Apple has been busy cleaning up its manufacturing plants that produce millions of iPads and iPhones in China by reducing its carbon footprint.

The consumer electronics company is working with its Chinese suppliers to eventually produce 2.2 gigawatts of solar power and other renewable energy. Apple has estimated that over 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution will be avoided as more of its suppliers rely on renewable energy between now and 2020. That is equivalent to having four million fewer cars on the road for a year!

Panels capable of generating about 200 megawatts of solar power will be financed by Apple in the northern, southern and eastern regions of China, where many of its suppliers are located. Foxconn, which runs the factory where the most iPhones are assembled, is pledging to contribute 400 megawatts of solar power as part of the 2-gigabyte commitment. The solar panels to be built by 2018 in China's Henan Province are supposed to produce as much renewable energy as Foxconn's Zhengzhou factory consumes while making iPhones.

Apple just completed projects in China that generate 40 megawatts of solar energy to offset the power required by its 24 stores and 19 offices in the country. All of Apple's data centers, offices and stores in the U.S. already have been running on renewable energy.

Apple also has a financial incentive to help make China a better place to live. The greater China region is Apple's second biggest market behind the United States. Apple CEO Tim Cook has made it clear that he wants the company to make even more inroads as rising incomes enable more of China's population to buy smartphones and other gadgets.

A recently published paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society reviews the development and utility of a computer model for the dispersion of volcanic smog or "vog," which forms when volcanic sulfur dioxide gas interacts with water and coverts it to acid sulfate aerosol particles in the atmosphere.

Vog poses a serious threat to the health of Hawai'i's people as well as being harmful to the state's ecosystems and agriculture. Even at low concentrations, which can be found far from the volcano, vog can provoke asthma attacks in those with prior respiratory conditions. It also damages vegetation and crops downwind from the volcano.

Collaborations between the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), and the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory have developed a computer model for predicting the dispersion of vog. The vog model uses measurements of the amount of sulfur dioxide emitted by Kilauea, along with predictions of the prevailing winds, to forecast the movement of vog around the state.

The team of scientists developed an ultraviolet spectrometer array to provide near real-time volcanic gas emission rate measurements; developed and deployed sulfur dioxide and meteorological sensors to record the extent of Kīlauea's gas plume; and developed web-based tools to share observations and model forecasts, providing useful information for safety officials and the public, and raising awareness of the potential hazards of volcanic emissions to respiratory health, agriculture and general aviation.

The Kilauea volcano, the most active volcano on earth, is situated on Hawai'i Island. The current eruption has been ongoing since 1983, while a new summit eruption began in 2008. The most significant effect of this new eruption has been a dramatic increase in the amount of volcanic gas that is emitted into Hawaiʻi's atmosphere. While the effects of lava eruption are limited to the southeastern sector of the Big Island, the volcanic gas emitted by Kilauea is in no way constrained; it is free to spread across the entire state.

Next year in Merida, Spain, a state-of-the-art façade that can turn solar energy into heat for residents' use will be installed. After a series of tests, the complex insulation system will prove its capabilities in real-life conditions. The worldwide energy consumption of buildings is expected to grow by 45% from 2002 to 2025.

To reduce this energy demand in old buildings across Europe, a group of researchers have designed an industrialized façade system for use in retrofitting works. The system brings an imaginative technological solution that can be applied to different types of building and façade orientations. The insulation technology is ready now for full-scale implementation in a real building in Merida, following a series of extensive tests, which checked its fire, water, wind, impact, acoustic and permeability resistance.

The project's researchers admit that their system is neither simple, nor cheap. Yet they are optimistic about the possibilities of the façade having a good return on investment.

To look for a mate, the male Asian Citrus Psyllid situates himself on a twig, buzzes his wings to send vibrations along adjacent leaves and branches, and listens for a female's response call. If the call comes, he travels in her direction, the abbreviated insect version of courtship ensues, and two to seven weeks later, scores of psyllids nymphs emerge from their eggs, feed on phloem sap, and mature into adults who head out into the world, ravaging untold numbers of citrus trees in the process.

