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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
Thailand's 'tiger temple' was a front for the commercial exploitation of tiger bones, skins and other parts for the lucrative international trade, writes Simon Evans. It made no contribution to conservation and the animals were subject to extreme cruelty. But while the temple's closure is good news, there are hundreds of similar tiger farms across the region that are no better - or even worse.
Operation IceBridge, NASA's airborne survey of polar ice, ended its eighth spring Arctic campaign on May 21. During their five weeks of operations, mission scientists carried out six research flights over sea ice and ten over land ice.
"We collected data over key portions of the Greenland Ice Sheet, like the fast-changing Zachariae Isstrom Glacier, and we got the broad geographic coverage of Arctic sea ice we needed," said Nathan Kurtz, IceBridge's project scientist and a sea ice researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "This is an important continuation of the time series for Arctic ice, particularly with the very warm Arctic winter noticeably impacting sea ice retreat and ice sheet melt onset this year."
La Red de Políticas sobre Energías Renovables para el Siglo 21, muestra que las energías renovables se han establecido firmemente como fuentes principales y competitivas de energía, en muchos países de todo el mundo, estrechando la brecha entre el tener y el no tener energía.
El 2015 fue un año récord para la instalación de energías renovables.
New research shows that young fish are eating tiny pieces of plastic instead of their regular food — with potentially devastating consequences.
A study published this month in the journal “Science” explains that juvenile perch larvae appear to be eating microplastics in place of their usual food sources, like free-swimming zooplankton. This hinders fish development, leaving them more susceptible to predators.
Microplastics — plastic particles that measure below 5mm — infiltrate our environments as a result of litter, such as plastic bags, packaging and other materials, that eventually end up in the sea. Microbeads — tiny plastics often found in health products, such as face scrubs and even some toothpastes — represent another major source of pollution. For this reason, a number of governments have either banned or are considering banning microbeads.
A radical new process that allows hydrogen to be efficiently sourced from liquid formic acid could be one step forward in making the dream of hydrogen-powered cars an economic reality.
Using formic acid to produce hydrogen has never been considered viable because it requires high temperatures to decompose and also produces waste by-products.
But the University of Melbourne's Professor Richard O'Hair has led an international team of scientists in designing a molecular catalyst that forces formic acid to produce only hydrogen and carbon dioxide and at a low temperature of only 70°C.
La Red de Políticas sobre Energías Renovables para el Siglo 21, muestra que las energías renovables se han establecido firmemente como fuentes principales y competitivas de energía, en muchos países de todo el mundo, estrechando la brecha entre el tener y el no tener energía.
El 2015 fue un año récord para la instalación de energías renovables.
