Scientists find gene that protects against potato blight
...ent by eliminating the application of thousands of tons of toxic chemicals. But despite the huge economic and environmental gains that could be realized, it is unclear if the technology will be widely utilized. Because of European fears of genetically modified crops, and the control exercised over growers...Worm farmers wriggle into US market
...y aims to build up annual production to 150 metric tons of ragworms (known as sandworms in the USA) - that's about 40 million worms. Its parent company currently produces about 50 metric tons, the majority exported to 20 countries. Seabait, a research 'spin out' company, was established in 1985 at Lyne...Lake ecosystem critical to East African food supply is threatened by climate change
...ke Tanganyika currently yield approximately200,000 tons of fish per year, and are far and away the most important source of animal protein for human consumption in this region of Central Africa," said Cohen. SGiven the already significant problems of malnutrition and civil conflict in central Africa, a si...Genomes of tiny microbes yield clues to global climate change
...rococcus and Synechococcus remove about 10 billion tons of carbon from the air each year as much as two-thirds of the total carbon fixation that occurs in the oceans. Patrick Chain, a biologist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and co-author of the two Nature papers, said the three cyanoba...Story tips from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, September 2003
...es the weight of a power transformer from about 75 tons to about 45 tons for a 30 megavolt-ampere (MVA) unit, the size typical of a substation in a medium-sized city. What's...Fe-TAML(R) activators developed at Carnegie Mellon help cleanup paper and wood pulp manufacturing
...cturing process produces approximately 100 million tons of bleached pulp each year for use in the manufacture of a variety of cellulose-based products including white paper. In standard mill paper processing, a dark, coffee-colored effluent is produced, called 'color' in the industry because of its dark h...Trade Center debris pile was a chemical factory, says new study
...When the trade center towers burned and collapsed, tons of concrete, glass, furniture, carpets, insulation, computers and paper were reduced to enormous, oxygen-poor debris piles that slowly burned until Dec. 19, 2001. In that hot pile, some of the debris' constituent elements combined with organic matte...Huge iceberg wreaks havoc on Antarctic marine ecosystem, study finds
...e next three months -- a crucial time of year when tons of microscopic marine algae, called phytoplankton, normally bloom in open water. Phytoplankton are a major food source for krill, which in turn are consumed by fish, seals, penguins and whales. Without massive amounts of phytoplankton, the entire fo...How many fish in the sea? Census of Marine Life launches first report
...eanic pasture, converting CO2 gas into 300 billion tons of food for tiny animals like krill that in turn feed the larger animals up the food chain. This is equal to all the food on land made through photosynthesis. Satellites looking at light reflected from the ocean provide reasonable indications of the...Bad Mileage: 98 tons of plants per gallon
Oct. 27, 2003 A staggering 98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant material that's 196,...00 kilograms to get 89,000 kilograms or 89 metric tons of ancient plant matter to make a gallon of gas. In U.S. units, that is equal to a bit more than 19......massive solar eruptions ensued hurling billions of tons of plasma (ionized particles) toward Earth, little damage was done here on the home planet. The Earth's magnetic field shields us from the direct effects of this radiation, but the charged plasma interacts with the Earth's magnetic field and can caus...Tracking the illegal ivory trade
... and last year the Singapore government seized 6.5 tons of ivory, the largest seizure in the history of the ivory trade. "The flow of illegal ivory appears to have markedly increased in the past year," says Wasser. One of the problems is that poachers can be hard to spot, especially in the forests of Cent...... Rebuild : Did you know that it takes at least 100 tons of aggregate to build a 6-room house, and 10,000 tons to build a mile of highway A recent USGS inventory of mines and mineral occurrences in Afghanistan i...Academy Harbor Consortium releases letter on mercury to President Bush
...r plants alone would decline from approximately 48 tons to about five tons. This matters because there is a direct link between mercury emitted to the atmosphere and mercury levels in fish--both those fish caught in our lakes and streams and the commercial fish caught in our world's oceans. Reduct...Science paper: Overharvesting of Brazil nuts leading to fewer trees
...on alone, harvesters annually collect about 45,000 tons valued at about $43 million worldwide, according to the Science paper. In parts of the Amazon forest where traditional peoples still live in the forest, the nuts are their primary source of income, Kainer said. Wild trees are the exclusive source of...Genetic master switch sends bacteria toward 'seafood dinner'
...rstanding this process is important because 10 11 tons of chitin (pronounced "KITE-in") are dumped annually in the oceans, largely by tiny sea animals called copepods, which shed their shells as they grow. "If nothing happened to this debris, we'd be up to our eyeballs in chitin, and the carbon and nitro...Peregrine falcons may face new environmental threat
... notes. "According to statistics from 1999, 24,300 tons of deca were used in the Americas, compared to only 7,500 tons in Europe," de Wit says. The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation provided funding for this resea...Farmed salmon more toxic than wild salmon, study finds
...OOMINGTON, Ind. -- A study of more than two metric tons of North American, South American and European salmon has shown that PCBs and other environmental toxins are present at higher levels in farm-raised salmon than in their wild counterparts. Researchers at Indiana University and five other research ce...Waste motor oil management may pose threat to health and the environment
...l in the study, with emissions of about 136 metric tons from California's used oil in 2002. Copper and lead weighed in at 6.5 and 5.2 metric tons respectively. But total mass alone does not address the potential threat to human health or the envi...