News by Subject Social & Behavior

The BioScience Talks podcast (http://bioscienceaibs.libsyn.com) features discussions of topical issues related to the biological sciences.

With climate change, we'll need less natural gas for heat and more electricity for cooling -- but what's the balance ? University of Utah researchers used hyper-localized climate models and building projections to find out. The answer is that buildings' energy use in the future varies wildly, depending on the climate scenario, and that local building policy now could have a big impact on energy use in the future.

Concrete sewer pipes around the world are most likely to fail either because their concrete is not strong enough or because they can't handle the weight of trucks that drive over them, a new study indicates.

High-resolution analysis of wind speed across Saudi Arabia can help fast track the expansion of the Kingdom's emerging world-class wind energy industry.

Almost one billion tonnes of plastic will be dumped on land and in the oceans over the period from 2016 to 2040 unless the world acts, say a team of 17 global experts who have developed a computer model to track the stocks and flows of plastic around the world.

Just a few negative online restaurant reviews can determine early on how many reviews a restaurant receives long-term, a new study has found. The study, published online earlier this month in the journal Papers in Applied Geography, also found that a neighborhood's median household income affected whether restaurants were rated at all.

The homes of wealthy Americans generate about 25% more greenhouse gases than residences in lower-income neighborhoods, mainly due to their larger size. In the nation's most affluent suburbs, those emissions can be as much as 15 times higher than in nearby lower-income neighborhoods.