Perhaps our species’s greatest misconception about the sea was that it is inexhaustible. The idea seems rather silly now, in a world where most people are familiar with the word “overfishing.” But men once gazed into the deep and imagined that it teemed with life so plentiful that we could take and take without ever [...]

Editor’s Note: Students from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. This series chronicles work being done by the student-led group, known as  Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineering (DHE) [formerly known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP)], to design "rocket stoves" in the village of [...]

This week’s blackouts in India have been blamed at least in part on the lack of rain during the annual monsoon season, which hindered hydropower production and increased the demand for electricity for use in agricultural irrigation. But the unusually dry year has also had at least one positive effect: it has helped to boost [...]

If you’ve ever watched shows like Hell’s Kitchen or Kitchen Nightmares, you’d know not to cross incendiary celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. Well, maybe his shows don’t air in Taiwan, because a crew of Taiwanese shark-fin smugglers wasn’t too impressed by Ramsay’s reputation, holding the TV host at gunpoint and pouring gasoline over him during the [...]

The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, By Charles Fishman, Published in 2011 by Free Press, New York NY, ISBN 978-1-4391-0207-7 ____________________ Resorting only minimally to the standard statistics of water scarcity in various regions around the world, Mr. Fishman dives in to several specific case studies intended to help the [...]

Collect trash, burn it, and then generate electricity. The technology is called Waste to Energy, and it uses our waste streams to produce electricity that can be cleaner than the average kilowatt-hour (kWh) generated in the United States today. A mountain of trash becomes a pile of energy. But, will this domestic renewable resource be [...]

There has been a lot of press, both positive and negative, about a recent United Nations report in which scientists recommended that we start eating insects to fight world hunger. But the other U.N. recommendation—that farmers should consider feeding insects to poultry and aquacultured fish—did not garner nearly as much attention, despite seeming more feasible. [...]

This article arises from Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University. On the evening of Wednesday, Oct. 24, Future Tense and Scientific American will be hosting an event in New York City on building resilient cities. To learn more and to RSVP, visit the New America Foundation website. [...]

During the 352-year life span of the Royal Society, the human population has risen from less than one billion people to seven billion and counting. That boom has been supported by science and technology—Watt’s coal-fired steam engine, Haber and Bosch synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin—and continues today as the world’s population expands at [...]

Two provocative ways to see long-term changes on earth are currently being promoted in honor of Earth Week. A Web site by NASA, and an app from HarperCollins, both show striking side-by-side satellite images of locations that have changed dramatically over time spans of up to 30 years or more. The primary intent is to [...]

Even as Iran’s nuclear program raises the likelihood of yet another conflict in the Middle East, the bigger threat is a potential food crisis in the making, says Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute. “When I ask myself, what are the threats for out security today, foreign aggression doesn’t make top five,” Brown [...]

About 800 million people worldwide do not get enough food to eat, while about 1.5 billion are overweight. As the global population expands by an additional 2 billion people by 2050 and climate change alters traditional agricultural areas, scientists and policy makers are racing to figure out how to address both problems. (Read more about [...]

If global development were a horse race, would you put your money on the slow-and-steady contenders or a fast new contender? With this year’s results just in, the old stalwart Scandinavian countries are still in the lead, according to the 2011 United Nations’ Human Development Index, published Wednesday. With Norway leading the charge in this [...]

One laptop per child seems a simple slogan, chock full of benefit. What could go wrong when you put the power of the Internet and solar cells into the hands of children in the developing world? After all, not only does it train the global underclass in the tools of modern production, it also unleashes [...]

Two typical German shepherds kept as pets in Europe or the U.S. consume more in a year than the average person living in Bangladesh, according to research by sustainability experts Brenda and Robert Vale of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. So are the world’s environmental ills really a result of the burgeoning number of [...]

Echoing luminaries before him—from Norman Borlaug to Kofi Annan—the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, called last night for a second Green Revolution focused on African farmers. That revolution won’t just be in new crop varieties and higher yields but also in farmer training and infrastructure—and, perhaps most controversially, will be genetically modified. "Three quarters of [...]

With the 2012 London Olympics drawn to a close, so starts the task of breaking down parts of the 500-acre Olympic Park that housed the world’s finest athletes for the past two weeks. But, the London 2012 Organizing Committee and the Olympic Delivery Authority are already two steps ahead. In their effort to keep this [...]

In 2010, people across the globe munched their way through 128 million tons of seafood. That’s according to the latest data coming out of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This hefty supply of fish equals around 41 pounds per person each year, and is taking its toll on the health of the oceans [...]

Rise ‘N Shine Farm’s first bounty of the year   Spring is here, and with it the first harvest of the season. It’s my family’s second year belonging to a CSA. This time around we chose a farm with a drop off site much closer to home. Our produce now comes from Rise ‘N Shine Organic Farm, [...]

That sound you do not hear is a half-million people not sighing in relief as the reservoir that slakes the thirst of the population of Raleigh, NC, and many surrounding smaller towns nears capacity for the first time in nearly a year. And on this World Water Day, when many turn their attention to the [...]

This week, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) is hosting the 5th International Conference on Energy Sustainability in Washington, DC. Over the next three days this conference will bring together researchers, scientists and engineers from around the world for more than 300 presentations related to the topic of energy sustainability. Attendees will also celebrate [...]

I heard this story on NPR/PRI’s The World while driving home from yoga last night. Here’s the tl;dr of it: a Dutch company is perfecting ways to grow food indoors using LED lights and elaborate climate controls. By optimizing light levels and wavelengths, a range of crops can be grown. One could theoretically grow plants [...]

I seem to be surrounded by green lately (check my website for more about my Girls camp on Environmental Engineering and the great new MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) on Sustainability at UIUC to be offered beginning in August). For PsiVid, though, a video focus seems appropriate. The Australian based Green Screen Climate Fix Flicks [...]

Bricks, sticks, and hay are decidedly pedestrian building materials in comparison to a new building that just opened to the public last Thursday in Hamburg, Germany. Ambitious architects have built an apartment covered in a thin layer of living, breathing algae. The building, known as BIQ (for Bio Intelligent Quotient), meets the extremely stringent passive-house [...]