March 05, 2009 - A Monash geoscientist and a team of international researchers have discovered evidence of links between New Caledonia and New Zealand, areas of the South Pacific thought to be geographically isolated.

Using new computer modelling programs Wouter Schellart and the team reconstructed the prehistoric cataclysm that took place when a tectonic plate between Australia and New Zealand sank 1100 kilometres into the Earth's interior and at the same time formed a long chain of volcanic islands at the surface.

March 04, 2009 - Study shows human water extraction threatens Dead Sea levels. The water levels in the Dead Sea – the deepest point on Earth – are dropping at an alarming rate with serious environmental consequences, according to Shahrazad Abu Ghazleh and colleagues from the University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany.

The projected Dead Sea-Red Sea or Mediterranean-Dead Sea Channels therefore need a significant carrying capacity to re-fill the Dead Sea to its former level, in order to sustainably generate electricity and produce freshwater by desalinization. The study shows that the drop in water levels is not the result of climate change.

March 03, 2009 - Climate change is already having a detectable impact on birds across Europe, says a Durham University and RSPB-led scientific team publishing their findings to create the world's first indicator of the climate change impacts on wildlife at a continental scale.

Published in the journal PLoS ONE, Durham University scientists working with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds have shown a strong link between recent population changes of individual species and their projected future range changes, associated with climate change, among a number of widespread and common European birds, including the goldfinch and the lesser spotted woodpecker.

March 03, 2009 - University of Colorado scientists detect microscopic life near 19,850 feet.

Gases rising from deep within the Earth are fueling the world's highest-known microbial ecosystems, which have been detected near the rim of the 19,850-foot-high Socompa volcano in the Andes by a University of Colorado at Boulder research team.

The new study shows the emission of water, carbon dioxide and methane from small volcanic vents near the summit of Socompa sustains complex microbial ecosystems new to science in the barren, sky-high landscape, said CU-Boulder Professor Steve Schmidt.

March 03, 2009 - It is an unlikely application, but researchers in China have discovered that chicken manure can be used to biodegrade crude oil in contaminated soil.

Writing in the International Journal of Environment and Pollution the team explains how bacteria in chicken manure break down 50% more crude oil than soil lacking the guano.

Bello Yakubu, Huiwen Ma, and ChuYu Zhang of Wuhan University, China, point out that contamination of soil by crude oil occurs around the world because of equipment failure, natural disasters, deliberate acts, and human error.

March 03, 2009 - From geckos and iguanas to Gila monsters and Komodo dragons, lizards are among the most common reptiles on Earth. They are found on every continent except Antarctica.

One even pitches car insurance in TV ads. They seemingly can adapt to a variety of conditions, but are most abundant in the tropics.

However, new research that builds on data collected more than three decades ago demonstrates that lizards living in tropical forests in Central and South America and the Caribbean could be in serious peril from rising temperatures associated with climate change.

March 02, 2009 - Mudslides that followed the 12 May 2008 Wenchuan, China earthquake, ranked by the US Geological Survey as the 11th deadliest earthquake ever recorded, may cause a carbon-dioxide release in upcoming decades equivalent to two percent of current annual global carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion, a new study shows.

Mudslides wipe away plants and topsoil, depleting terrain of nutrients for plant regrowth and burying swaths of vegetation. Buried vegetable matter decomposes and releases carbon dioxide and other gases to the atmosphere.

March 02, 2009 - When Alan Pradel of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris CAT scanned a 300-million-year-old fossilized iniopterygian from Kansas, he and his colleagues saw a symmetrical blob nestled within the braincase.

This turned out to be the oldest brain found in fossil form, a wholly unexpected and rare discovery. Additional scanning on the synchrotron at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France (and using a new X-Ray approach) yielded detailed information about the structure of brain, the shape of the braincase, and the nerves running between the two features.

The new discovery is described with several other intact braincases—the first three-dimensional fossils from this group of extinct marine fishes—in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Feb 24, 2009 - "Psychedelica" seems the perfect name for a species of fish that is a wild swirl of tan and peach zebra stripes and behaves in ways contrary to its brethren.

So says University of Washington's Ted Pietsch, who is the first to describe the new species in the scientific literature and thus the one to select the name.

Psychedelica is perhaps even more apt given the cockamamie way the fish swim, some with so little control they look intoxicated and should be cited for DUI.

Members of Histiophryne psychedelica, or H. psychedelica, don't so much swim as hop. Each time they strike the seafloor they use their fins to push off and they expel water from tiny gill openings on their sides to jet themselves forward.

Feb 27, 2009 - Nestled just off the east coast of Australia, picturesque North Stradbroke Island is a haven for local wildlife.

Yet some of the inhabitants of the island's creeks and swamps are far from peaceful.

Slender crayfish are aggressive territorial creatures, explains ecologist Robbie Wilson of the University of Queensland, Australia. When two crayfish catch sight of one another, they size each other up in a ritualistic display, which can quickly escalate from careful tapping of their opponent's chelae (enlarged front claws) to a full-blown fight.

Feb 26, 2009 - Global climate rapidly shifted from a relatively ice-free world to one with massive ice sheets on Antarctica about 34 million years ago. What happened? What changed? A team of scientists led by Yale geologists offers a new perspective on the nature of changing climatic conditions across this greenhouse-to-icehouse transition—one that refutes earlier theories and has important implications for predicting future climate changes.

Detailed in the February 27 issue of Science, their data disproves a long-held idea that massive ice growth in the Antarctic was accompanied by little to no global temperature change. This report shows that before the Southern Hemisphere ice expansion, high-latitude temperatures were at least 10°C (about 18˚F) warmer than previously estimated and that there was a 5˚C - 10˚C drop in surface-water temperature during the climate transition.

Feb 26, 2009 - Humans lost in the desert are well known for going around in circles, prompting scientists to ask how desert creatures find their way around without landmarks for guidance.

Now research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Frontiers in Zoology shows that Desert Ants input both local smells and visual cues into their navigation systems to guide them home.

Until now researchers thought that the Desert Ant Cataglyphis fortis, which makes its home in the inhospitable salt pans of Tunisia, was a pure vision-guided insect.

Feb 25, 2009 - Next time you have an unlucky encounter with a crab's pinchers, consider that the claw tips may be reinforced with bromine-rich biomaterial 1.5 times harder than acrylic glass and extremely fracture resistant, says a University of Oregon scientist.

Residents on the U.S. West Coast may have had close encounters with the biomaterial -- detailed by a seven-member team in a paper published online in advance of regular publication in the Journal of Structural Biology. The translucent substance empowers the claw tips of the striped (or lined) shore crab (Pachygrapsus cassipes) as the pinchers pick and hold prey.

Feb 25, 2009 - The wide-ranging IPY findings result from more than 160 endorsed science projects assembled from researchers in more than 60 countries.

Launched in March 2007, the IPY covers a two-year period to March 2009 to allow for observations during the alternate seasons in both polar regions.A joint project of WMO and ICSU, IPY spearheaded efforts to better monitor and understand the Arctic and Antarctic regions, with international funding support of about US$ 1.2 billion over the two-year period.

Feb 20, 2009 - Some algae have been hanging together rather than going it alone much longer than previously thought, according to new research.

Ancestors of Volvox algae made the transition from being a single-celled organism to becoming a multicellular colony at least 200 million years ago, during the Triassic Period. At that time, Earth was a hot-house world whose inhabitants included tree ferns, dinosaurs and early mammals.

Previous estimates had suggested Volvox's ancestors arose only 50 million years ago. The algae switched to a communal lifestyle in only 35 million years -- "a geological eyeblink," said lead researcher Matthew D. Herron of The University of Arizona in Tucson.

Feb 19, 2009 - Tropical forests hold more living biomass than any other terrestrial ecosystem. A new report in the journal Nature by Lewis et al. shows that not only do trees in intact African tropical forests hold a lot of carbon, they hold more carbon now than they did 40 years ago--a hopeful sign that tropical forests could help to mitigate global warming. In a companion article, Helene Muller-Landau, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, says that understanding the causes of this African forest carbon sink and projecting its future is anything but straightforward.

Feb 13, 2009 - If you've ever tried capturing a lizard, you'll know how difficult it is. But if you do manage to corner one, many have the ultimate emergency quick release system for escape. They simply drop their tails, leaving the twitching body part to distract the predator as they scamper to safety.

According to Gary Gillis from Mount Holyoke College, USA, up to 50% of some lizard populations seem to have traded some part of their tails in exchange for escape. This made Gillis wonder how this loss may impact on a lizard's mobility and ability to survive. .

Feb 13 2009 - What you see is what you get" often is the mantra in the highly competitive life of birds, as they use brilliant displays of color to woo females for mating.

Now researchers are finding that carotenoids -- the compounds responsible for amping up red, orange, and yellow colors of birds -- also may play a role in color perception and in a bird's ability to reproduce, making it a cornerstone in birds' vitality.

These are among the findings presented by Kevin McGraw, an Arizona State University assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago.

Feb 13, 2009 - A quarter-century of data reveals how changing weather patterns and land use, combined with overfishing and pollution, are taking a heavy toll on penguin numbers

NEW YORK (Embargoed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for release 5p.m. EST Friday, Feb. 12, 2009) – A combination of changing weather patterns, overfishing, pollution, and other factors have conspired to drive penguin populations into a precipitous decline, according to long-term research funded by the Wildlife Conservation Society. The findings were presented today by University of Washington professor and WCS scientific fellow Dr. P. Dee Boersma at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago. Boersma has studied Magellanic penguins in Argentina for WCS since 1982.

Feb 09, 2009 - Scientists have found proof in Bermuda that the planet's sea level was once more than 21 meters (70 feet) higher about 400,000 years ago than it is now. Their findings were published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews Wednesday, Feb. 4.

Storrs Olson, research zoologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and geologist Paul Hearty of the Bald Head Island Conservancy discovered sedimentary and fossil evidence in the walls of a limestone quarry in Bermuda that documents a rise in sea level during an interglacial period of the Middle Pleistocene in excess of 21 meters above its current level.

Feb 09, 2009 - Two Brigham Young University researchers who just returned from Antarctica are reporting a hardy worm that withstands its cold climate by cranking out antifreeze. And when its notoriously dry home runs out of water, it just dries itself out and goes into suspended animation until liquid water brings it back to life. Identifying the genes the worm uses to kick in its antifreeze system can be useful information – similar genes found in other Antarctic organisms are currently being used to engineer frost-resistant crops.

But BYU's Byron Adams, associate professor of molecular biology, and his Ph.D. student Bishwo Adhikari are carrying on their love affair with microscopic nematode worms for a different reason.

Feb 09, 2009 - In the era of global warming, when many scientists say we are experiencing a human-caused mass extinction to rival the one that killed off the dinosaurs, one might think that the discovery of a host of new species would be cause for joy. Not entirely so, says Paul Ehrlich, co-author of an analysis of the 408 new mammalian species discovered since 1993.

"What this paper really talks about is how little we actually know about our natural capital and how little we know about the services that flow from it," said Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford.

Feb 08, 2009 - University of Utah biologists discovered that young "right whales" learn from their mothers where to eat, raising concern about their ability to find new places to feed if Earth's changing climate disrupts their traditional dining areas.

"A primary concern is, what are whales going to do with global warming, which may change the location and abundance of their prey?" asks Vicky Rowntree, research associate professor of biology and a coauthor of the new study. "Can they adapt if they learn from their mother where to feed – or will they die?"

Previous research by Rowntree and colleagues showed that when climate oscillations increase sea temperatures, southern right whales give birth to fewer calves because the warm water reduces the abundance of krill, which are small, shrimp-like crustaceans eaten by the whales.

Feb 05, 2009 - When MIT Professor of Anthropology Stefan Helmreich set out to examine the world of marine microbiologists for a new book, his research took an unexpected twist.

Helmreich, who has been recognized for his innovative cultural anthropology work, had decided to study scientists who chase some of the world's smallest creatures in some of the world's most forbidding places. So he spent long hours interviewing microbial biologists such as Penny Chisholm, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies at MIT, and Edward DeLong, professor in MIT's Department of Biological Engineering and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and an associate member at the Broad Institute.

Feb 05, 2009 - University of Toronto geophysicists have shown that should the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse and melt in a warming world – as many scientists are concerned it will – it is the coastlines of North America and of nations in the southern Indian Ocean that will face the greatest threats from rising sea levels.

