Scientific American - Environment

Readers Respond on "A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030"

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST

Winds of Change I found it surprising that in “ A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030 ,” Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi do not mention the effects of the suggested energy sources on climate. The authors propose to absorb about six terawatts of energy from about 60 terawatts available in the wind, or about 10 percent of its total energy. Because the winds, at least near the U.S., usually flow around highs or lows, where the speed and related Coriolis force tend to maintain the pressure difference, I can easily envision that absorbing the energy will change the rate at which the pressure centers collapse. How this would change the weather, I do not know, but it must make a change to give us some of the energy. Possibly, the weather change would be an improvement, but as a believer in Murphy’s Law, I would be surprised. About 100 years ago dumping garbage into the ocean was justified because the oceans were infinite compared to the effect, so no one calculated how much was allowable. Let’s be smarter this time! Why not do the calculations before we cause more problems? [More]

Floor Plan: Linoleum May Be Green, but Is There an Ecofriendly Way to Keep It Clean?

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST

Dear EarthTalk: I have a new linoleum floor, which I chose partly for its ecofriendliness. How do I clean and maintain it without using harsh or toxic chemicals? --A. J. Maimbourg, via e-mail

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IPCC Errors Prompt Review by International Science Academies

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:31:00 EST

African crop yields wither, along with the Amazon rainforest; Himalayan glaciers disappear by 2035. These are the erroneous predictions ascribed to the most recent report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--a document reviewed by some 2,500 scientists and other experts as well as vetted by more than 190 countries. So does the fact that a few errors crept into a more than 3,000 page report merit a revision of IPCC processes? [More]

Auto-dicted: Sans a Major Diversion of U.S. Transportation Dollars to Mass Transit, Urban Traffic Congestion May Not Ease

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST

Dear EarthTalk: Short of massive efforts to build a public transportation infrastructure, which doesn’t appear likely anytime soon, what is being done to address traffic congestion, which is reaching absurd levels almost everywhere? --John Daniels, Baltimore

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Invasion of the Drones: Unmanned Aircraft Take Off in Polar Exploration

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST

A multinational, robotic air corps is quietly invading the polar regions of the earth. Some catapult from ships; some launch from running pickup trucks; and some take off the old-fashioned way, from icy airstrips. The aircraft range from remote-controlled propeller planes--of the type found at Toys “R” Us--to sophisticated, high-altitude jets. All are specially outfitted, not with weapons but with scientific instruments.

Unmanned aircraft have made headlines in the mountains of Afghanistan, but the technology has quickly trickled down to scientists seeking a less expensive, safer way to study the earth’s poles. Researchers have begun to put unmanned aerial systems, or UASs, to a variety of tasks, from monitoring the ozone layer to counting seal populations. Thanks to lower costs and improved technologies, “it’s absolutely exploded in the past couple of years,” says Elizabeth Weatherhead, who is an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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End-of-Days Danger

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST

I don’t know how many e-mails I have received from children who are terrified that 2012 will somehow involve the end of life as we know it, all because of an unfounded fringe religious prophecy that has received mass-market exposure with the release of a recent Hollywood movie. I have tried to reassure those children (and not a few adults) that this date represents nothing more cosmically special than the year of the next presidential election.

Having said that, however, I just realized there might be a genuine connection between 2012 and an end-of-days menace!

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Fighting aliens with aliens: U.K. imports insect species to tackle invasive plant

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:14:00 EST

For the first time in U.K. history, an alien species (meaning one that is not native to the area) will be let loose in the kingdom to combat the growth of another species--also introduced. [More]

PET project: Using organic catalysts to make more biodegradable plastics

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:30:00 EST

Whereas most discarded plastic water and beverage bottles (those imprinted with a number 1 within a triangular arrow) can be recycled , the resulting second-generation plastic is generally unusable for making new plastic bottles. This is because the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) thermoplastic polymer used to make the original bottles is often made with the help of metal oxide or metal hydroxide catalysts that linger in the recycled material and weaken it over time. [More]

Smokestash Industry: ARPA-E Seeks Breakthroughs in Carbon Capture Technology

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:01:00 EST

WASHINGTON--Every second, our bodies capture carbon dioxide in our tissues, transport it via the blood, and dump it in the lungs from where it is exhaled. This unconscious process is yet another way humans contribute to the accumulation of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere--albeit in a minuscule volume compared with burning fossil fuels . The key to this metabolic process is an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase and it's efficiency at capturing and releasing CO2 is what human engineers want to mimic at the power plant scale. [More]

Seeking Transformational Energy Technologies

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:01:08 EST

[ This special issue podcast is longer than the usual 60 seconds. ]

Last week, the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for energy held its inaugural conference in Washington, D.C.--a direct response to a growing sense that the U.S. is losing its technology lead when it comes to the race for cleaner ways to produce and use energy. "We have a Sputnik moment right now. We are losing our technology leadership and we are falling behind."

