News by Subject Biology

University of Guelph researchers found residues of the insecticides in the livers of wild turkeys, providing evidence that this common agrochemical is being ingested by free-ranging animals.

Today, producing feed for pigs, cattle and chicken causes immense impacts for the climate and the environment. In the future, animal feed production is likely to be shifted from croplands to large-scale industrial facilities as it could bring both financial and environmental benefits. Replacing 2 percent feed with protein-rich microbes could decrease agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, global cropland area and nitrogen losses by over 5 percent.

Scientists from the University of Georgia have calculated the potential global impact of China's ban on plastic waste imports and how this policy might affect efforts to reduce the amount of plastic waste entering the world's landfills and natural environment.

As the world's population swells, humans will have to figure out how to keep feeding livestock without using even larger tracts of land to grow food for them or causing more harm to the environment. Scientists report in a study appearing in Environmental Science & Technology that the key could be bacteria that can efficiently produce large amounts of microbial proteins. These proteins could replace some of the crops grown today to feed animals.

A Princeton University-led study in the journal Nature Geosciences examined the global carbon cycle and suggests that scientists may have misgauged how carbon is distributed around the world, particularly between the northern and southern hemispheres. The results could change projections of how, when and where the currently massive levels of atmospheric carbon will result in environmental changes such as ocean acidification.

Even 'modest' action to limit climate change could help prevent the most extreme water-shortage scenarios facing Asia by the year 2050, according to a new study led by MIT researchers.

Air pollution has smothered China's cities in recent decades. In response, the Chinese government has implemented measures to clean up its skies. But are those policies effective? Now an innovative study co-authored by an MIT scholar shows that one of China's key antipollution laws is indeed working -- but unevenly, with one particular set of polluters most readily adapting to it.