"There is widespread concern that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be prone to collapse, resulting in a rise in global sea levels," says geophysicist Jerry X. Mitrovica, who, along with physics graduate student Natalya Gomez and Oregon State University geoscientist Peter Clark, are the authors of a new study to be published in the February 6 issue of Science magazine. adds Gomez.

Feb 05, 2009 - Despite the great cultural, physical, and genetic diversity found amongst the numerous West Central African human populations that are collectively designated as "Pygmies," a report published online on February 5th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, finds that they diverged from a single ancestral population just about 2,800 years ago.

The new study is the first to reconstruct the history of the numerous forest-dwelling pygmy populations, who make their livings as hunter-gatherers, and their immediate sedentary, agriculturalist neighbors, according to the researchers.

Feb 05, 2009 - Why do nearly half of North American wolves have black coats while European wolves are overwhelmingly gray or white? The surprising answer, according to teams of biologists and molecular geneticists from Stanford University, UCLA, Sweden, Canada and Italy, is that the black coats are the result of historical matings between black dogs and wild gray wolves.

The research, federally funded by the National Science Foundation, appears Feb. 5 in the online edition of the journal Science and will be published later in the journal's print edition.

The scientists used molecular genetic techniques to analyze DNA sequences from 150 wolves, about half of them black, in Yellowstone National Park, which covers parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

Feb 05, 2009 - This year marks both the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work "On the Origin of Species." Just in time for the Darwin observances, a new paper appearing today in the journal Science by a team led by University of Notre Dame researchers Andrew Forbes, Thomas Powell, and Jeffrey Feder offers important insights into how new species come to be.

"This study is important because it shows how biodiversity itself can be a major generator of biodiversity," Feder said. "As new species form, they can create new opportunities for others to take advantage of, which, in turn, can lead to a chain reaction of ever more new species."

Feb 04, 2009 - Increasing greenhouse gases could delay, or even postpone indefinitely the recovery of stratospheric ozone in some regions of the Earth, a new study suggests. This change might take a toll on public health.

Darryn W. Waugh, an atmospheric scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and his colleagues report that climate change could provoke variations in the circulation of air in the lower stratosphere in tropical and southern mid-latitudes — a band of the Earth including Australia and Brazil. The circulation changes would cause ozone levels in these areas never to return to levels that were present before decline began, even after ozone-depleting substances have been wiped out from the atmosphere.

Feb 04, 2009 - Climate change is about to cause a major upheaval in the shallow marine waters of Antarctica. Predatory crabs are poised to return to warming Antarctic waters and disrupt the primeval marine communities.

"Nowhere else than in these ecosystems do giant sea spiders and marine pillbugs share the ocean bottom with fish that have antifreeze proteins in their blood," says Rich Aronson, professor of biological sciences at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Fla. "The shell-cracking crabs, fish, sharks and rays that dominate bottom communities in temperate and tropical zones have been shut out of Antarctica for millions of years because it is simply too cold for them."

Feb 02, 2009 - Scientists today announced the discovery of 10 amphibians believed to be new to science, including a spiky-skinned, orange-legged rain frog, three poison dart frogs and three glass frogs, so called because their transparent skin can reveal internal organs.

The species were discovered during a recent Rapid Assessment Program (RAP) expedition in Colombia's mountainous Tacarcuna area of the Darien, near the border with Panama.

The expedition was led by herpetologists from Conservation International (CI) in Colombia and ornithologists from the Ecotrópico Foundation, with the support of the local Emberá community of Eyakera.

Feb 02, 2009 - With most mammals, the biggest and most aggressive male claims the alpha male role and gets his choice of food and females.

But a new study from the University of Minnesota suggests that at least among chimpanzees, smaller, more mild-mannered males can also use political behavior to secure the top position.

The finding was gleaned from 10 years of observing dominant male chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, looking at behaviors they used to compete for alpha male status relative to their size.

Jan 29, 2009 - Times are tough for wildlife living at the frontier between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Armies are reportedly encamped in a national park and wildlife preserve on the Congolese side, while displaced herders and their cattle have settled in an adjoining Ugandan park.

And yet, the profusion of prey in the region could potentially support more than 900 individuals of the emblematic African lion, according to new research – but only if immediate conservation steps are taken.

Jan 29, 2009 - Glaciers around the globe continue to melt at high rates. Tentative figures for the year 2007, of the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, indicate a further loss of average ice thickness of roughly 0.67 meter water equivalent (m w.e.).

Some glaciers in the European Alps lost up to 2.5 m w.e. The new still tentative data of more than 80 glaciers confirm the global trend of fast ice loss since 1980. Glaciers with long-term observation series (30 glaciers in 9 mountain ranges) have experienced a reduction in total thickness of more than 11 m w.e. until 2007.

Jan 29, 2009 - Followers are just as important to good leadership as are the leaders themselves, reveals a new study of stickleback fish published online on January 29th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

By randomly pairing fish of varying degrees of "boldness," the researchers showed that each member of a pair adopts the role of leader or follower. More importantly, they found, the behavior of each member of the pair is strongly influenced by its partner. " Our study shows that the process by which leaders and followers emerge is a dynamic one," said Andrea Manica of the University of Cambridge.

Jan 28, 2009 - Making bales with 30 percent of global crop residues – the stalks and such left after harvesting – and then sinking the bales into the deep ocean could reduce the build up of global carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by up to 15 percent a year, according to just published calculations.

That is a significant amount of carbon, the process can be accomplished with existing technology and it can be done year after year, according to Stuart Strand, a University of Washington research professor.

Further the technique would sequester – or lock up – the carbon in seafloor sediments and deep ocean waters for thousands of years, he says.

Jan 27, 2009 - The remarkable honey bee can tell the difference between different numbers at a glance. A fresh, astonishing revelation about the 'numeracy' of insects has emerged from new research by an international team of scientists from The Vision Centre, in Australia, published January 28 in the online, open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.

In an exquisitely designed experiment, researchers led by Dr. Shaowu Zhang, Chief Investigator of The Vision Centre and Australian National University and Professor Hans Gross and Professor Juergen Tautz of Wurzburg University in Germany, have shown that bees can discriminate between patterns containing two and three dots – without having to count the dots.

Jan 26, 2009 - Popularized by the 2005 movie "March of the Penguins," emperor penguins could be headed toward extinction in at least part of their range before the end of the century, according to a paper by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers published January 26, 2009, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The paper, co-authored by five researchers including WHOI biologists Stephanie Jenouvrier and Hal Caswell, uses mathematical models to predict the effect on penguins of climate change and the resulting loss of sea ice.

The research indicates that if climate change continues to melt sea ice at the rates published in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the median population size of a large emperor penguin colony in Terre Adelie, Antarctica, likely will shrink from its present size of 3,000 to only 400 breeding pairs by the end of the century.

Jan 26, 2009 - Through work originally designed to remove contaminants from soil, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and their Belgium colleagues at Hasselt University have identified plant-associated microbes that can improve plant growth on marginal land. The findings, published in the February 1, 2009 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, may help scientists design strategies for sustainable biofuel production that do not use food crops or agricultural land.

"Biofuels are receiving increased attention as one strategy for addressing the dwindling supplies, high costs, and environmental consequences of fossil fuels," said Brookhaven biologist and lead author Daniel (Niels) van der Lelie, who leads the Lab's biofuels research program. "But competition with agricultural resources is an important socioeconomic concern ".

Jan 22, 2009 - Spitting cobras have an exceptional ability to spray venom into eyes of potential attackers. A new study published in Physiological and Biochemical Zoology reveals how these snakes maximize their chances of hitting the target.

The name "spitting cobra" is a bit of a misnomer. Cobras don't actually "spit" venom, says the study's lead author Bruce Young, director of the Anatomical Laboratory in the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Muscle contractions squeeze the cobra's venom gland, forcing venom to stream out of the snake's fangs.

Jan 22, 2009 - Lately, every drought, flood or hurricane which happens in the planet is connected with climatic change, and therefore the interest of society and scientists is getting to know this phenomenon better.

Climatic change is connected at present with the phenomenon of global warming. This is characterized by the increase of carbon dioxide (CO2 gas), which produces the reduction of heat emission to the space and provokes a higher global warming.

Although gases in the atmosphere tell us about this greenhouse effect, oceans have accumulated information for million years which allow us a better understanding of this phenomenon.

Jan 22, 2009 - A new study led by the U.S. Geological Survey and involving the University of Colorado at Boulder indicates tree deaths in the West's old-growth forests have more than doubled in recent decades, likely from regional warming and related drought conditions.

The study, published in the Jan. 23 issue of Science, documented tree deaths in all tree sizes in the West located at varying elevations, including tree types such as pine, fir and hemlock. Significant die-offs also were documented in the interior West -- including Colorado and Arizona -- as well as Northwest regions like northern California, Oregon, Washington and southern British Columbia.

Jan 21, 2009 - An international team of researchers, with the participation of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and CREAF, has achieved to resolve fundamental questions related to the behaviour of ants.

Researchers discovered how some species that successfully invade large extensions of land have an unusual way of doing so: they cooperate with other colonies to form a supercolony.

Researchers alert that a plague of this type of ant could turn into a global problem.

Jan 21, 2009 - Scientists studying climate change have long believed that while most of the rest of the globe has been getting steadily warmer, a large part of Antarctica – the East Antarctic Ice Sheet – has actually been getting colder.

But new research shows that for the last 50 years, much of Antarctica has been warming at a rate comparable to the rest of the world. In fact, the warming in West Antarctica is greater than the cooling in East Antarctica, meaning that on average the continent has gotten warmer, said Eric Steig, a University of Washington professor of Earth and space sciences and director of the Quaternary Research Center at the UW.

Jan 21, 2009 - Not only has the average global temperature increased in the past 50 years, but the hottest day of the year has shifted nearly two days earlier, according to a new study by scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University.

Just as human-generated greenhouse gases appear to the be the cause of global warming, human activity may also be the cause of the shift in the cycle of seasons, according to Alexander R. Stine, a graduate student in UC Berkeley's Department of Earth and Planetary Science and first author of the report.

Jan 20, 2009 - An African elephant never forgets – especially when it comes to the loss of its kin, according to researchers at the University of Washington. Their findings, published online in the journal, Molecular Ecology, reveal that the negative effects of poaching persist for decades after the killing has ended.

"Our study shows that it takes a long time – upwards of 20 years – for a family who has lost its kin to rebuild," said lead researcher Kathleen Gobush, Ph.D., a research ecologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency and a former doctoral student at the University of Washington Center for Conservation Biology.

Jan 20, 2009 -The Indian Ocean could be due another massive earthquake within the next 30 years, one that could rival the magnitude of the one that caused the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.

Researchers made the prediction after studying corals, which show rings of growth from which past sea levels can be inferred. Earthquakes push the land up, depressing the sea level in the area and preventing corals from growing upwards. Sea levels then rise as the land subsides, leaving the history of the earthquake imprinted in the coral growth patterns.

Jan 20, 2009 - Penn State Assistant Professor of Biology Tracy Langkilde has shown that native fence lizards in the southeastern United States are adapting to potentially fatal invasive fire-ant attacks by developing behaviors that enable them to escape from the ants, as well as by developing longer hind legs, which can increase the effectiveness of this behavior.

"Not only does this finding provide biologists with an example of evolution in action, but it also provides wildlife managers with knowledge that they can use to develop plans for managing invasive species," said Langkilde.
The results will be described in a paper to be published later this month in the journal Ecology

Jan 20, 2009 - A new species of fish from tropical South America is confirming suspected roots to the loricariid catfish family tree.

Lithogenes wahari shares traits with two different families of fish: the bony armor that protects its head and tail, and a grasping pelvic fin that allows it to climb vertical surfaces.

The discovery of both of these characteristics in Lithogenes suggests to ichthyologists Scott Schaefer of the American Museum of Natural History and Francisco Provenzano of the Universidad Central de Venezuela that the common ancestor of the Loricariidae and Astroblepidae probably could grasp and climb rocks with its tail and mouth.

Jan 19, 2009 - A four-week expedition to explore the deep ocean south-west of Tasmania has revealed new species of animals and more evidence of impacts of increasing carbon dioxide on deep-sea corals.

The collaborative voyage of US and Australian researchers was led by chief scientists Dr Jess Adkins from the California Institute of Technology and Dr Ron Thresher from CSIRO's Climate Adaptation and Wealth from Oceans Flagships.

