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
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New Guinea forests shrinking faster than the Amazon
The lush tropical rainforests of Papua New Guinea are not the unspoilt haven that many believed till now. In fact, they are disappearing faster than those in the Amazon.
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US nuclear recycling plans raise proliferation risks
If you can't innovate, then reinvent the wheel. That seems to be the thinking behind the US Department of Energy's (DoE) plans for a nuclear fuel reprocessing programme - but this tactic may play into the hands of weapons-makers.
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The greening of Silicon Valley
"IF THE best way to create the future is to invent it, we say the second-best way is to finance it." John Doerr is only half joking. He is one of the most influential venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, and he knows a thing or two about financing the future. But ask him what he's focused on now and you won't hear venture-capital buzz-phrases such as "Web 2.0". These days, Doerr is firmly focused on clean technology - and in particular, energy technologies that can save the planet from global warming.
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Earth sunshade would not rewind the climate
Anyone clinging to the notion that we can wipe the slate clean of all our climate mistakes by deflecting the sun's rays with space mirrors is in for a disappointment. Dan Lunt of the University of Bristol, UK, and colleagues carried out the most detailed climate-modelling study to date on the impact of a sunshade.
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Childhood lead exposure leads to crime
Here's another reason to ensure your home is lead-free. Exposure to the toxic element during development makes people more likely to get into trouble with the law as adults.
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Tropical forests axed in favour of palm oil
Indonesia and Malaysia have long denied that their tropical forests are being burned to make way for lucrative palm oil plantations. It seems they've been lying through their teeth. Between 1990 and 2005 palm plantations rocketed by 1.87 million hectares in Malaysia and by more than 3 million hectares in Indonesia.
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Obesity helps mice fend off malaria
Fat: what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, or so you might think. But obesity seems to protect mice against a fatal form of malaria. Working out how it has this effect might lead to new treatments for people.
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Bring on the solar revolution
We have heard all about Al Gore's inconvenient truths on climate change. Now comes an extremely convenient truth from his German counterpart. Social Democrat MP Hermann Scheer, who has been dubbed more revolutionary than Greenpeace, says the great unspoken truth is how painless it will be to convert the world to renewable energy, especially solar power. So much so that the Kyoto protocol is a waste of time that makes what is easy and cheap seem hard and expensive.
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New mesh gives net gains against mosquitoes
Get a good night's sleep: bed nets designed to stop mosquitoes in their tracks are undergoing large-scale trials in India and Tanzania. The German firm BASF has developed a polymer mesh whose cross-linked structure can retain a pyrethroid insecticide inside it for 25 washes, yet still allows enough of the chemical to diffuse to the surface to "knock down" nearly all the mosquitoes that land on it.
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Cheap carbon trap cleans up power station emissions
One way to combat global warming is by sequestering the carbon dioxide belched out by power stations, locking it away in buried vaults. A big problem, though, is that only about a tenth of the gas produced by burning fossil fuels is CO2. Most of the rest is nitrogen, which is not a greenhouse gas and would needlessly take up space in the vault. But separating the two gases can be a costly affair. Now a team led by Maciej Radosz at the University of Wyoming in Laramie say they have designed a cheap filter that could capture 90 per cent or more of the CO2 emitted by power stations.