Jaya Jiwatram

In New York it's hard to escape the billowing exhaust fumes emanating from vehicles, the cacophonous sounds of honking taxi cabs, the stench of garbage piled along narrow streets, or even the dingy rats that carelessly scuttle along the gritty underground railway tracks.

So, it's even harder to imagine that come 2012, the Big Apple could be a hot spot for an eco-friendly vacation. And, yet, it may very well be, because that's when the city hopes to complete its transformation of the southern half of Governors Island into a 40-acre sustainable, eco-friendly park.

An environmental study reports that polarized light from surfaces, such as asphalt and glass buildings, is adversely affecting wildlife behavior.

Call it the "green" team or even the "dream" team, but what environmentalists can now say with affirmation is that change really is here. President-elect Barack Obama's picks for his administration's green team are among the best and brightest scientists and advocates of environmental change.

Brainiacs now have something besides their intelligence to celebrate; their sperm. The intellectually endowed produce better quality and more mobile sperm, according to a study published in Intelligence and led by Rosalind Arden of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College in England.

When your mother says eat your greens, you just might want to listen. It's been known since the 1970's that cruciferous vegetables, or cabbage family vegetables, such as broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and kale, have anti-cancer benefits. But researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who have studied the benefits of anti-cancer vegetables for 15 years, are the first to explain how an anti-cancer compound, indole-3-carbinol (I3C), found in broccoli and cabbage, works to slow down the activity of an enzyme linked to rapidly developing breast cancer.

Long gone are the days when woolly mammoths roamed the icy North American and Eurasian turf 10,000 years ago. But in the labs of Penn State University they have been resurrected—well, almost.

While you won't see a shaggy, 12-feet-tall mammoth brought back from the dead any time soon (unlike the 16-year-old frozen mice earlier this month), scientists at Penn State are the first to decode almost the entire DNA set of the now extinct species of elephant.

Trash is a stinky topic. With 130 million tons of it hitting landfills annually, it is the nation's largest human-caused producer of methane gas. And now, residents in Florida's St. Lucie County are turning that stench to gold. Or at least to gas. The county has paired up with Atlanta-based company Geoplasma to implement a plasma gasification plant.

Researchers reveal that a 1.2 million-year-old female pelvis they found in Ethiopia in 2001 suggests our predecessors were larger-brained than previously thought

The story of evolution got bigger last week when researchers revealed in the journal Science that they had discovered a wide-hipped pelvis, suggesting our ancestors were larger-brained than formerly thought. The first of its kind, the 1.2 million-year-old, near-complete female pelvis is from the now-extinct Homo erectus species, believed to be our first human-like relative to leave Africa.

Tequila may be just another drink to those out in the town, but to a team of scientists in Mexico their country's native alcohol turned out to be a gem; a diamond, to be precise. Javier Morales, Luis Apátiga and Victor Castaño at the National Autonomous University of Mexico made the alchemist-worthy discovery while experimenting turning various organic solutions, such as acetone and ethanol, into diamonds. The scientists noted that 80-proof tequila (40 percent alcohol) had the ideal proportion of ethanol to water to create diamond films.

He is greenish brown, has dragon scales for skin, grows up to 32 inches and is the world's last remaining lizard-like reptile that has a lineage dating back to about 225 million years when dinosaurs still roamed the earth—he's a tuatara and he's making a comeback. A species native to New Zealand, the tuatara was spotted nesting in a sanctuary close to Wellington last week, the first such sighting in 200 years. Staff at the 620-acre Karori Wildlife Sanctuary stumbled upon four white, leathery ping-pong sized tuatara eggs during routine maintenance work at the end of last week.