"We set out to search for life deeper than any previous voyage in Australian waters," Dr Thresher says. "We also gathered data to assess the threat posed by ocean acidification and climate change on Australia's unique deep-water coral reefs."

Jan 18, 2009 - In work that could expand the frontiers of genetic engineering, MIT chemists have, for the first time, genetically altered a plant to produce entirely new compounds, some of which could be used as drugs against cancer and other diseases.

The researchers, led by Sarah O'Connor of the Department of Chemistry, produced the new compounds by manipulating the complex biosynthetic pathways of the periwinkle plant. This sort of manipulation, which O'Connor and her graduate student, Weerawat Runguphan, report in the Jan. 18 issue of Nature Chemical Biology, offers a new way to tweak potential drugs to make them less toxic (and/or more effective).

Jan 16, 2009 - An international team of scientists has solved a mystery that has puzzled marine chemists for decades. They have discovered that fish contribute a significant fraction of the oceans' calcium carbonate production, which affects the delicate pH balance of seawater. The study gives a conservative estimate of three to 15 percent of marine calcium carbonate being produced by fish, but the researchers believe it could be up to three times higher.

Published January 16th in Science, their findings highlight how little is known about some aspects of the marine carbon cycle, which is undergoing rapid change as a result of global CO2 emissions.

Until now, scientists believed that the oceans' calcium carbonate, which dissolves in deep waters making seawater more alkaline, came from marine plankton.

Jan 16, 2009 - Temperature change in the Arctic is happening at a greater rate than other places in the Northern Hemisphere, and this is expected to continue in the future. As a result, glacier and ice-sheet melting, sea-ice retreat, coastal erosion and sea level rise can be expected to continue.

A new comprehensive scientific synthesis of past Arctic climates demonstrates for the first time the pervasive nature of Arctic climate amplification. The U.S. Geological Survey led this new assessment, which is a synthesis of published science literature and authored by a team of climate scientists from academia and government.

Jan 15, 2009 - By carefully selecting which varieties of food crops to cultivate, much of Europe and North America could be cooled by up to 1°C during the summer growing season, say researchers from the University of Bristol, UK.

This is equivalent to an annual global cooling of over 0.1°C, almost 20% of the total global temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution.

The growing of crops already produces a cooling of the climate because they reflect more sunlight back into space, compared with natural vegetation.

Jan 14, 2009 - Water and energy are two resources on which modern society depends.

As demands for these increase, researchers look to alternative technologies that promise both sustainability and reduced environmental impact.

Engineered osmosis holds a key to addressing both the global need for affordable clean water and inexpensive sustainable energy according to Yale researchers.

Jan 14, 2009 - Global yields of most biofuels crops, including corn, rapeseed and wheat, have been overestimated by 100 to 150 percent or more, suggesting many countries need to reset their expectations of agricultural biofuels to a more realistic level.

That's according to a study led by Matt Johnston and Tracey Holloway of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and Jon Foley of University of Minnesota, which drew on actual agricultural data from nearly 240 countries to calculate the potential yields of 20 different biofuels worldwide.

Jan 13, 2009 - Using a 218-year-long temperature record from a Bermuda brain coral, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have created the first marine-based reconstruction showing the long-term behavior of one of the most important drivers of climate fluctuations in the North Atlantic.

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is a wide-ranging pressure seesaw that drives winter climate over much of North America, Europe and North Africa.

Jan 13, 2009 - Tropical oceans are known as the deserts of the sea. And yet this unlikely environment is the very place where the rich and fertile coral reef grows.

Dutch researcher Jasper de Goeij investigated how caves in the coral reef ensure the reef's continued existence.

Although sponges in these coral caves take up a lot of dissolved organic material, they scarcely grow.

However, they do discard a lot of cells that in turn provide food for the organisms on the reef.

Jan 12, 2009 - Modern microscopy technology has allowed two scorpion biologists, Carsten Kamenz of the Humboldt University in Berlin and Lorenzo Prendini of the American Museum of Natural History, to study and document what is nearly invisible.

Looking at tiny morphological features like the sculpting of the hair-like outgrowths on lamellae—structures that fold like the leaves of a book and give the scorpion respiratory system its name, the book lung—Kamenz and Prendini found a wealth of new variation that gives insight into the evolutionary relationships among scorpions. Their research, recently published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, presents their raw data as an illustrated atlas of the book lungs of all major lineages of scorpions.

Jan 08, 2009 - The evolutionary history of diatoms -- abundant oceanic plankton that remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year -- needs to be rewritten, according to a new Cornell study. The findings suggest that after a sudden rise in species numbers, diatoms abruptly declined about 33 million years ago -- trends that coincided with severe global cooling.

The research casts doubt on the long-held theory that diatoms' success was tied to an influx of nutrients into the oceans from the rise of grasslands about 18 million years ago.

Jan 08, 2009 - New research indicates that the ocean could rise in the next 100 years to a meter higher than the current sea level – which is three times higher than predictions from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC. The groundbreaking new results from an international collaboration between researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, England and Finland are published in the scientific journal Climate Dynamics.

According to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the global climate in the coming century will be 2-4 degrees warmer than today, but the ocean is much slower to warm up than the air and the large ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are also slower to melt.

Jan 08, 2009 - Flooding like that which devastated the North of England last year is set to become a common event across the UK in the next 75 years, new research has shown.

A study by Dr Hayley Fowler, of Newcastle University, predicts that severe storms – the likes of which currently occur every five to 25 years across the UK – will become more common and more severe in a matter of decades.

Looking at 'extreme rainfall events' – where rain falls steadily and heavily for between one and five days – the study predicts how the intensity of these storms may change in the future.

Jan 08, 2009 - In ant society, workers normally give up reproducing themselves to care for their queen's offspring, who are their brothers and sisters.

When workers try to cheat and have their own kids in the queen's presence, their peers swiftly attack and physically restrain them from reproducing.

Now, a new study published online on January 8th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, explains just how the cheaters get caught red-handed.

Jan 07, 2009 - If the long-forgotten remains of an undiscovered dinosaur were found hidden in the Poconos Mountains, the story likely would run looped on every 24-hour news station in the country. But when an entire new genus of microscopic organism that existed in the time of the dinosaurs is discovered, the world doesn't blink an eye.

But it is these creatures--so tiny that just a sliver of mud can hold thousands of species--that may hold the key to understanding the past, present and future of our planet's climate.

Connecticut College botanist Peter Siver studies diatoms and chrysophytes, photosynthetic microorganisms found in lakes, oceans and other water sources that hold the clues to understanding climate change dating back millions and millions of years.

Jan 07, 2009 - Smooth, dark buildings, vehicles and even roads can be mistaken by insects and other creatures for water, according to a Michigan State University researcher, creating "ecological traps" that jeopardize animal populations and fragile ecosystems.

It's the polarized light reflected from asphalt roads, windows -- even plastic sheets and oil spills -- that to some species mimics the surface of the water they use to breed and feed.

The resulting confusion could drastically disrupt mating and feeding routines and lead insects and animals into contact with vehicles and other dangers, Bruce Robertson said.

Jan 07, 2009 - A remarkable new discovery shows the four-eyed spookfish to be the first vertebrate ever found to use mirrors, rather than lenses, to focus light in its eyes.

Professor Julian Partridge from the University of Bristol, said: "In nearly 500 million years of vertebrate evolution, and many thousands of vertebrate species living and dead, this is the only one known to have solved the fundamental optical problem faced by all eyes – how to make an image – using a mirror."

While the spook fish looks like it has four eyes, in fact it only has two, each of which is split into two connected parts. One half points upwards, giving the spookfish a view of the ocean – and potential food – above. The other half, which looks like a bump on the side of the fish's head, points downwards into the abyss below. These 'diverticular' eyes are unique among all vertebrates in that they use a mirror to make the image.

Jan 07, 2009 - Mercury pollution has already spurred public health officials to advise eating less fish, but it could become a more pressing concern in a warmer world.

So suggests a paper that appears in a recent issue of the journal Oecologia.

Sue Natali, a postdoctoral associate in botany at the University of Florida and the paper's lead author, compared mercury levels in soils under trees growing in air enriched with carbon dioxide to soil beneath trees in ambient air.

Jan 06, 2009 - Between December 26, 2008, and January 6, 2009, several hundred small earthquakes rumbled beneath Yellowstone Lake in northern Wyoming. According to reports from the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, this earthquake swarm is “well above typical activity at Yellowstone,” but it is not unprecedented. In the past forty years of monitoring, periodic swarms of small earthquakes, some reaching magnitudes greater than 4.0, have been the typical mode of activity at Yellowstone Lake.

This image shows the topography of Yellowstone Lake and the location of quakes that occurred between December 29 and January 6. The size and color of the dots indicate magnitude and date.

Jan 05, 2009 - Climate researchers have shown that big volcanic eruptions over the past 450 years have temporarily cooled weather in the tropics—but suggest that such effects may have been masked in the 20th century by rising global temperatures. Their paper, which shows that higher latitudes can be even more sensitive to volcanism, appears in the current issue of Nature Geoscience.

Scientists already agree that large eruptions have lowered temperatures at higher latitudes in recent centuries, because volcanic particles reflect sunlight back into space. For instance, 1816, the year following the massive Tambora eruption in Indonesia, became known as "The Year Without a Summer," after low temperatures caused crop failures in northern Europe and eastern North America.

Jan 17, 2009 - Were the Earth a crystal ball, you might gaze 2,900 kilometers down to its outer core with a telescope. The Earth, though, is frustratingly opaque — to light.

Most knowledge of the planet’s internal structure comes from studying seismic waves, which give a kind of ultrasound image. Inferences about Earth’s internal chemistry rely on the elements found in near-surface rocks, meteorites and the sun.

Recently, geoscientists have developed a new tool for probing the Earth’s innards. Borrowing a page from astrophysics, they are using the curious subatomic particles known as neutrinos.

Astrophysicists have used neutrino telescopes for decades to study neutrinos originating in the sun and elsewhere in the cosmos. Now earth scientists are taking a neutrino telescope and looking down, to illuminate the Earth’s interior by detecting “geoneutrinos” — neutrinos produced within the planet itself.

Jan 01, 2009 - Abundant tiny particles of diamond dust exist in sediments dating to 12,900 years ago at six North American sites, adding strong evidence for Earth's impact with a rare swarm of carbon-and-water-rich comets or carbonaceous chondrites, reports a nine-member scientific team.

These nanodiamonds, which are produced under high-temperature, high-pressure conditions created by cosmic impacts and have been found in meteorites, are concentrated in similarly aged sediments at Murray Springs, Ariz., Bull Creek, Okla., Gainey, Mich., and Topper, S.C., as well as Lake Hind, Manitoba, and Chobot, Alberta, in Canada. Nanodiamonds can be produced on Earth, but only through high-explosive detonations or chemical vaporization.

Nov 19, 2008 - A study published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE highlights how the exploration of the ocean depths can benefit humankind. This is the story of a voyage of discovery, starting with marine animals that glow, the identification of the molecules responsible and their application as marker in living cells. Many marine organisms such as sea anemones and corals produce fluorescent proteins, which come in a variety of dazzling hues. Fluorescent proteins have revolutionized biomedical research by enabling the imaging of processes within living cells and tissues. The impact of this technology is considered so high that the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was most recently awarded to scientists that discovered and further developed the first green fluorescent protein that was applied as cellular marker.

Nov 19, 2008 - Larvae of marine invertebrates – worms, sponges, jellyfish - have the simplest eyes that exist. They consist of no more than two cells: a photoreceptor cell and a pigment cell. These minimal eyes, called eyespots, resemble the 'proto-eyes' suggested by Charles Darwin as the first eyes to appear in animal evolution. They cannot form images but allow the animal to sense the direction of light. This ability is crucial for phototaxis – the swimming towards light exhibited by many zooplankton larvae. Myriads of planktonic animals travel guided by light every day. Their movements drive the biggest transport of biomass on earth.

"For a long time nobody knew how the animals do phototaxis with their simple eyes and nervous system," explains Detlev Arendt, whose team carried out the research at EMBL. "We assume that the first eyes in the animal kingdom evolved for exactly this purpose. Understanding phototaxis thus unravels the first steps of eye evolution."

