According to the 2000 census, Americans office workers spend an average of 52 hours a week at their desks or work stations. Many recent studies on job satisfaction have shown that workers who spend longer hours in office environments, often under artificial light in windowless offices, report reduced job satisfaction and increased stress levels.

An Imperial biologist has been announced as the fourth College scientist since 2000 to win the Zoological Society of London's prestigious Scientific Medal.

The U.S. Forest Service’s Center for Urban Forest Research has released a guide demonstrating how trees benefit cities in temperate parts of the West such as Southern California, Central Idaho and the Oregon Coast.

The West has become 500 percent dustier in the past two centuries due to westward U.S. expansion and accompanying human activity beginning in the 1800s, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The balance of nature looms prominently in the public mind these days. Climate change, genetically modified plants and animals, and globally declining fish stocks are but a few of the issues that remind us that ours is a fragile world. Or is it?

If you are reading this, chances are that you live in a city – one, perhaps, on its way to becoming a megacity with a population that exceeds 10 million or more. If not, you and most of the world’s population soon will be, according to global population demographics projections.

Two hydroelectricity dams appear to be threatening the health of Lake Victoria – and of the people living along its shores who depend on the lake for food. A new study¹ suggests that the dams’ systematic overuse of water has decreased the lake level by at least two meters between 2000 and 2006 – and that this drop was not influenced by weather.

Amid growing consumer demand for more environmentally-friendly cleaning products, chemical suppliers are stepping-up their efforts to provide greener ingredients with the same effectiveness of conventional ones, according to an article scheduled for the Jan. 21 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS’ weekly newsmagazine.

Like the proverbial coal miners’ canary-in-the-cage, seagulls may become living sentinels to monitor oil pollution levels in marine environments, report scientists in Spain. Their study is scheduled for the Feb. 1 issue of ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly journal.

Purdue University researchers are collaborating with Chrysler LLC in a project to use poplar trees to eliminate pollutants from a contaminated site in north-central Indiana.

In order to increase productivity, forest practices have become more intense in recent decades. Forest fertilization increased by 800% in the southeastern United States from 1990 to 1999, and the total acreage fertilized in the Southeast exceeds the forest area fertilized in the rest of the world.

Research carried out in the Department of Social Psychology and Methodology of Behaviour Sciences of the University of Granada has shown that the level of academic training is not related to the ecological awareness of people, despite the great proliferation of programs designed to educate and increase social awareness of the environment.