The American Bumblebee – a species once more commonly seen buzzing around Southern Ontario – is critically endangered, according to a new study led by York University. The finding, published in Journal of Insect Conservation, found the native North American species, Bombus pensylvanicus, is facing imminent extinction from Canada, considered the highest and Continue Reading
Trees have the ability to capture and remove pollutants from the soil and degrade them through natural processes in the plant. It’s a feat of nature companies have used to help clean up polluted sites, though only in small-scale projects. Now, a probiotic bacteria for trees can boost the speed Continue Reading
Rice University materials scientists have created a light foam from two-dimensional sheets of hexagonal-boron nitride (h-BN) that absorbs carbon dioxide. They discovered freeze-drying h-BN turned it into a macro-scale foam that disintegrates in liquids. But adding a bit of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) into the mix transformed it into a Continue Reading
About $20 billion worth of energy leaks out of windows in the United States each winter – and that’s with double-paned insulating windows installed on a majority of buildings. The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is now working with manufacturers to bring to market a “super Continue Reading
A novel composite material has been developed by scientists in the Energy Safety Research Institute (ESRI) at Swansea University which shows promise as a catalyst for the degradation of environmentally-harmful synthetic dye pollutants, which are released at a rate of nearly 300,000 tonnes a year into the world’s water. This Continue Reading
Over the last half-decade, public transit ridership declined nationwide. The number of vehicle miles traveled in cars is rising, and traffic congestion is getting worse in many U.S. cities. At the same time, the century-old taxi industry is struggling, with many taxi companies going bankrupt. Are ride-hailing companies such as Continue Reading
The world’s oceans soak up about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans pump into the air each year — a powerful brake on the greenhouse effect. In addition to purely physical and chemical processes, a large part of this is taken up by photosynthetic plankton as they incorporate carbon into their bodies. When plankton die, Continue Reading
