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Driving from Medan, Indonesia’s third-largest city, to Lake Toba, the world’s largest volcanic lake in the central highlands of Sumatra, the extent of the country’s deforestation becomes numbingly clear. For hours, a visitor passes plantation after plantation — here palm oil, there paper pulp — all the way to a small, protected forest ring around the lake.

In a study that spans Canada’s Pacific Coast, University of Victoria researchers have confirmed that human disturbance of seagrass meadows results in lower fish diversity.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have shown that between 87 and 98 percent of ships comply with the tougher regulations for sulphur emissions that were introduced in northern Europe in 2015. The lowest levels of compliance were observed in the western part of the English Channel and in the middle of the Baltic Sea.

Queen’s University researcher Xiaolong Yang and his research team have developed a light emission-based biosensor that uses firefly luciferase (the enzyme that allows fireflies to light up) to monitor cancer cell activity and help find new ways to fight the spread of cancer.

Researchers have conducted the first field tests for a new laser-based system that can pinpoint the location of very small methane leaks over an area of several square miles. The new technology could one day be used to continuously monitor for costly and dangerous methane leaks at oil and gas production sites.