Topic: Science & Technology

World Water Day is celebrated globally on March 22 in an effort to raise awareness about the availability of clean, fresh water, a natural resource that many take for granted.

One-in-five people in the world do not have access to safe drinking water, and two-in-five lack access to improved sanitation services. By 2025, close to two billion people will be living in regions with severe water scarcity, according to a United Nations report.

A new processes promises to produce billions of gallons of ethanol from plant based garbage, from brewer's mash to paper trash.

University of Maryland research that started with bacteria from the Chesapeake Bay has led to a process that may be able to convert large volumes of all kinds of plant products, from leftover brewer’s mash to paper trash, into ethanol and other biofuel alternatives to gasoline.

Researchers have developed a low-cost material for capturing carbon dioxide . Produced with a simple one-step chemical process, the material has a high capacity for absorbing carbon dioxide – and can be reused many times.

Researchers have developed a new, low-cost material for capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants and other generators of the greenhouse gas. Produced with a simple one-step chemical process, the new material has a high capacity for absorbing carbon dioxide – and can be reused many times.

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Georgia Tech graduate student Jeffrey Drese assembles a fixed-bed flow system by loading a tubular reactor into a heating chamber. The equipment is used to test the new adsorbent material.

Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have developed a series of global maps that show where projected habitat loss and climate change are expected to drive the need for future reserves to prevent biodiversity loss..

Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have developed a series of global maps that show where projected habitat loss and climate change are expected to drive the need for future reserves to prevent biodiversity loss.

Back in the old days at Rochdale College, we knew how to weigh our kilos. However, we're sure that's not what the good folks at Sandia have in mind as they seek to redifine the kilogram.

The kilogram is losing weight and many international scientists, including some at Sandia National Laboratories, agree that it’s time to redefine it.

Jonathan Storm and Justin Boyles, who are working on doctorates in the ecology and organismal biology department at Indiana State University, were selected by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to take part in the research hoping to unravel the mystery of what is leading to bats’ deaths.

When Jonathan Storm and Justin Boyles journeyed to New York to investigate what is killing entire colonies of bats, the two Indiana State University doctoral students found bats in crisis.

New research suggests that many biofuel blends do not contain the advertised amount of biofuel.

While sampling blended biodiesel fuels purchased from small-scale retailers, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that many of the blends do not contain the advertised amount of biofuel.

Bacteria mutate for a living, evading antibiotic drugs while killing tens of thousands of people in the United States each year. But as concern about drug-resistant bacteria grows, one novel approach under way at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seeks to thwart the bug without a drug by taking a cue from nature.

Mark Schoenfisch and his lab of analytical chemists at UNC have created nano-scale scaffolds made of silica and loaded with nitric oxide (NO) – an important molecule in mammals that plays a role in regulating blood pressure, neurotransmission and fighting bacterial infections, among other vital functions.

Media packaging is going low-plastic, no-plastic, bio-degradable, and almost edible.

In an industry dominated by the consumption of plastic and paper, Precision Disc Manufacturing Corp. has announced new greener packaging alternatives for CD and DVD discs. "The typical retail CD or DVD package is entirely comprised of plastic, paper and metal," explained Mike Arnold, General Manager of the British Columbia based company, "so we have worked with our suppliers to provide choices that reduce the negative environmental impact of the traditional packaging types."

A Michigan Technological University researcher has produced a new seismic model that could help geophysicists figure out what is going on inside Mount St. Helens, North America's most active volcano.

Volcanoes are notoriously hard to study. All the action takes place deep inside, at enormous temperatures. So geophysicists make models, using what they know to develop theories about what they don’t know.

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The crater created during the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, with the new lava dome. The volcano in the background is Mount Adams, due east of Mount St. Helens. The picture shows the glacier (crevassed and covered with ash), with the older dome that was built from 1980-86 in the lower left.