An elephant never forgets: the old saying has some basis in scientific fact, at least when it comes to remembering an encounter with the business end of an angry honeybee. And that may be good news for farmers, say Lucy King and her colleagues at Save the Elephants in Nairobi, Kenya, who have devised […] Read More »
There’s a lot of “oomph” in a step: up to ten watts of power is lost as heat each time a foot hits the ground. Mobile devices such as phones and laptops use between one and 15 watts, so harnessing our “foot power” would make a notable difference for consumers. So far, however, attempts […] Read More »
Andre Sharon, an engineer at Boston University and the Fraunhofer Center for Manufacturing Innovation (CMI), has an idea that could launch a thousand ships. He wants to build a fleet of ships—mobile wave-energy harvesters, he calls them—to ply the ocean, fishing for energy.
Although ocean waves are abundant and constant, until now it’s been […] Read More »
Green roofs have been around for centuries. But as the planet heats up and open space dwindles, a renaissance in green-roof design is sprouting wild, new urban canopies. Even the simplest green roofs and walls absorb rainfall, provide habitat for birds and insects, and help reverse the urban heat-island effect. The most ambitious roofs […] Read More »
By Michael Abrams
Have you seen flamingos on the moon? In marshes, swamps, and zoos, the tall birds are already striking enough—fire-feathered, boomerang-beaked, and perched on a single, knobby-kneed stick of a leg. But put them on an endless bleached and flat landscape, and they become otherworldly.
Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni is just such […] Read More »
Kids these days: In a series of worrying studies, researchers have found that the Internet appears to be shaping how kids perceive ecological threats, as well as causing concerns about a few high-profile species in distant lands and also about obscure threats to the plants and animals just outside their windows.
Childhood is “the […] Read More »
Jack Kerouac famously parlayed a road trip into the Great American Novel. Now two University of Minnesota scientists have turned their own time on the road into something equally nifty: a way to generate electricity with a negative carbon footprint.
Martin Saar, assistant professor in the Department of Earth Sciences, and graduate student Jimmy […] Read More »
Wind farmers take note: You can’t count on common forecasting methods to figure out whether the turbines will kill birds. A new study from Spain concludes that pre-construction studies are pretty bad at predicting which turbines will lead to deadly bird collisions.
“The prevention of bird collisions in newly built wind farms is a critical […] Read More »
Drawing on tissues stored in an unusual “frozen zoo,” researchers have created the first stem cells from endangered species. In humans, researchers are excited about stem cells – which can become any tissue in the body – because of their potential to treat disease. Now, it is possible endangered organisms could see some benefit too. […] Read More »
Need to measure how much uranium is in the soil at that contaminated old mine? Just bring a can of Coca-Cola Classic® along. Researchers report that the popular pop works just as well as more expensive solutions for analyzing levels of “bioaccessible” uranium and other trace elements in soil.
There is a rising need […] Read More »
The Monadnock Building in downtown Chicago, Illinois, was completed in 1894 and was once the largest office building in the world. With austere, 17-story façades ornamented mainly by columns of bay windows, it’s the sort of structure that led the poet Carl Sandburg to call Chicago “City of the Big Shoulders.”
It’s also a […] Read More »
By Richard Conniff
People who work in the natural world often get asked how on Earth they came to devote their lives to gastropods, or ground beetles, or whatever other species happens to have found its way into their hearts. What the questioners generally mean is that becoming a naturalist is a little enviable, […] Read More »
Sitting in a sturdy wooden chair as you read this? How do you know the raw material didn’t come from a criminal gang that had razed a protected forest? And how about the pages of this magazine—was some of the pulp wrung from an endangered tree?
For decades, it was hard for conservationists fighting […] Read More »
Durian is famous for its noxious smell, but one day the so-called king of fruits could actually help reduce pollution, say researchers at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. They are developing a process to turn durian and other tropical plants into activated carbon, a component of electric-car batteries.
Activated carbon is used to […] Read More »
By John Carey
As a scientist working on breakthrough lighting technologies, Jeff Tsao is a firm believer in the magic of energy efficiency. After all, the numbers are compelling. Replace traditional bulbs with far more efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and, studies suggest, the U.S. could cut the electricity used by lighting by at least […] Read More »
