AFTER $10 billion spent, countless papers and a large helping of controversy, are we any closer to knowing whether Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert offers a secure resting place for America's nuclear legacy?

China has more dams than any other country, and many of them are in Sichuan, an earthquake-prone, mountainous region. The majority of them produce hydroelectricity. The region is well-placed to supply power to large industrial cities down the Yangtze valley, and when the dams were built this must have appeared a logical strategy. Now it looks foolhardy. Hundreds of Sichuan's dams have been damaged by the earthquake and could collapse during the coming monsoon season. (Editorial)

Long-period seismic sources associated with glacier motion have been recently discovered, and an increase in ice flow over the past decade has been suggested on the basis of secular changes in such measurements. Their significance, however, remains uncertain, as a relationship to ice flow has not been confirmed by direct observation. Here the authors combine long-period surface-wave observations with simultaneous Global Positioning System measurements of ice displacement to study the tidally modulated stick

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.

In May 2005, the Arunachal Pradesh government filed an application in the Supreme Court regarding the Subansiri (Lower) project, expressing serious concerns about large storage dams: "

Arunachal Pradesh is awarding hydroelectric projects to private companies at the breakneck speed of one every nine days without proper scrutiny. The government says hydroelectricity is the key to the state