The economist Paul Krugman suggested in his New York Times column earlier this month that the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico could provide the flagging environmental movement with the renewed impetus it so badly needs. The modern movement, he pointed out, gained a great deal of momentum from a fire on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, on 22 June 1969.
An unlikely coalition of logging companies and environmental groups has reached an agreement to protect more than 300,000 square kilometres of Canadian boreal forest
Despite decades of research into drugs and vaccines for neglected diseases such as tuberculosis and dengue fever, few products have made it through clinical development and into the hands of the millions who desperately need them.
In 2007, a paper in the journal Cancer Cell announced that the compound dichloroacetate (DCA) had been found to shrink tumours in rats (S. Bonnet et al. Cancer Cell 11, 37
Reports that the geological record of erosion indicates a fourfold increase in global sedimentation rates during the past 5 million years merited a global explanation. Explanations offered include an increased rate of mountain formation and global cooling.
The climate community must work together to create a single, clean, comprehensive and open repository of detailed temperature data, say Peter A. Stott and Peter W. Thorne.
Increased erosion associated with the rise of the world's great mountain ranges has been held to be the cause of a prolonged episode of past climate cooling. That connection is now brought into doubt.
Driven by efforts to curb fossil-fuel use and concerns about the security of energy supplies, the number of applications for renewable-energy patents is booming. But the patents are scattered across many databases, in different formats that are not readily searchable, leading to a lack of clarity over who owns specific energy-technology patents, and in which regions.
