Nearly everyone involved in the controversy over Canada’s troubled Trans Mountain Pipeline was surprised when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced in May that his government would take over the construction from a private company to ensure that additional tar sands crude oil can move from northern Alberta to a port in British Columbia.

Think summer holidays and you’ll likely call up images of a beautiful beach or a glittering blue lake. But more and more lakes, rivers and coastal areas are plagued by an oversupply of nutrients that causes algae to grow at an explosive rate, which can eventually lead to water bodies that can’t support aquatic life.

Dyes are widely used in industries such as textiles, cosmetics, food processing, papermaking and plastics. Globally, we produce about 700,000 metric tons — the weight of two Empire State Buildings — of dye each year to color our clothing, eye shadow, toys and vending machine candy.

Hurricane Harvey was an unprecedented rain event that delivered five consistent days of flooding and storms to Texas last August. Now, research from UTSA Assistant Professor Vikram Kapoor in civil and environmental engineering has substantiated that the storm caused high levels of fecal contamination to be introduced into waterways draining into the Gulf of Mexico and impairing surface water quality.

We’re very careful about what our kids eat, but what about the air they breathe?

The public can now access information about active wildfires across the country using a smartphone.

Chemical engineers testing methods to improve efficiency of diesel engines while maintaining performance are getting help from a summer staple: Tiki torches.

A team of scientists from the University of Portsmouth have developed new scientific tests to better understand the effects of pollution on wildlife behaviour.

Earlier this year, a three-year-old video of researchers extracting a long, twisted tube from a reptile’s bleeding nostril went viral. To date, it has accumulated more than 30 million views and set off a moral panic.

Rice University scientists have released the first results of extensive water sampling in Houston after the epic flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey. They found widespread contamination by E. coli, likely the result of overflow from flooded wastewater treatment plants.