The Asian Citrus Psyllid is a pest that is loathed by orange farmers because they spread a rod-shaped bacteria called Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus. The bacteria causes a disease called citrus greening that turns the trees' leaves yellow and makes the fruit bitter and stunted. There is no cure, and the infected trees usually die within a few years.

USDA and University of Florida researchers are looking to halt the spread of the disease that caused an estimated $3.63 billion in lost revenue from orange juice for the state of Florida from 2006-2012. Development of vibration traps that hijack psyllid mating calls to locally bring their populations under control has been recently invented by the teams.

Out in the mid-day heat of the orange groves, the male psyllids channel their wing vibrations down their legs and out through adjacent twigs and leaves. If a nearby female is interested, she'll reply back within a third to a half of a second. Within this window, the researchers' microphone detects the incoming male call and the microcontroller sends out a female response call through the piezoelectric buzzer before any neighboring psyllids can. When the male draws closer, he gets snagged and immobilized on an adhesive surface, from where he can be collected during periodic trap inspections.

While the device hasn't yet been tested extensively out in the field, estimates that each device would be effective over a range of two feet in a citrus tree, with a cost of construction between $50-100, including the cost of the microcontrollers.

A system for managing and storing energy, developed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne campus (EPFL), has received extensive co-financing from the Canton of Vaud, and is built around an industrial-capacity battery developed by Vaud-based company Leclanché. It is now connected to the Romande Energie-EPFL solar park (one of the largest in Switzerland) and will be used to conduct real-world tests on the behavior of a power grid that is fed electricity from solar panels.

The Romande Energie-EPFL solar park will be used to study new, industrial-scale solutions for using renewable energies (especially solar energy) and feeding them into the power distribution grid, as part of the 'EPFL Smart Grid' project. It will be able to hold up to 500 kWh, which is the equivalent of the average energy consumed by fifty Swiss households over the course of one day, while managing variations in power as a function of the sunshine.

The research involving the new system is set to last 23 months and will optimize the functioning of the various components of the new system and its management with an integrated electricity production and distribution network.

A University of Connecticut researcher has created a gel that enhances the ability of solar cells to absorb energy from sunlight. This light-harvesting antenna could double the efficiency of current solar cell panels and make them cheaper to build.

Sunlight strikes Earth every day with more energy than is used globally in a year. But finding an efficient way to capture and store that solar energy to replace fossil fuels as the world's go-to energy source still remains a challenge.

Silicon photovoltaic solar cells, the most common type currently used on rooftop panels to convert photons – tiny particles of light – into electricity, can't take advantage of the blue part of the light spectrum. Only photons with the right amount of energy get absorbed by the photovoltaic cell. The antenna built by Professor Challa V. Kumar and his team, collects unused blue photons in the light spectrum and, via a process of "artificial photosynthesis," converts them to lower energy photons that the silicon can then turn into current.

Taking inspiration from plants, the team used a mixture of biodegradable materials to collect sunlight, much like plant chlorophyll. The concoction includes cow blood protein, fatty acid from coconuts, and different organic dyes. Together these substances form a gel that, when placed in a Gratzel cell, a particular type of solar cell, increases their absorption of unused photons and the power output of the cell.

One of the most promising bioenergy crops in the U.S. comes from switchgrass. This crop has the potential to provide high-yield biomass on marginal soils unsuitable for traditional agricultural crops.

New research conducted by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, UC Berkeley, the University of Oklahoma, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation is looking into whether switchgrass cultivation could result in an enhancement of key ecosystem services such as biofuel diversity, soil fertility, and carbon sequestration. The team has found that switchgrass can grow and propagate in marginal soils, making it a good candidate for sustainable biofuel production.

Plants and microorganisms have co-evolved for millions of years. Understanding the biochemical and genomic basis of beneficial plant-microbial interactions is a challenge for agriculture, forestry and invasive species management. Better knowledge of the molecular interactions within the plant microbiome also may benefit sustainable crop management. This is particularly relevant to the bioenergy feedstock sector, which is keen to avoid the "food for fuels" debate, and utilize land that is not currently in high-value food production.