Nov 18, 2008 - A team led by a Texas A&M University anthropologist has discovered a group of primates not seen alive in 85 years. The pygmy tarsiers, furry Furby/gremlin-looking* creatures about the size of a small mouse and weighing less than 2 ounces, have not been observed since they were last collected for a museum in 1921. Several scientists believed they were extinct until two Indonesian scientists trapping rats in the highlands of Sulawesi accidentally trapped and killed a pygmy tarsier in 2000.

Sharon Gursky-Doyen, working with one of her graduate students, Nanda Grow, and a team of locals trapped three of the nocturnal creatures in Indonesia in late August. The pygmy tarsiers possess fingers with claws instead of nails, which Gursky-Doyen says is a distinguishing feature of this species, and distinguishes them from nearly all other primates which have nails and not claws. The claws may be an adaptation to the mossy environment, she believes.

Nov 18, 2008 - Ants specializing on one job, such as snatching food from a picnic, are no more efficient than "Jane-of-all-trade" ants, according to new research at The University of Arizona.

The finding casts doubt on the idea that the worldwide success of ants stems from job specialization within the colony.

Anna Dornhaus, a UA assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, said: "The question is, 'Why is job specialization a good thing?' We thought that the fact that ants have specialists was one of the things that made them so successful and live all over the world in all habitats in great. But, she added, "it turns out that the ones that are specialized on a particular job are not particularly good at doing that job."

Nov 18, 2008 - When Ohio State glaciologists failed to find the expected radioactive signals in the latest core they drilled from a Himalayan ice field, they knew it meant trouble for their research.

But those missing markers of radiation, remnants from atomic bomb tests a half-century ago, foretell much greater threat to the half-billion or more people living downstream of that vast mountain range.

It may mean that future water supplies could fall far short of what's needed to keep that population alive.

In a paper just published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers from the Byrd Polar Research Center explain that levels of tritium, beta radioactivity emitters like strontium and cesium, and an isotope of chlorine are absent in all three cores taken from the Naimona'nyi glacier 19,849 feet (6,050 meters) high on the southern margin of the Tibetan Plateau.

Nov 14, 2008 - Islands hold a special place in the thoughts of evolutionary biologists like Anne Yoder. They're like floating labs of evolution.

The recipe works like this: put some food, water and shelter in an isolated location where escape and immigration are unlikely. Introduce just a handful of individuals. Cook 60 million years. Decipher results.

"Madagascar, where lemurs evolved, is probably the most productive and exquisite natural evolutionary laboratory on the planet," says Yoder, who is director of the NSF-funded Duke Lemur Center. "And lemurs are the crown jewels of the evolutionary process there."

Nov 13, 2008 - (NaturalNews) Numbers of zooplankton, tiny organisms that form the base of the ocean's food chain, have plummeted 70 percent since the 1960s, according to numbers collected by the British Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

The data were included without further comment in a graph on page nine of DEFRA's 2008-2009 Marine Program Plan. The nonprofit organization Buglife noticed this graph, however, and began sounding the alarm.

Nov 13, 2008 - Observations from satellites now allow scientists to monitor changes to water levels in the sea, in rivers and lakes, in ice sheets and even under the ground. As the climate changes, this information will be crucial for monitoring its effects and predicting future impacts in different regions. Sea level rise in one of the major consequences of global warming, but it is much more difficult to model and predict than temperature. It involves the oceans and their interaction with the atmosphere, the ice sheets, the land waters and even the solid Earth, which modifies the shapes of ocean basins. Measurements from tidal gauges show that for most of the twentieth century, sea levels rose by 1.8 mm per year on average.

Nov 13, 2008 - Philadelphia, PA, November 13, 2008 – There may be less than 20,000 rhinoceros in the world, with one species perhaps already extinct and another with possibly only four animals remaining in the wild.
As the populations of these animals age and become infirm, successful breeding becomes increasingly difficult. In an article scheduled for publication in Theriogenology, An International Journal of Animal Reproduction, researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin, Zoo Budapest and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, report on the first live birth of a rhinoceros resulting from artificial insemination (AI) with frozen and thawed semen.

Nov 13, 2008 - An unusual microorganism discovered in the open ocean may force scientists to rethink their understanding of how carbon and nitrogen cycle through ocean ecosystems.

A research team led by Jonathan Zehr, professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, characterized the new microbe by analyzing its genetic material, even though researchers have not been able to grow it in the laboratory.

Zehr said the newly described organism seems to be an atypical member of the cyanobacteria, a group of photosynthetic bacteria formerly known as blue-green algae.

Nov 13, 2008 - When cockroaches flee their predators, they choose, seemingly at random, amongst one of a handful of preferred escape routes, according to a report published on November 13th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

"By using one of a number of possible trajectories, we think that cockroaches may behave with sufficient unpredictability to avoid the possibility that predators will learn their escape strategy," said Paolo Domenici of CNR-IAMC in Italy.

"As we say in our report, the predator is made to guess."

Nov 13, 2008 - Just after Americans have headed to the polls to elect their next president, a new report in the November 13th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, reveals how one species of fish picks its leaders: Most of the time they reach a consensus to go for the more attractive of two candidates.

"It turned out that stickleback fish preferred to follow larger over smaller leaders," said Ashley Ward of Sydney University. "Not only that, but they also preferred fat over thin, healthy over ill, and so on. The part that really caught our eye was that these preferences grew as the group size increased, through some kind of positive social feedback mechanism."

Nov 12, 2008 - Root-knot nematodes are extreme parasites. These microscopic, omnipresent worms cause major damage to horticultural and field crops in sub-tropical regions, resulting in significant financial losses to growers and gardeners.

Until recently, fumigation of the soil with methyl bromide before planting was the primary method for controlling root-knot nematodes in valuable vegetable crops. Methyl bromide (MeBr) is an odorless, colorless gas that has been widely used as a plant pesticide. Since the discovery that the substance has severe negative effects on the environment—it depletes the stratospheric ozone layer—the use of methyl bromide has been phased out in the U.S.

Nov 12, 2008 - Many of the world's deep-sea octopuses evolved from species that lived in the Southern Ocean, according to new molecular evidence reported by researchers at Queen's University Belfast. The findings of a study funded by the National Environment Research Council and led by Dr Louise Allcock at Queen's School of Biological Sciences and colleagues from Cambridge University and British Antarctic Survey will be reported at a conference in Spain this week. The World Conference on Marine Biodiversity is taking place in Valencia between 11 and 15 November.

The Queen's research forms part of a decade-long global research programme to learn more about the world's oceans.

Nov 12, 2008 - The key to understanding Earth's evolution, including how our atmosphere gained oxygen and how volcanoes and earthquakes form, is to look deep, really deep, into the lower mantle—a region some 400 to 1,800 miles (660 to 2,900 kilometers) below the surface.

Researchers at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory simulated conditions at these depths and recently discovered that the concentration of highly oxidized (ferric) iron (Fe3+) in the two major mantle minerals is key to moving heat in that region. Such heat transfer affects material movement throughout the planet. They also discovered that less oxidized (ferrous) iron (Fe2+) has much smaller effect than expected. The results, reported in the November 13, issue of Nature, call into question current models of mantle dynamics.

Nov 11, 2008 - Dishonesty may be more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously thought. A team of Australian ecologists has discovered that some male fiddler crabs "lie" about their fighting ability by growing claws that look strong and powerful but are in fact weak and puny. Published this week in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology, the study is the first direct evidence that crabs "bluff" about their fighting ability.

The signals animals send each other about their fighting prowess - and the honesty of these signals - is a long-standing problem in evolutionary biology. Despite their size - they are just two centimetres across - fiddler crabs are ideal for studying dishonesty in signalling.

Nov 10, 2008 - Setting sail on the Pacific, a University of Delaware-led research team has embarked on an extreme adventure that will find several of its members plunging deep into the sea to study hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.

The team, which will be conducting research in environments that include scalding heat, high pressure, toxic chemicals and total darkness, is part of the National Science Foundation-funded "Extreme 2008: A Deep-Sea Adventure."

The scientists are being joined by students from around the world on dry land who have signed up for an exciting virtual field trip. More than 20,000 students from 350 schools in the United States, Aruba, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Great Britain and New Zealand are participating.

Nov 06, 2008 - A study reported in today's issue of Nature disputes a longstanding picture of how ice sheets influence ocean circulation during glacial periods.

The distribution of sunlight, rather than the size of North American ice sheets, is the key variable in changes in the North Atlantic deep-water formation during the last four glacial cycles, according to the article. The new study goes back 425,000 years, according to Lorraine Lisiecki, first author and assistant professor in the Department of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Nov 06, 2008 - A NASA-led research team has used satellite data to make the most precise measurements to date of changes in the mass of mountain glaciers in the Gulf of Alaska, a region expected to be a significant contributor to global sea level rise over the next 50-100 years.

Geophysicist Scott Luthcke of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues knew from well-documented research that changes in the cryosphere – glaciers, ice caps, and other parts of the globe covered year-round by ice -- are a key source of most global sea level rise. Melting ice will also bring changes to freshwater resources and wildlife habitat.

Nov 06, 2008 - Billions of tons of carbon sequestered in the world's peat bogs could be released into the atmosphere in the coming decades as a result of global warming, according to a new analysis of the interplay between peat bogs, water tables, and climate change.

Such an atmospheric release of even a small percentage of the carbon locked away in the world's peat bogs would dwarf emissions of manmade carbon, scientists at Harvard University, Worcester State College, and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology write in the current issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

Nov 06, 2008 - While Earth has experienced numerous changes in climate over the past 65 million years, recent decades have experienced the most significant climate change since the beginning of human civilized societies about 5,000 years ago, says a new Cornell University study. The paleo-climate record shows very rapid periods of cooling in the past, when temperatures have dropped by as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) in a matter of years to decades, "the rate of warming we are seeing [now] is unprecedented in human history," said Cornell oceanographer Charles Greene, the lead author of the paper appearing in the latest issue (November 2008) of the journal Ecology, which is published by the Ecological Society of America.

Nov 06, 2008 - A wild fungus has been found to produce a variety of hydrocarbon components of diesel fuel. The harmless, microscopic fungus, known as Gliocladium roseum (NRRL 50073), lives quietly within ulmo trees in the Patagonian rainforest.

Gary Strobel of Montana State University has found that the fungus produces many energy-rich hydrocarbons, and that the particular diesel components produced can be varied by changing the growing medium and environment of the fungus.

The fungus even performs under low-oxygen conditions like those found deep underground.

Nov 05, 2008 - If you want to drive someone away, then throwing up on them is probably going to do the trick. But the caterpillars of the small mottled willow moth (aka the beet armyworm; Spodoptera exigua) take defensive vomiting to a whole new level. Their puke is both detergent and chemical weapon; its goal is not to cause revulsion but to break through the waterproof layer that its predators find so essential.

Willow moths are attacked by a variety of predatory ants. To study their defences, Rostas and Blassmann reared several caterpillars and exposed them to the European fire ant (Myrmica rubra). After mere seconds, the ants would attempt to bite and sting the caterpillar, which, in response, would regurgitate droplets of fluid at its attackers.

Nov 05, 2008 - Scientists say that a type of rock found at or near the surface in the Mideast nation of Oman and other areas around the world could be harnessed to soak up huge quantities of globe-warming carbon dioxide.

Their studies show that the rock, known as peridotite, reacts naturally at surprisingly high rates with CO2 to form solid minerals—and that the process could be speeded a million times or more with simple drilling and injection methods. The study appears in this week's early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Peridotite comprises most or all of the rock in the mantle, which undergirds earth's crust.

Nov 04, 2008 - Scientists have discovered what they believe is an eight-armed creature, which colonised a large section of the world's oceans over 300 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged.

The findings represent the first comparable animal fossils from the Ediacaran Period, 635 to 541 million years ago, which appear in two drastically different preservation environments - black shale of South China and quartz rock of South Australia.

"According to palaeogeographic reconstructions, South China and South Australia were close to each other at the time, belonging to a supercontinent called Gondwana," says lead author Dr Maoyan Zhu.Zhu, a scientist at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, first helped to make the China-Australia connection two years ago during a Beijing conference.

Nov 04, 2008 - Imagine descending in a submarine to the ice-cold, ink-black depths of the ocean, 800 metres under the surface of the Atlantic. Here the tops of the hills are covered in large coral reefs. NIOZ-researcher Furu Mienis studied the formation of these unknown cold-water relatives of the better-known tropical corals.

