Month: December 2010

  • Green Diet

    It is a buzz word nowadays. Green is good. there is green chemistry, green products, and green foods. How much green is good and how much is just lip service is another matter. Green is more that that the product is sustainable or based on recycled materials in this case. Researchers found that more than…

  • Impacts of Bottom Trawling on Fisheries, Tourism, and the Marine Environment

    Fishing is one of the most important employers and sources of protein for coastal communities in Belize. Yet bottom trawls and other kinds of unselective fishing gear cause harm to other fisheries and to the marine environment by catching juvenile fish, damaging the seafloor, and leading to overfishing.

  • Frog Bladders Hold Surprises

    Australia’s desert frogs are famously able to store up large amounts of water in their bladder to last them through the drought. But now researchers from Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory have found that frog bladders can hold another, even more bizarre surprise.

  • EPA postpones smog rule again

    The Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday it was again delaying its final rule on smog limits, with the rule now expected by the end of July 2011. This is the third time the agency has delayed the smog standards, originally slated to be finalized in August. The initial standards proposed near the start of…

  • Wild Immunity

    Which is better to be? Wild and free or tame and domesticated? That has always been an interesting philosophical question. Professor Mark Viney and colleagues at the University of Bristol compared the immune function of wild mice who have to find their own food with that of mice bred in captivity who have all food…

  • ‘Greener’ Climate Prediction Shows Plants Slow Warming

    ScienceDaily (Dec. 8, 2010) — A new NASA computer modeling effort has found that additional growth of plants and trees in a world with doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would create a new negative feedback — a cooling effect — in the Earth’s climate system that could work to reduce future global warming.

  • Renewable Energy Incentives Future in Danger

    Political rancor seems likely to derail a vitally important piece of legislation affecting the renewable energy sector. The Investment Tax Credit (ITC) grant scheme was introduced as part of the 2009 U.S. stimulus package, and it was considered a key piece of legislation by the green sector because it supported the industry during an economic…

  • Mountain gorilla population up by 100 individuals

    Conservation appears to be working for the Critically Endangered mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei) in the Virunga massif region, as a new census shows an additional 100 individuals from the last census in 2003, an increase of over a quarter. The Virunga massif is a region in three nations—Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and…

  • U.N.’s Ban urges climate deal, short of perfect

    Saying the health of the planet is at stake, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged 190 nations meeting in Mexico on Tuesday to agree to steps to fight climate change that fall short of a perfect deal. “We cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Ban told a first session of environment ministers…

  • The Universal Influenza Vaccine

    Every year, people line up to get flu vaccines at pharmacies and doctor’s offices because the flu develops new strains, requiring the vaccines to be updated. What if there was a single flu vaccine you could take to last for decades against any flu virus strain? Such a thing would make yearly trips to get…