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Neonicotinoid pesticides hinder wild queen bumblebee’s reproductive success, according to a new University of Guelph study.

Smog from cars and trucks is an expected health hazard in big cities, but researchers from the University of Cincinnati found pollution from truck exhaust on one of the most remote mountain roads in the world.
 

Soil scientists Derek Peak and Steven Siciliano and Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) professor Paolo Mussone will work with industry partners Federated Cooperatives Limited (FCL) and United Farmers of Alberta Co-operative Limited (UFA) to develop and test new soil additives that can trap and remove petroleum hydrocarbons for easier digestion by soil-based organisms.

As electronics become increasingly pervasive in our lives – from smart phones to wearable sensors – so too does the ever rising amount of electronic waste they create. A United Nations Environment Program report found that almost 50 million tons of electronic waste were thrown out in 2017—more than 20 percent higher than waste in 2015. Troubled by this mounting waste, Stanford engineer Zhenan Bao and her team are rethinking electronics. “In my group, we have been trying to mimic the function of human skin to think about how to develop future electronic devices,” Bao said. She described how skin is stretchable, self-healable and also biodegradable – an attractive list of characteristics for electronics. “We have achieved the first two [flexible and self-healing], so the biodegradability was something we wanted to tackle.”

Thanks to a quarter-century of research and monitoring, scientists now know how different wildlife species were injured by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and how long it took for populations to recover.

This information may have important implications when responding to other oil spills, when conducting damage assessment studies after spills and when considering the environmental risks associated with extracting and shipping oil.