Industrial biotechnology has the potential to save the planet up to 2.5 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year and support building a sustainable future, a WWF report found.

As the world is debating how to cut dangerous emissions and come together in an international agreement treaty which will help protect the planet from potentially devastating effects of climate change, innovative ideas how to reduce our CO2 are very valuable.

A recent report published by WWF Denmark identifies the potential to be between 1 billion and 2.5 billion tons CO2 per year by 2030, more than Germany's total reported emissions in 1990.

Industrial biotechnology could help create a true 21st century green economy, the report states. Read the rest of this entry »

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

- William Wordsworth

Regular contact with nature helps humanize us. We can know a sense of unity with all life by way of the sights and sounds of the natural world. This important spiritual element is often left out of discussions of why protecting the environment is a critical issue for our time.

If your hometown and home state are anything like mine, you know how much things have been changing. National parks are wonderful and important places of inspiration and heritage, but we don't live there. We are crowding nature out of our daily lives. Yet I believe that it is precisely here, at the borderlands and interchanges of our ordinary human activities with the natural landscape, that nature affects us most profoundly. Read the rest of this entry »

Bees are truly amazing creatures, found in just about every region of the world from the Arctic tundra to the towering peaks of the Himalayas. About three quarters of more than 240,000 of the world's flowering plants rely on them to reproduce.

• There are more than 20,000 bee species in the world and, unlike the honeybee, most of them are solitary. They range in size from the 1.5 mm tropical stingless bee to the 40 mm long giant rock bee of Asia.
• They include mining bees, mason bees, leaf-cutter bees, carpenter bees, carder bees, masked bees, sweat bees and bumblebees.¹
• Most bees don't live in hives and are not communal. Instead, they nest in grassy hillocks, in burrows in the ground, under rock ledges, in trees and in rotten wood. Read the rest of this entry »

Just because Albert Einstein said that the faster-than-light travel is impossible isn't any reason to stop trying for it, a number of Star Trek-loving theoretical physicists have declared. To achieve the starship Enterprise's fabled warp speed, they propose simply bending the rules of physics a bit.

The speed-of-light speed limit, they argue, only applies within space-time (the continuum of three dimensions of space plus one of time that we live in). While any given object can't travel faster than light speed within space-time, theory holds, perhaps space-time itself could travel. "The idea is that you take a chunk of space-time and move it," said Marc Millis, former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project. "The vehicle inside that bubble thinks that it's not moving at all. It's the space-time that's moving" [SPACE.com]. Read the rest of this entry »