Tag Archives: Environment

Researchers put pristine Antarctic peninsula at risk

Men and women wanted for hazardous duty. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Compensations include off-road driving, penguin spotting and no-hassle waste disposal.

That could be a job advertisement for station staff at Fildes Peninsula Antarctic research stations. It’s not as noble as the apocryphal advertisement for explorer Ernest Shackleton’s expedition in the early twentieth century, which promised honour and recognition, but then some of the site’s modern occupants deserve neither, according to a report released last month by Germany’s Federal Environment Agency.

Continue reading Researchers put pristine Antarctic peninsula at risk

Plugging In to Plant Roots

feb13cov-300px-1359044175994Cast-off electrons in a plant’s roots can provide electricity, a Dutch team reports. Now, through a spin-off company, it hopes to grow grassy generators on rooftops and promote decentralized electrical production in wetlands in developing countries.

Plants exude a variety of waste products that microbes consume, such as glucose, acetate, butyrate, and propionate. The underground interaction leaves spare electrons in the surrounding soil and water, which researchers—led by Bert Hamelers at Wageningen University, in the Netherlands—began tapping in experiments in 2007. They were already working on using so-called microbial fuel cells (MFCs) to treat wastewater when they realized that plant roots improved the performance of the fuel cells. Continue reading Plugging In to Plant Roots

The Soot Surveyor

In the atmosphere, soot traps heat like carbon dioxide does. But unlike CO2, soot stays near its source and falls to Earth in weeks, so it’s considered low-hanging fruit in the fight against global warming. The first step to reducing atmospheric soot is to find it, which scientists have been doing since the 1980s with a particle-measuring tool called an aethalometer. Continue reading The Soot Surveyor