Environment

While we may think of blue jeans as kind of earthy, basic clothing, the process by which they're dyed is definitely not eco-friendly. That may soon no longer be the case, however, thanks to the development of a new coloration technique.

Agriculture is a huge environmental issue in many ways, but one that’s often overlooked is livestock urination. Researchers from Germany and New Zealand have now demonstrated a potential way to reduce that problem – by toilet-training cows.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere attracts most of the attention in environmental concerns, but much of that ends up in oceans, making them more acidic. Now scientists have created nanojars that can easily capture this and other pollutants from water.

Climate change can feel inevitable, but we’ve stepped up to the challenge before. New modeling shows how bad things would be if CFCs hadn’t been banned decades ago – depleted ozone would've increased UV exposure and stopped plants capturing carbon.

Although stand-up paddleboards are eco-friendly to use, they're typically made of not-so-green substances. German scientists are trying to change that, with a board made of sustainable materials – obtained partially from old wind turbine blades.

The Ocean Cleanup Project has made a significant tweak to its design, switching from a passive device to one powered by active propulsion, which the team sees as a far more efficient and effective way of removing plastic waste from the ocean.

According to a new report issued by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), human-caused climate change will have dire consequences over the next 20 years.

Nuclear and fossil fuel power plants consume huge amounts of water for cooling, which then goes to waste as water vapor. MIT engineers have now developed a system that can capture and recycle that lost water.

A new study paints a startling picture of how the evolutionary habits of juvenile turtles lure them into the most polluted parts of the ocean, demonstrated by the discovery of plastic in the stomachs of young turtles around the coast of Australia.

Most of us have in our busy lives wished there were more hours in the day. That wish actually came true billions of years ago – and that might be why we have so much oxygen now, as photosynthesizing microbes took advantage of the productivity boost.

Such is the magnitude of our plastic pollution problem that cleaning beaches is a tough ask. The BeBot is a robot designed to tackle this problem, sifting through sand to gather up waste while making a minimal impact on the environment.

As work continues to clean up the mess left by the meltdown of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011, scientists are enlisting some local help in their efforts to survey the damage, in the form of rat snakes that frequent the area.