Taming the Butterfly

Himalayan villagers have won the backing of climate science for their suspicions that snow cover, water resources and the ecosystem are changing in their region, a study published Wednesday said.

Precipitation and runoff in California's major river basin will not fall dramatically with climate change, according to a new federal study that shows rising temperatures will have an uneven effect on the West's water supplies.

Creating power from water. I bet when I say that you picture a damn or a large turbine being pushed by hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, all rushing at tremendous speeds. It is a cool, and accurate, image of how most power comes from water. That is not to say that it is the only way that power can come from water.

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.

The Dalai Lama said Saturday that India should be seriously concerned about the melting of glaciers in the Tibetan plateau as millions of Indians use water that comes from there.

The US president has urged Chinese leaders to implement policies to help create a more balanced economic relationship between Washington and Beijing. Barack Obama also raised concerns about the human rights situation in China in talks with Wang Qishan, the Chinese vice-premier, and the state councillor, Dai Bingguo, at the White House in Washington on Monday. Obama and the Chinese leaders discussed ways of working together to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programmes, the White House said in a statement.

As Nasa prepares to retire its fleet of space shuttles, it is encouraging private companies to build new rockets to get its astronauts into orbit. Among the firms landing huge contracts to build the next generation of spacecraft is SpaceX. Science correspondent David Shukman visited the company's rocket factory in California for a look inside the prototype capsule.

Texas Agrilife Research fire and brush control studies in the Rolling Plains on a working ranch-scale showed the benefits and limitations of managed fires for reducing mesquite encroachment while sustaining livestock production.

In this July 15, 2008 file photo, a sign advocating buying fresh and local in the Shenandoah Valley is tacked on a bulletin board at the Shenandoah Valley Produce auction in Dayton, Va. A heightened consumer interest in produce grown nearby, which many assume to mean fresher food, fewer chemicals, and grown smaller farms, has led to popular use of the word on displays and menus. While good for many farmers, the trend can be misleading for consumers, as there is no one or regulated meaning for "local".

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 an exciting experiment with major implications for food production under climate change, CSIRO and University of Sydney scientists have found allowing ants and termites to flourish increased a wheat crop's yield by more than one third.

Evidence supporting the link between savings and college success is growing. Three studies out of the Center for Social Development (CSD) at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis offer a connection between assets and college enrollment and completion.

Having power over others and having choices in your own life share a critical foundation: control, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The paper finds that people are willing to trade one source of control for the other. For example, if people lack power, they clamor for choice, and if they have an abundance of choice they don't strive as much for power.

People who suffer from irregular heartbeat could see their episodes cut in half if they do yoga regularly, according to a study released Saturday in the United States.

It's an unfamiliar neighborhood and you find yourself in the middle of a bunch of streets and buildings you've never seen before. Giving the environment a quick once-over, you make a snap decision about whether you're safe or not. And chances are, that first 'gut' call is the right one, say Binghamton University researchers Dan O'Brien and David Sloan Wilson in an article published in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

A year after the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, some experts are pondering the next doomsday scenario - a massive oil well blowout in the icy waters off Alaska's northern coast.

It's not like open field farming. OK, it is a little bit. Marcin Jakubowski, of Open Source Ecology, has taken it upon himself to release the blueprints for 50 farm machines in open source. According to his TED page, this is one element in a more ambitious project. "Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village."

The sign was a digital billboard, a new breed of outdoor advertising that is growing in both the region and the nation. The problem for Young, a Philadelphia architect, is that they're energy guzzlers, compared with other signage. In a recent report, he found that the largest of them can use 30 times what a typical household consumes. The report - funded by an independent grant but done under the auspices of an advocacy group that opposes the signs - concludes that as Philadelphia strives to become the nation's greenest city, a proliferation of digital signs might not be sending the right message.

The United States should plan to store spent nuclear fuel in cooling pools and concrete-and-steel casks for 100 years as it sorts out what should be done with it in the long term, according to a new study from MIT. Storing spent fuel temporarily, the study argues, is in some ways better than immediately transferring it into permanent underground storage at facilities like the proposed one at Yucca Mountain.