environment

Farmers in Southern California this summer arent planting as much as they usually would. Its not because of a new government subsidy on corn or soybeans. Its because they wont have enough water with which to irrigate their crops. Is this a crisis for the farmers? Actually, its a crisis for San Diego and neighboring municipalities—theyre buying the water for $16.8 million a year from the Palo Verde Valley to help quench their own droughts. In exchange, the farmers are letting 26,000 acres go fallow this season.

Brigham Young University bear biologist Thomas Smith says that guns aren't necessarily your best option when facing down one of the beasts.

Smith and his team analyzed 20 years worth of incidents in Alaska, and found that the wilderness equivalent of pepper spray effectively deterred bears 92 percent of the time, whereas guns only did the trick one-third less often. (He studied polar bears, too, hence the picture, at left, of an unconscious mother and her cubs. And yes, he did get away before everyone woke up.)

At 5,282 square miles the Wilkins Ice Shelf is one of the largest on the Antarctic Peninsula. It is also the latest casualty of global warming.

Satellite images released today by the British Antarctic Survey and the National Snow and Ice Data Center reveal a massive collapse over the past month—disintegration resulting in, most recently, a breakaway iceberg seven times the size of Manhattan.

Municipalities are always weighing cost against environmental concerns and quite often, cost wins out at great expense to the environment. Residents of New York City will remember the summer of 2002 when the Bloomberg administration ceased recycling glass and plastic, citing budgetary concerns. It was cheaper for the city to dump tons of reusable refuse into landfills than to continue its recycling program. After a year of no plastic recycling and two years of no glass, the city determined the savings were negligible and resumed recycling both.

Six weeks ago, the Monterey Bay Aquarium released a young white shark into the ocean, and the swimmer has already cruised down the coast to the waters off Mexico.

The shark, which spent 162 days at the aquarium after it was accidentally caught by a local fisherman, is the first to carry two different tracking tags.

In a new review article in Nature Geoscience, two scientists say that black carbon, the stuff that gets kicked up into the air from biomass burning and diesel engines, among other things, could account for as much as 60 percent of the warming effect of carbon dioxide. That's three to four times greater than most estimates, and more than that of any greenhouse gas save CO2.

A new low-cost, nanotech-based approach to power generation developed by researchers at Boston College and MIT could lead to cleaner-running semiconductors, air conditioners, car exhausts and more. The technique, published online yesterday in Science, uses the nanostructures to dramatically increase thermal efficiency.

It could slow carbon dioxide emissions, power cars and jets, and replace petroleum altogether. Pond scum or green slimewhatever you want to call italgae is the next great hope in the world of environmental startups.

Here's one for your "only in California" file: A judge has ordered a Sunnyvale couple to cut down two of the eight redwood trees on their property because they block sunlight access to their neighbor's solar panels.

About six years ago, Mark Vargas complained that eight redwood trees on Richard Treanor's and Carolyn Bissett's property were blocking sunlight to the $70,000 worth of solar panels he built to power his house in 2001. To protect his investment, Vargas cited the obscure Solar Shade Control Act that requires homeowners to keep their trees from shading more than 10 percent of a neighbor's solar panels between 10am and 2pm, peak hours for collecting sunlight. The judge ruled in favor of Vargas, although he decided against fining Treanor and Bissett the up to $1,000 a day in violations allowed by the law.

Former NBA MVP Steve Nash is known for many things: his Canadian citizenship, his diminutive stature for a basketball player (63 on his toes), even his now-shortened locks. But never has the term trash talk been associated with him—until now.

A panel convened by the National Academy of Engineering announced today a list of the most important projects in the world—at least, what would be, were we to figure out how to build them. The 14 priorities range from economical solar power—we only need to harness 1/10,000th of the sunlight that hits Earth to satisfy the world's energy needs—to reverse-engineering the brain and universal access to clean water (see the full list after the break). They're also introducing a slick new website to solicit public opinion. What do you think is the most important engineering challenge for the century to come?

Running the hot water for five minutes burns as much energy as leaving a 60W light bulb on for 14 hours, according to Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute.

In the international alliance to fight climate change, the United States is considered the sullen loner. But in the seven years since we rejected Kyoto, changes have begun. Not at the federal level, however. It’s the locals who are making it happen.

The idea that a presidential debate focused on science will advance the cause of science "is more magical thinking than scientific," according to a new essay by David Goldston in the journal Nature. Momentum around such a debate has been growing since December, when a grassroots, nonpartisan group called Science Debate 2008 started a petition that called for a "public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Medicine and Health, and Science and Technology Policy." The petition now has many thousand signatories [full disclosure: they include both myself and the editor-in-chief of Popular Science, a.k.a. my boss].

Perusing the deluge of overheated press releases from the CES conference a few weeks ago, one in particular, for Panasonics new line of EVOLTA batteries, got me thinking. And when I say thinking, I mean muttering curse words and shaking my fist. The release made a big deal about the fact that these new batteries last from 1.3 to 2 times as long as other alkaline batteries—which is to say, slightly less poisonous and wasteful, but not much. Whoopdee-flipping-doo.