Furu Mienis studied the development of carbonate mounds dominated by cold-water corals in the Atlantic Ocean at depths of six hundred to a thousand metres. These reefs can be found along the eastern continental slope from Morocco to Norway, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and on the western continental slope along the east coast of Canada and the United States. Mienis studied the area to the west of Ireland along the edges of the Rockall Trough.

Nov 04, 2008 - Dinosaurs survived two mass extinctions and 50 million years before taking over the world and dominating ecosystems, according to new research.
Reporting in Biology Letters, Steve Brusatte, Professor Michael Benton, and colleagues at the University of Bristol show that dinosaurs did not proliferate immediately after they originated, but that their rise was a slow and complicated event, and driven by two mass extinctions.

“The sheer size of dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus makes us think there was something special about these animals that preordained them for success right from the beginning,” Brusatte said. “However, our research shows that the rise of dinosaurs was a prolonged and complicated process.

Nov 04, 2008 - It sounds like a tale straight from "CSI": The bully invades a home and does away with the victim, then is ultimately found out with the help of DNA evidence. Except in this instance the bully and the victim are two species of songbirds in northwest North America, and the DNA evidence shows conclusively that one species once occupied the range now dominated by the other.

The case started about 400,000 years ago when encroaching glaciers split a single warbler species into two separate groups that eventually became distinct species, with hermit warblers living in coastal areas from northern California to Alaska and Townsend's warblers living farther inland in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana.

Nov 03, 2008 - The Greenland ice cap has been a focal point of recent climate change research because it is much more exposed to immediate global warming than the larger Antarctic ice sheet. Yet while the southern Greenland ice cap has been melting, it is still not clear how much this is contributing to rising sea levels, and much further research is needed.

A framework for such research was defined at a recent workshop organised by the European Science Foundation (ESF). "The main objectives were to establish current understanding, prioritise research needs, and develop proposals," said one of the ESF workshop's convenors, Professor Tavi Murray from the Glaciology Group at Swansea University in the UK.

Nov 03, 2008 - The fight against climate warming has an unexpected ally in mushrooms growing in dry spruce forests covering Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and other northern regions, a new UC Irvine study finds.

When soil in these forests is warmed, fungi that feed on dead plant material dry out and produce significantly less climate-warming carbon dioxide than fungi in cooler, wetter soil. This came as a surprise to scientists, who expected warmer soil to emit larger amounts of carbon dioxide because extreme cold is believed to slow down the process by which fungi convert soil carbon into carbon dioxide.

Oct 30, 2008 - The world's rarest big cat is alive and well. At least one of them, that is, according to researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) who captured and released a female Far Eastern leopard in Russia last week.

The capture was made in Primorsky Krai along the Russian-Chinese border by a team of scientists from WCS and the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Biology and Soils (IBS). The team is evaluating the health and potential effects of inbreeding for this tiny population, which experts believe contains no more than 10-15 females. Other collaborators include: Wildlife Vets International, National Cancer Institute, and the Zoological Society of London.

Oct 30, 2008 - Bumblebee colonies which are fast learners are also better able to fight off infection, according to scientists from Queen Mary, University of London and the University of Leicester.

Dr Nigel Raine from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, and Akram Alghamdi, Ezio Rosato and Eamonn Mallon from the University of Leicester tested the learning performance and immune responses of bumblebees from twelve colonies. The team tested the ability of 180 bees to learn that yellow flowers provided the biggest nectar rewards, and to ignore blue flowers. To test the evolutionary relationship between learning and immunity, they also took workers from the same colonies and tested their immune response against bacterial infection.

Oct 29, 2008 - A giant Atlantic bluefin tuna weighing more than half a ton had the honor of being fitted with the 1000th electronic tracking tag placed on this threatened species when it was caught and released on Monday (October 20) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence off Port Hood, Nova Scotia.

The prized fish, which measured 10 feet in length, was tagged by a scientific team from the Tag-A-Giant (TAG; www.tagagiant.org) campaign of Stanford University, Dalhousie University and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, working in collaboration with Canadian fishermen from Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. The field team was led by Drs. Mike Stokesbury of Dalhousie University and Steve Wilson of Stanford University.

Oct 29, 2008 - EPFL researchers have developed a numerical model that can re-create the state of Switzerland's Rhône Glacier as it was in 1874 and predict its evolution until the year 2100. This is the longest period of time ever modeled in the life of a glacier, involving complex data analysis and mathematical techniques. The work will serve as a benchmark study for those interested in the state of glaciers and their relation to climate change.

The Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology at ETH Zurich has been a repository for temperature, rainfall and flow data on the Rhône Glacier since the 1800s. Researchers there have used this data to reconstruct the glacier's mass balance, i.e. the difference between the amount of ice it accumulates over the winter and the amount that melts during the summer.

Oct 29, 2008 - What do sunspots and the Paraná river in South America have in common? The answer, say physicists in Argentina, is that when the number of sunspots goes up, so does the river's level. Indeed, the correlation between the two is so strong that the physicists believe that solar activity could be used to predict when the Rio Paraná will flood.

Rising in southern Brazil and flowing through Paraguay and Argentina before reaching the Atlantic Ocean near Buenos Aires, the Paraná is the world’s fourth largest river in terms of water flow. Because much of the river is navigable and flows through heavily populated regions, its rate of flow has been recorded continuously since 1904.

Oct 29, 2008 - A quarter-million people were killed when a tsunami inundated Indian Ocean coastlines the day after Christmas in 2004. Now scientists have found evidence that the event was not a first-time occurrence. A team working on Phra Thong, a barrier island along the hard-hit west coast of Thailand, unearthed evidence of at least three previous major tsunamis in the preceding 2,800 years, the most recent from about 550 to 700 years ago. That team, led by Kruawun Jankaew of Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, included Brian Atwater, a University of Washington affiliate professor of Earth and space sciences and a U.S. Geological Survey geologist. A second team found similar evidence of previous tsunamis during the last 1,200 years in Aceh, a province at the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra where more than half the deaths from the 2004 tsunami occurred.

Oct 28, 2008 - New scientific discipline studies bats, birds, other animals in atmosphere closest to Earth's surface.By the dark of the Halloween new moon, scientists are looking at what's hovering just above the ground. Far from ghost-busting, however, the researchers are using sophisticated technology like Doppler weather radar to study the aerosphere--the air and the organisms that migrate and feed within it. Biologists and atmospheric scientists are engaged in the study of aeroecology: how and why airborne organisms--bats, birds, arthropods and microbes--depend on the support of the atmosphere closest to Earth's surface.

Oct 28, 2008 - International team exploring two of the last uncharted regions of Earth, the Aurora and Wilkes Subglacial Basins, to learn about past climate change and future impacts on global sea level

Scientists from the U.S., U.K. and Australia have teamed up to explore two of the last uncharted regions of Earth, the Aurora and Wilkes Subglacial Basins, immense ice-buried lowlands in Antarctica with a combined area the size of Mexico. The research could show how Earth's climate changed in the past and how future climate change will affect global sea level.

Oct 28, 2008 - Frogs and salamanders, those amphibious bellwethers of environmental danger, are being killed in Yellowstone National Park.

The predator, Stanford researchers say, is global warming. Biology graduate student Sarah McMenamin spent three summers in a remote area of the park searching for frogs and salamanders in ponds that had been surveyed 15 years ago. Almost everywhere she looked, she found a catastrophic decrease in the population.

The amphibians need the ponds for their young to hatch, but high temperatures and drought are drying up the water.

Oct 28, 2008 - The thickness of sea ice in large parts of the Arctic declined by as much as 19% last winter compared to the previous five winters, according to data from ESA’s Envisat satellite.
 
Using Envisat radar altimeter data, scientists from the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at University College London (UCL) measured sea ice thickness over the Arctic from 2002 to 2008 and found that it had been fairly constant until the record loss of ice in the summer of 2007.

Unusually warm weather conditions were present over the Arctic in 2007, which some scientists have said explain that summer ice loss. However, this summer reached the second-lowest extent ever recorded with cooler weather conditions present.

Oct 27, 2008 - It is known for a long time that the plant hormone auxin is transmitted from the top to the bottom of a plant, and that the local concentration of auxin is important for the growth direction of stems, the growth of roots, the sprouting of shoots.

To name a few things; auxin is also relevant to, for instance, the ripening of fruit, the clinging of climbers and a series of other processes. Thousands of researchers try to understand the different roles of auxin.

In many instances the distribution of auxin in the plant plays a key role, and thus the transport from cell to cell.

Oct 27, 2008 - Ants prefer salty snacks to sugary ones, at least in inland areas that tend to be salt-poor, according to a new study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ecologists from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) and the University of Oklahoma tested the salt versus sugar preferences of ants from North, Central and South America, using ant populations at varying distances from the ocean. While ocean spray and storms can spread salt tens of miles from the coast, areas farther inland are often deprived of salt, and the researchers suspected they might find different taste choices between coastal and inland ants.

Oct 24, 2008 - The amount of methane in Earth's atmosphere shot up in 2007, bringing to an end approximately a decade in which atmospheric levels of the potent greenhouse gas were essentially stable. The new study is based on data from a worldwide NASA-funded measurement network.

Methane levels in the atmosphere have more than doubled since pre-industrial times, accounting for around one-fifth of the human contribution to greenhouse gas-driven global warming. Until recently, the leveling off of methane levels had suggested that the rate of its emission from Earth's surface was being approximately balanced by the rate of its destruction in the atmosphere.

Oct 23, 2008 - Cholera is a major killer and since the first pandemic in the early 19th century it has claimed millions of lives. According to Amit Lerner from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, the lethal infection is harboured by an equally infamous insect: chironomids (midges).

Lerner explains that the females contaminate water sources with the deadly bacteria when laying their eggs. He adds that his colleagues Nikolay Meltser and Meir Broza had found that females actively choose the body of water where they lay their eggs, but it wasn't clear what drives a female to select a particular pond.

Oct 24, 2008 - Bumblebees use flower scent to guide their nest-mates to good food sources, according to scientists from Queen Mary, University of London. For any animal, finding food on its own can be time consuming and inefficient; social animals such as bees reduce these problems by informing their peers of plentiful sites, and 'recruiting' them to the search. Honeybees use their waggle-dance to tell nest-mates the distance and direction of a food source. But bumblebees can't communicate geographical information in this way; instead, they release a recruitment pheromone in the nest to encourage their colleagues to venture out in search of food. But where should they look?

Oct 23, 2008 - A powerful greenhouse gas is at least four times more prevalent in the atmosphere than previously estimated, according to a team of researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. Using new analytical techniques, a team led by Scripps geochemistry professor Ray Weiss made the first atmospheric measurements of nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), which is thousands of times more effective at warming the atmosphere than an equal mass of carbon dioxide. The amount of the gas in the atmosphere, which could not be detected using previous techniques, had been estimated at less than 1,200 metric tons in 2006. The new research shows the actual amount was 4,200 metric tons. In 2008, about 5,400 metric tons of the gas was in the atmosphere, a quantity that is increasing at about 11 percent per year.

Oct 23, 2008 - Many animals live longer when raised on low calorie diets. But now researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that they can extend the life spans of roundworms even when the worms are well fed — it just takes a chemical that blocks their sense of smell.

Three years ago, the researchers, led by Kerry Kornfeld, M.D., Ph.D., reported they found that a class of anticonvulsant medications made the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans live longer. But until now, they didn't quite know what the drugs did to give the worms their longevity. They report their latest findings in the Oct. 24 issue of the Public Library of Science Genetics.

Oct 23, 2008 - Trees in a hyper-diverse tropical rainforest interact with each other and their environment to create and maintain diversity, researchers report in the Oct. 24 issue of the journal Science. This study was conducted in the Yasuni forest dynamics plot of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, the most diverse tropical forest site associated with the Center for Tropical Forest Science/Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory network (CTFS/SIGEO). It is difficult to determine the effects of climate change, habitat fragmentation and species extinctions on life's diversity without a coherent model of how communities are organized; but a unified theory of diversity patterns in ecological communities remains elusive.

Oct 23, 2008 - Without eyes or ears, plants must rely on the interaction of molecules to determine appropriate mating partners and avoid inbreeding. In a new study, University of Missouri researchers have identified pollen proteins that may contribute to the signaling processes that determine if a plant accepts or rejects individual pollen grains for reproduction.

Like humans, the mating game isn't always easy for plants. Plants rely on external factors such as wind and animals to bring them potential mates in the form of pollen grains. When pollen grains arrive, an introduction occurs through a "conversation" between the pollen (the male part of the flower) and the pistil (the female part of the flower).

