| Uncharted waters: Blown fuses and other troubles send the New Clermont back to the docks as the team regroups Editor's Note: A team of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students was traveling up New York's Hudson River this week on the New Clermont , a 6.7-meter boat outfitted with a pair of 2.2-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cells to power the boat's motors. Their journey began September 21 from Manhattan's Pier 84 and was to cover 240 kilometers (at a projected speed of 8 kilometers per hour). After making several stops along the way, the crew originally expected to arrive back at Rensselaer Polytech's campus in Troy, N.Y., on September 25. This is the fourth of Scientific American.com's blogs chronicling this expedition, called the New Clermont Project . [More] rss.sciam.com |
Peat and Repeat: Can Major Carbon Sinks Be Restored by Rewetting the World's Drained Bogs? The logging of palm trees grown atop the decaying peatlands of Borneo and Sumatra helps drive the economy of Indonesia, and this fact alone is starting to make the nation a top global priority for efforts to mitigate the warming climate. The problem is three-pronged: First, cheap pulp and paper produced in Indonesia winds up in the glossy coated products we know as junk mail, luxury shopping bags or children's books. Then, once the original trees are gone, palm oil plantations are often planted in their place. Finally, and most importantly from the perspective of the global climate, all of this is happening on top of peat--essentially dead plants that have remained wet under swampy conditions--which is drained as a result of all this activity. Globally, such degraded peatlands emit nearly three billion tons per year of carbon dioxide that was previously locked up in the decaying matter, or roughly 6 percent of all such greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Climate Change Likely Caused Polar Bear to Evolve Quickly Climactic changes might currently be threatening the survival of polar bears ( Ursus maritimus ), but similar shifts appear to have played an important part in bringing the species into existence in the not too distant past. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Central Park vs. Prospect Park Which is better designed, more beautiful, more fun: Central Park or Prospect Park? It’s a lovers’ quarrel. nytimes.com |
A Ban On Biodiversity? Biodiversity . The word can't help but fail to do justice to the myriad species of plants and animals, the fecundity of the natural world, the complex web of life. As a word, it’s easy to ignore.But inattention equals extinction. Earth is experiencing its sixth mass extinction event, species winking out of existence before we even know them. And it is a mass extinction entirely caused by the relentless expansion of human habitat and agriculture , as well as human domination of the natural systems--such as the climate--that make life possible. [More] rss.sciam.com |