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Two NASA research aircraft will fly over the Baltimore-Washington area of northeastern Maryland through July as part of a mission to enhance the measurement of ground-level air quality from space.

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.

Researchers in America have shown that ozone -- a known pollutant at low levels in the earth's atmosphere, causing harmful effects on the respiratory system and sensitive plants -- can be reduced, on average, when electric vehicle charging is done at night time.

panel of marine scientists who met earlier this year in Oxford, England, have concluded that the world's oceans are facing an unprecedented loss of species. As the London Independent reports today, "The seas are degenerating far faster than anyone has predicted, the report says, because of the cumulative impact of a number of severe individual stresses, ranging from climate warming and sea-water acidification, to widespread chemical pollution and gross overfishing." They concluded that the negative impacts are greater than predicted, and that mass extinctions could occur within one human generation.

"Bicyclean, a pedal-powered grindstone that pulverizes entire circuit boards inside a polycarbonate enclosure, capturing the dust. Though Field is now a year out of college, her project recently won the silver award at the Acer Foundation's Incredible Green Contest in Taiwan and was displayed for three days at COMPUTEX Taipei, one of the world's largest computer industry expositions. The $35,000 prize will enable her to return to Ghana to test a second-generation prototype and to seek non-profit status for the endeavor, a significant milestone in a project she was afraid might fall by the wayside after graduation."

Emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuels and the cement industry scaled a record high in 2010, rocketing by 5.9 percent over 2009 in a surge led by developing countries, scientists reported on Sunday.

Airborne gases get sucked into stubborn smog particles from which they cannot escape, according to findings by UC Irvine and other researchers published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using a web app that is provided online, participants are asked to attempt to identify certain constellations and, if they can, rate them against magnitude charts. The project tracks the increasing problem of disappearing darkness, which can interrupt the cycles of plant and animal life, eventually to a fatal degree.

Research from North Carolina State University shows that so-called biodegradable products are likely doing more harm than good in landfills, because they are releasing a powerful greenhouse gas as they break down.

A year after an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists and biologists are getting their first real idea of how much damage was done to the regionís population of sea turtles as the females begin heading to coastal shores to nest. The greatest concern has been for the Kemps ridley, the smallest sea turtle and the most endangered.

Climate change is expected to alter the global industry in fruits and nuts dramatically as tree crops such as pistachios and cherries struggle in the rising temperatures, researchers said.

The time may finally be right to sell Americans on eco-driving, according to a group of transportation experts from four University of California campuses as well as representatives from industry and government who attended an all-day conference on May 18.

Scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science have discovered a technique to track urban atmospheric plumes thanks to a unique isotopic signature found in vehicle emissions.

Auburn University researchers said oil mats submerged in the seabed more than a year after the biggest oil spill in U.S. history pose long-term threats to coastal ecosystems across the northern Gulf of Mexico. The study, released on Tuesday by the school's engineering department, showed that tarballs churned to the surface by Tropical Storm Lee and deposited along Alabama beaches this month had "essentially identical" chemical composition as samples taken from mats after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. "Our interpretation of these observations is that submerged tar mats buried offshore of this coastline are breaking apart to yield these tar balls," the study reads, estimating the tarballs in question contained about 17 percent oil by mass.

In a recent study published in Nature Climate Change, Dr. Ulrike Burkhardt and Dr. Bernd Karcher from the Institute for Atmospheric Physics at the German Aerospace Centre show that the contrails created by airplanes are contributing more to global warming that all the CO2 that has been caused by the entire 108 years of airplane flight.

As Pennsylvania streams go, Conewago Creek in Dauphin, Lebanon and Lancaster counties is really nothing special. But remember the name, because it could hold the key to cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay.

More than one billion urban residents will face serious water shortages by 2050 as climate change worsens effects of urbanization, with Indian cities among the worst hit, a study said Monday.

Policymakers are very familiar with land-use planning. But what is the best approach for planning uses of America's coastal waters and oceans? That question has gained importance since President Obama formed the National Ocean Council last summer and charged it with developing an ecosystem-based stewardship policy for the nation's oceans, coastal waters and the Great Lakes.

University of Alberta-led research has confirmed that a relatively harmless inorganic form of mercury found worldwide in ocean water is transformed into a potent neurotoxin in the seawater itself.

Along with China's rise as a world economic power have come a rapid climb in energy use and a related boost in man-made carbon dioxide emissions. In fact, China overtook the United States in 2007 as the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases. Yet according to this new forecast, the steeply rising curve of energy demand in China will begin to moderate between 2030 and 2035 and flatten thereafter. There will come a time-within the next two decades-when the number of people in China acquiring cars, larger homes, and other accouterments of industrialized societies will peak. It's a phenomenon known as saturation. "Once nearly every household owns a refrigerator, a washing machine, air conditioners and other appliances, and once housing area per capita has stabilized, per household electricity growth will slow,'' Levine explains.