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Trichodesmium : The world's most famous nitrogen fixer

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:42:00 EST

Editor's Note: Journalist and crew member Kathryn Eident and scientist Jeremy Jacquot are traveling on board the RV Atlantis on a monthlong voyage to sample and study nitrogen fixation in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, among other research projects. This is the sixth blog post detailing this ongoing voyage of discovery for ScientificAmerican.com .

Imagine you’re in space, floating high above the Earth. Picture the world’s oceans, glimmering sapphire under the heat of the sun and the protection of the ozone layer. Look closer, there’s a patch of brown in the middle of all that blue. It’s a bloom of phytoplankton called Trichodesmium , a “world famous” nitrogen fixer. [More]

Worm Charmers (preview)

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST

If you happen to be hiking in the right part of Florida at dawn, you might catch the sound of a predator hidden in the vegetation. Surely an alligator must be the source of these calls, you say to yourself. But the sound does not come from an alligator, or a mother bear, or some newly introduced predator from the Amazon. It comes from a human predator--a “worm grunter.”

Worm grunters have mastered the art of charming worms out of their burrows so they can be collected and sold as bait. First, the hunters pound a stob, or wooden stake, into the soil, and then they rub the stake with a flat piece of metal called a rooping iron. The vibrations resonate through the ground. In response, hundreds of large earthworms emerge, some as far as 12 meters from the baiter.

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Endangered in a Dangerous Land: Afghanistan expands its protected species list, including the "world's least-known bird"

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:00:00 EST

Nine months after it created its first list of protected endangered species , the government has added 15 more to the list, including what has been billed as "the world's least-known bird." [More]

Fish Fry: How Will a Warming World Impact U.S. Trout Populations?

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST

Dear EarthTalk: A fisherman friend of mine told me that trout populations in the interior West of the U.S. are already shrinking due to global warming. Is this true? And what is the long term prognosis for the trout? --Jon Klein, Portsmouth, N.H. [More]

Recycling Some Hospital Waste (Not the Really Gross Kind)

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:03:08 EST

The food industry leads the nation in pounds of waste produced annually. So, what’s second? It’s health care facilities. They dispose of more than four billion pounds of waste each year. [More]

Is ARPA-E Enough to Keep the U.S. on the Cutting-Edge of a Clean Energy Revolution?

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:01:00 EST

WASHINGTON, D.C.--At the inaugural summit of ARPA–E, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy , no less an august personage than Norman Augustine declared that we were possibly witnessing an inflection point--a turn from old thinking to new. As an aerospace business pioneer, Augustine certainly knows when trajectories change and escape velocities are attained. Indeed, a host of speakers regarded ARPA–E's effort as an Apollo project, a Manhattan project, and Mike Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials, even called for ARPA–E to be part of a potential Marshall Plan for energy--a road map to a future of clean power, complete with the Hoover Dam of solar, or the like. [More]

Next-Gen Scientists Honored for Evolving Medicine and Renewables [Slide Show]

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:00:00 EST

The more mysteries that scientists unlock, the more opportunities emerge for the next generation of researchers to transform newfound knowledge into tomorrow's breakthroughs that serve society. The Lemelson–M.I.T. Program recognized several potential breakthroughs Wednesday in awarding four of its $30,000 Lemelson–M.I.T. Student Prizes to those from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (R.P.I.), and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (U.I.U.C.). [More]

Waste Land: Does the Large Amount of Food Discarded in the U.S. Take a Toll on the Environment?

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST

Dear EarthTalk: What are the environmental implications of all the food we throw away here in the United States? --Mike Schiller, Cambridge, Mass. [More]

Climate change will impact infectious diseases worldwide, but questions remain as to how

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:30:00 EST

NEW YORK--As climatologists weather the IPCC controversy , another storm is brewing, and this one is filled with not with bloggers but with beasts, bugs and bacteria. It is the potential plague of infectious diseases --threatened to be made worse, many scientists propose, by projected changes in the Earth's climate . [More]

A Common Herbicide Turns Some Male Frogs into Females

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:31:00 EST

The bountiful fields of the U.S. are awash in atrazine . Some 36 million kilograms of the odorless, white powder are applied on farms to control grassy weeds. Some 225,000 kilograms of the herbicide fall with the rain each year, sometimes up to 1,000 kilometers from the source. All that atrazine may be having another effect: turning male frogs female. [More]