Chinese solar panels
Credit: Marufish/ Flickr

Between 2008 and 2013, China’s fledgling solar-electric panel industry dropped world prices by 80 percent, a stunning achievement in a fiercely competitive high-tech market. China had leapfrogged from nursing a tiny, rural-oriented solar program in the 1990s to become the globe’s leader in what may soon be the world’s largest renewable energy source.

“They fundamentally changed the economics of solar all over the world,” said Amit Ronen, director of the Solar Institute of George Washington University, one of many scholars following the intense competition in the emerging $100 billion industry that supports the world’s growing solar energy demands.

China’s move eclipsed the leadership of the U.S. solar industry, which invented the technology, still holds many of the world’s patents and led the industry for more than three decades. Just how China accomplished that and why it did is still a matter of concern and debate among U.S. experts.

One clear result is that the U.S. solar industry was hit hard by plunging prices and can no longer supply more than a third of rapidly […]

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Gregory Socha, principal of Arcadia Elementary School, greets students as they arrive for classes.
Ann Hermes/Christian Science Monitor

KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN — Tracy Zarei has wanted to teach children ever since she was in the second grade. She knew she would have to go to college to become a teacher.

“She was a straight-A student,” says her mother, Sheri, who was working double shifts in a nursing home to pay rent on their mobile home. “She cried when she got her first B.”

Then one day Tracy’s world shifted. When her mother returned home from work, Tracy handed her a note. “She said, ‘Mom, you’re going to be disappointed,’ ” recalls Sheri, who thought it must be a traffic ticket. Instead it was a positive pregnancy test. Antonio Jr. was born in March 2005. Tracy was a junior in high school.

For many teenage mothers, this is when school ends and hardship begins. By age 22, only half of all single mothers in the United States receive a high school diploma, compared with 90 percent of their peers.

With […]

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Credit: Harvest to Home

A large analysis of current research shows that people who eat at least 20g of nuts a day have a lower risk of heart disease, cancer and other diseases.

The analysis of all current studies on nut consumption and disease risk has revealed that 20g a day – equivalent to a handful – can cut people’s risk of coronary heart disease by nearly 30 percent, their risk of cancer by 15 percent, and their risk of premature death by 22 percent.

An average of at least 20g of nut consumption was also associated with a reduced risk of dying from respiratory disease by about a half, and diabetes by nearly 40 percent, although the researchers note that there is less data about these diseases in relation to nut consumption.

The study, led by researchers from Imperial College London and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, is published in the journal BMC Medicine.

The research team analysed 29 published studies from around the world that involved up to 819,000 participants, including more than 12,000 cases of coronary heart disease, 9,000 cases of stroke, 18,000 […]

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Solar installations have changed the lives of millions.

Solar powered lights are changing the way people do business in Kenya. In the town of Embu, which is located in central Kenya northeast of Nairobi, Violet Karimi is a farmer who can now take advantage of the evening hours to sell her produce, thanks to the arrival of solar lights in her town. Now at night she leaves her three children studying at home by the light of a solar lantern and takes fruit and vegetables harvested on her farm to sell in Embu’s open air market.

“I collect my stock and head to the market where I trade until late in the evening,” said the 36-year-old. “This is possible because the solar lights in the market and the rest of Embu town are switched on the whole night.” On a good day, she says she can bring home as much as $30. That’s three times as much as she could sell during a shorter day before the solar lights made longer trading hours possible. “Customers want to shop in […]

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Workers with heavy equipment try to contain an oil spill on the Jensen farm near Tioga, North Dakota
Credit: Neal Lauron/Greenpeace

In September 2013, a Tesoro Corp. pipeline ruptured in a wheat field near Tioga, North Dakota, spewing 840,000 gallons of fracked oil from the Bakken Shale, causing one of the biggest onshore oil spills in recent U.S. history. More than three years later, only a third of the spill has been recovered. To make matters worse, as the Associated Press reported, Tesoro has not even set a date for clean-up completion despite ’round-the-clock work to fix the break.

Cleaning up the spill will set Tesoro back an estimated $60 million. Crews have had to dig 50 feet underground to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of oil-tainted soil, North Dakota Health Department environmental scientist Bill Suess told the AP, adding that he worries that much of the oil may never be completely removed.

Critics of oil pipelines argue that spills are not just a question of “if” but “when.” Spills are a common […]

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