AQE 2013, the Air Quality & Emissions Show (formerly ‘MCERTS’) has announced a partnership with The Institute of Air Quality Management (IAQM), which organiser Marcus Pattison says “will make a major contribution to the new expanded remit for the event, which now includes all aspects of ambient air quality in addition to its traditional focus on industrial emissions.”

Roger Barrowcliffe, Chairman of the IAQM, believes that air quality is an environmental issue which concerns many members of the public and represents an outstanding problem for government at all levels. He says: “Despite consistent progress in reducing emissions from industry and road transport, we have not yet achieved universal compliance with the standards and guidelines we use to protect the health of humans and ecosystems.  To make more progress we need to increase our understanding of the problems and to utilise even better techniques in our management of air quality.

Scientists are attempting to mimic the way plants harness energy from the sun in order to make a more efficient renewable fuel.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) are embarking on an £800,000 project to replicate photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert sunlight into sugars to help them grow.

Radiocarbon dates of tiny fossilized marine animals found in Antarctica’s seabed sediments offer new clues about the recent rapid ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and help scientists make better future predictions about sea-level rise. This region of the icy continent is thought to be vulnerable to regional climate warming and changes in ocean circulation. Reporting this month in the journal Geology a team of researchers from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the University of Tromsø presents a timeline for ice loss and glacier retreat in the Amundsen Sea region of West Antarctica.

The team concludes that the rapid changes observed by satellites over the last 20 years at Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers may well be exceptional and are unlikely to have happened more than three or four times in the last 10,000 years.

Cumbria's tourism board has joined the growing clamour against any further research into the burying of nuclear power station waste within the borders of the Lake District national park.

The board – which oversees the park, the county's largest earner and one of the most-visited group of attractions in the UK – has also stated its strong opposition to investigations in the Solway Coast area of outstanding natural beauty on the West Cumbrian side of the famous lakes and fells.