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Make clean fuel or feed the world? That's the dilemma facing biofuel producers now that the world food crisis is making the turning of food crops into biofuel seem increasingly irresponsible. But maybe there's a way out. Mariam Sticklen of Michigan State University in East Lansing and colleagues have engineered a fuel plant to make its own cellulases - a bit like oil that refines itself into petroleum.
Carbon is locked away down in the Earth's crust: in magma and old carbonate rocks buried by plate tectonics, in fossil fuels like coal and oil, and in ice lattices beneath the ocean bed. It has long been assumed that this carbon was largely cut off from the surface, and could safely be ignored when analysing the effect of greenhouse gases on climate. Now it seems there may be much more "deep carbon" ready to spew out than we thought.
A major modelling study forecast that warming of the north Atlantic could make hurricanes scarcer - while the worst ones might have stronger winds and produce more rain. Thomas Knutson and colleagues from NASA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, have previously produced a remarkably accurate year-by-year "hindcast" of hurricane numbers over the past 30 years. So their prediction of an 18 per cent decline in the annual hurricane count by late this century commands attention.
Turkmenistan intends to create a huge lake in the desert by filling a natural depression with drainage water. Critics say it's a bad idea that could even spark a war.
Understanding the composition of the atmosphere over geological time is critical to understanding the history of the Earth system, as the atmosphere is closely linked to the lithosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. Although much of the history of the lithosphere and hydrosphere is contained in rock and mineral records, corresponding information about the atmosphere is scarce and elusive owing to the lack of direct records.
The chief of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has called for the creation of a National Climate Service to manage and disseminate information about global warming.
In a long-anticipated decision hailed as a victory by environmental groups, the United States declared the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) a 'threatened' species. But this heightened protection status may have little bearing on the animals' ultimate fate.
