When it comes to vehicles that have a serious impact on the environment, we all immediately think of gas-burning cars and trucks, but passenger aircraft can have a significant impact on the environment as well. One way that passenger jets can impact our planet is in producing those wispy white lines called contrails that we …
Solar power technology shows promise in helping humanity wean itself off of power sources that are far more damaging to the planet. It’s already used for a variety of applications, from powering residential homes to filling batteries on the International Space Station, but solar panels have one pretty huge limitation: they can’t generate power in …
E-scooters have a very environmentally-friendly image. Tiny and battery-powered, they seem like a convenient, responsible alternative to making short trips in a car, but new research suggests that the big picture is a lot more complicated. A team of researchers from NC State took an in-depth look at the overall environmental impact of the e-scooter …
Last year, a report surfaced that suggested someone, somewhere was producing a huge amount of an ozone-destroying chemical which had already been banned worldwide way back in 2010. Scientists knew it was being pumped into the air, but they didn’t know where it was coming from or who was doing it. Now, scientists report that …
Cleaning up trash is not a glamorous job, and you’d have to imagine that cleaning up ocean trash is no different. Slowly plucking someone else’s refuse and placing it in a bag where it should have been in the first place is something that scientists working in the field tend to do because they feel …
Okay, I’ve got some good news and some bad news, which one do you want first? Let’s start with the good news: New research into the winds over the open ocean are speedy and reliable enough that, if we could find a way to efficiently harness them, we could power the entire planet without a …
Alan Cross spends his days as a veterinary orthopedic surgeon, but when he heads to his garage his precise skill set is applied to a different kind of beast. Cross built this gorgeous electric motorcycle by himself, and even though it looks like a hollow shell to the untrained eye, it’s actually a marvel of …
When you hear the term “mass extinction” you probably imagine something like the space rock that smacked Earth and led to the demise of the dinosaurs, but according to a new research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we’re currently experiencing an extinction event of our very own. After monitoring …
Mother Earth is one seriously gracious host. Humanity has done little else to the planet that produced us than completely destroy it at every turn. We dump toxic oil into oceans, irreversibly alter the climate, drive species into extinction, and pile heaps of trash everywhere we can find space for it. Nature owes us nothing, but it still …
How do you combat the ills of poor air quality and pollution in a massive city of over eight million people, where there’s hardly room to plant new trees? You build a forest straight up into the sky. That’s the idea behind the Nanjing Vertical Forest, which is scheduled to be fully built by 2018, and will bring …
