Technology gets old – it’s just the way it works (or stops working). So what do you do with it when it’s time for a new laptop or cell phone? Unless you’ve got one of the new biodegradable cell phones, you probably don’t want to chuck all that plastic and silicon into a landfill where…

A report from a high-powered commission today blasted the government, regulators, and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) for not anticipating and preventing the crisis at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant triggered by a powerful earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. Multiple reactor meltdowns and massive radiation releases forced authorities to evacuate 150,000 people from around…

Whaling is the hunting of whales mainly for meat and oil. Its earliest forms date to at least 3000 BC. So it has long been a successful economic activity but not too good for the whales whose population tends to be endangered. The Republic of Korea has announced plans to kill endangered whales under a…

The United Nations had set a target for developing countries around the world to cut the proportion of children who suffer from hunger in half by 2015 from 1990 levels. It is true that childhood hunger has improved since its peak in 1985. However, insufficient progress has been made, and only five percent of the…

When evaluating the historic contributions made by different countries to the greenhouse gasses found in Earth’s atmosphere, calculations generally go back no further than the year 1840 which is roughly when the industrial revolution began. But this may not be fair since civilization has been around far longer than that. New research from Carnegie’s Julia…

Even cemeteries aren’t sacrosanct in the relentless drive to extract fossil fuels. Far beneath the final resting places of many Americans, including war veterans, lies a wealth of natural gas trapped in shale rock formations, which could be tapped using the controversial hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, technique.

A chance discovery of historic photos in a Danish basement has given new insight to researchers studying the ice on Greenland. The photos were found at the National Survey and Cadastre of Denmark, Denmark’s surveying and mapping agency. They originate from the explorer, Knud Rasmussen’s expedition to the southeast coast of Greenland in the early…

Pakistan’s new national sustainable development strategy (NSDS) boasts a ‘green action agenda’ and proposes to set up a knowledge management system that is based on science, technology and innovation.

Most of us had never heard the term “derecho” until Friday, when we learned that’s what meteorologists call the kind of massive storm that swept through the Midwest and blitzed the Eastern Seaboard, killing at least 20 people and leaving a 700-mile swath of destruction and downed power lines in its wake.

World leaders attending the recent Rio+20 conference agreed to promote sustainable consumption and production, but analysts say getting businesses and buyers to do just that will require far more than words on paper. To the immense disappointment of environmental groups and even some multinational corporations, Rio+20 failed to produce binding commitments or a plan on…