Researchers led by Prof. Sébastien Sauvé of the University of Montreal’s Department of Chemistry have discovered that traces of caffeine are a useful indicator of the contamination of our water by sewers. (more…)
*University of Minnesota research suggests that wastewater treated with standard technologies contains far greater quantities*
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL — A new University of Minnesota study reveals that the release of treated municipal wastewater – even wastewater treated by the highest-quality treatment technology – can have a significant effect on the quantities of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, often referred to as “superbacteria,” in surface waters.
The study also suggests that wastewater treated using standard technologies probably contains far greater quantities of antibiotic-resistant genes, but this likely goes unnoticed because background levels of bacteria are normally much higher than in the water studied in this research. (more…)
Deforestation, considered by scientists to contribute significantly to global warming, has been shown by a Yale-led team to actually cool the local climate in northern latitudes, according to a paper published Nov. 17 in Nature.
“If you cut trees in the boreal region, north of 45 degrees latitude, you have a net cooling effect,” says Xuhui Lee, the study’s principal investigator and professor of meteorology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. “You release carbon into the atmosphere by cutting down trees, but you increase the albedo effect — the reflection of sunlight.” (more…)
Known as the sugarcane of the desert, sweet sorghum could be a sustainable and ecological future biofuel crop for Arizona.
Researchers in the University of Arizona’s department of agricultural and biosystems engineering recently reaped the reward of six years of planning, testing and trials and harvested 40 acres of experimental sweet sorghum at the UA College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ Red Rock Agricultural Research Center. (more…)
COLUMBIA, Mo. – Manufactured until 1977, and banned by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1979, pentachlorobiphenyls (PCBs) are chemicals still commonly found in the environment because they break down slowly. (more…)
*Ecological changes from lakebed may have led to two different populations of once-related steelhead trout*
A catastrophic landslide 22,500 years ago dammed the upper reaches of northern California’s Eel River, forming a 30-mile-long lake which has since disappeared. It left a living legacy found today in the genes of the region’s steelhead trout.
Using remote-sensing technology known as airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and hand-held global-positioning-systems (GPS) units, scientists recently found evidence for a late Pleistocene, landslide-dammed lake along the river. (more…)
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Increases in air pollution and other particulate matter in the atmosphere can strongly affect cloud development in ways that reduce precipitation in dry regions or seasons, while increasing rain, snowfall and the intensity of severe storms in wet regions or seasons, says a new study by a University of Maryland-led team of researchers. (more…)
Critical genetic secrets of a bacterium that holds potential for removing toxic and radioactive waste from the environment have been revealed in a study by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The researchers have provided the first ever map of the genes that determine how these bacteria interact with their surrounding environment.
“Knowing how bacteria respond to environmental changes is crucial to our understanding of how their physiology tracks with consequences that are both good, such as bioremediation, and bad, such as biofouling,” says Aindrila Mukhopadhyay, a chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division, who led this research. “We have reported the first systematic mapping of the genes in a sulfate-reducing bacterium – Desulfovibrio vulgaris – that regulate the mechanisms by which the bacteria perceive and respond to environmental signals.” (more…)
