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Britain has brought online a new desalination plant near London capable of providing the city with 150 million gallons (568 million litres) of water per day, should the need arise. At a cost of £270 ($445) million, and built over the past four years, the plant uses reverse osmosis to remove salt from the brackish water pumped in from the Thames Estuary, which it then pumps into local reservoirs, thus staving off the threat of drought.

Although the dune ecosystem is unusual, fragile and is protected by the "habitats" directive of the network Natura 2000, its conservation is very vulnerable to the proliferation of car parks, nearby buildings and inadequate boardwalks installed for protection or beach access.

Medical ethicist Harvey Fineberg shows us three paths forward for the ever-evolving human species: to stop evolving completely, to evolve naturally - or to control the next steps of human evolution, using genetic modification, to make ourselves smarter, faster, better. Neo-evolution is within our grasp. What will we do with it?

But home robots - dominated by vacuums - make up 55 percent of the company's revenue and are part of the reason iRobot is on a tear. Shares are up 43 percent since the start of the year, and the company earned a profit of $26 million on sales of $401 million last year, up from $3 million on $299 million in revenue the year before. Last week, the company announced it had won a contract to make bomb disposal robots for the Navy.

We tend to think of our cell phones as our own person technological domains. They are the places where we can store our digital life and keep an eye on the things that we need to, while we are on the go. But, what if your data is not you own, what if it is used against you in a court of law?

City buildings create their own microclimates. Ignoring these variations can make life uncomfortable for inhabitants and prevent buildings from achieving true energy efficiency, according to Evyatar Erell, a professor of architecture at Israel's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev."Even when architects design a green building, it may not make the best use of the environment because other buildings get in the way," he said.

One of the most important decisions facing designers of plug-in electric or hybrid vehicles is related to battery choice. Now, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have used a life cycle analysis to examine three vehicle battery types to determine which does the best job of powering the vehicle while causing the least amount of environmental impact during its production.

The gamitana fish, a close relative of the flesh-eating piranha, mostly eats fruit and can carry seeds down the Amazon River as far as 3 miles (5 kilometers), reports a new Cornell study, making it one of the longest seed dispersals ever reported. The researchers report that these fish (Colossoma macropomum, known as gamitana in Peru, and tambaqui in Brazil) may play an important role in the structure of the Amazon forest as fruit seeds remain viable in their gut for many days and are widely spread.

The United States cannot rule out another oil disaster in its waters, the official who led the response to last year's Gulf of Mexico spill told AFP, as the country marks one year since the tragedy.

The old saying there's plenty more fish in the sea might soon no longer apply to the Mediterranean, says Swiss-based International Union for Conservation of Nature. A study it is releasing Tuesday, April 19, 2011 says more than 40 species of marine fish there could soon disappear - almost half the species of sharks and rays and at least 12 species of bony fish are threatened with extinction due to overfishing, pollution and loss of habitat.

Back in 2009 Mayor Bloomberg prohibited vehicle traffic on Broadway between 42nd Street and 47th Street in Times Square to create a pedestrian plaza (video here). Now, the city's most recent Community Air Survey found that, "After the conversion to a pedestrian plaza, NO pollution levels in Times Square went down by 63 percent while, NO2 levels went down by 41 percent." Unlike N2O, which makes you laugh at Phish shows, NO2, or nitrogen dioxide, destroys your lungs and may cause Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Nitric oxide (NO) isn't good for you either.

People naturally sort words and objects into categories, a key process in forming memory. But when it comes to how things are mentally organized, cultures dramatically differ in their strategies.

Though the Arctic is often pictured as a vast white wasteland, scientists believe a thin layer of soot - mostly invisible - is causing it to absorb more heat. They want to find out if that's the main reason for the recent rapid warming of the Arctic, which could have a long-term impact on the world's climate.

In a solar cell, sunlight hits a light-harvesting material, causing it to release electrons that can be harnessed to produce an electric current. The new MIT research, published online this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, is based on findings that carbon nanotubes - microscopic, hollow cylinders of pure carbon - can enhance the efficiency of electron collection from a solar cell's surface.

Don't judge food by its organic label because "organic" doesn't necessarily mean good it's for you. Yet a new study by Jenny Wan-Chen Lee, a graduate student in Cornell's Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, finds that consumers persist in believing that foods labeled "organic" are healthier and lower in fat.

In November 2010 the World Economic Forum gathered in Dubai to discuss issues on the global agenda. Before the forum, the 700 members of each of the 72 Global Agenda Councils were asked which other councils they would benefit from interacting with. This data was then released to the public as part of a visualization challenge organized by visualizing.org. Shown here is one of the honorable mentions, an interactive visualization created by Daniel McLaren that shows a map of the strongest collective responses between the councils. It uses the analogy of energy, as described by McLaren: "Starting at the selected node, energy travels outward and is divided among each connection and dissipates when crossing weak connections." Not all responses are displayed because the data has been filtered to show only the strongest relationships.

On April 26, 1986, history's greatest nuclear accident took place northwest of the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl. Despite the scale of the disaster, 25 years later, we still do not know its real effects. An international team of investigators has shown for the first time that the colour of birds' plumage may make them more vulnerable to radioactivity.

John Hunter puts all the problems of the world on a 4′x5′ plywood board - and lets his 4th-graders solve them. At TED2011, he explains how his World Peace Game engages schoolkids, and why the complex lessons it teaches - spontaneous, and always surprising - go further than classroom lectures can.

According to a report released by Freedom House titled Freedom on the Net 2011, Iran is the worst country when it comes to online freedom.  The top three countries, in order, are Estonia, The United States and Germany. The study judged countries based on three specific criteria: Obstacles to internet access, limits on content and violations of user rights.  They assigned each country a numerical score based on those criteria.  Countries scoring from 0-30 are designated "free," countries scoring from 31-60 are designated "party free" and those with score of 61-100 are labelled "not free."

A group of Cornell-developed, fingernail-sized satellites may travel to Saturn within the next decade, and as they flutter down through its atmosphere, they will collect data about chemistry, radiation and particle impacts.