Taming the Butterfly

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.

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.

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.

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.

According to a new research study, Europeans are happier when they have a day off and work less, while their American counterparts would rather be working those extra hours. Published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, the research, led by Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn from the University of Texas, looks at survey results of Europeans and Americans and how they identified being happy.

The Agulhas Current which runs along the east coast of Africa may not be as well known as its counterpart in the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream, but researchers are now taking a much closer look at this current and its "leakage" from the Indian Ocean into the Atlantic Ocean. In a study published in the journal Nature, April 27, a global team of scientists led by University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science Associate Professor Lisa Beal, suggests that Agulhas Leakage could be a significant player in global climate variability.

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.

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?

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.

Amphibian declines around the world have forced many species to the brink of extinction, are much more complex than realized and have multiple causes that are still not fully understood, researchers conclude in a new report.

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."

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.

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.

In urban communities, less than 1 in 100 inhabitants died from Spanish flu in 1918, but in isolated communities up to 9 out of 10 died. An important explanation for the differences is due to different exposure to influenza in the decades before the Spanish flu came. Those living in urban communities probably had a higher degree of pre-existing immunity that protected against illness and death in 1918 than those living in very isolated rural areas. This is shown in a new study from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

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.

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.

The punishment your car endures on a cold winter commute pales in comparison to the veritable torture that researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are inflicting on two electric utility research vehicles - all in the name of science. 

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.

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.

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.