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Los coches híbridos han recorrido un largo camino desde que la primera Toyota Prius debutó en Japón hace casi 20 años. Lo mismo puede decirse de los coches eléctricos ya que GM lanzó su EV1 a finales de 1990, sólo para dar marcha atrás, los recuperó y los destruyó, enfureciendo de paso a sus aficionados en el proceso. En la actualidad hay decenas de modelos híbridos que disfrutaron de una subida en los precios de la gasolina y sus ventas se dispararon 2007…y nuevamente en 2012. Sin embargo, más recientemente, sus ventas globales han estado en declive. Mientras tanto los vehículos eléctricos son cada vez más sofisticados, están mejorando su alcance y han visto las ventas en repunte, mientras que los fabricantes de automóviles se han vuelto más competitivos en su publicidad.

Scientists have had a literal breakthrough off the coast of Mexico.

After weeks of drilling from an offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico, they have reached rocks left over from the day the Earth was hit by a killer asteroid.

The cataclysm is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. "This was probably the most important event in the last 100 million years," says Joanna Morgan, a geophysicist at Imperial College in London and a leader of the expedition.

Since the 1980s, researchers have known about the impact site, located near the present-day Yucatan Peninsula. Known as Chicxulub, the crater is approximately 125 miles across. It was created when an asteroid the size of Staten Island, N.Y., struck the Earth around 66 million years ago. The initial explosion from the impact would have made a nuclear bomb look like a firecracker. The searing heat started wildfires many hundreds of miles away.

A recent study released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) concludes that the current drought that began in 1998 in the eastern Mediterranean Levant  – which includes Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey – is the region’s worst dry spell since 1100 C.E.

NASA scientists reconstructed our regional drought history by studying records of tree rings, from dead and live specimens, across several Mediterranean countries to determine patterns of dry and wet years over a 900-year time span. Tree rings are good indicators of precipitation since dry years cause thin rings while thick rings show when water was plentiful. They concluded that the years between 1998 and 2012 were drier than any other period, and that the drought was likely caused by humans.

Ben Cook, lead author and climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York City, said the range of regional weather events has varied widely over the last millennium, but the past twenty years stand out as extreme, falling outside the range of natural variability.

El estudio entre la Universidad de Birmingham y de la Universidad de Hong Kong, publicado en Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, una revista de la Asociación Americana para la Investigación del Cáncer, se suma a la creciente preocupación en torno a los riesgos para la salud de la exposición prolongada a las partículas finas en el ambiente.

El material particulado es el término para las partículas que se encuentran en el aire, incluidos los hidrocarburos y metales pesados ​​producidos por el transporte y la generación de energía, entre otras fuentes. 

Canada is no stranger to wildfires, but this week’s ferocious blaze in Fort McMurray is extreme — even by Canadian standards. 80,000 people have fled from the heart of tar sands country in an unprecedented evacuation effort.

As people consign their homes and belongings to the flames and firefighters struggle to contain the blaze, there’s an inevitable question: Do we have climate change to thank for the intensity of this fire?

This issue is emerging all over the world as shifts in the climate drive environmental imbalances that promote the spread of fire. Droughts turn the landscape into tinder, and tree die-offs create ample fuel for fast-moving, incredibly hot fires that can whip through the landscape at terrifying speeds.