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 has mandated that 36 billion gallons of annual biofuel production by constructed by 2022, and that approximately half is expected to be produced from cellulosic feedstock. Switchgrass has been identified as one of the most promising bioenergy crops in the U.S., with the potential to provide high-yielding biomass.

Switchgrass is a native North American prairie grass, with broad adaptability and minimal nutritional needs, meaning it could be cultivated on marginal lands that are unsuitable for agronomic crop plants. If cultivated on marginal lands, acreage for switchgrass would increase substantially. Roughly 11% of the U.S. mainland is comprised of "marginal lands" and represent an untapped agronomic resource well-suited to switchgrass' deep, extensive root growth architecture.

To meet the Department of Energy's goal to replace 30% of petroleum-based transportation fuels with biofuels by 2030, the U.S. will require more acreage dedicated to bioenergy crops and substantial productivity increases.

Recently, Washington State University scientists have discovered a local wasp that kills a type of stink bug that harms fruit orchards.

The wasp is known as Trissolcus japonicus and hails from Asia. It is being studied under quarantine in the U.S. as a possible weapon against the stink bug. Two small clusters of the stingless wasp were discovered in Vancouver, Washington, in August and September by a field technician with WSU's research lab in Wenatchee.

Since 2007, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has directed studies of the wasp in quarantine laboratories to determine if it can be released in the wild to destroy the crop-wrecking brown marmorated stink bug.

The stink bug species, which also originated in Asia, has caused millions of dollars in damage to fruit orchards in the Mid-Atlantic region since it was discovered in Pennsylvania less than two decades ago. The stink bug has been moving West, as it has been found in Washington, Oregon and parts of California.

With the increasing desire to fight global climate change, increasing the use of renewable energy resources such as solar, is a challenge to the traditional model of utility-scale solar energy installations. Until now, studies quantifying the effects on land-cover change and analyses of impacts on protected areas near solar facilities have been limited.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, assessed the siting impacts of 161 existing, under construction, and planned utility-scale solar energy facilities in California. Utility-scale solar energy facilities generate at least 1 megawatt, which is enough to power approximately 165 homes.

The researchers found that a majority of sites are located in natural California shrub- and scrublands covering about 145 square miles:

• 28% are in croplands and pastures.
• Less than 15% are in developed areas.
• Around 19% are in areas far from existing transmission infrastructure, which has adverse economic, energetic, and environmental consequences.

This study included two kinds of solar technologies, photovoltaics (PV), which use semiconductors, and concentrating solar power (CSP), which use mirrors to focus the sun’s rays for generating steam.

In analyzing impacts on protected areas, the researchers calculated the proximity of solar installations to them. The fact that nearly 20% of solar facilities were far from transmission infrastructure means that the energy must travel farther and therefore have greater energy losses, cost more to build, and new transmission corridors degrade the natural environment. Almost 30% of all installations were in croplands and pastures. It is possible that the mounting pressure from drought has made this shift to solar energy an easier decision for farmers.

After evaluating land-cover change from solar facilities, the researchers used the Carnegie Energy and Environmental Compatibility computer model to develop a compatibility index to identify areas of potential and direct conflict with respect to environmental resources California-wide. Compatible areas are areas that are already developed. For photovoltaic technology, they identified some 8,500 square miles of these compatible areas (11.2% of total PV installations) and 30,000 square miles of potential compatible areas (71.7% of PV installations).

Potentially compatible areas are the next best thing. They are not protected, they would not require heavy site preparation, such as grading steep slopes, and they are within 6 miles of transmission lines and roads. There are many locally unique considerations that come into this category, for instance view disruption for local residents. Incompatible areas are natural and protected areas. The scientists found that some 55.5% of CSP installations were in either compatible or potentially compatible areas.

In order to feed the world’s population, many forests are being taken down in order to establish an agricultural presence. With an increasing need to keep up, why does it matter where deforestation occurs?

