Every year brings new accounts of coral bleaching in the tropical oceans. Even the largest living structure on Earth, the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, is under threat. According to marine scientist, J.E.N.Veron, in a couple generations coral reefs will no longer exist. Unless of course, humans find a different way to…

Home gardening has surged in the past couple of years. Plenty of reasons account for the partial shift from factory farm to backyard farm: concern over nutrition, environmental issues, and economic worries.

Fog is a common feature along the West Coast during the summer, but a University of Washington scientist has found that summertime coastal fog has declined since 1950 while coastal temperatures have increased slightly.

A new regulatory regime for dispensing around 100 billion euros of carbon permits has been approved by EU regulators, granting steelmakers and oil refineries free emission allowances in an effort to shield them from international competition after 2012. Fears that tighter controls on CO2 emissions in Europe will drive factories to relocate abroad has led…

Major advances in earthquake analyses using new technologies developed by NASA and are revealing surprising insights into a major earthquake that rocked parts of the American Southwest and Mexico in April, including increased potential for more large earthquakes in Southern California. At the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, scientists from…

As the Arctic rapidly warms in the 21st century and Arctic sea ice largely disappears in summer, a strip of year-round ice is likely to remain to the north of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic archipelago, providing a refuge for some sea-ice dependent wildlife, such as polar bears and ringed seals, according to researchers. A…

Traditionally one thinks of San Francisco as having quaint foggy mornings. Things change. Fog is a collection of water droplets or ice crystals suspended in the air at or near the Earth’s surface. While fog is a type of a cloud, the term fog is typically distinguished from the more generic term cloud in that…

There are estimated to be 20 million people in the United States with either prediabetes or type 2 diabetes by the year 2020. Diabetes is one of the leading causes of heart disease, and half of all people with diabetes die from cardiovascular complications. A previous study has found the vitamin B1 to be an…

I don’t envy the folks charged with determining where the public charging infrastructure should be installed to support the rollout of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). The lucky owners of the first Volts and Leafs that are delivered during the next few weeks and months will primarily rely on home charging, but that will be complemented…

This past weekend at the second annual Japan-Arab Economic Forum, the governments of Japan and Tunisia formally sealed a deal to collaborate on a sustainable business project that takes advantage of Tunisia’s ample solar resources. Together the two countries will be building a solar power plant in the Sahara desert, which is rapidly becoming a…