July 2010

Green Energy from Plants - July 16, 2010

Medieval alchemy -- you've seen it in the movies: A wizard-like figure hovers over a glowing vat adding mysterious ingredients in his quest to turn lead into gold. U.S. Department of Energy scientists would hate to be called alchemists. But they'...

Monitoring Carbon - July 15, 2010

Catch the news and weather at 10 tonight along with the day's carbon report. Carbon report? That's right. If the CarbonTracker system developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth Systems Laboratory catches on, ...

Cozy Bats - July 14, 2010

Putting space heaters in caves might sound...well, batty. But it could mean survival for bats in 17 Eastern states where a new disease has killed an estimated one million bats since 2006. It's called, "White-nose Syndrome," after s...

Carbon Storage in Mangroves - July 13, 2010

Mangrove trees are simply amazing, in a sci-fi kind of way. They live in perhaps the most hostile plant environment imaginable -- a coastal war zone where saltwater and freshwater collide daily. Mangroves wrestle with soft soil so short on oxygen...

RBI Highlights Conservation Needs - July 12, 2010

Get in and get out! It works for the Navy Seals. So why not do the same with a crack team of scientists? Recently, Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History did just that. They assembled a group of thirteen scientists to do what's...

Bats Deliver Seeds - July 9, 2010

The world's rainforests are disappearing at an alarming rate. But conservationists have a new trick that may help restore them. All it takes is some fake fruit, legions of gullible bats, and what conservationists call "seed rain." You see, the S...

Sizing Up Storms - July 8, 2010

It's no news to anyone that hurricanes can be devastating. Luckily, hurricane forecasting has improved a lot over the years. We owe much of that improvement to a plane originally designed to destroy submarines. The P-3 Orion aircraft was put into ...

Don’t Flush -- Ballast, That Is - July 7, 2010

Don't flush! At least not your ship's ballast tanks. In port, cargo ships load tons of seawater into ballast tanks that add weight to balance the ship and maintain stability at sea. Trouble is, that water contains all manner of local mar...

Refresh on Refuse - July 6, 2010

Wait! Stop! What's that you're throwing away? Each year, Americans dump nearly 180 million tons of trash into landfills according to the Environmental Protection Agency. This is the bottles, boxes, cans, grass clippings, furniture, clothing, phone...

Raising the Bar - July 5, 2010

Have you ever been really bugged by a new ding in your car, but weeks later, you barely noticed it? We all learn to tolerate negative changes by adjusting our perception. Ecologists call this "shifting our baseline," and it has serious implications f...

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