Choking China: The struggle to clear Beijing's air
As pollution levels return to normal in China's capital after a record-breaking month of smog, what can be done to banish the smog?
New Scientist
-
Four ways to feed the world
By 2025 there will be 9 billion people on Earth, all needing food. A look at the best ways to stave off starvation.
-
Copenhagen talks are still crucial
When a meeting is billed as determining the future of humanity, few will be surprised if it fails to live up to expectations. And so it is proving with next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen: the Danish government has announced that time has run out on the possibility of delegates securing a watertight successor to the 1997 Kyoto protocol. (Editorial)
-
Tagging the tigers of the sea
Tuna boats in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean will be alowed to catch a total of 13,500 tonnes of bluefin tuna next year, down from the provisional quota of 19,950 tonnes.
-
How reputation could save the Earth
Have you ever noticed a friend or neighbour driving a new hybrid car and felt pressure to trade in your gas guzzler? Or worried about what people might think when you drive up to the office in an SUV?
-
Water purifiers for the poor fail to prove their worth
Many of the systems intended to provide clean water for families in some of the world's poorest communities may not work. That's the conclusion of Paul Hunter, a microbiologist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, who has assessed past studies of the effectiveness of household water treatment (HWT) systems.
-
Wet weather put early humans on Europe's doorstep
Trees and shrubs grew in the Sahara between 120,000 and 45,000 years ago, suggesting wet spells may have helped early humans as they left Africa.
-
Mini ice age took hold of Europe in months
Detailed studies of ancient climate have revealed that the onset of Europe's "Big Freeze", 13,000 years ago, was anything but glacial.
-
Instant Expert: The Copenhagen climate change summit
Two-hundred-and-fifty billion tonnes. That's the bottom line. If we are serious about avoiding dangerous climate change, 250,000 megatonnes is the maximum amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere. Keep going at current rates and we will have used up that ration in 20 years.
-
Mass extinction blamed on fiery fountains of coal
Fossil fuels have a new crime to live down. A frenzy of hydrocarbon burning at the end of the Permian period may have led to the most devastating mass extinction Earth has ever seen, as explosive encounters between magma and coal released more carbon dioxide in the course of a few years than in all of human history.
-
A golden age for GM crops?
The war over genetically modified foods is entering a new phase. At last, the GM industry has produced what it promised at the outset: a product designed to have real benefits for consumers. It's an oil