a radically opposite stance on how we design our furniture, designer and innovator Gavin Munro has come up with a unique way to create furniture. Instead of cutting wood and joining the pieces together, he simply grows trees into chairs or tables. The idea is simple, yet innovative: let nature do all the work, and […]
Researchers at University of Hawaii, Manoa in collaboration with a team from the University of Tokyo were surprised to find not one, but two species of deep-water sharks that have positive buoyancy. Most sharks have a negative buoyancy, meaning if they stop swimming they'll sink to the bottom, and some researchers have posited that there may be some species with neutral buoyancy. Finding sharks that defy this conventional wisdom is definitely an important discovery. Now the researchers are trying to find out how the positive buoyancy is attained and whether other shark species have this ability.
More job opportunities could be created by investing clean energy sources than fossil fuels.
Geological evidence indicates that our planet has seen five mass extinction cycles since life first appeared on the planet. While they sound like the kind of cataclysmic events that only beardy men with huge boats survive through (read that in a book once, so it must be true), they are actually an integral part of […]
This Friday, the International Whaling Commission issued a report in which it states Japan has failed to provide any reasonable explanation for its mass killing of over 4,000 whales in the Antarctic for the past 12 years. The country says it's hunting whales for research purposes, but clearly it's all a front. A lame excuse. Unimpressed by the report, Japan officials claim there's a debate and lack of consensus (not really), and even though it "acknowledges" the IWC position it will likely continue as before. In other words, they don't care.
A novel, previously unseen self-repair mechanism was reported by a team of researchers at Caltech who studied the moon jellyfish. A lot of animals, mostly invertebrates, grow back their lost limbs after these are bitten off by predators or lost in an accident. The moon jellyfish, however, employs a different tactic altogether: instead of expending a lot of energy to regrow its lost limb, the animal re-arranges the limbs it has left to regain symmetry. Even when it's left with two limbs out of its initial eight, the jellyfish will still re-arrange itself. This sort of mechanism might prove extremely useful in designing self-repairing robots.
A research group working at the Australian Grains Free Air CO₂ Enrichment facility (AgFace) in Victoria is studying the effect elevated carbon dioxide will have on crops such as wheat, lentils, canola and field pea. They grow experimental crops in the open, surrounded by thin tubes that eject carbon dioxide into the air around the plants. Findings show that crops have higher yield (up to 25% more), but less proteins. Elevated CO2 also seems to ruin bread made from the grown wheat.
Wild bees provide environmental services worth $3,250 (€2,880) per hectare per year - accounting for billions, globally. Writing in Nature Communications, study authors quantify how much bees are doing for us, and stress that despite all their immense value, we still don't have a concrete plan to stop their numbers from dwindling.
We tend to think of the Earth's water as an inexhaustible resource; after all, you learn the basic water cycle in first grade - water moves from the rivers to the oceans and then evaporates into the atmosphere and then it comes back as rain - so how could it be disappearing? Well, the reality is much more complex than that, and as two different studies showed, we may actually be heading towards a major water crisis.
Among the best thing about being a biologist is you get to name things when you discover it. Now, a marine researcher in California will name one of the cutest invertebrates we've ever seen: so adorable, that it might actually be named 'adorabilis'.
In only 15 years, renewable energy (wind, solar, hydro) could surpass fossil fuels as the main provider of energy. According to a new International Energy Agency (IEA) report, renewables could provide more than 50% of the energy market by 2050. But even so, they warn, without bolder emission cuts, we'll be blowing past our current climate targets.
Ocean acidification, one of the often ignored dangers associated with climate change is becoming increasingly worrying. As our climate becomes hotter and hotter, the oceans become more and more acidic, and this threatens some animals' ability to create and maintain carbonatic shells.
It seems rather obvious to me, but there was a lot of debate regarding how a country’s politics affect its emissions – for better or for worse. A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that environmental policies in the US have had a significant impact on emissions from 1990 […]
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports it has classed all chimpanzees, whether captive or wild, under the Endangered Species Act. Previously, chimpanzees kept captive in labs for biomedical research, entertainment or as pets were classed as "threatened".The USFWS director Dan Ashe agrees that this has transmitted an erroneous mixed message to the public. Whether captive (and hopefully cared for) or living in the wild, all chimps belong the same species, and this species is definitely endangered and in dire need of help.
