The Local Food Hub in the Charlottesville, Va., area is an example of a new trend: nonprofit distribution enterprises that aggregate food produced by small-scale local farmers and move it quickly to local customers such as restaurants, schools, and retirement homes.

"Archaeologists who study early hunter-gatherer societies are discovering that even the simplest cultures altered their environments, whether they meant to or not."

One key chemical tool used to control mosquito-spread malaria in the developing world -- DDT -- has harmful environmental consequences. Now a new article in the journal Nature tells of research on chemicals that may promise to be effective mosquito repellants by blocking the insects' ability to detect carbon dioxide.

Laboratory researchers are pursuing technologies for skipping the burning of coal altogether, and producing electricity directly from carbon via fuel cells.

"Wild animals normally are killed by cancer only in rare cases. But scientists are finding that some deadly cancers in animals--including Quebec's belugas, California sea lions and North Sea flounder--seem to be triggered or accelerated by environmental contaminants."

"A water shortage described as the most critical since the earliest days of Iraq's civilisation is threatening to leave up to 2 million people in the south of the country without electricity and almost as many without drinking water."

Bayer's plant at Institute, West Virginia, said that it would reduce by 80 percent its production of methyl isocyanate, the highly toxic chemical that killed thousands in the 1984 Bhopal disaster.