Aproximadamente el 31 por ciento de los alimentos producidos en los EE.UU., o 60.4 millones de kilogramos de comida con valor $ 162 mil millones de dólares, se desperdiciaron en el 2011, según el Departamento de Agricultura de Estados Unidos (USDA por sus siglas en inglés). Ahora, investigadores de la Universidad de Missouri han encontrado que el tipo de alimento desperdiciado tiene un impacto significativo sobre el medio ambiente. Aunque en promedio se pierde menos carne en comparación con frutas y verduras, los investigadores encontraron que se utiliza significativamente más energía en la producción de carne en comparación con la producción de hortalizas. Este derroche de energía es por lo general en forma de recursos que pueden tener impactos negativos sobre el medio ambiente circundante, tales como combustible diésel o fertilizante que se libera al medio ambiente.

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Jode Roberts has spent a lot of the summer checking out ditches and fields along the sides of roads, railways and trails. At first, he didn’t like what he was seeing. Roberts, who is leading the David Suzuki Foundation’s effort to bring monarchs back from the brink, was searching for signs that the butterflies had visited patches of milkweed plants. Despite the bleak start, he recently hit the jackpot: a half-dozen eggs and a couple of monarch caterpillars, calmly munching on milkweed leaves.

Over the past millennium, eastern monarch butterflies have migrated northward from Mexico in spring, arriving in southern Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes in early summer, where they lay eggs on the undersides of milkweed leaves. In the following weeks, their caterpillars hatch and eat a steady milkweed diet. In late summer, they form chrysalises and undergo the amazing transformation into butterflies. They then begin fattening themselves for the arduous return to the Mexican alpine forests where they overwinter.

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Koko la gorila, es más conocida por un estudio de toda la vida en el que se le enseña una forma silenciosa de comunicación: el lenguaje de señas americano. Pero algunos de los sonidos simples que ha aprendido pueden cambiar la percepción de que los seres humanos son los únicos primates con la capacidad para el habla.

En 2010, Marcus Perlman comenzó el trabajo de investigación de la Fundación Gorila en California, donde Koko ha pasado más de 40 años viviendo con los seres humanos, que interactúan durante muchas horas cada día con Penny Patterson, psicóloga, y el biólogo Ronald Cohn.

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New evidence from Fukushima shows that as many as 2,000 people have died from necessary evacuations, writes Ian Fairlie, while another 5,000 will die from cancer. Future assessments of fatalities from nuclear disasters must include deaths from displacement-induced ill-heath and suicide in addition to those from direct radiation impacts.

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Prior to the advent of human-caused global warming in the 19th century, the surface layer of Earth's oceans had undergone 1,800 years of a steady cooling trend, according to a new study. During the latter half of this cooling period, the trend was most likely driven by large and frequent volcanic eruptions.

An international team of researchers reported these findings in the August 17, 2015 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience. The study also indicates that the coolest temperatures occurred during the Little Ice Age--a period that spanned the 16th through 18th centuries and was known for cooler average temperatures over land.

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The vibrant, mega-million-dollar farm to table movement is under increasing scrutiny these days. In San Diego, where produce is an $1.8 billion industry and year-round farmers markets can be found in almost every neighborhood (one of the few financial spinoffs of climate change, perhaps), the farm-to-table concept is getting a bad rep.

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