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Nestled more than half a kilometer deep in a salt mine, the plutonium slowly decays, taking some 250,000 years to become uranium. As the U.S. debates what to do with the nuclear waste produced by its fleet of 104 reactors, the radioactive legacy of decades of nuclear bomb-making sits entombed in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DoE) Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. Now the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, a diverse group of former politicians, industry representatives and academics, has delivered its draft report on what to do with the rest of the nation’s nuclear waste....

UYUNI, Bolivia—“Gray gold” may be the key to a future filled with hybrid or electric vehicles. That’s because lithium is the most important ingredient in the batteries that power these cars. Even without many electric cars on the road today the lightest metal on Earth is more and more a mining target of multinational companies as lithium ion batteries power an increasing array of electronic gadgets. Lithium is found in many places on the planet, but among all of them no deposit is richer than the vast salt flats of Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, covering more than 10,000 square kilometers of the remote high plains....

December 2007, Vol. 297, Num. 6, pg. 40, ENOUGH HOT AIR ALREADY, by The Editors. December 2007, Vol. 297, Num. 6, pg. 42, MEANINGFUL GOALS FOR CLIMATE TALKS, by Jeffrey D. Sachs. December 2007, Vol. 297, Num. 6, pg. 70, MAKING CARBON MARKETS WORK, by David G. Victor and Danny Cullenward. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?articleID=29896DAF-E7F2-99DF-3CB3CA01486CA951 November 7, 2007, Science Talk, ETHICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE. http://podcast.sciam.com/weekly/sa_podcast_071107.mp3 November 2007, Vol. 297, Num. 5, pg. 40, CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE LAW, by Jeffrey D....

By Colleen Jenkins WINSTON-SALEM, North Carolina (Reuters) - A deadly winter storm brought heavy snow, freezing rain and potentially historic accumulations of ice to the southeastern United States on Wednesday, causing thousands of power outages and disrupting early commutes, forecasters said. The worsening storm stretched from eastern Texas to the Carolinas, and is likely to reach the Middle Atlantic states by late Wednesday, National Weather Service meteorologist Roger Edwards said. “It’s unusual to have an ice storm that far east in the Deep South,” he said....

Three years ago, I received an e-mail from a 10-year-old girl I’ll call Ann, from Brazil, my native country, asking me several questions. Is there life on Mars? Do you control the Curiosity [rover]? Does NASA have a lot of technology? Do you work with research? Do you know many scientists? Do you know the president of the United States? I was so pleased to see a girl asking me these questions, since that I would also have been fascinated by rovers on Mars at her age....

The 232,000 residents of New Hanover County, N.C., on the storm-battered North Carolina coast agree on two things: Climate change is real, and they haven’t done much to protect their homes. The unwillingness of climate change believers to take basic protective steps—described in a new University of Notre Dame study—suggests that policymakers trying to encourage climate action are better off talking about the benefits of mitigation than about the dangers of a warming planet....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Carbon dioxide emissions from energy production in the United States fell to 5.29 billion metric tons in 2012 - its lowest level since 1994 - despite a growing economy and rising population, according to government data released on Monday.The Energy Information Administration, the statistics arm of the Department of Energy, said there was a 3.8 percent drop from the previous year.That marked the largest decline in a non-recession year since EIA started tracking the data....

Unmarried women with children have long been at the core of the welfare controversy in the U.S. In 1984 Charles Murray, currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argued that the increasing generosity and availability of welfare–then called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)–led to the growth of female-headed families. In 2004 there were almost 1.5 million births to unmarried women, a quarter of them teenagers. Since 2000 the number of unmarried women who gave birth for the first time has averaged at least 650,000 a year....

Sri Lanka’s Samanalawewa dam on the country’s Walawe River has been leaking since the day it was completed in 1992. In the interim, the country has spent more than $65 million to plug the leaks in its second-largest dam, built to power the 120-million-watt Samanalawewa Hydroelectric Project. A 2005 study found that the reservoir—located near the town of Balangoda about 100 miles (160 kilometers) southeast of the capital Colombo—was leaking continuously at a rate of 475 gallons (1,800 liters) per second....

