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If you?re a high school student studying astronomy and your local skies are too polluted with light for star gazing or if you can?t afford a good telescope, let your computer do the skywatching for you.

Ryan Hannahoe punches coordinates on a keyboard, then waits for a telescope under the New Mexico skies to swing toward the dramatic dust cloud marked on astronomical charts as B33, the constellation Orion. Where he lives in Pennsylvania, city lights make such observations impossible.
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A light tap on the side of your head could one day restore your eyesight, according to Mohsen Shahinpoor and his team at the University of New Mexico. The tap would tighten a band of artificial muscle wrapped round your eyeballs, changing their shape and bringing blurry images into focus.

The researchers call their artificial muscle a ?smart eye band.? It will be stitched to the sclera, the tough white outer part of the eyeball, and activated by an electromagnet in a hearing-aid-sized unit fitted behind one ear.
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Ireland is shrinking warns Andrew Cooper, director of the Coastal Research Group at the University of Ulster. He says the sea is swallowing up about 750 acres of Ireland each year, and warns that the process would quicken.

He says global warming will subject Ireland?s shores, particularly along the northern and western Atlantic coasts, to more frequent and powerful storms, but the governments of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic are doing little to erect coastline defenses.

Tourism officials have been forced to close some of the Irish coast?s cliffside hiking trails because of a growing risk of collapse. Cooper says, ?The growing demands on the coast mean that urgent action is needed.?

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Uncontrolled growth and lack of access to technology are driving the cities of the southern half of the Earth to the verge of environmental collapse. At the recent conference of the Alliance for Global Sustainability (AGS), with delegates from universities in Tokyo, Sweden, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Federal Swiss Institute of Technology, experts discussed how to end this negative trend in the developing world?s urban areas.

In the northeastern Chinese province of Shandong, home to 87 million people, pollution from coal-burning electrical plants causes hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. The capital of the province, Jinan, with 5 million inhabitants, is one of the seven most contaminated cities in China, according to the World Bank. read more