Vital Technologies, Inc.

In a sharp reversal of Bush administration policies, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday that the agency planned an aggressive review of permit requests for mountaintop coal mining, citing serious concerns about potential harm to water quality.

Global warming is more than a third to blame for a major drop in rainfall that includes a decade-long drought in Australia and a lengthy dry spell in the United States, a scientist said on Wednesday.

Kenya's most famous animals are fleeing as thousands of firefighters battle flames in four national parks, but some animals may be trapped in the crater of a dormant volcano, a government official said Tuesday.

Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil in Alaska's Prince William Sound, oil persists in the region and, in some places, "is nearly as toxic as it was the first few weeks after the spill," according to the council overseeing restoration efforts.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that climate-warming greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, pose a danger to human health and welfare, a White House website showed on Monday.

Ice cover on the Great Lakes has declined more than 30 percent since the 1970s, leaving the world's largest system of freshwater lakes open to evaporation and lower water levels, according to scientists associated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

China's steel industry should face fees on its exports into the United States if Washington adopts greenhouse gas cuts and Beijing does not, U.S. steel industry officials and advocates said.

The Environmental Protection Agency's new leadership, in a step toward confronting global warming, submitted a finding that will force the White House to decide whether to limit greenhouse gas emissions under the nearly 40-year-old Clean Air Act.

Pekanbaru, Indonesia – Most violent incidents between people and tigers in Sumatra’s Riau Province in the past 12 years have occurred near forests being cleared by paper giant Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) and associated companies, according to a new analysis of human-tiger conflict data. The analysis, conducted by the group Eyes on the Forest, found that since 1997, 55 people and 15 Sumatran tigers (Panthera tigris sumatrae) have been killed during conflict encounters in Riau Province. Another 17 tigers have been captured and removed from the wild.

Air quality models have achieved a great degree of sophistication over the last few years thanks mainly to scientific and computational advances. These are tools that simulate the dynamics of the atmosphere and estimate the impact of particular sources of contamination such as industries or traffic on air quality so that plans and decisions can then be made according to the produced results.

The Black Sea harbours vast quantities of hydrogen sulfide, the toxic gas associated with the smell of rotten eggs. This noxious gas could be used as a renewable source of hydrogen gas to fuel a future carbon-free economy, according to Turkish researchers writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Nuclear Hydrogen Production and Applications. The waters of the Black Sea contain very little oxygen. As such, the rare forms of life that live in the depths of the inland sea, so-called extremophile bacteria, survive by metabolising sulfate in the water. The sulfate fulfils a similar biochemical role to oxygen in respiration for these microbes allowing them to release the energy they need to live and grow from the nutrients they absorb from the water.

Renewable energy could play a much larger role in supplying the world's energy needs than previously estimated — but it won't come cheap, according to a new study. The research, presented at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen, Denmark, this week (11 March) says that renewable energy could supply 40 per cent of the world's energy needs by 2050.

Visibility on clear days has declined in much of the world since the 1970s thanks to a rise in airborne pollutants, scientists said on Thursday. They described a "global dimming" in particular over south and east Asia, South America, Australia and Africa, while visibility remained relatively stable over North America and improved over Europe, the researchers said.

Leatherback turtles, the most widely distributed reptiles on Earth, are threatened with extinction themselves, in large part due to the carelessness of humans. A Dalhousie University professor addresses the threat of plastics to this endangered species. They survived the extinction of the dinosaurs. They're descendants of one of the oldest family trees in history, spanning 100 million years. But today leatherback turtles, the most widely distributed reptiles on Earth, are threatened with extinction themselves, in large part due to the carelessness of humans.

WASHINGTON — The northeastern U.S. coast is likely to see the world's biggest sea level rise from man-made global warming, a new study predicts. However much the oceans rise by the end of the century, add an extra 8 inches or so for New York, Boston and other spots along the coast from the mid-Atlantic to New England. That's because of predicted changes in ocean currents, according to a study based on computer models published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.