The 70 million neurons in the mouse brain look like a tangled mess, but researchers are beginning to unravel the individual threads that carry messages across the organ. A 3D brain map released on 27 October, called MouseLight, allows researchers to trace the paths of single neurons and could eventually reveal how the mind assembles information. The map contains 300 neurons and researchers plan to add another 700 in the next year....

Until now, patients who suffer from one of the most common causes of vision loss have had little hope for treatment. Age-related macular degeneration, or AMD, typically strikes people older than 60 by thinning a layer of cells at the back of the eye known as the retinal pigment epithelium. This layer of cells eliminates waste from the eye and nourishes photoreceptors, the neurons that absorb and convert the light that creates the images we see....

Free beer. And thus I found my way to a lecture in late February at the New York Academy of Sciences by renowned beer maven Charlie Bamforth. A man for whom the word “avuncular” was coined, the British Bamforth has three decades of brewing expertise under his belt. Over his belt is what he insists is “a sausage belly, not a beer belly.” “Beer is the basis of modern static civilization,” began Bamforth, Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Brewing Science at the University of California, Davis....

Parents who research treatments for autism are confronted with a bewildering array of options, almost all of which have never been tested for safety and effectiveness. Organizations like The Cochrane Collaboration, which reviews the quality of evidence for medical treatments, are putting more effort into evaluating popular alternative treatments. So far, the most comprehensive review of alternative autism treatments comes from two pediatricians: Susan Hyman of the University of Rochester School of Medicine Golisano Children’s Hospital at Strong and Susan Levy, a clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia....

Dear EarthTalk: As I understand it, “debt-for-nature swaps” are arrangements by which countries can erase debt by preserving land. Are any being done today?—Bill Hunt, Topeka, Kans. The debt-for-nature swap concept, whereby a portion of a developing nation’s foreign debt is forgiven in exchange for local investments in environmental conservation measures, dates back to the mid-1980s when Thomas Lovejoy of the non-profit World Wildlife Fund (WWF) first proposed it as a way to deal with the problems of developing nations’ indebtedness and the negative consequences for their natural resources and diverse environments....

The climate challenge just became a lot more challenging. We know that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are accelerating global warming. But intrepid research has revealed an additional sinister threat: methane. As Sarah Simpson reports, the warming of the Arctic is releasing vast quantities of methane that has been locked away for centuries in formerly frozen soil. Once released, methane traps 25 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide does....

In the tightly woven networks of the brain, tugging one neuronal thread can unravel numerous circuits. Because of that, the authors of a paper published in Nature on December 9 caution that techniques such as optogenetics—activating neurons with light to control brain circuits—and manipulation with drugs could lead researchers to jump to unwarranted conclusions. In work with rats and zebra finches, neuroscientist Bence Ölveczky of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his team found that stimulating one part of the brain to induce certain behaviours might cause other, unrelated parts to fire simultaneously, and so make it seem as if these circuits are also involved in the behaviour....

You’ve seen the pictures. Aerial shots of thousands of acres of precious rainforest being slashed and burned to make way for more palm production. Smoke curling up in the sky over Indonesia, making it one of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters (ClimateWire, June 30). Hoping to stop this, some countries have banned the further conversion of forestland into palm oil plantations, but enforcement has been nearly impossible (Greenwire, April 28)....

SAN FRANCISCO - The green economy continues to show almost remarkable signs of vitality, business leaders say, despite the near-total collapse of global talks, stalemate in Washington, D.C., and polls showing decreased urgency to tackle climate change. Driving the industry, investors say, are consumer interest in the environmental and economic benefits of energy efficiency, corporate sustainability mandates and essentially a bet that at some point there will be a price on carbon emissions....

By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - Part of East Antarctica is more vulnerable than expected to a thaw that could trigger an unstoppable slide of ice into the ocean and raise world sea levels for thousands of years, a study showed on Sunday. The Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica, stretching more than 1,000 km (600 miles) inland, has enough ice to raise sea levels by 3 to 4 meters (10-13 feet) if it were to melt as an effect of global warming, the report said....

Millions of wireless customers access public Wi-Fi hot spots every day. Some people get free access to Wi-Fi through their mobile operator and use the networks to avoid going over their data caps. Others subscribe to Wi-Fi services to get access to higher-speed data wherever it’s available. Whether you use free Wi-Fi or you subscribe to a service, getting on to whatever Wi-Fi network you are using is not always a simple and easy process....