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Bring on Enviropig?: Can Genetic Engineering Make Meat a More Sustainable Food?
Food safety advocates may shudder at the thought, but a team of scientists in Canada have come up with a new breed of pig that is intended to make meat a greener, more sustainable food. The Enviropig is engineered to have the same meat quality as your typically breeded Yorkshire pig, with all the ideal…
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Huge Parts of World Are Drying Up: Land ‘Evapotranspiration’ Taking Unexpected Turn
ScienceDaily (Oct. 11, 2010) — The soils in large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including major portions of Australia, Africa and South America, have been drying up in the past decade, a group of researchers conclude in the first major study to ever examine “evapotranspiration” on a global basis.
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Night-time lights bring insects, disease
Use of artificial lighting at night can change human and insect behaviors, increasing the risk of insect-borne disease. Consider that before gas street lamps and electric light bulbs were invented in the 1800s, the world settled into darkness after sunset, relying only on the moon and stars for light. That is still the case in…
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China overtakes U.S. as biggest energy consumer
IEA calculations based on preliminary data show that China has now overtaken the United States to become the world’s largest energy user. China’s rise to the top ranking was faster than expected as it was much less affected by the global financial crisis than the United States. For those who have been following energy consumption…
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VW Diesel Passat BlueMotion Hits Almost 75 MPG
Gavin Conway, a writer for the UK’s Sunday times, recently set out for a country drive. Quite the drive, in fact: his drive ended up lasting three days, on a three-day trip that took him from Maidstone, Kent, to the south of France, and almost all of the way back, on one tank of diesel.…
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A High-Risk Energy Boom Sweeps Across North America
Energy companies are rushing to develop unconventional sources of oil and gas trapped in carbon-rich shales and sands throughout the western United States and Canada. So far, government officials have shown little concern for the environmental consequences of this new fossil-fuel development boom. The most direct path to America’s newest big oil and gas fields…
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Hungary races to raise dam to avert new toxic spill
Hungarian authorities raced to finish building an emergency dam by Tuesday to hold back a threatened second spill of toxic sludge, and hunted for clues to the causes of last week’s deadly industrial spill. A million cubic meters of red mud, a by-product of alumina production, burst out of a plant reservoir into villages and…
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Sewage from passenger ships and ferries banned from the Baltic Sea
Ship sewage will no longer be allowed to foul the Baltic Sea. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) on Friday agreed to ban the discharge of sewage from passenger ships and ferries in the Baltic Sea. The decision comes after a three year WWF campaign to stop the dumping of waste water in the Baltic Sea.…
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Hungary sludge reservoir may collapse, town evacuated
Hungary’s premier warned on Saturday that the wall of a damaged industrial reservoir was likely to collapse, threatening a second spill of toxic red sludge, and a nearby village was evacuated as a precaution. About one million cubic meters of the waste material leaked out of the alumina plant reservoir into several villages and waterways…
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Ring of Fire Cause
The Pacific Ring of Fire is an area where large numbers of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur in the basin of the Pacific Ocean. In a 25,000 mile horseshoe shape, it is associated with a nearly continuous series of oceanic trenches, volcanic arcs, and volcanic belts and/or plate movements. The Ring of Fire has 452…