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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Ghandi's ghost saves the Himalayan trees
From Kashmir to Burma, where tigers once lived amid lush forests, a vast tract of land has been laid bare by the timber industry. In its wake have come landslides, drought and yet further poverty. The
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'Off-grid' cellphone towers could save lives
Electricity from rural cellphone towers in poor countries could chill vaccines, saving 5 million lives every year, say Harvey Rubin and Alice Conant.
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Can we stop the internet destroying our planet?
When the first comprehensive report in years to examine energy use by computer servers was published in February 2007, it was greeted with surprise by industry insiders. Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, found that worldwide power consumption by servers had doubled between 2000 and 2005. "Everyone thought CO2 emissions were a problem for transportation and big energy," says Bill St Arnaud of Canarie, Canada's internet development organisation in Ottawa, Ontario.
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Is the net hurting the environment?
Sending an email across the Atlantic Ocean does not burn any jet fuel, but the internet is not without its own, huge carbon footprint.
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Texas oil companies will soon be locking away carbon
The industry most often accused of being responsible for the excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is, strange as it may seem, desperate to buy more of the stuff. Oil companies are paying industrial plants and natural gas processing facilities to bottle their waste CO2, and are then pumping it underground.
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Earth economist: The food bubble is about to burst
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Let there be night, for wildlife's sake
IT IS time to take back the night for wildlife. That was the rallying call from a landmark session on light pollution at the Society for Conservation Biology on 4 July in Edmonton, Canada. The disruptive effects on animals of our penchant for bright lights has rarely impinged on public consciousness.
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Have we underestimated total oil reserves?
Black gold might not be as scarce as we thought. This week oil prices escalated to a record $139 per barrel, but that may partly be because the amount of available oil in known reserves has been significantly underestimated. So says Richard Pike, a former oil-industry adviser and chief executive of the UK Royal Society of Chemistry, who blames flawed statistical calculations.
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'Flammable ice' could be mined for fuel
They call it flammable ice, and it could be the world's last great source of carbon-based fuel - assuming we can mine methane hydrates, crystal lattices of ice that trap methane beneath ocean beds and permafrost. One problem with extracting this methane is that you have to melt the ice to bring the gas to the surface. In 2002, a team of geologists from Canada and Japan tried injecting hot water into the ice beneath the delta of the McKenzie river in northern Canada. While this released some hydrates, it used a lot of energy.
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Renewable energy: Will the lights stay on?
One of the key problems with renewables is their intermittent availability. You can only generate energy from the wind when it is blowing, or from the sun when it's shining. Critics argue this is why we will never be able to rely on renewables for the majority of our electricity generation. But that criticism may soon be silenced.