Feature Article

Ever since hurricane Katrina, it has been an open secret: the old, the poor and immigrants suffer most when natural disasters hit the US.

The wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC issued a wake-up call to the Indonesian authorities this week: stop the illegal trade in Sumatran tiger body parts or the species will be hunted to extinction.

THE US Environmental Protection Agency is in trouble again. Already under fire for failing to get tough on carbon dioxide emissions, the agency has now had its scheme for dealing with mercury pollution ruled illegal.

It is well known that when the dangers of smoking became increasingly obvious in the 1950s, tobacco companies funded scientific research aimed at downplaying the risks. Now, a little-known strand of that campaign, aimed at giving an intellectual gloss to pro-smoking arguments, has been detailed for the first time.

The management and conservation of the world's oceans require synthesis of spatial data on the distribution and intensity of human activities and the overlap of their impacts on marine ecosystems.

A high-throughput protocol was developed for the synthesis of zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs). Twenty-five different ZIF crystals were synthesized from only 9600 microreactions of either zinc(II)/cobalt(II) and imidazolate/imidazoloate-type linkers.

Porous solids have become a rich playground for chemists, who can tailor the materials' makeup for use in gas storage, filtering and catalysis.

Clouds have always given climate modelers fits. The clouds in their models are crude at best, and in the real world, researchers struggle to understand how clouds are responding to-and perhaps magnifying-greenhouse warming; But two new studies now show that much of the worry about clouds' role in the warming has been misdirected.

Focus on the whole forest and think big. That's the intent of a bill, introduced in the U.S. Senate, that would direct the Forest Service to fund large, collaborative projects to reduce fire risk, improve forest health and stimulate economic development.

The tribal women in the sleepy village of Donga-nala in Korba district run a unit for making medicines from herbs, thus converting traditional medicinal knowledge into fortunes.