Cutting the same number of trees in two different locations of a forest can have vastly different impacts, according to a study co-authored by four Stanford researchers. Clearing habitat from within a large, intact forest can do up to four times more damage to biodiversity and carbon storage than clearing the same amount of land on the forest's edge. According to estimates, agricultural land will expand by more than 740 million acres in the next 40 years. With such mounting pressure, it is essential to find ways to meet agricultural demand while conserving critical ecosystems and minimizing overall impacts.

Brazil, a biodiversity hotspot and one of the planet's largest stores of forest-based carbon, is also facing pressure for large-scale land transformation for agricultural production. It is the largest sugarcane producer and the second largest soybean producer in the world, and the area cultivated with these two crops has more than doubled in the past decade, with further increases predicted.

Conversion of forest to agriculture is most destructive when it occurs in a fragmentary pattern rather than in a consolidated patch. Less carbon is stored in forest edges and small forest fragments because of increased tree mortality due to greater exposure to wind, fire, pests and other threats. Breaking up forests into smaller fragments can also block corridors that wildlife use to seek out food, mates and refuge. However, many policy schemes still treat an acre of a particular type of forest – regardless of its location or pattern – as having a uniform value for carbon storage and biodiversity.

Expanding agriculture into adjacent land rather than fragmenting forest reduces impacts by more than three times for biodiversity – or an order of magnitude for carbon storage for the same increase in agricultural area. Even something as simple as gradually spreading into a forest as opposed to jumping ahead beyond the current forest edge can cut the losses to carbon or biodiversity in half for the same amount of forest converted.

The paper's authors suggest that governments, corporations and other stakeholders consider these factors in the creation of carbon-trading schemes, sustainability assessments, agricultural zoning, development mitigation and other decisions. Specifically, the researchers suggest policies that encourage expansion around existing agriculture or edges of forests, as opposed to large infrastructure efforts such as roads that leapfrog agricultural development into frontier habitats.

A new method that obtains a clean organic fertilizer has been developed from research conducted at the Centre for Plant Biotechnology and Genomics. This method is able to regenerate degraded soil caused by overharvesting.

Using natural biodegradable biopolymers like organic fertilizers could be a sustainable alternative facing the common usage of inorganic nitrogen fertilizers that result harmful to the environment. This way, researchers from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in collaboration with University of Hamburg, have developed a method to obtain biocompounds made from the chitin of the exoskeletons of crustaceans and insects, and its usage in plant cultivations has proved to be more efficient.

This compound is biodegradable, insoluble and harmless to human health, it does not pollute the environment and it can be used in lower amount than other compounds since it does not disappear by evaporation or leaching. Otherwise, the cost can be up to 10% cheaper than other organic fertilizer, what it means an additional advantage for its future usage.

The nitrogen fertilizers traditionally used in agriculture have polluting effects both in water and in the atmosphere, this can degrade soils and contribute to global warming. Thus, food industry demands more efficient organic fertilizers which are respectful to the environment.

This material has been tested as a fertilizer and has proven to stimulate the growth of several plant species, both forestry and herbaceous, increasing up to the 10% its total content of nitrogen and carbon as well as an increase of its roots. All the mentioned characteristics of this material, its easy method of production and its low price compared to the traditional fertilizers make this new material a sustainable alternative with an easy market deployment in the area of agricultural fertilization.

The ability to find catalysts that are highly active, inexpensive, and friendly to the environment is a real challenge for researchers. However recent efforts have focused on combining two metals, often in a structure where a core of one metal is surrounded by an atom-thick layer of a second one.

The properties and performance of these so-called bimetallic core-shell catalysts can be superior to those of either of the constituent metals, but determining how to take advantage of this synergy can be challenging.

Dion Vlachos, who directs the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation at the University of Delaware, uses computational techniques to predict how these nanoscale materials will behave, and he recently made a surprising discovery about the structure of bimetallic catalysts. The results of the work, which was done with postdoctoral researcher Wei Guo, are documented in a paper, “Patched Bimetallic Surfaces Are Active Catalysts for Ammonia Decomposition,” published in Nature Communications.

Vlachos and Guo performed multi-scale simulations of the decomposition of ammonia on various nickel-platinum catalysts and found that patches of the “guest metal.” Decomposition of ammonia is often used as a representative reaction for predicting new catalytic materials and understanding why some reactions are sensitive on a particular material’s structure.

