The European Commission, on 29 th April 2013, slapped a two-year ban on insecticides suspected of killing off bee colonies. This follows the European Food Safety Authority finding that they pose a high acute risk to honey bees.

The amount of nitrogen that is excreted by livestock is directly proportional to the amount it is fed . This is according to Chris Reynolds a researcher in nutritional physiology of ruminants  at  the University of Reading , UK.

Dealing with sludge is one of the biggest issues of waste water treatment.

Our data on the natural world is uncertain. And so are the models we use to make sense of it. The Uncertweb project, funded by the EU, aims to clarify both of these sources of doubt.

We are used to the idea of vulnerable environments and species. We are also familiar with cultural vulnerability. For example when traditional peoples meet seductive modern ways of life.

Forests and land ecosystems are the earth’s carbon reservoirs. They are key to limit the impact of greenhouse gases, as they fix those gases down.

With climate change, flora and fauna shift their seasonal inner clock.  For example, fruit tree blossom earlier than previous years.

It may look incredibly innocent, but the harlequin ladybird, a stowaway onboard fruit and flower consignments from Asia, is on a ‘most unwanted’ list.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are set to become an important material for the future. That’s because they are light, robust, and highly conductive, both electrically and thermally whilst still being chemically stable.

Natural sensory system such as bacteria engineered to detect pollution and placed in a self-contained portable box could be the most effective way to track pollutants .

Following the 2006 ban on sturgeon fishing, the Romanian town of Sfantu Gheorghe, located at the mouth of the Danube river, turned to other income source to replace its fishing based economy.

We can blame all sorts of things on the weather. But a stomach bug?  It seems unlikely. Yet, scientists say greater quantities of rainfall and bigger storms will lead to more stomach upsets in parts of Europe.

Scientists keep producing increasingly complex modelling tools to evaluate urgently needed mitigating strategies of our carbon footprint .  However, it is policy makers who have to decide on measures to curb our CO2 emissions.

The EU’s driest region is Murcia in Spain. But it is also an area of intensive agriculture for such arid land.

In Europe more than 12 million tonnes of mixed plastic waste are dumped on landfills every year, according to a report from NUMIX scientists. The recycling of plastic into usable products has proven difficult .

Eco-symbiosis is en vogue. Indeed, this approach consists in using waste from one industry as raw material for another. It appears like an ideal solution for one of the most challenging type of pollution: oil spills .

Imagine that a hundred years ago it was possible to take the ‘digital fingerprint’ of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and store it in an international database.

Making planning decisions about cities today means keeping an eye on climate change predictions.  More flash floods are expected, for example.

Caring about a sound environment, Stephen Stansfeld has been studying the effect of noise pollution on people’s health and their remedy.