Oct 23, 2008 - One of the smallest dinosaur skulls ever discovered has been identified and described by a team of scientists from London, Cambridge and Chicago. The skull would have been only 45 millimeters (less than two inches) in length. It belonged to a very young Heterodontosaurus, an early dinosaur. This juvenile weighed about 200 grams, less than two sticks of butter.

In the Fall issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the researchers describe important findings from this skull that suggest how and when the ornithischians, the family of herbivorous dinosaurs that includes Heterodontosaurus, made the transition from eating meat to eating plants.

Oct 22, 2008 - Researchers from McGill University, along with colleagues from the California Institute of Technology, the Curie Institute in Paris, Princeton University and other institutions, have unearthed crystalline magnetic fossils of a previously unknown species of microorganism that lived at the boundary of the Paleocene and Eocene epochs, some 55 million years ago. Their results were published Oct. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research might help scientists understand more thoroughly the potential effects of significant changes in the Earth's climate.

Though they are only some four microns long, these newly discovered, spear-shaped magnetite crystals (magnetofossils) – unearthed at a dig in New Jersey – are up to eight times larger than previously known magnetofossils.

Oct 21, 2008 - A UC Davis researcher known for her honey bee line "New World Carniolans" has crossed her bees with their Old World counterparts to enhance their positive characteristics.

"The bees are very gentle, very hygienic and very productive, and hopefully will confer increased resistance to pests and disease," said UC Davis bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey.

The Carniolan honey bee (Apis mellifera carnica) is a subspecies of the Western honey bee. The subspecies, which originated in Slovenia, is the second most popular among California beekeepers, after another Western honey bee subspecies, the Italian honey bee.

UC Cooperative Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen of UC Davis said genetic research of honey bees is critical for the bee industry.

Oct 21, 2008 - Contrary to popular belief, polar dinosaurs may not have traveled nearly as far as originally thought when making their bi-annual migration.

University of Alberta researchers Phil Bell and Eric Snively have suggested that while some dinosaurs may have migrated during the winter season, their range was significantly less than previously thought, which means their treks were shorter. Bell and Snively's findings were recently published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Paleontology.

Oct 20, 2008 - Spinner dolphins have long been known for their teamwork in capturing prey but a new study using high-tech acoustics has found that their synchronization is even more complex than scientists realized and likely evolved as a strategy to maximize their energy intake.

The study, by scientists at Oregon State University and the University of Hawaii, found that dolphins engage in a highly choreographed night-time "dance" to enclose their prey, and then dart into the circle of confused fish in organized pairs to feed for about 15 seconds, before backing out and letting the next pairs in line take their turn.

Oct 17, 2008 - Researchers at the University of Delaware have discovered that when the leaf of a plant is under attack by a pathogen, it can send out an S.O.S. to the roots for help, and the roots will respond by secreting an acid that brings beneficial bacteria to the rescue. The finding quashes the misperception that plants are "sitting ducks"--at the mercy of passing pathogens--and sheds new light on a sophisticated signaling system inside plants that rivals the nervous system in humans and animals.

The research was led by Harsh Bais, assistant professor of plant and soil sciences at UD, former postdoctoral researcher Thimmaraju Rudrappa who is now a research scientist at the DuPont Co., Kirk Czymmek, associate professor of biological sciences and director of UD's Bio-Imaging Center, and Paul Paré, a biochemist at Texas Tech University.

Oct 16, 2008 - Athens, Ga. – Streams that once sang with the croaks, chirps and ribbits of dozens of frog species have gone silent. They're victims of a fungus that's decimating amphibian populations worldwide.

Such catastrophic declines have been documented for more than a decade, but until recently scientists knew little about how the loss of frogs alters the larger ecosystem.

A University of Georgia study that is the first to comprehensively examine an ecosystem before and after an amphibian population decline has found that tadpoles play a key role keeping the algae at the base of the food chain productive.

Oct 16, 2008 - A genetic study of a fish that lives in the icy waters off Antarctica sheds light on the adaptations that enable it to survive in one of the harshest environments on the planet.

(To see an audio slide show on the fish, please go to: http://publicaffairs.illinois.edu/slideshows/Antarctic%5FNotothenioids/The study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to search the genome of an Antarctic notothenioid fish for clues to its astounding hardiness.
There are eight families of notothenioid fish, and five of them inhabit the Southern Ocean, the frigid sea that encircles the Antarctic continent. These fish can withstand temperatures that would turn most fish to ice.

Oct 16, 2008 - Paleontologists have long debated the function of the strange, bony crests on the heads of the duck-billed dinosaurs known as lambeosaurs. The structures contain incredibly long, convoluted nasal passages that loop up over the tops of their skulls. Scientists at the University of Toronto, Ohio University and Montana State University now have used CT-scanning to look inside these mysterious crests and reconstruct the brains and nasal cavities of four different lambeosaur species.

At the annual meeting of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology in Cleveland, Ohio, on Oct. 16, the team will present new study findings that suggest the crests were used for communication.

Oct 15, 2008 - It's confirmed: Even though flatback turtles dine on fish, shrimp, and mollusks, they are closely related to primarily herbivorous green sea turtles. New genetic research carried out by Eugenia Naro-Maciel, a Marine Biodiversity Scientist at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History, and colleagues clarifies our understanding of the evolutionary relationships among all seven sea turtle species.

Naro-Maciel and colleagues used five nuclear DNA markers and two mitochondrial markers to test the evolutionary relationships of all species of marine turtles—leatherback, flatback, green, hawksbill, loggerhead, Kemp's Ridley, and Olive Ridley—and four 'outgroups,' or more distantly related animals.

Oct 15, 2008 - As concerns about the effects of global warming continue to mount, a new study published in the December issue of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology finds that an increase in average temperature of only two degrees Celsius could have a devastating effect on populations of Australia's iconic kangaroos.

"Our study provides evidence that climate change has the capacity to cause large-scale range contractions, and the possible extinction of one macropodid (kangaroo) species in northern Australia," write study authors Euan G. Ritchie and Elizabeth E. Bolitho of James Cook University in Australia.

Oct 15, 2008 - How species are formed and how species remain separate are crucial questions in evolutionary biology.

The offspring of crosses between different animal species are often infertile or die when still in the womb.

A mule, for example, cannot reproduce. A sheep-goat hybrid, the result of a cross between a sheep and a goat, is usually stillborn. Such hybrids can also be dysfunctional, for example, because the sounds they make are a mixture of sounds from both parent species.

Oct 15, 2008 - Newly exposed parts of Tiktaalik roseae--the intermediate fossil between fish and the first animals to walk out of water onto land 375 million years ago--are revealing how this major evolutionary event happened. A new study, published this week in Nature, provides a detailed look at the internal head skeleton of Tiktaalik roseae and reveals a key intermediate step in the transformation of the skull that accompanied the shift to life on land by our distant ancestors.

A predator, up to nine feet long, with sharp teeth, a crocodile-like head and a flattened body, Tiktaalik's anatomy and way of life straddle the divide between fish and land-living animals. First described in 2006, and quickly dubbed the "fishapod," it had fish-like features such as a primitive jaw, fins and scales, as well as a skull, neck, ribs and parts of the limbs that are similar to tetrapods, four-legged animals.

Oct 15, 2008 - New research by scientists at The Academy of Natural Sciences provides the first detailed look at the internal head skeleton of Tiktaalik roseae, the 375-million-year-old fossil animal that represents an important intermediate step in the evolutionary transition from fish to animals that walked on land.

The study, published in the Oct. 16 issue of Nature shows that the transition from aquatic to terrestrial lifestyles involved complex changes not only to the appendages (fins to limbs) but also to the internal head skeleton.

This is the first report on Tiktaalik roseae since the original description in 2006 made international news. A team co-led by the Academy's Dr. Ted Daeschler discovered Tiktaalik roseae (tik-TAHL-ik RO-zay) in 2004 within Devonian-age rock on Ellesmere Island in Canada, more than 700 miles above the Arctic Circle.

Oct 14, 2008 - Earlier this year, consumers around the world noticed higher food prices as the cost of most grains escalated.

In many parts of the developing world, rice, a crucial staple for billions of people, became too expensive or not available at all, triggering large-scale hunger and food riots that destabilized entire countries and regions.

In May of this year, a group of computational biologists at the University of Washington began to tap the collective power of more than 1 million desk top computers to better understand the protein structures of rice plants.

Oct 14, 2008 - A U.S.-led, multinational team of scientists from six nations will pierce the mysteries of one of the globe's last major unexplored places this month.

Using sophisticated airborne radar and other Information Age tools and techniques, the scientists will virtually "peel away" more than four kilometers (2.5 miles) of ice covering an Antarctic mountain range that rivals the Alps in elevation, and which current scientific knowledge suggests shouldn't be there at all.

What the team hopes to find there are answers to some of the most basic questions about the nature of the southernmost continent--and specifically the massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet...

Oct 14, 2008 - While paleontologists may scour remote, exotic places in search of prehistoric specimens, Tufts researchers have found what they believe to be the world's oldest whole-body fossil impression of a flying insect in a wooded field behind a strip mall in North Attleboro, Mass.

During a recent exploration as part of his senior project, Richard J. Knecht, a Tufts geology major, and Jake Benner, a paleontologist and senior lecturer in the Geology Department, set out to hunt for fossils at a location they learned of while reading a master's thesis that had been written in 1929.

With chisels and hammers, the team reached the shale and sandstone outcropping described in the paper. There they delicately picked away pieces of rock before reaching a section that yielded fossils. Just below the surface, they uncovered a fossilized impression of a flying insect.

Oct 09, 2008 - A UC San Diego engineer has revealed a new mode of propulsion based on how water snails create ripples of slime to crawl upside down beneath the surface.

Eric Lauga, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering, recently published a paper in the journal Physics of Fluid called "Crawling Beneath the Free Surface: Water Snail Locomotion," that explains how and why water snails can drag themselves across a fluid surface that they can't even grip.

Based on Lauga's research, the secret is in the slime. The main finding of Lauga's research is that soft surfaces, such as the free surface of a pond or a lake, can be distorted by applying forces; these distortions can be exploited (by an animal, or in the lab) to generate propulsive forces and move. .

Oct 09, 2008 - Will climate change exceed life's ability to respond? Biodiversity in a Warmer World, published in the Oct. 10, 2008 issue of the journal, Science, illustrates that cross-disciplinary research fostered by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama clearly informs this urgent debate.

As an extremely diverse region of rainforest and coral reefs, the tropics may have the most to lose as a result of global warming. Some disagree, arguing that tropical organisms will be favored as their ranges expand into temperate areas. Few empirical studies provide specific answers to help us choose conservation and mitigation measures. Science asked Jens Svenning, University of Aarhus, Denmark and Richard Condit of the Smithsonian's Global Earth Observatory Network to review two papers about species range change:

Oct 09, 2008 - The first ecosystem ever found having only a single biological species has been discovered 2.8 kilometers (1.74 miles) beneath the surface of the earth in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. There the rod-shaped bacterium Desulforudis audaxviator exists in complete isolation, total darkness, a lack of oxygen, and 60-degree-Celsius heat (140 degrees Fahrenheit).

D. audaxviator survives in a habitat where it gets its energy not from the sun but from hydrogen and sulfate produced by the radioactive decay of uranium. Living alone, D. audaxviator must build its organic molecules by itself out of water, inorganic carbon, and nitrogen from ammonia in the surrounding rocks and fluid.

Oct 09, 2008 - Brachiosaurs and other long-necked giants of the dinosaur world weighed as much as 10 African elephants. Researchers now think they know why the tubby vegetarian beasts got so big: They swallowed high-energy foods whole.

Their small heads helped, too, by allowing those long necks to reach nutritious leaves high up in the trees.

With body lengths of more than 131 feet (40 m) and heights of 56 feet (17 m), sauropods dwarfed meat-eating dinosaurs and even the largest land mammals ever. Sauropods appeared on the scene about 210 million years ago in the Late Triassic and dominated Earth's ecosystems for more than 100 million years from the Middle Jurassic to the end of the Cretaceous.

Oct 08, 2008 - CSIRO's Wealth from Oceans Flagship uncovered a treasure trove of creatures thriving on mountains deep under the ocean off south-eastern Australia.

