| The Tesla Roadster is a rocket. And all-electric, too “Are you ready?” the young driver beside me asked, as we sat in the two-seat Tesla Roadster convertible, facing a straight, steep, quarter-mile road that rises from the water of San Francisco Bay up the headland to the Golden Gate Bridge. Then he floored the accelerator. I was driven into the seat-back behind me--and I mean driven, like I was strapped into some insane amusement park ride--for several full seconds as the car accelerated and accelerated like a rocket up the climb. Only there was no screaming flame blasting behind us. There was no engine roaring either. I was being shot up this road so fast my emergency senses were on full alert, yet all was eerily quiet. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Copenhagen: Look to the Sea? The oceans control climate change. Not only do the world's waters absorb the bulk of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, they also absorb the bulk of the extra carbon dioxide. And that means one thing: a more acid ocean . New research shows that while some shell-forming sea critters, like lobsters, will actually build thicker shells in a more acid ocean, clams and oysters, among others, have shells that partially dissolved under the new conditions. And tiny creatures known as foramnifera are already building less thick shells as a result of a drop in ocean pH from 8.2 to 8.1 over the course of the last century. That tenth of a point on the logarithmic pH scale actually means a roughly 30 percent increase in acidity. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Waste Land: Does the Large Amount of Food Discarded in the U.S. Take a Toll on the Environment? Dear EarthTalk: What are the environmental implications of all the food we throw away here in the United States? --Mike Schiller, Cambridge, Mass. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Spare Times: For Children A selected guide to events by and for children in the New York area. nytimes.com |
Plastic from Plants: Is It an Environmental Boon or Bane? More than 2.5 billion plastic bottles--partially made from plants--are already in use around the world in a bid to replace petroleum as the fundamental building block of everyday plastics. The so-called PlantBottle from the Coca-Cola Co. is made by converting sugars from sugarcane farmed in Brazil into the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic commonly used in the ubiquitous clear bottles for various beverages. Fully recyclable, the bottles debuted at the 2009 U.N. Copenhagen Climate Conference and Vancouver Olympics, and are now on sale from Japan to Chile and across the U.S. [More] rss.sciam.com |