The poor air quality at major sporting events can have a damaging affect on athletes’ performance and health.
Lots of these: settling ponds precipitate iron oxide and other suspended materials from the Red and Bonita mines near the Gold King Mine.
Eric Vance/EPA
The dramatic wastewater spill in the Animas River is past its critical phase, but given the long history of untreated mine waste, there will surely be more like it.
Waterbugs are used for the monitoring of river ecosystem health across the world.
Amanda Woodman
The peppered moth will always hold a special place in the annals of evolutionary biology. Its story is a classic example of natural selection, and of how animals can act as indicators of environmental change.
What fly ash looks like after being stored in an ash dam.
Leslie Petrik
Despite looming legal challenges, states are devising plans to comply with limits on power plant carbon emissions – a crucial part of Obama’s climate policies.
Batteries can cut carbon emissions, but mining the metals and other resources needed to make them can be a dirty business.
Jon Seb Barber/Wikimedia Commons
The advent of battery storage heralds an even deeper embrace of electric cars and renewable energy. But amid the green tech revolution, we should be wary of creating new pollution problems.
Hong Kong: a showcase for Asian urban development.
CarolSpears/Wikimedia Commons
Nobel Laureates met recently in Hong Kong to sign a memorandum calling for cities to help guard against climate change. As the most creative places on the planet, big cities are the perfect place to meet this challenge.
China’s government says it plans to tackle smog, but has also moved to shut down criticism on the issue in the wake of a popular online documentary.
EPA/DIEGO AZUBEL
Under the Dome, a hugely popular online documentary about China’s smog crisis, could be as influential as 1962’s US pesticide exposé Silent Spring - but only if Chinese officials allow debate to flourish.
The National Children’s Study may have been flawed, but it was still a valuable endeavor.
Children running via glenda/Shutterstock
Environmental health research has confirmed that chronic, low-level exposure to toxins in our environment – including our food, air and water – can have a significant impact on our health. We need to expand…
Despite firefighters’ efforts, the Hazelwood mine fire showered the nearby town of Morwell with pollution.
AAP Image/Country Fire Authority
I’m quite nervous about writing this. I’m going to stray from my familiar academic world into a political one, and it’s on an issue that may very well have killed several people. My reputation has already…
Rubbish strewn on beaches eventually ends up in one of the world’s giant ocean garbage patches.
Vberger/Wikimedia Commons
Most of us have littered at one time or another, and in the process we probably contributed to the enormous of amounts of plastic that enter the ocean every year, eventually ending up in one of the five…
Ice cores reveal that Antarctica was polluted long before Scott and Amundsen set foot there.
Andrew Mandemaker/Wikimedia Commons
Lead pollution from Australia reached Antarctica in 1889 – long before the frozen continent’s golden age of exploration – and has remained there ever since, new research shows. In our study, published…
Is that an volatile organic compound I can smell, or your aftershave?
Lei Han
While city planners have been encouraged to plant trees and gardens to green the city for the health of its inhabitants, recent research has found that the same trees can damage certain buildings. Our…
The ineffective burning of wood in traditional stoves means that more people die around the world from pollution indoors than outdoors. There are simple, cleaner alternatives for sale, but encouraging…
City-dwellers consider cycling or walking to work to be part of a healthy routine. But latest studies on air pollution show that nanoparticles – unseen pollutants – are a major concern. In the UK, the…
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report tells us that CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to rise and that, unchecked, climate change will likely…