Environment

The amount Americans throw away annually would fill a 100-story building 44 times, says Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. The USDA and the EPA have issued a challenge to cut that in half by 2030.

New safety regulations and a slump in oil prices means tens of thousands of railroad tank cars are being taken out of service. Railroads are scrambling to find space to store unwanted oil trains.

 

Scientists used an estimate of how much fossil fuel is left in the ground to do computer simulations and come up with a worst-case scenario.

The aquaculture project would be the same size as New York's Central Park and produce 11 million pounds of yellowtail and white sea bass each year. But some people see it as an aquatic "factory farm."

Montana has one of the heaviest lifts of any state to comply with the EPA's plan to reduce carbon emissions. But the state is also rich in renewable energy, and the regulations may be a boon to some.

Sound gets into our brains and processed so quickly that it shapes all other perceptions, says neuroscientist Seth Horowitz. "You hear anywhere from 20 to 100 times faster than you see."

Using divers to monitor whether life is returning to the 100 or so marine protected areas is pricey. Now, advances in DNA sequencing mean scientists just need a seawater sample to do a marine census.