The United States currently leads the world in the number of plug-in electric vehicles on the road, capturing 41% of the global market. Though the market can be traced back to the early-to-mid 1990s with the release of the Chrysler TEVan and the General Motors EV1, it wasn’t until the second wave of vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf and the Chevrolet Volt, both introduced in 2010, that plug-in electric cars started to become a success in the US.

It was Tesla Motors with its Roadster series which first entered production in 2008 that reignited this interest in the market though. The small company was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003 before current CEO Elon Musk joined the company the following year and led the business to new heights with links to new battery technologies that made plug-in electrical vehicles a more viable option for everyday journeys.

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New research shows that fishing is having a significant impact on the make-up of fish populations of the Great Barrier Reef. It’s long been known that environmental impacts such as climate change and pollution are amongst the drivers of change on the Great Barrier Reef. Now researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University have found that removing predator fish such as coral trout and snapper, through fishing, causes significant changes to the make-up of the reef’s fish populations.

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Por segundo año consecutivo, las emisiones de dióxido de carbono (CO2) relacionado con la producción energía en los Estados Unidos han aumentado, según las últimas cifras oficiales.

Sin embargo, a diferencia de 2013, cuando las emisiones y el producto interno bruto (PIB) creció a un ritmo similar (2,5% y 2,2%, respectivamente), en el 2014 la tasa de crecimiento de las emisiones de CO2 de 0,7%, fue mucho menor que la tasa de crecimiento del PIB de ese año, que fue del 2,4%.

Las emisiones de CO2 relacionadas con la energía son el mayor componente de las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero globales estadounidenses. El 31 de marzo de 2015, los Estados Unidos presentaron oficialmente...

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Plants are one of the last bulwarks against climate change. They feed on carbon dioxide, growing faster and absorbing more of the greenhouse gas as humans produce it. But a new study finds that limited nutrients may keep plants from growing as fast as scientists thought, leading to more global warming than some climate models had predicted by 2100.

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When plant biodiversity declines, the remaining plants face diminishing productivity, say scientists in study published April 20 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "The loss of biodiversity is threatening ecosystem productivity and services worldwide, spurring efforts to quantify its effects on the functioning of natural ecosystems," said lead author Jingjing Liang, a forest ecologist from West Virginia University.

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A new study by UC San Francisco has found that statins can help prevent disease in older adults but must be weighed against potentially serious side effects.

Amid a projected cost of almost $900 billion for cardiovascular disease over the next decade in the U.S., statins are used by nearly half the elderly population in the nation. But in spite of the widespread use, there has been little systematic scrutiny of the potential risks of the drugs in older adults and whether those side effects could offset cardiovascular and other health benefits.

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