ENN
Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
“With a changing climate, the increasing severity of flooding and drought, and unsustainable use of groundwater to meet increased food production demands due to population growth, the world’s freshwater resources are under a level of stress unseen before,” said Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.
What are we doing to protect our protected spaces?
Smog is a problem. But the knowledge about its constituents – no longer. Researchers from several leading Warsaw scientific institutions have joined forces and developed a new, extremely precise method for the chemical analysis of suspended particulate matter. The method, easily adaptable in many modern laboratories, not only determines the chemical composition of compounds, but even recognizes changes in the spatial distribution of atoms in molecules.
Energy saving lightbulbs are harder to find and more expensive in low-income U.S. communities than in more affluent areas, according to a new study from the University of Michigan. The cost for households to upgrade from incandescent to LED bulbs, for example, was two times higher in low-income neighborhoods.
Shuttering coal- and oil-fired power plants lowers the rate of preterm births in neighboring communities and improves fertility, according to two new University of California, Berkeley, studies.
Scientists have published a detailed analysis of how 22 recent hurricanes would change if they instead formed near the end of this century. While each storm's transformation would be unique, on balance, the hurricanes would become a little stronger, a little slower moving, and a lot wetter.