Other advantages of studying this reaction include the need to find less-energy-intensive catalysts to break down ammonia, which is the primary chemical in most fertilizers, as well as ammonia’s ability to serve as a carbon-free energy carrier for fuel cells. Future work will investigate the feasibility of patched surfaces for additional bimetallic catalysts and other reactions, and Vlachos is optimistic about the potential of the approach.

Cities around the world are facing major water-related challenges, and are further aggravated by global trends such as urbanization and climate change. The time has come for water to become an asset rather than a problem in ‘smart livable cities’ of the future.

All over the world, people are migrating to ever larger cities. Global urbanization poses new water-related challenges—chief among them supplying clean drinking water, disposing of wastewater, and managing extreme precipitation.

The challenges of supplying sufficient water has led authorities, water utility companies, technology suppliers, and knowledge institutions from all over the world to coin the phrase ‘fit for purpose water’—where water of a quality other than drinking water is used for washing clothes, watering lawns, and cleaning the car, for example.

In some parts of Australia, the authorities supply consumers with two different qualities of water. One is drinking water, and collected rainwater or treated wastewater is used to wash clothes and flush toilets, and other daily operations that do not require drinking water quality.

Now, the ‘Fit for purpose water’ idea has also found its way to Denmark. As a general rule, Denmark has a plentiful supply of water. However, in the Copenhagen area, extracting sufficient quantities of groundwater to meet the city’s water needs is proving to be a challenge. Heavy precipitation has also spiked interest in using rainwater for purposes that do not require water of drinking water quality. Danish manufacturing companies are also interested in ‘fit for purpose water’ as a way to reduce their consumption of drinking water. By recycling and reusing water for cleaning operations, businesses can reduce the costs associated with clean drinking water and the discharge and treatment of wastewater.

Two engineering researchers are turning trees into energy storage devices capable of powering everything from a smart watch to a hybrid car.

Emily Cranston, an assistant chemical engineering professor, and Igor Zhitomirsky, a materials science and engineering professor, are using cellulose, an organic compound found in plants, bacteria, algae and trees, to build more efficient and longer-lasting energy storage devices or super capacitors. This development paves the way toward the production of lightweight, flexible, and high-power electronics, such as wearable devices, portable power supplies and hybrid and electric vehicles.

Cellulose offers the advantages of high strength and flexibility for many advanced applications; of particular interest are nanocellulose-based materials. The work demonstrates an improved three-dimensional energy storage device constructed by trapping functional nanoparticles within the walls of a nanocellulose foam.

The foam is made in a simplified and fast one-step process. The type of nanocellulose used is called cellulose nanocrystals and looks like uncooked long-grain rice but with nanometer-dimensions. In these new devices, the 'rice grains' have been glued together at random points forming a mesh-like structure with lots of open space, hence the extremely lightweight nature of the material. This can be used to produce more sustainable capacitor devices with higher power density and faster charging abilities compared to rechargeable batteries.

Lightweight and high-power density capacitors are of particular interest for the development of hybrid and electric vehicles. The fast-charging devices allow for significant energy saving, because they can accumulate energy during braking and release it during acceleration.

There are differentiating opinions about how to manage an infestation of aphids. Some will advise insecticides as a way to manage an infestation, but others will swear by ladybugs. The latter is more environmental friendly, and once the ladybugs run out of food to eat, they move on.

While this strategy may work in someone's backyard, it's not an option on a large farm. In a Trends in Plant Science Opinion paper, agricultural researchers in Sweden and Mexico argue that one way around the scalability problem is to bring back the odors and nectars found in wild plants that attract pest-eating predators. This could be done either through breeding programs or by using artificial devices.

It's also not unusual for wild plants to produce nectar on their leaves to feed carnivores. While leaf-eating caterpillars or beetles are munching away on plant matter, predatory ants or wasps have a sugary substance to drink and a well-stocked spot to lay their eggs.

