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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
A mobile phone-based innovation that can predict rain is helping farmers in six Sub-Saharan Africa countries sow, fertilise and harvest crops at the optimum time.
The innovation is being used in Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal to improve crop yields and optimise food production through information and communication technology (ICT) weather forecasting model that produces Global Positioning System (GPS)-specific forecasts.
Un equipo de investigación dirigido por científicos de la Universidad de California, Riverside y la Universidad de Miami (UM) Escuela Rosenstiel de Ciencias Marinas y Atmosféricas, ha encontrado que la luz ultravioleta está cambiando la estructura de los componentes de petróleo de Deepwater Horizon (DWH) en algo más tóxico, amenazando aún más a numerosos peces importantes en lo comercial y ecológicamente.
We all know about the huge declines in bee and monarch butterfly populations. Now, it turns out that in some areas nearly all insects are at risk of extinction. And if we don’t solve this problem soon, the repercussions could be huge.
Insects are an important part of the global ecosystem. They not only provide important pollination services, but they also occupy an important place on the bottom of the food chain for many animals. Fewer insects means less food, leading to plant and animal population declines.
“The growing threat to [insects], which play an important role in food security, provides another compelling example of how connected people are to our environment, and how deeply entwined our fate is with that of the natural world,” said Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, in a press statement.
Un telescopio ligero que un equipo de científicos e ingenieros de la NASA está desarrollando específicamente para investigaciones científicas del telescopio CubeSat, podría llegar a ser el primero en llevar a un espejo hecho de nanotubos de carbono en una resina epoxi.
The bioenergy crop sorghum holds great promise as a raw material for making environmentally friendly fuels and chemicals that offer alternatives to petroleum-based products. Sorghum can potentially yield more energy per area of land than other crops while requiring much less input in terms of fertilizer or chemicals. New research examines how genetic improvement of specific sorghum traits, with an eye toward sustainability, could help maximize the usefulness of sorghum as a bioenergy crop.
The work was conducted by researchers from the University of Florida in Gainesville, Washington State University in Pullman, the USDA-ARS in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the University of Missouri, Columbia. They highlight disease resistance, flooding tolerance and cell wall composition as key targets for genetically improving sorghum for sustainable production of renewable fuels and chemicals.
Los investigadores están descubriendo que algas, pastos marinos y otro tipo de vegetación puede absorber con eficacia el CO2 y reducir la acidez en el océano. Cultivar estas plantas en aguas locales, dicen los científicos, podría ayudar a mitigar los efectos perjudiciales de la acidificación sobre la vida marina.
