EarthScape

The National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska is an area of land on the Alaska North Slope owned by the United States federal government and managed by the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management. It lies to the west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service managed…

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields. The sun rotates every 28 days, and because it doesn’t have a solid surface, it should be slightly flattened. This tiny flattening has been studied with many instruments for…

A new study has revealed the under-appreciation that exists for the role dams play in climate change; how the reservoirs behind them can cause surges of greenhouse gases as the water levels go up and down. In a study of the water column at such a reservoir, marine scientists found an astonishing 20-fold increase in…

A new report confirms the critical importance of offshore wind in replacing aging power plants, saving up to £89bn from the UK’s energy bill, and has the potential to take a large share of a global £1 trillion market by 2050. As well as reducing reliance on imported gas and meeting GHG emissions and renewable…

A high federal court in Brazil has ruled that work on the Belo Monte dam in the Brazilian Amazon be immediately suspended. Finding that the government failed to properly consult indigenous people on the dam, the ruling is the latest in innumerable twists and turns regarding the massive dam, which was first conceived in the…

In the face of a changing climate many species must adapt or perish. Ecologists studying evolutionary responses to climate change forecast that cold-blooded tropical species are not as vulnerable to extinction as previously thought. The study, published in the British Ecological Society’s Functional Ecology, considers how fast species can evolve and adapt to compensate for…

A new study has found that men who eat a healthy serving of walnuts every day will improve their sperm quality and boost fertility. The chemical in the walnut, omega-3, is also common in many other tree nuts. The researchers from the UCLA School of Nursing believe it is the omega-3 that provides the fertility…

Total global fish production, including both wild capture fish and aquaculture, reached an all-time high of 154 million tons in 2011, and aquaculture is set to top 60 percent of production by 2020, according to new research conducted by the Worldwatch Institute (www.worldwatch.org) for its Vital Signs Online service. Wild capture was 90.4 million tons…

aguna Niguel, CA — America is going green, but not the way environmentalists had planned it. The unlikely hero is none other than Corporate America, which is giving consumers the green whether they realize it or not. Why? Because it’s good for the customer, it’s good business, and let’s face it, as MGM Senior Vice…

Yesterday Ford Motor Co. announced that the company would accelerate investment in electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrids. The moves come as Ford and its competitors within the American automobile industry experience a resurgence following their near-death experience just a few years ago.