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Farmers earn more profits when there is demand for corn for biofuel instead of for food only. This can lead some to convert grasslands and forests to cropland. This conversion, also called indirect land use change, can have large-scale environmental consequences, including releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere. To penalize the carbon emissions from this so-called indirect land use change, the USEPA and California Air Resources Board include an indirect land use change factor when considering the carbon savings with biofuels for their compliance with the federal Renewable Fuel Standard or California’s Low-Carbon Fuel Standard.

Four hundred million lines of text: that’s how much data is in a single gene-sequencing file when Scott Pavey’s team receives it. If you wanted to scan it manually, and generously assume it would take one second per line to look at, it would take you 12 and a half years of reading around the clock to get through it all.

Atmospheric aerosols are tiny particles that scatter and absorb sunlight but also influence climate indirectly through their role in cloud formation. One of the largest sources of aerosols is sea spray which is produced over the world’s oceans. Understanding how these particles take up water from the atmosphere, their so-called hygroscopicity, is important because it determines how much sunlight they reflect and how well they can form clouds.

ASU scientists harness the trial-and-error power of evolution to coax nature into revealing answer to energy challenge

Whether or not society shakes its addiction to oil and gasoline will depend on a number of profound environmental, geopolitical and societal factors.

Each year millions of animals are used in Canada for medical research and toxicity testing, but a growing body of scientific evidence points to the difficulties of treating humans like 70-kg mice.

After years of using rodents to conduct heart disease research, Charu Chandrasekera began to question the value of using animals as stand-ins for humans. She lost her fervour for animal research after her father suffered a heart attack, bringing home to her the realization that human relevance must be at the forefront of biomedical discoveries.