Word: using
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...make superefficient wind-power turbines. In Japan scientists are perfecting paper-thin solar cells that will be cheap to produce and could turn every house into its own electricity supplier. These ventures, along with many others, are beginning to draw the outlines of a world in which energy use keeps rising and, though fossil fuels remain an important power source, CO2 levels in the atmosphere actually begin to drop...
Efficiency doesn't help when the wind isn't blowing; you need to store energy generated during gales for use when the air is still. The best way to do that, says Robert Williams, of Princeton University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, is to use the excess to compress air and force it into subterranean aquifers, caves or salt domes...
Biologists who explore biodiversity see it vanishing before their eyes. To use two of their favorite phrases, they live in a world of wounds and practice a scientific discipline with a deadline. They generally agree that the rate of species extinction is now 100 to 1,000 times as great as it was before the coming of humanity. Throughout most of geological time, individual species and their immediate descendants lived an average of about 1 million years. They disappeared naturally at the rate of about one species per million per year, and newly evolved species replaced them at the same...
...use those funds would be a matter of endless debate. Should local communities be entitled to set the agenda, or should outside experts take control? Should limited hunting be allowed in parks, or should they be put off limits? Mistakes will be made, the landscape will keep changing, and species will still be lost, but the difficulty of the task should not lead us to abandon hope. Many of the planet's natural habitats are gone forever, but many others can be saved and in time restored...
...Fish farming--aquaculture--doesn't take pressure off wild fish. Many farms use large numbers of cheap, wild-caught fish as feed to raise fewer shrimp and fish of more lucrative varieties. And industrial-scale fish- and shrimp-aquaculture operations sometimes damage the coastlines where the facilities are located. The farms can foul the water, destroy mangroves and marshes, drive local fishers out of business and serve as breeding grounds for fish diseases. In places such as Bangladesh, Thailand and India, which grow shrimp mainly for export to richer countries, diseases and pollution usually limit a farm's life...