Science

Intensity of Harvey’s Devastation Linked to Warming

Intensity of Harvey’s Devastation Linked to Warming

By Alex Kirby Tropical storm Harvey is by any standard off the scale. Some parts of Texas have received in just over a week the rainfall they would normally expect in an entire year, and the storm is described as generating as much rain as would normally be seen only once in more than 1,000 […]

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    Scientists Use Google Earth and Crowdsourcing to Map Uncharted Forests

    Scientists Use Google Earth and Crowdsourcing to Map Uncharted Forests

    By Katie Fletcher, Tesfay Woldemariam and Fred Stolle No single person could ever hope to count the world’s trees. But a crowd of them just counted the world’s drylands forests—and, in the process, charted forests never before mapped, cumulatively adding up to an area equivalent in size to the Amazon rainforest. Current technology enables computers […]

    We Have Less Than 5% Chance of Avoiding ‘Dangerous’ Global Warming

    We Have Less Than 5% Chance of Avoiding ‘Dangerous’ Global Warming

    Our chances of keeping warming under dangerous levels by the end of this century are increasingly slim, according to two new studies published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. The first study took a statistical approach to examine likely warming scenarios by 2100, finding a less than five percent chance of holding warming below […]

    Energy Department Scientists Barred From Attending Nuclear Power Conference

    Energy Department Scientists Barred From Attending Nuclear Power Conference

    By Elliott Negin Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, was one of 30 U.S.-based scientists scheduled to speak at the quadrennial International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conference on fast breeder nuclear reactors in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in late June. Lyman did not attend the previous two conferences, in Kyoto in 2009 and […]

    ‘The Only Full Service Crime Lab for Wildlife in the World’

    ‘The Only Full Service Crime Lab for Wildlife in the World’

    Check out this video from Great Big Story to see how scientists are solving crimes against animals. Wildlife, including endangered species, are killed illegally, smuggled and sold for billions of dollars each year. Founded by a crime scene investigator, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon, uses state-of-the-art technology (as […]

    Poison Papers Reveal EPA Collusion With Chemical Industry

    Poison Papers Reveal EPA Collusion With Chemical Industry

    By Rebekah Wilce The world of independent chemical testing has a shiny veneer. The public is reassured that chemicals they’re exposed to on a daily basis are certified by technicians in spotless white lab coats who carefully conduct scientific studies, including on animals in neat rows of cages. But a federal grand jury investigation that […]

    Is Geoengineering the Answer to Limit Global Warming?

    Is Geoengineering the Answer to Limit Global Warming?

    By Tim Radford Geoengineering, the deliberate alteration of the planet to undo its inadvertent alteration by humans over the past 200 years, is back on the scientific agenda, with a climate compromise suggested as a possible solution. One group wants to turn down the global thermostat and reverse the global warming trend set in train […]

    Humans Have Created 9 Billion Tons of Plastic in the last 67 Years

    Humans Have Created 9 Billion Tons of Plastic in the last 67 Years

    By Tim Radford Scientists have calculated yet another item on the human shopping list that makes up the modern world: plastics. They have estimated the mass of all the plastic bottles, bags, cups, toys, instruments and fabrics ever produced and tracked its whereabouts, as yet another index of the phenomenal change to the face of […]