Theories point out that the reason these rather helpful traits no longer exist in crops is because plant breeders and decision makers couldn't tell the difference between helpful insects and pests. Only in the past 30 years has it been recognized that plants use odors to communicate to one another and to other species. Such defenses involve multiple genes, however, and it won't be easy to simply bring them back.

One faster alternative would be to plant crops alongside other species that both attract carnivores and repel pests. The downside is that intercropping requires more work during harvesting and its success rate isn't 100%. Another option is to create mechanical dispensers that could release carnivore-calling odors and fungicidal nectar.

The type of schooling a student is engaged in plays a large role in short-changing the nation’s most economically disadvantaged students of critical math skills, according to a study in the Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.

The study indicates that unequal access to rigorous mathematics content is widening the gap in performance on a prominent international math literacy test between low- and high-income students, not only in the United States but in countries worldwide.

Using data from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), conducted by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), researchers from Michigan State University and OECD confirmed not only that low-income students are more likely to be exposed to weaker math content in schools, but also that a substantial share of the gap in math performance between economically advantaged and disadvantaged students is related to those curricular inequalities.

It was found that in almost every one of the 62 countries examined, a significant amount was added to the social class-related performance gap because of what students studied in schools. The 2012 PISA was the first international study to include student-level indicators of exposure to math content. The authors relied on data from more than 300,000 students, who ranged in age from 15 years and 3 months to 16 years and 2 months.

In the United States, over one-third of the social class-related gap in student performance on the math literacy test was associated with unequal access to rigorous content. The other two-thirds was associated directly with students’ family and community background. Among the 33 OECD participating countries, the U.S. ranked 11th in the relative importance of schooling to SES inequality.

There are striking differences in how countries group their students and structure their instructional opportunities, meaning that in countries like the U.S. there are greater within-school inequalities in content coverage, while in other countries such as France, Germany, and Japan inequalities are larger between schools. Regardless of whether unequal learning opportunities for lower-income students were found within or between schools, they intensified inequitable student outcomes.

A new study published in Biological Conservation suggests that drones could monitor the success of forest regeneration in the tropics. Automating the monitoring process will lead accurate results and could save a significant amount of time and money.

For the sake of agriculture, rainforests became heavily demolished through the years 1990-2005 by more than 8% through deforestation. Today, large areas of agricultural land are being restored to rainforest to meet conservation goals in the tropics. It is important to monitor the success of these efforts to ensure that these areas are replenished with the right vegetation.

Driving the conservation efforts include government subsidies, and many of the people implementing the projects are individual land owners. Monitoring regeneration can be labor intensive and expensive, making it difficult to know whether conservation efforts have been successful. However, using drones to replace manual monitoring under certain conditions could save considerable costs, making the monitoring process more feasible for scientists.

Monitoring rainforests manually requires skilled, knowledgeable people and specialist equipment, and can be especially challenging if the land is difficult to access. An alternative to manual monitoring is LiDAR - remote sensing technology that analyzes reflected light. However, a single LiDAR flight to monitor forest recovery remotely can cost upwards of $20,000.

In the new study, researchers tested a new automated approach to monitoring that doesn't involve manual intervention. Using inexpensive drone-based remote sensing technology, the researchers measured the structure of the forest canopy across a series of 1-hectare regenerating fields that were previously agricultural land in southern Costa Rica. The land is part of a long-term tropical forest restoration study.

The drones were fitted with a simple 10 megapixel point-and-shoot digital camera and use open-source software to process these overlapping images. The camera takes thousands of photos and the "Ecosynth" methodology then creates 3D images called point clouds that represent the vegetation. In total, the drone and camera cost US$1500 - less than a tenth of the cost of some equivalent flights.

A highly destructive species is threatening tomato crops, and a Virginia Tech scientist is aiming to put an end to it. The measures, including quarantine, are designed to stop the advance of the pest “Tuta absoluta” throughout the world. The insect originated in Panama and Costa Rica, has been moving northward, but has not established itself in the United States.

No larger than an eyelash, the tiny moth spread from its native Latin America to Europe in 2006 and later crossed the Mediterranean to Africa. Now threatening Asia, the moth strikes at the world's most commercially important horticulture crop - the tomato, valuable to farmers around the world. Its path is destructive and its advance rapid, moving from Spain in 2006 through Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India.

