Penguins living off the coast of South Africa have likely starved to death en masse during their moulting season as a result of collapsing food supplies.

Being close to a natural habitat such as a forest doesn’t necessarily make farmland more attractive to pollinators, a new study shows.

Although the Atlantic hurricane season has officially ended, Floridians’ woes over severe weather and soaring homeowners’ insurance costs still linger.

If manganese nodules can be mined in an environmentally friendly way, the critical metals needed for the energy transition could be produced with low CO2 emissions.

If you look up at the sky on a clear day, chances are you’ll notice thin, white clouds following behind airplanes— also known as contrails.

As tropical forests experience chronic drying and more extreme droughts due to climate change, some plants are adapting by growing longer root systems to reach water deep within soils, according to a study published in November in New Phytologist. 

A new study links gas and propane stove emissions to asthma, lung cancer, and other health risks.

A new chemical method that could speed up the creation of medicines, materials and products people rely on every day has been developed by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Chemistry researchers.

Growing energy demand means the U.S. will almost certainly have to expand its electricity grid in coming years. What’s the best way to do this? A new study by MIT researchers examines legislation introduced in Congress and identifies relative tradeoffs involving reliability, cost, and emissions, depending on the proposed approach.

The researchers evaluated two policy approaches to expanding the U.S. electricity grid: One would concentrate on regions with more renewable energy sources, and the other would create more interconnections across the country. For instance, some of the best untapped wind-power resources in the U.S. lie in the center of the country, so one type of grid expansion would situate relatively more grid infrastructure in those regions. Alternatively, the other scenario involves building more infrastructure everywhere in roughly equal measure, which the researchers call the “prescriptive” approach. How does each pencil out?

After extensive modeling, the researchers found that a grid expansion could make improvements on all fronts, with each approach offering different advantages. A more geographically unbalanced grid buildout would be 1.13 percent less expensive, and would reduce carbon emissions by 3.65 percent compared to the prescriptive approach. And yet, the prescriptive approach, with more national interconnection, would significantly reduce power outages due to extreme weather, among other things.

Read more at: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Photo Credit: Laurseum via Pixabay

Countries agreed Wednesday to new limits on the international trade in African hornbills.