A new project started by Green Energy Africa in September 2014 has brought solar energy to 2,000 homes in Naiputa county alone, and put new power into the hands of women who sell affordable solar installations.
Known to feed mainly on seals, the images Jon Aars at the Norwegian Polar Institute captured of a polar bear dining on dolphins is a "culinary" first for the species. The photographs were taken in the Norwegian High Arctic, mid-April 2014. The bear was seen feeding on the carcass of one white-beaked dolphin, and covering another with snow.
After placing no less than 225 camera traps, a group of researchers has collected a massive database of 1.2 million photos documenting the secret live of the animals that roam Tanzania's Serengeti National Park. The shots offer a raw, unedited glimpse that wouldn't had been possible otherwise; genuinely up close and personal. So personal that some of the lions and other beasrs in the park went a step too far and tried to eat the cameras. At time, the only thing that was left of the camera was plastic shreds, but luckily some memory cards survived. How often do you get to see the last shot made by a camera? With a lion with a fully open jaws staring right at you, no less.
It's nothing new to hear about chimps or monkeys drinking alcohol, most often stolen from unsuspecting tourists, but a new research which documented the chimpanzees of Bossou, south-eastern Guinea, for the past 17 years found some engage in habitual drinking. It's the first evidence of habitual drinking outside humans. Like humans, some enjoy the brew more often than others, while some totally abstain from the habit.
Converting the power infrastructure to rely on clean, renewable energy seems like a daunting, expensive and some would say, unachievable task. But Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, and his colleagues, including U.C. Berkeley researcher Mark Delucchi, are the first to outline how each of the 50 states can achieve such a transition by 2050.
There are some important issues nowadays in which scientists and laymen seem to disagree on. For instance, there's climate change. While the world's leading climate scientists agree with 95% confidence (very very very likely) that the world's climate is changing in an accelerated manner due to greenhouse emissions as a result of human activities. But only 50% of Americans agree that global warming is happening and is caused by humans. Then there's the age old Darwinism vs creationism schism. A major survey found that 31% of the US public believed that humans had existed in their present form since the beginning, with a further 24% stating that humans had evolved under the guiding hand of a supreme being. In contrast, only 2% of AAAS scientists said humans had not evolved in their time on Earth. Of course, then there's the case of doctors vs so-called anti-vaxxers - people who refuse to vaccinate themselves or their children because they think these cause illness, not ail or prevent it. But maybe one of the most heated debate in which scientists and the public is mostly opposed concerns genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Seven miniature species of frogs living on seven different mountain tops sounds like the premise for the next Kung Fu Panda sequel. But as researcher Marcio Pie of the Federal University of Parana and his colleagues show in a paper published in PeerJ., it is what they have found in the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil.
Geoscientists have finally unraveled one of Greenland's long-standing mysteries: how billions of gallons of water can drain in a matter of hours. They believe that this might also help us better understand how sea levels will rise in the future.
The island country is preparing to launch a new energy policy, seeking to curb costs and promote the use of environmentally friendly sources of power.
In its “Energy Security and Sustainability Strategy” (ES2 Strategy) report, the US army outlines the steps it should take to increase resilience and adapt to an ever changing world. Energy makes the go world round, and for an army it's literally a matter of life and death. Not surprisingly, the authors note given the current climate of affairs the "army will prioritize solutions that reduce multiple resources. The Army can use energy more efficiently by purchasing energy efficient products, modernizing buildings and utility systems, purchasing energy efficient vehicles, and using more renewable/alternative energy sources." Basically, being dependent on a finite resource (oil) is a security vulnerability, which isn't something new. Military strategists have been aware of this for a long time - maybe the most during WWII when many lives were claimed in battles over oil rigs in North Africa and the Middle East, and oil refineries were being bombed on the clock. What's changed today is the feasibility of renewable energy sources. Drawing the line, in those situations were oil is a liability (and we can only expect these to become ever numerous in the future), it'll be scrapped in favor of renewable energy systems, both for generating and storing energy.