The team’s recommendations to eradicate the pest include:

• Educate administrators, scientists, and the public about the impending danger of the coming Tuta absoluta invasion.
• Adopt quarantine measures to prevent its introduction. These would include such steps as not allowing the import of tomatoes with stems, leaves, or a calyx.
• Set up monitoring programs in border areas using pheromone traps.
• Explore the effectiveness of using natural enemies of Tuta absoluta, imported from South America, home of the moth, to control the pest.
• Form regional and global networks to inform each other and the world about Tuta absoluta discoveries.

In 2011, Tuta absoluta infested 404,000 acres of cultivated tomato, representing 40 percent of the world's crop. In the United States, the tomato industry accounts for more than $2 billion in annual farm cash receipts. The economic impact of this insect has already been severe in countries where it has become established. In Spain, its presence led to an increase of $209 per acre per season related to pest management. In central Argentina, management of Tuta accounts for 70% of the pest management costs for late-season tomato crops.

Since then, the program has held half a dozen workshops to raise awareness about the invasive species and help public officials and farmers prepare to minimize the destruction.

A highly destructive species is threatening tomato crops, and a Virginia Tech scientist is aiming to put an end to it. The measures, including quarantine, are designed to stop the advance of the pest “Tuta absoluta” throughout the world. The insect originated in Panama and Costa Rica, has been moving northward, but has not established itself in the United States.

No larger than an eyelash, the tiny moth spread from its native Latin America to Europe in 2006 and later crossed the Mediterranean to Africa. Now threatening Asia, the moth strikes at the world's most commercially important horticulture crop - the tomato, valuable to farmers around the world. Its path is destructive and its advance rapid, moving from Spain in 2006 through Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India.

The team’s recommendations to eradicate the pest include:

• Educate administrators, scientists, and the public about the impending danger of the coming Tuta absoluta invasion.
• Adopt quarantine measures to prevent its introduction. These would include such steps as not allowing the import of tomatoes with stems, leaves, or a calyx.
• Set up monitoring programs in border areas using pheromone traps.
• Explore the effectiveness of using natural enemies of Tuta absoluta, imported from South America, home of the moth, to control the pest.
• Form regional and global networks to inform each other and the world about Tuta absoluta discoveries.

In 2011, Tuta absoluta infested 404,000 acres of cultivated tomato, representing 40 percent of the world's crop. In the United States, the tomato industry accounts for more than $2 billion in annual farm cash receipts. The economic impact of this insect has already been severe in countries where it has become established. In Spain, its presence led to an increase of $209 per acre per season related to pest management. In central Argentina, management of Tuta accounts for 70% of the pest management costs for late-season tomato crops.

Since then, the program has held half a dozen workshops to raise awareness about the invasive species and help public officials and farmers prepare to minimize the destruction.

Switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy by 2050 would cost about $1 trillion dollars per year, but that cost would be more than offset by lower energy costs, saving $1.1 trillion, says a Greenpeace report. Wind turbines, for example, run on a "free" energy source—the wind, while a power station has to be constantly refueled with expensive coal or gas.

The world's nations are seeking to curb rampant emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions in a bid to slow global warming, but the cost of the transformation is often held up as a major obstacle, especially for poor and developing countries.

The report highlighted that as many as 9.7 million people could have jobs in the solar power industry by 2030—more than 10 times as many as today and equivalent to the current number of jobs in the coal sector, while wind industry jobs could increase up to almost eight million

The researchers based their forecasts on UN estimations for economic development and population growth, and assumed the world's energy system would be completely "decarbonized" over the next 35 years. They also considered rising energy demand in fast-growing Africa and Asia, offset by lower demand in rich nations resulting in a peak of global demand by about 2020. The study also assumed that renewable energy costs come down as the technology and availability improves.

Short term, electricity could become slightly more expensive—by about $0.02 per kilowatt hour, but "as prices rise for conventional fuels, these costs will become economically favorable across all world regions by 2030, and by 2050 the fuel cost savings will be 1.7 US cents/kWh," said the report.