Earth

Earth

Manifest dirt

Nineteenth-century settlers left a dusty mark on the West. Rocky Mountain lake deposits reveal that America’s westward expansion kicked huge amounts of dirt into the air—probably from livestock grazing. A team led by Jason Neff, a biogeochemist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, examined soil cores from the beds of tiny mountain lakes in […]

Earth

Greener Green Energy: Today’s solar cells give more than they take

With new production techniques, the total emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants from making and using solar panels are now only one-tenth as high as those of conventional power generation.

Earth

Dioxin’s long reach

Breast development is delayed in teenage girls who were exposed to the organic pollutant dioxin in the womb and in their mothers' breast milk.

Agriculture

Resistance to Bt crops emerges

Resistance to pest-killing cotton crops is spreading among one species of caterpillar, but techniques to prevent the spread of resistance appear to be working for five other species.

Earth

Defining Toxic: Federal agencies look to cells, not animals, for chemical testing

Government scientists are collaborating to shift the testing of potentially toxic chemicals away from animals to methods that use high-speed automated robots, which should generate data relevant to humans faster and more cheaply than current methods.

Earth

Going Down: Climate change, water use threaten Lake Mead

If climate changes as expected and future water use is not curtailed, there's a 50 percent chance that Arizona's Lake Mead, one of the southwestern United States' key reservoirs, will become functionally dry in the next couple of decades.

Earth

Water-Hogging Electric Vehicles

Electric cars may save on gasoline, but some can place an indirect drain on other resources.

Earth

Spying asbestos

A quick, on-site test will allow contractors and inspectors to test for asbestos in construction materials such as concrete.

Earth

Find My Valentine—or Other Places

The federal Geographic Names Information System lists 14 sites around the nation named Valentine—Including Alta Mills, Kan., and Bedison, Mo., for which Valentine is an alternate moniker. You can search for locations that may share your name, a name associated with some holiday (like Santa Claus, Ind.), or the name of an object of your […]

Earth

Don’t like it hot

King penguins don't live on continental Antarctica but even they are vulnerable to warming water.

Earth

Finding Fault: Trace of old subduction zone found in Italy

A thick layer of rocks now lying high in the mountains of Italy is the remains of a quake-generating subduction zone active under the sea millions of years ago, a discovery that provides clues about ancient seismic activity along this interface between tectonic plates and insights into what may be happening along many such subduction zones today.

Earth

Early dioxin exposure hinders sperm later

Dioxin exposure at an early age affects sperm quality later in life.