Green Options

The researchers further warn that increasing temperatures in this vital, globally-extended ecosystem could “reduce the transfer of primary produced organic matter to higher trophic levels” (e.g., such as those that sustain corals and the many species that use them as habitat), interfere with the global carbon pump, and possibly set up a positive feedback mechanism, further increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

In an interview, this author asked Dr. Wang, about the foreseeable impacts/uses of this technique. “Ultimately,” said Wang, ” this is a new way of accelerating the evolution of the whole organism in a very directed fashion (i.e., controlled by scientist). This is going to be important in new cell based therapies, new cell based production of drugs, or, say, biofuels.”

The the year round demand for items like cherries, mangoes, almonds and pistachios is far out-pacing world-wide production, leading to the perception of a shortage of pollinators.

According to the NAU researchers, the warming that occurred in the 20th Century and early 21st Century, “contrasts sharply” with the millennial-scale cooling trend; the last half-century being the warmest in the record, and, the decade from 1999 - 2008 being the warmest decade of the last 200 decades. Over all average temperatures were 1.4° C (about 2.5° F) warmer than the projected value based on the linear cooling trend.

An interview with and climate scientist and oceanographer Dr. Julian P. Sachs. quote from the interview: “The increase in atmospheric CO2 and methane since about 1850 are unprecedented in the last 800,000 years in terms of the amount and rate. High levels of these gases in the atmosphere in the geologic past (last 800 kyr there is excellent data from ice cores) have always been associated with warm temperatures, and vice versa. It is not a stretch to [...]

According to a 2008 study (Jelks et al), nearly 40% of freshwater species in North America are either at risk of disappearing or have already vanished. Representing some 761 distinct species, 230 are deemed “vulnerable”, 190 are threatened, 280 are endangered, and 61 are extinct (or extinct in the wild). These numbers represent a 90+% increase over a 1989 assessment of freshwater species. And these trends are consistent with assessments in Europe.

Most of us would consider a trip to a state or national park to be a chance to get away from the pollution that plagues our cities. But it’s seldom easy to escape the effects of urban and industrial air pollution. Now, with a new art project called ECLIPSE, the web viewer or park visitor can see real time air quality data “imposed” on the otherwise scenic landscapes of our state and national parks.

The appeal of shortwave, geoengineering is in it’s purportedly rapid, remediation impact (although no global experiments have been conducted yet). However, the combined climate impact of GHG increases with a geoengineered reduction in shortwave radiation is not known, but, it is feared, could result in environmental “winners” and “losers”–meaning some regions of the planet could experience severe drought, and even increased conflict over water resources.

The proposed experiment is called LIFE -Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment–and will be placed aboard Phobos-Grunt, a joint Russian-American mission to Phobos, the largest (and innermost) of Mars’s two moons (the smaller being Deimos). If all goes according to plan, it will be the first time living creatures from Earth will be sent intentionally beyond our Earth - Moon system.

In a first, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have developed a completely tree-powered electrical circuit.
The nano-scale device—approximately 130 nanometers [a nanometer is one billionth of a meter] in size—consumes just 10 billionths of a watt (10 nanowatts).

Unlike the legendary science fair experiment in which a potato-based electric circuit is created using two electrodes (each electrode being a different metal, which react with the starch, causing a potential difference and thus a current), the UW device utilizes electrodes comprised of the same metal, and is able to generate (output) 1.1 volts. “As far as we know, this is the first peer-reviewed paper of someone powering something entirely by sticking electrodes into a tree,” according to paper co-author Babak Parviz, associate professor of electrical engineering at the UW.