Archive for the ‘Environment’ Category

February 23rd, 2010

New insights into helping marine species cope with climate change

Marine reserves are increasingly important for species that are being forced by climate change to move to a new home, adapt to new conditions or die. Stanford biologist Steve Palumbi compares the relative benefits of large and small protected areas in perpetuating populations. He also has found a coral species that has developed the “skills” to cope with rising temperatures.

February 23rd, 2010

Where Did Insects Come From

Since the dawn of the biological sciences, humankind has struggled to comprehend the relationships among the major groups of “jointed-legged” animals — the arthropods. Now, a team of researchers, including Dr. Joel Martin and Dr. Regina Wetzer from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM), has finished a completely new analysis of the evolutionary relationships among the arthropods, answering many questions that defied previous attempts to unravel how these creatures were connected.

January 27th, 2010

Marine lab hunts subtle clues to environmental threats to blue crabs

The Atlantic blue crab, Callinectes sapidus, long prized as a savory meal at a summer party or seafood restaurant, is a multi-million dollar source of income for those who harvest, process and market the crustacean along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Unfortunately, the blue crab population has been declining in recent years under the assault of viruses, bacteria and man-made contaminants. The signs of the attack often are subtle, so researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the College of Charleston (CofC) are at work trying to identify the clues that will finger specific, yet elusive, culprits.

January 27th, 2010

Scientists return to Haiti to assess possibility of another major quake

A team funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) is returning to Haiti this week to investigate the cause of the January 12, magnitude 7 earthquake there.

January 18th, 2010

Alligators breathe like birds

Alligators have a one-way path for breathing that is similar to birds’, new research shows. The findings, published in the Jan. 15 Science, could explain how  dinosaurs’ ancestors rose to prominence.

December 28th, 2009

Final moments of bee landing tactics revealed

Landing is tricky: hit the ground too fast and you will crash and burn; too slow and you may stall and fall. Bees manage their approach by monitoring the speed of images moving across their eyes. By slowing so that the speed of the looming landing pad’s image on the retina remains constant, bees manage to control their approach. But what happens in the final few moments before touch down? And how do bees adapt to landing on surfaces ranging from the horizontal to upside-down ceilings? Flies land on a ceiling by simply grabbing hold with their front legs and somersaulting up as they zip along, but a bee’s approach is more sedate. Mandyam Srinivasan, an electrical engineer from the Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland and the Australian Research Council’s Vision Centre, knew that bees must be doing something different from daredevil flies. Curious to know more about bee landing strategies Srinivasan teamed up with Carla Evangelista, Peter Kraft, and Judith Reinhard from the University of Queensland, and Marie Dacke, visiting from Lund University. The team used a high-speed camera to film the instant of touch down on surfaces at various inclinations and publish their discoveries about bee landing tactics in The Journal of Experimental Biology on December 28 2009 at http://jeb.biologists.org.

December 28th, 2009

Sun and moon trigger deep tremors on San Andreas Fault

The faint tug of the sun and moon on the San Andreas Fault stimulates tremors deep underground, suggesting that the rock 15 miles below is lubricated with highly pressurized water that allows the rock to slip with little effort, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, seismologists.

December 28th, 2009

Glacier melt adds ancient edibles to marine buffet

Glaciers along the Gulf of Alaska are enriching stream and near shore marine ecosystems from a surprising source – ancient carbon contained in glacial runoff, researchers from four universities and the U.S. Forest Service report in the December 24, 2009, issue of the journal Nature*.

December 17th, 2009

Marine scientists discover deepest undersea erupting volcano

Scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NOAA have recorded the deepest erupting volcano yet discovered–West Mata Volcano–describing high-definition video of the undersea eruption as “spectacular.”

December 14th, 2009

When it comes to fish families, the bigger and bossier the better

HAMILTON, ON, December 10, 2009–If you are spending the holidays with big Uncle Frank or bossy Aunt Minnie and wondering whether you would be better off with another family, spare a thought for the humble cichlid fish.

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