Two Wealth from Oceans Flagship voyages aboard the Marine National Facility Research Vessel Southern Surveyor have given scientists a rare glimpse into the hidden world of our oceans. The RV Southern Surveyor was at sea for two weeks in November 2006 and two weeks in April 2007. The survey areas were about 100 nautical miles off the coast of southern Tasmania in the Huon Commonwealth Marine Reserve (CMR).

Oct 08, 2008 - Researchers are homing in on the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea to assess the likely changes, between now and the middle of the century, in the frequency, intensity, and tracks of these powerful storms.

Initial results are expected early next year.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., working with federal agencies as well as the insurance and energy industries, has launched an intensive study to examine how global warming will influence hurricanes in the next few decades.

The goal of the project is to provide information to coastal communities, offshore drilling operations, and other interests that could be affected by changes in hurricanes.

Oct 08, 2008 - A report scheduled to be published this week in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that maintaining the proper balance of herbivorous fishes may be critical to restoring coral reefs, which are declining dramatically worldwide. The conclusion results from a long-term study that found significant recovery in sections of coral reefs on which fish of two complementary species were caged.

Coral reefs depend on fish to eat the seaweeds with which the corals compete, and without such cleaning, the reefs decline as corals are replaced by seaweeds. Different fish consume different seaweeds because of the differing chemical and physical properties of the plants.

Oct 08, 2008 - The northern part of the Greenland ice sheet experienced extreme snowmelt during the summer of 2008, with large portions of the area subject to record melting days, according to Dr. Marco Tedesco, Assistant Professor of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at The City College of New York (CCNY), and colleagues. Their conclusion is based on an analysis of microwave brightness temperature recorded by the Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) onboard the F13 satellite.

"Having such extreme melting so far north, where it is usually colder than the southern regions is extremely interesting," Professor Tedesco said.

Oct 07, 2008 - Caught on film: the deepest living fish They’ve been phot­graphed for the first time, as part of re­search proj­ect involving the University of Aberdeen, U.K., and the University of Tokyo.

In findings announced in ealy October, scientists encountered groups of these highly sociable creatures swarming nearly five miles (7,700 me­ters) underwater in one of the world's deepest ocean trenches, the Japan Trench.

The animals are called snail fish, from the family Liparidae, and are found only below 6,000 meters, where they deal with total darkness, near freezing tempertures and immense water pressure equivalent to 1,600 elephants on the roof of a small car. The research project is called HADEEP. For the Video click here

Oct 07, 2008 - A team of scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has found a way to genetically enhance the scent of flowers and implant a scent in those that don't have one.

Smell plays an important role in our lives: It influences the way in which we choose fruit and vegetables, perfume, and even a partner. And yet, smell is not just what we smell with our noses, it's also what we taste, explains Prof. Alexander Vainstein, who is heading the team at the Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment. "Aroma is of major importance for defining the taste of food."

Oct 06, 2008 - A new NASA study shows that the rising frequency and intensity of arctic storms over the last half century, attributed to progressively warmer waters, directly provoked acceleration of the rate of arctic sea ice drift, long considered by scientists as a bellwether of climate change.

NASA researcher Sirpa Hakkinen of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Mass., and the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia, set out to confirm a long-standing theory derived from model results that a warming climate would cause an increase in storminess.

Oct 06, 2008 - Most glaciers in every mountain range and island group in Alaska are experiencing significant retreat, thinning or stagnation, especially glaciers at lower elevations, according to a new book published by the U.S. Geological Survey. In places, these changes began as early as the middle of the 18th century.

Although more than 99 percent of Alaska's large glaciers are retreating, a handful, surprisingly, are advancing.

The Glaciers of Alaska, authored by USGS research geologist Bruce Molnia, represents a comprehensive overview of the state of the glaciers of Alaska at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century.

Oct 06, 2008 - Up to one-third of mammals may soon no longer roam the Earth, according to the 2008 endangered species list, released today. More than 1,700 scientists from around the globe have contributed to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) 2008 Red List, an assessment of species' extinction risk.

The list is updated every four years, but this edition is the first since 1996 that has included an evaluation of all the world's 5,487 known mammals. The news is good for some species, but dire for others.

The list shows that more than five per cent of threatened species are making a comeback.

Oct 03, 2008 - The melodious singing of birds has been long appreciated by humans, and has often been thought to reflect a particularly positive emotional state of the singer. In a new study published in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE on October 1, researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan have demonstrated that this can be true.

When male birds sang to attract females, specific "reward" areas of their brain were strongly activated. Such strong brain activation resulted in a similar change in brain reward function to that which is caused by addictive drugs.

Oct 01, 2008 - Findings may lead to new ways to protect crops and make other useful products.

Flexible filamentous viruses make up a large fraction of known plant viruses and are responsible for more than half the viral damage to crop plants throughout the world.

New details of their structures, which were poorly understood, have been revealed by scientists using a variety of sophisticated imaging techniques at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborating institutions.

Oct 01, 2008 - A team of Yale scientists has found that certain countries and some U.S. states stand to benefit from the use of compact fluorescent lighting more than others in the fight against global warming. Some places may even produce more mercury emissions by switching from incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescent lighting.

The study, which appears online October 1 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, looked at all 50 states and 130 countries to determine the impact of fluorescent lighting on total mercury emissions in those regions.

Sep 30, 2008 - Indiana University biologist Armin Moczek explains his findings about the inverse relationship between horn and copulatory organ size in male beetles and how it affects species divergence.

It began with an idea as old as Charles Darwin's.

In 1859, Darwin surmised in The Origin of Species that natural selection, the competition between individuals within a population for survival, might have many parallels to the competition between growing organs as they develop inside a young organism--success of one would have to come at the expense of another.

Sep 30, 2008 - The shorelines of ancient Alberta, British Columbia and the Canadian Arctic were an important refuge for some of the world's earliest animals, most of which were wiped out by a mysterious global extinction event some 252 million years ago.

U of C scientists have solved part of the mystery of where marine organisms that recovered from the biggest extinction on earth were housed. A team of researchers, including Charles Henderson, a geoscience professor at the U of C, Tyler Beatty, a PhD candidate at the U of C and J-P Zonneveld...

Sep 30, 2008 - Thousands of feet below the bottom of the sea, off the shores of Santa Barbara, single-celled organisms are busy feasting on oil. Until now, nobody knew how many oily compounds were being devoured by the microscopic creatures, but new research led by David Valentine of UC Santa Barbara and Chris Reddy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts has shed new light on just how extensive their diet can be.

In a report to be published in the Oct. 1 edition of the journal Environmental Science & Technology, Valentine, Reddy, lead author George Wardlaw of UCSB, and three other co-authors detail how the microbes are dining on thousands of compounds that make up the oil seeping from the sea floor.

Sep 30, 2008 - Reporting in Biology Letters, Steve Brusatte, Professor Michael Benton, and colleagues at the University of Bristol show that dinosaurs did not proliferate immediately after they originated, but that their rise was a slow and complicated event, and driven by two mass extinctions.

"The sheer size of dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus makes us think there was something special about these animals that preordained them for success right from the beginning," Brusatte said. "However, our research shows that the rise of dinosaurs was a prolonged and complicated process. It isn't clear from the data that they would go on to dominate the world until at least 30 million years after they originated."

Sep 30, 2008 - Reconstructing the climate of the past is an important tool for scientists to better understand and predict future climate changes that are the result of the present-day global warming. Although there is still little known about the Earth's tropical and subtropical regions, these regions are thought to play an important role in both the evolution of prehistoric man and global climate changes.

New North African climate reconstructions reveal three 'green Sahara' episodes during which the present-day Sahara Desert was almost completely covered with extensive grasslands, lakes and ponds over the course of the last 120.000 years.

Sep 30, 2008 - Researchers from TU Delft joined forces with the Center for Space Research (CSR) in Austin, Texas, USA, to develop a method for creating an accurate picture of Greenland's shrinking ice cap. On the strength of this method, it is now estimated that Greenland is accountable for a half millimetre-rise in the global sea level per year.

These findings will be published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters in early October. The research was based on data from the German-American GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellites, two satellites that have been orbiting the earth behind each other since mid-2002.

Sep 30, 2008 - Chimpanzees may not forget a familiar face—or a behind, a new study says. In a recent experiment, captive primates were able to identify photos of their acquaintances' rears and match them with the right faces. The ability suggests that the animals possess mental "whole body" representations of other chimps they know.

Each participating chimp was flashed a picture of another's bum, with visible genitals, then shown the face of the derriere's owner and another face of the same gender.Both males and females were successful in this anatomical match game, pairing faces and posteriors with much greater frequency than chance alone—but only if the photos showed chimps they already knew.

Sep 29, 2008 - Sounds travel farther underwater as world's oceans become more acidic. It is common knowledge that the world's oceans and atmosphere are warming as humans release more and more carbon dioxide into the Earth's atmosphere. However, fewer people realize that the chemistry of the oceans is also changing—seawater is becoming more acidic as carbon dioxide from the atmosphere dissolves in the oceans.

According to a paper to be published this week by marine chemists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, these changes in ocean temperature and chemistry will have an unexpected side effect—sounds will travel farther underwater.

Sep 29, 2008 - Froghoppers, also known as spittlebugs, are the champion insect jumpers, capable of reaching heights of 700 mm - more than 100 times their own body length. Research published today in the open access journal BMC Biology reveals that they achieve their prowess by flexing bow-like structures between their hind legs and wings and releasing the energy in one giant leap in a catapult-like action.

Froghoppers are well distributed around the world. Images of the insects flexing and jumping are described in the research carried out by Malcolm Burrows from the University of Cambridge and his colleagues.

Sep 29, 2008 - After reaching the second-lowest extent ever recorded last month, sea ice in the Arctic has begun to refreeze in the face of autumn temperatures, closing both the Northern Sea Route and the direct route through the Northwest Passage.

This year marked the first time since satellite measurements began in the 1970s that the Northern Sea Route, also known as the Northeast Passage, and the Northwest Passage were both open at the same time for a few weeks. "NIC analysis of ESA's Envisat and other satellite datasets indicated that the Northern Sea Route opened when a path through the Vilkitski Strait finally cleared by 5 September," NIC Chief Scientist Dr Pablo Clemente-Colón said via email from aboard the US Coast Guard icebreaker Healy in the Arctic, where he is conducting joint mapping operations with the Canadian Coast Guard.

Sep 26, 2008 - Ancient lava flows are guiding a better understanding of what generates and controls the Earth's magnetic field – and what may drive it to occasionally reverse direction.

The main magnetic field, generated by turbulent currents within the deep mass of molten iron of the Earth's outer core, periodically flips its direction, such that a compass needle would point south rather than north. Such polarity reversals have occurred hundreds of times at irregular intervals throughout the planet's history – most recently about 780,000 years ago – but scientists are still trying to understand how and why.

Sep 26, 2008 - Canadian bedrock more than 4 billion years old may be the oldest known section of the Earth's early crust. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and McGill University in Montreal used geochemical methods to obtain an age of 4.28 billion years for samples of the rock, making it 250 million years more ancient than any previously discovered rocks.

The findings, which offer scientists clues to earliest stages of our planet's evolution, are published in this week's issue of the journal Science. "This research highlights the ways in which new instrumentation [a thermal ionization mass spectrometer, or TIMS] enables the collection of new data--data which lead to major scientific discoveries," says David Lambert, program director in the National Science Foundation.

Sep 25, 2008 - A line of massive boulders on the western shore of Tonga may be evidence of the most powerful volcano-triggered tsunami found to date. Up to 9 meters (30 feet) high and weighing up to 1.6 million kilograms (3.5 million pounds), the seven coral boulders are located 100 to 400 meters (300 to 1,300 feet) from the coast.
The house-sized boulders were likely flung ashore by a wave rivaling the 1883 Krakatau tsunami, which is estimated to have towered 35 meters (115 feet) high.

"These could be the largest boulders displaced by a tsunami, worldwide," says Matthew Hornbach of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. "Krakatau's tsunami was probably not a one-off event."

Sep 25, 2008 - An explanation for a strange property of noctilucent clouds--thin, wispy clouds hovering at the edge of space at 85 km altitude--has been proposed by an experimental plasma physicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), possibly laying to rest a decades-long mystery.

Noctilucent clouds, also known as night-shining clouds, were first described in 1885, two years after the massive eruption of Krakatoa, a volcanic island in Indonesia, sent up a plume of ash and debris up to 80 km into Earth's atmosphere. The eruption affected global climate and weather for years and may have produced the first noctilucent clouds.

