by Timon Singh, 07/21/12

filed under: News, Recycling / Compost, Renewable Energy
Egyptian teenagers are on a roll lately - if they’re not proposing the next-generation of space propulsion systems, then they’re figuring out how to use the country’s plastic waste for fuel! Sixteen-year-old Azza Abdel Hamid Faiad has found that an inexpensive catalyst ( Read more... )

The Western Black Rhino of Africa was declared officially extinct Thursday by a leading conservation group.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature said that two other subspecies of rhinoceros were close to meeting the same fate.

The Northern White Rhino of central Africa is now "possibly extinct" in the wild and the Javan Rhino "probably ( Read more... )

Small farms may be better for food security and biodiversity
We often assume the only way to feed the world's rapidly growing human population is with large-scale industrial agriculture. Many would argue that genetically altering food crops is also necessary to produce large enough quantities on smaller areas to feed the world's people.

But recent ( Read more... )

University of California, Davis via physorg.com: Study shows plants moved downhill, not up, in warming world
January 20, 2011

In a paper published today in the journal Science, a University of California, Davis, researcher and his co-authors challenge a widely held assumption that plants will move uphill in response to warmer temperatures ( Read more... )

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Eradicating any organism would have serious consequences for ecosystems - wouldn't it? Not when it comes to mosquitoes, finds Janet Fang.

Every day, Jittawadee Murphy unlocks a hot, padlocked room at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, to a swarm of malaria-carrying mosquitoes (Anopheles stephensi). She gives ( Read more... )