Page 4 - Robert Pal News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

by Katherine Lee Robert Pal, Ph.D. Image by Alycia Holland. The theme of this year’s AAAS Annual Meeting was “Understanding Dynamic Ecosystems,” which aimed to examine how science, engineering, and technology can help various biological, physical, social, and economic systems maintain balance and achieve improvements. Fittingly, one of the presenters was restoration ecologist and botanist Robert Pal, Ph.D., whose work involves identifying solutions for areas that have become unbalanced by invasive plants and finding ways to restore those ecosystems. Like so many things these da...

MICHAEL CAST When storm water rushes down the Butte hill, toxic metals come with it. Filtering those metals out of surface water is one of the great challenges of the Superfund cleanup. With a grant from the EPA, Montana Technological University student scientists are experimenting with a new solution to the problem: sustainable biochar wattles, or beds of charcoal made from organic waste. They think they can catch the bad metals the old methods let slip through. Doing what hasn’t been done starts by looking where nobody has thought to look. In this case, the student scientis...