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Avner Vengosh has been named Nicholas Chair of Environmental Quality, effective July 1.

By 1900, many cities in the U.S., Canada and Europe were beginning to incinerate their burgeoning volumes of garbage and trash. At the time, public health boards, sanitary engineers and city leaders strongly supported incineration. From the 1930s through the 1960s, nearly half of U.S. and Canadian cities incinerated city waste, and millions of tons of ash was produced each year.

A team of North Carolina scientists and researchers have less than two years to develop a proposal that will convince the National Science Foundation that eastern North Carolina is ripe to become an engine of innovative ecosystem technology that could advance a new workforce and a resilient and sustainable economy.

Sperm whales live in the remote open ocean. Or at least, that’s what scientists have long thought. The U.S. government’s 2010 recovery plan for sperm whales characterizes their range as “generally offshore.” A 2016 study of their Australian range describes the whales as foraging in “deep offshore areas of the world’s oceans.” This understanding goes way back.

A growing group of New Jersey politicians have called for an offshore wind activity moratorium, despite multiple scientists saying whale deaths off the Northeast coast this winter aren't elevated compared to previous years and show no link to offshore wind.

The U.S. offshore wind power industry is in its infancy, with just a handful of turbines installed along the Atlantic coast. But they’re already being blamed for the deaths of whales that have washed up on beaches in New Jersey, New York, Virginia and elsewhere.