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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
On 25 April, Nepal was hit by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. But as well as quakes, the country is also vulnerable to climate change, a combination that makes it harder to build resilience and risk preparedness.
As mean temperatures rise in South Asia, the monsoon season has changed, leading to more-erratic rainfall and increasing the risk of floods and landslides that can claim lives and wreck food production.
The forests of Denver, Colo., are currently under attack by an invasive insect species from Asia. So what is the scientists’ plan to stop this assault on trees? They’re going with the controversial move of introducing a second invasive species to destroy the first one. If it sounds like that children’s song about the old lady who swallowed the spider to catch the fly, that’s because it basically is. Unleashing a second non-native species might help to eradicate the first species, but it can also unleash a series of other consequences. Previous experiments in this invasive species vs. invasive species tactic have worked out with various degrees of success, as these four examples will show.
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Plants need water. People need water. Unfortunately, there’s only so much clean water to go around — and so the effort begins to find a solution.
Luckily for people, some plants are able to make do without perfectly clean water, leaving more good water for drinking. One strategy is to use treated wastewater, containing salt leftover from the cleaning process, to water large areas of turf grass. These areas include athletic fields and golf courses. Golf courses alone use approximately 750 billion gallons of water annually in arid regions.
However, most plants cannot tolerate a lot of salt. As some areas of the United States run low on clean water, plant breeders are trying to breed plants that are more salt tolerant. This would conserve clean water while maintaining healthy turf.
Plant breeders can actually see the individual effect of what each parent plant passes on because the genes add intensity to the trait. These are additive effects. Breeders can more easily select for those features when they observe those differences.
While the debate over whether to label foods containing GMO ingredients plays out across the country, another engineered food has long been waiting to hit grocery stores: genetically modified salmon.
Los aviones de pasajeros de hoy son cada vez más eficientes, motivados por las regulaciones como régimen de comercio de emisiones de la Unión Europea (UE)y las aerolíneas que buscan exprimir ganancias de cada gota de combustible ahorrado.
Sin embargo, en el suelo, los aeropuertos operan en una clase diferente. Nuevos hallazgos de un proyecto de investigación financiado por la Unión Europea muestran que los aeropuertos comerciales utilizan tanta energía como una ciudad pequeña y que hasta una quinta parte de ella puede ser desperdiciada.
