"Lorenzo Pellegrini, who "gardens" the Risoud Forest in Switzerland to assist the future resonant acoustics of the wood currently growing there. It's a violin garden for the 24th century."

"Cornell and Rutgers researchers report in the March issue of Oceanography that the severe loss of summertime Arctic sea ice—attributed to greenhouse warming—appears to enhance Northern Hemisphere jet stream meandering, intensify Arctic air mass invasions toward middle latitudes, and increase the frequency of atmospheric blocking events like the one that steered Hurricane Sandy west into the densely populated New York City area."

"the rare earth metals were extracted from nickel-metal hydride batteries collected from 386 Honda hybrid vehicles that were stored prior to being on sale but became unusable by the Great East Japan Earthquake. Further, as soon as a sufficient volume is secured, Honda will begin applying the same process and recycle rare earth metals extracted from used nickel-metal hydride batteries collected by Honda dealers through battery replacement."

"...the Tigris and Euphrates basins -- which are ripe with border disputes, conflict over Kurdish minorities, and now major conflicts in Syria and Iraq -- might be more prone to the insidious effects of water instability than other places around the globe."

"Each year, 130,000 Americans are hospitalized and 3,000 die of contaminated food."

"The researchers have applied a mathematical model to a real world situation, the environmental collapse of a lake in China, to help prove a theory which suggests an ecosystem 'flickers', or fluctuates dramatically between healthy and unhealthy states, shortly before its eventual collapse." ECOSYSTEM FLICKERING. Oh, I like that. I will wait to see if Deb Chachra decides it counts as a daily idiom.

water testing

"East Africa's most populous city, Nairobi, is a booming metropolis, regional headquarters to major international corporations like Coca-Cola and Google, and filled with upwardly mobile urban dwellers. And all the trash they produce has to go somewhere. It ends up in Dandora, the city's only municiple dumpsite, where thousands of workers -- men, women, and children -- pick through refuse daily, looking for food and recyclable scraps to sell. It's a hard, toxic life -- but it's also the only job available..."

solar cells thinner than a thread of spider silk that are flexible enough to be wrapped around a single human hair.

"A better parking lot might be covered with solar canopies so that it could produce energy while lowering heat. Or perhaps it would be surfaced with a permeable material like porous asphalt and planted with trees in rows like an apple orchard, so that it could sequester carbon and clean contaminated runoff."

"Auckland-based Apeiron Aerospace, an innovative aerospace company focussed on delivering technology to the global UAV sector, has designed a tactical UAV system for cloud seeding as the existing process involving manned aircraft endangers the lives of pilots."

"In 1969, the US government detonated a subterranean nuclear bomb to break loose natural gas deposits from tight sandstone formations more than 8,000 feet below ground on a Colorado mountain. The bomb was twice as powerful as the one that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945."

"...it’s emblematic of the fact that there’s an enormous amount we don’t know about the world around us. It makes me wonder how many other things there are like this."

"Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region."

"Next week a British engineering team heads off to Antarctica for the first stage of an ambitious scientific mission to collect water and sediment samples from a lake buried beneath three kilometres of solid ice."

"“Shitscape” describes “the making of an entirely functioning landscape built from human excreta”. It proposes to accomplish this by recovering “the ‘soil’ from the settlements while extracting the beneficial flora from the forest and, in turn, utilize both as a generator for a new and evolving landscape”."

"A Japanese company has developed a miniature version of Noah's ark in case Japan is hit by another massive earthquake and tsunami – a floating capsule that looks like a huge tennis ball."

"According to the World Bank, in 2008 46 percent of Indian urbanites – or nine out of every ten living in a slum – lacked “improved sanitation facilities”, meaning that people living within them lack sewerage and public toilets3. Where community toilets do exist, poor maintenance and overuse often render them unsanitary before long. For example, a survey of 151 slum settlements in Mumbai conducted by Mahila Milan/NSDF found that there were 3,433 municipal toilet seats, 80 percent of which were not working, to serve one million people – a ratio of one toilet for every 1,488 people4. Likewise, a 1993 survey of half a million slum-dwellers in Kanpur found that 66 percent had no toilets. Lacking facilities, they shit in the open or in waterways."

The whole thing makes me mad, but now when you search "Amazon River" on the Googles, you're going to be faced with a bullshit story about a "second River", without any attempt by any of the "journalists" to point out that, well, you know, water might be moving underground and all, but it sure as shit ain't a river, and it certainly ain't on the goddamn scale of the, you know, ACTUAL RIVER sittin' up there on the surface.  My prediction: you will never hear about this work again, because future work is going to DRASTICALLY reduce the actual discharge estimates from the groundwater.

Brazilian scientists have discovered an underground river some 4,000 meters (13,000) feet deep, which flows from west to east like the country's famous waterway.

Plumes of chemicals will cost $96 million to clean up in the next 30 years, including $6 million this year.

"The prices of staple foods will more than double in 20 years unless world leaders take action to reform the global food system, Oxfam has warned."

"Six Scottish windfarms were paid up to £300,000 to stop producing energy, it has emerged."

"Jack O'Malley-James of the University of St Andrews has studied what plants might be like on an Earth-like planet with two or three suns and found that they may appear black or grey.  He will be presenting results at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno on Tuesday 19th April"

"Everyone knows about Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and, now, Fukushima. But what about Semipalatinsk, Palomares and Kyshtym? The world is full of nuclear disaster zones.."

"Queen's researchers have discovered that nanoparticles, which are now present in everything from socks to salad dressing and suntan lotion, may have irreparably damaging effects on soil systems and the environment."

"A group of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives is proposing to shift funds from NASA’s climate-change research coffers to the agency’s manned spaceflight program, an effort they say could preserve what they described as the agency’s core mission even as the new GOP-controlled House seeks to make good on vows to roll back federal discretionary spending this year"

"Using a common metal most famously found in self-cleaning ovens, Sossina Haile hopes to change our energy future. The metal is cerium oxide—or ceria—and it is the centerpiece of a promising new technology developed by Haile and her colleagues that concentrates solar energy and uses it to efficiently convert carbon dioxide and water into fuels."

New research has shown that it is possible and affordable for the world to achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2030, if there is the political will to strive for this goal.