Taming the Butterfly

Climate change disasters, such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, dieback of the Amazon rainforest or collapse of the Atlantic overturning circulation, could be predicted according to University of Exeter research.

A device the size of a deck of playing cards that can track temperature, humidity, light and barometric pressure is moving from the shipping world to the realm of research to help develop a better understanding of how the climate is changing.

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.

As a kid growing up near the space program in Huntsville, Ala., reading as much science fiction as he could get his hands on, Kasting had space exploration on his mind all the time. It influenced who he is today as well as the research he's most interested in conducting. By studying early Earth's atmosphere and the origins of oxygen in it, Kasting has become one of the foremost experts on planetary habitable zones. In his book, "How to Find a Habitable Planet," Kasting explains how his research with NASA may be able to detect worlds outside of our solar system that are suitable for sustaining life.

As America struggles down the road toward a coherent energy policy that focuses on a higher degree of self-reliance, policymakers face numerous issues and realities. These include: the finite supply and environmental impact of fossil fuels, the feasibility and costs to implement a widespread switch to renewable energy sources, and the variables that lead to consumers' preferences for particular types of power generation.

Not all research papers receive their own hashtag on Twitter. But #arseniclife (as it was dubbed in tweets) was no ordinary paper.

Any architect recognizes the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), lead by star architect Rem Koolhaas, as one of the most important and thought-provoking architectural firms in the world. The counterpart to OMA's architectural practice is AMO, a design and research studio that specifically focuses on areas beyond the traditional boundaries of architecture, such as media, politics, sociology, technology, fashion or graphic design. Remarkably, it seems AMO is getting more and more active in developing complex-scale, mass-medium data graphics. In February of this year, they presented the "Energy Report" for the WWF, a comprehensive study claiming that the world can be 100 percent reliant on renewable energy by 2050.

The United Nations food agency on Monday called for greater use of environmentally sustainable techniques by poor farmers in order to increase crop intensity to feed the world's growing population.

In a bit of technical wizardry, students from the University of Adelaide, Australia, have devised and built an electric diwheel, that with modification, could possibly solve inner city transportation problems. The team, comprised of 14 mechanical engineering students, has taken the idea of a diwheel and quite literally, turned it on its head, and in the process have created a vehicle that could be used to safely transport people around; all with a minimum amount of energy.

Scientists say they're close to producing new "super varieties" of wheat that will resist a virulent fungus while boosting yields up to 15 percent, potentially easing a deadly threat to the world's food supply.

Construction can resume on a massive Southern California solar energy project after wildlife officials determined it will not jeopardize the threatened desert tortoise, federal officials said Friday.

There are many avenues of research being pursued in the quest for new power sources, but the most far-out idea is (literally) space-based solar power. Traditional solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays are attractive for a number of reasons, but there are also a number of problems with them. An interesting variation on the traditional, ground-based solar PV is discussed in detail in a recent article over at The Oil Drum. The article discusses the prospect of placing the PV arrays in orbit as geosynchronous satellites that collect solar power and beam it back down to ground stations as microwave energy.

Natural gas is important in many sectors of the economy: for generating electricity, as a heat source for industry and buildings, and in chemical feedstock. Given the abundance of natural gas available through large global resources and the recent emergence of substantial unconventional supplies in the United States, worldwide usage of the fuel is likely to continue to grow considerably and contribute to significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come, according to a comprehensive, multidisciplinary study carried out over the last three years by MIT researchers.

By 2050, the coolest summers in the tropics and parts of the northern hemisphere will still be hotter than the most scorching summers since the mid-20th century if global warming continues apace, according to a new study.

Diseases that ravage wheat fields are as old as time itself. The ancient Romans even had a legend to explain the terrible plagues.

Does climate change seriously threaten to wipe out the human species if left unchecked? Examining our evolutionary past suggests it might once have been the perfect catalyst for our extinction. But now?

Women have been left defenceless and at the mercy of militia groups in the aftermath of the Iraq war in 2003 according to research from the University of Birmingham.

An international team of scientists has undertaken a study, the results of which have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, to better understand the link between climate conditions and the disease known as plague. Their results indicate that the amount of rain an area receives over a given time can greatly affect the spread of the disease.

Neala Kendall, a graduate student from the University of Washington in Seattle, after studying cannery data on sockeye salmon harvested from Bristol Bay in Alaska, has discovered that the length of the average sockeye caught there, has been dropping for the past half century.

Animals and plants may not be able to evolve their way out of the threat posed by climate change, according to a UC Davis study of a tiny seashore animal. The work was published today (June 8) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.