Publication archives

Chinese President Hu Jintao took centre stage Thursday ahead of an Asia Pacific summit with trade and climate change high on the agenda of his talks with the leaders of Australia and the United States.

PLAINVIEW, MINN. - Maurie and Rita Young are much like other operators of large dairy farms in Minnesota. They volunteer at the State Fair, their children belonged to Future Farmers of America -- and their cows are milked by Mexican workers.

A few weeks ago, heavy rains flooded a stretch of land along the Minnesota and Wisconsin border that is home to hundreds of organic farmers. Reports have been devastating - with many individual farms reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

While 10 years of bathing North Carolina pine tree stands with extra carbon dioxide did allow the trees to grow more tissue, only those pines receiving the most water and nutrients were able to store significant amounts of carbon that could offset the effects of global warming, scientists told a national meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA).

Japan will try to turn the millions of wooden chopsticks that go discarded each year into biofuel to ease the country's energy shortage, officials said Wednesday. Biofuels are seen as an alternative clean energy resource that can reduce dependence on Middle East oil and lessen the impact of global warming. Japan has virtually no natural energy resources of its own.

As superheroes go, the tiny insect that Ellen Lake holds in her outstretched hand seems preposterous. For starters, it's no bigger than a speck of dirt. In magnification, with its bizarre long snout, the insect - a weevil known as R. latipes - looks almost comical, like something Dr. Seuss would have created.

The forests are disappearing. That's the warning from conservationists who point to statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, which found Rhode Island has been losing forest land since 1963, when the tree cover peaked at 434,000 acres, or about two-thirds of the state.