articles

More than 190 countries are meeting in Paris next week to create a durable framework for addressing climate change and to implement a process to reduce greenhouse gases over time. A key part of this agreement would be the pledges made by individual countries to reduce their emissions.

A study published in Science today shows that if implemented and followed by measures of equal or greater ambition, the Paris pledges have the potential to reduce the probability of the highest levels of warming, and increase the probability of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

In the lead up to the Paris meetings, countries have announced the contributions that they are willing to make to combat global climate change, based on their own national circumstances. These Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDCs, take many different forms and extend through 2025 or 2030.

Dow AgroSciences, which sells seeds and pesticides to farmers, made contradictory claims to different parts of the U.S. government about its latest herbicide. The Environmental Protection Agency just found out, and now wants to cancel Dow's legal right to sell the product.

The herbicide, which the company calls Enlist Duo, is a mixture of two chemicals that farmers have used separately for many years: glyphosate (also known as Roundup) and 2,4-D. It's Dow's answer to the growing problem of weeds that are resistant to glyphosate, which has become the weed-killing weapon of choice for farmers across the country.

The new formulation is intended to work hand-in-hand with a new generation of corn and soybean seeds that are genetically engineered to tolerate sprays of both herbicides.

Computer simulations have allowed scientists to work out how a puzzling 555-million-year-old organism with no known modern relatives fed, revealing that some of the first large, complex organisms on Earth formed ecosystems that were much more complex than previously thought.

The international team of researchers from Canada, the UK and the USA, including Dr Imran Rahman from the University of Bristol, studied fossils of an extinct organism called Tribrachidium, which lived in the oceans some 555 million years ago.  Using a computer modelling approach called computational fluid dynamics, they were able to show that Tribrachidium fed by collecting particles suspended in water.  This is called suspension feeding and it had not previously been documented in organisms from this period of time.

Avanzar hacia una empresa “sin papeles” o mejor dicho más eficiente en el uso de la tecnología y por lo tanto menos encaminada a imprimir, revisar y volver a subir al sistema tiene muchas ventajas, no solo ambientales sino también económicas y de organización, pero en un entorno clásico de oficina con carpetas, archivadores, impresoras y multifuncionales, el transitar hacia un entorno de trabajo digital puede ser una experiencia difícil en el que toda la empresa tiene que unirse a la causa y alta dirección tiene que “comprar” este nuevo paradigma de trabajo.

Para las generaciones anteriores puede ser más difícil deshacerse de su océano de copias impresas y acoplarse a llenar formularios en la pantalla además de que muchos documentos también deben ser leídos, analizados y corregidos en formato digital y el tener un documento impreso para ser corregido con una pluma se torna una práctica obsoleta y “cara”, desde el punto de vista de eficiencia de costos. Así que mientras el personal más joven experto en tecnología lo tomará con calma, para las generaciones anteriores se hace complicado, pero tarde que temprano llegará el cambio y bien dicen que quien pega primero pega dos veces, posiblemente tu competencia ya esté tomando cartas en el asunto y pronto te sorprenda con una mayor participación en tu mercado.

Algunos beneficios de una empresa sin papeles o “Paperless” son...

A microscopic marine alga is thriving in the North Atlantic to an extent that defies scientific predictions, suggesting swift environmental change as a result of increased carbon dioxide in the ocean, a study led a by Johns Hopkins University scientist has found.

What these findings mean remains to be seen, as does whether the rapid growth in the tiny plankton's population is good or bad news for the planet.

Published today in the journal Science, the study details a tenfold increase in the abundance of single-cell coccolithophores between 1965 and 2010, and a particularly sharp spike since the late 1990s in the population of these pale-shelled floating phytoplankton.