Conserve Planet Earthbecome a planet earth hero

Jets are quite loud especially if they fly over your home much less for those closer like passengers or those at an airport. When jet-powered passenger aircraft first went into service in the 1950s, their engines were as loud as rock bands. Times have changed, but public dismay over jet noise has not. EurActiv reports from the Paris Air Show. Today’s engines are on average 75% quieter than those produced at the dawn of the jet age. This is the result, manufacturers say, of steady technological improvements that along with more aerodynamic aircraft have reduced the nuisance of flying for passengers and those on the ground.

A new survey report has revealed that the majority of the public believe the Government should support the construction of more renewable energy sources like solar, wave and tidal power. And the poll, commissioned by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, found a third of those questioned would even consider investing in small-scale community renewable projects like wind farms, solar farms or small-scale biomass plants.

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Non-native species are organisms that have been purposely or accidently introduced to an area outside its original geographic range. Often, these non-native species become invasive where they thrive in their new habitat and can aggressively start to take over the environment by outcompeting some of the native species. This alteration can not only cause harm to the environment, but to the economy as well.

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Panama’s researchers have played a key role in creating a rapidly growing salmon that may soon become the world’s first commercially sold genetically modified (GM) animal. The US’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ruled the consumption of GM salmon to be as safe as conventional Atlantic salmon, and is now analyzing public comments on its environmental impact as the final part of the approval process. If the FDA permits the transgenic salmon to be imported for human consumption — which the firm that developed the fish hopes will be granted this year — the research station in Panama that is studying the GM salmon would switch to growing it for the US market.

Salinity is an ecological factor of considerable importance, influencing the types of organisms that live in a body of water and perhaps the climate as well. Salinity influences the kinds of plants that will grow either in a water body, or on land fed by a water (or by a ground water. So salt is a vital ecological restraint. Contrary to common perception, salinity is hardly uniform in the world’s oceans. “It’s apparent when you look at a surface salinity map of the Indian Ocean,” said Subrahmanyam Bulusu, the director of the Satellite Oceanography Laboratory in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina. “In the northern part of the Arabian Sea, the salinity is considerably higher than in the northern part of the Bay of Bengal.”

Many animals migrate in an effort to find food, a more hospitable climate, and most importantly, a place to breed. However, a herd of elk known as the Clarks Fork herd, made up of nearly 4,000 elk, are coming back from their Yellowstone National Park migration with fewer calves compared to those elks that do not migrate, which are known as resident elk. So why are the resident elk being considered more successful compared to migrating individuals in the same herd?

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When deciding whether or not to clear a patch of rainforest land for development, scientists are often called in to quantify how many different species exist there. But determining the number of rare and threatened species living in a section of jungle isn’t easy. If they are very rare, the individual members of the species will be hard to find; if the area being surveyed is along a steep slope it may be difficult to access the area; if there are lots of species to identify, you might need to hire a dream team of biologists—each specialized within a different area of biodiversity—and that can get expensive. However a new study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Journal by an international group of scientists suggests a more cost-effective and efficient way to rapidly assess local biodiversity: instead of spending time and money looking at everything—searching for rare and threatened individuals in a forest patch or on a hillside—focus instead on the biological difference which can easily be determined within a few, easy-to-find, common species.

Data from NAA’s Landsat 8 is now freely available, enabling researchers and the general public to access images captured by the satellite within twelve hours of reception. The data is available to download at no charge from GloVis, EarthExplorer, or via the LandsatLook Viewer.

We are constantly being told what to eat, what not to eat, what is good for our eyesight and what helps us loose weight. Well here’s another suggestion: eat parsley, celery, and chamomile tea in order to help kill cancer cells. Researchers at The Ohio State University’s Comprehensive Cancer Center found that the compound identified as apigenin could stop breast cancer cells from inhibiting their own death.

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To ensure South-East Asias’s growing population has enough water to drink, we need to collect more rain, says Crispin Maslog. The world’s next major crisis will be a lack of water for home use, including drinking water, many scientists predict. Humans can survive around 40 days without food, but much less than that without water to drink. The scarcity of water for domestic use is becoming a critical problem, especially in rural parts of developing countries. Surface water in rivers, streams or lakes, and groundwater, are increasingly becoming contaminated with pollutants from factories, households, farms and mines. Wells dug deeper to extract groundwater are drying up.