Sep 25, 2008 - Today the new Global Carbon Budget was launched simultaneously by Global Carbon Project co-chair Michael Raupach in France at the Paris Observatory, and in the USA at Capitol Hill, Washington by GCP Executive Director Pep Canadell.

Sep 25, 2008 - Behavioral development in adult honeybees involves a stereotypical transition from energetically-inexpensive hive work to energetically-expensive foraging behavior at approximately 3 weeks of age.

Each day after this transition, a foraging bee (which weighs only 80 mg, or roughly equivalent to a breath mint) will on average fly 8 km (5 miles), contract their wing muscles approximately 4,000,000 times, and reduce approximately 60 ml of pure oxygen in its thorax (the body segment housing the flight muscles). Age and foraging behavior should have strong affects on cellular oxidative stress and antioxidant mechanisms, especially in flight muscle, as well as functional senescence.

Sep 24, 2008 - Paleontologist David Krause describes his search for the ancestors of mammals that live in Madagascar today. Not in my wildest dreams did I anticipate the fossil riches that my research team would discover on our first expedition to the island of Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa, back in 1993.

And now, 15 years later, we continue to dig up spectacular specimens from the badland hills in the northwestern part of the island that, collectively, reveal a bizarre assemblage of backboned creatures that once lived there.

My original objective was to discover the remains of fossil mammals that inhabited Madagascar during the Late Cretaceous, at the end of the "Age of Dinosaurs."

Sep 24, 2008 - An international research team studying sound production in deep-sea fishes has found that cusk-eels use several sets of muscles to produce sound that plays a prominent role in male mating calls.

These findings, published online today in the Royal Society journal, Biology Letters, may help researchers gain further insight into acoustic communication in the deep sea and the role of sound in fish behavior. Virginia Commonwealth University Life Sciences biologists Michael L. Fine, Ph.D., Kim Nguyen and Hsung Lin, both graduate students at VCU, together with Eric Parmentier at the Université de Liège in Belgium, examined the sonic muscles of the fawn cusk-eel, Lepophidium profundorum, a species found in the Atlantic Ocean.

Sep 24, 2008 - Scientists studying social insect behaviour have discovered a remarkable example of self-sacrifice in a species of ant found in Brazil. The Brazilian ant Forelius pusillus routinely seals the entrance to its nest each night. The entrance is first closed from the inside. One or a few ants remain outside and continue closing the entrance, carrying and kicking sand and soil into the hole in the ground. Those ants that stay outside to complete the task are therefore unable to return to the nest and die before the nest is re-opened from the inside each morning. Social insects such as bees, ants and wasps are known for giving their lives to defend their hive or nest (ie a honey bee worker dies after stinging).

Sep 24, 2008 - Queen's researchers have found that the main source of food for many fish - including cod - in the North Atlantic appears to adapt in order to survive climate change. Billions of Calanus finmarchicus, a plankton species, which are just a few millimetres in size, live in the waters of the North Atlantic where the research was carried out.

It showed they responded to global warming after the last Ice Age, around 18,000 years ago, by moving north and maintaining large population sizes and also suggests that these animals might be able to track the current change in habitat..

Sep 23, 2008 - An unusual breed of dinosaur that was the size of a chicken, ran on two legs and scoured the ancient forest floor for termites is the smallest dinosaur species found in North America, according to a University of Calgary researcher who analyzed bones found during the excavation of an ancient bone bed near Red Deer, Alberta.

Sep 22, 2008 - Stanford, CA—How much carbon dioxide is too much? According to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) greenhouse gases in the atmosphere need to be stabilized at levels low enough to "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."

But scientists have come to realize that an even more acute danger than climate change is lurking in the world's oceans—one that is likely to be triggered by CO2 levels that are modest by climate standards. Ocean acidification could devastate coral reefs and other marine ecosystems even if atmospheric carbon dioxide stabilizes at 450 ppm, a level well below that of many climate change forecasts.

Sep 22, 2008 - Two species of giraffe, several rhinos and five elephant relatives, along with multitudes of rodents, bush pigs, horses, antelope and apes, once inhabited what is now northern Pakistan.

But when climate shifted dramatically there some 8 million years ago, precipitating a major change in vegetation, most species became locally extinct rather than adapting to the new ecosystem, according to an extensive, long-term study of mammal fossils spanning a 5-million-year period.

Sep 22, 2008 - An international team of earth scientists report movement of warmed sea water through the flat, Pacific Ocean floor off Costa Rica. The movement is greater than that off midocean volcanic ridges. The finding suggests possible marine life in a part of the ocean once considered barren.

With about 71 percent of the Earth's surface being ocean, much remains unknown about what is under the sea, its geology, and the life it supports. A new finding reported by American, Canadian and German earth scientists suggests a rather unremarkable area off the Costa Rican Pacific coast holds clues to better understand sea floor ecosystems.

Sep 22, 2008 - A potentially deadly fungus that can kill frogs and toads was inadvertently introduced into Mallorca by a captive breeding programme that was reintroducing a rare species of toad into the wild, according to a new study published today in the journal Current Biology.

The study, by researchers from Imperial College London and international colleagues, reveals that captive Mallorcan midwife toads released into the wild in 1991 were infected with the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd).

Sep 22, 2008 - An extinct giant tortoise could make a comeback now that living turtles in the Galapagos Islands have been confirmed as hybrid descendents.

Researchers had previously scratched their heads over the group of mixed-ancestry tortoises living on the island of Isabela in the Galapagos. But the connection to the extinct species only clicked after they compared the genetic makeup of living tortoises with DNA taken from museum specimens of the giant tortoise that once lived on the island of Floreana. The [living tortoise] samples were collected in 1994, but we had no idea what was in there because we didn't have Floreana data," said Gisella Caccone, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. "OK, now we have genotypes for 15 to 25 animals from the museums, so we did the analysis and boom!"

Sep. 22, 2008 - When early humans mastered the use of fire, their immediate rewards were warmth, light, and protection from nocturnal predators. Investigators have assumed that our ancestors also quickly realized the advantages of flame-cooked food — easy chewing and digestion — though clear evidence has been hard to find. A new study bolsters that idea, showing that we share our fondness for cooked grub with our wild cousins, the great apes.

Victoria Wobber and her graduate advisor at Harvard University, Richard Wrangham, along with a third colleague, gave a choice between cooked and raw food to a number of captive apes.

Sep 22, 2008 - An ancient fish sported something like fingers that were the precursors to our own digits, according to an analysis of a new fossil skeleton. "It's really the last piece of evidence to say fingers are not new. They were really present in fish," said lead researcher Catherine Boisvert, an evolutionary biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden.

The fossilized skeleton belonged to Panderchthys, a predatory fish that spanned up to 4 feet (130 cm) and likely dwelled in shallow waters where it inched along the muddy bottom about 385 million years ago.While the fossil was discovered in the 1990s by chance in a brick quarry in Latvia in northern Europe, scientists only recently analyzed the fins with computed tomography (CT) and found that the right paddle is tipped with four bony extensions.

Sep 18, 2008 - A NASA instrument has detected an Antarctic ozone "hole" (what scientists call an "ozone depletion area") that is three times larger than the entire land mass of the United States—the largest such area ever observed.

The "hole" expanded to a record size of approximately 11 million square miles (28.3 million square kilometers) on Sept. 3, 2000. The previous record was approximately 10.5 million square miles (27.2 million square km) on Sept. 19, 1998. The ozone hole's size currently has stabilized, but the low levels in its interior continue to fall.

Sep 18, 2008 - As climate change is credited as one of the main drivers behind soaring food prices, the Global Crop Diversity Trust is undertaking a major effort to search crop collections—from Azerbaijan to Nigeria—for the traits that could arm agriculture against the impact of future changes. Traits, such as drought resistance in wheat, or salinity tolerance in potato, will become essential as crops around the world have to adapt to new climate conditions.
Climate change is having the most negative impact in the poorest regions of the world, already causing a decrease in yields of most major food crops due to droughts, floods, increasingly salty soils and higher temperatures.

Sep 18, 2008 - Walnut trees respond to stress by producing significant amounts of a chemical form of aspirin, scientists have discovered.

The finding, by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., opens up new avenues of research into the behavior of plants and their impacts on air quality, and also has the potential to give farmers an early warning signal about crops that are failing.

"Unlike humans, who are advised to take aspirin as a fever suppressant, plants have the ability to produce their own mix of aspirin-like chemicals, triggering the formation of proteins that boost their biochemical defenses and reduce injury," says NCAR scientist Thomas Karl, who led the study.

Sep 18, 2008 - A new iguana has been discovered in the central regions of Fiji. The colorful new species, named Brachylophus bulabula, joins only two other living Pacific iguana species, one of which is critically endangered. The scientific name bulabula is a doubling of bula, the Fijian word for 'hello,' offering an even more enthusiastic greeting.

Pacific iguanas have almost disappeared as the result of human presence. Two species were eaten to extinction after people arrived nearly 3,000 years ago. The three living Brachylophus iguana species face threats from loss and alteration of their habitat, as well as from feral cats, mongooses and goats that eat iguanas or their food source.

Sep 18, 2008 -Study finds 3 to 6 feet by 2100 possible. The fast motion of glaciers, which can cause large amounts of ice to be dumped off land into the sea, is a wild card in projections of sea level rise, but estimates of its contribution can still be constrained according to a recent study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Principal Investigator Joel Harper, a glaciologist at the University of Montana, says it is more plausible to expect sea level to rise as much as 80 centimeters by the end of this century, rather than several meters, as some scientists have theorized. "We have estimated limits on sea level rise during the next century by considering simple constraints on glacier and ice sheet motion," Harper said. "Our work suggests that 0.8 meter of sea level rise is a plausible upper limit.

Sep. 17, 2008 -Abrupt climate change has occurred on earth many times over the past millions of years. Climate scientists hypothesize that these sharp transitions may be caused when the earth system reaches a tipping point, or a critical value, resulting in a change of several degrees.

These abrupt transitions have caused, for example, the formation and melting of glaciers throughout the earth, North Africa’s change from savannah to desert 5,000 years ago, and various other changes. Over the past few decades, researchers have been gathering evidence showing that earth’s current climate has been slowly warming over the past century, leading to the question of whether it might reach another tipping point.

Sep 17, 2008 - Researchers found evidence that the birds are able to outsmart people's closest relatives when it comes to finding a way to access food without it falling into a trap. Many studies have investigated the remarkable ability of crows from the Pacific island territory of New Caledonia to make tools from leaves, and customise them with great dexterity to extract grubs and caterpillars.

Now a team from Auckland University, led by Prof Russell Gray, publishes what it says is "the most conclusive evidence to date" that the birds are indeed smart, showing that they can reason causally and use analogy in a way not seen even in our closest relatives, the great apes.

Sep 16, 2008 - Arctic sea ice coverage appears to have reached its lowest extent for the year and the second-lowest amount recorded since the dawn of the satellite era, according to observations from the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in BoulderIn March, when the Arctic reached its annual maximum sea ice coverage during the winter, scientists from NASA and the data center reported that thick, older sea ice was continuing to decline. According to NASA-processed satellite microwave data, this perennial ice used to cover 50-60 percent of the Arctic, but this winter it covered less than 30 percent.

Sep 16, 2008 - Australian scientists were hopeful Tuesday that two tonnes of bones found in the country's northeast are the remains of a new species of dinosaur.

"A two-week dig in the west of Queensland state has uncovered bones in an area which three years ago yielded the fossilised remains of a late Triassic period herbivore dubbed Matilda. Amateur paleontologist David Elliott, from the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Institute which organised the dig, said the new bones were considered as too small to belong to 20-metre (66-foot) long Matilda. Elliott said the chances the new bones -- estimated to be up to 98 million years old -- were from a new species was "very, very likely simply because of the rarity of Australian dinosaurs".

Sep 16, 2008 - By recording video at 250,000 frames per second, biologists have shot the first high-speed camera sequences of spores being ejected by fungi. The spores experience accelerations that may be the fastest of any particle known to biology, the researchers report online September 17 in PLoS ONE.

Scientists have long known that certain fungi can pressurize the fluid in their cells and use that ability to shoot spores as far out as possible. Some researchers have photographed the process, but until now no one had been able to watch it in slow-motion, says fungal biologist Nicholas Money of Miami University of Ohio. “The first time we saw these in the lab, I was crying,” Money says. “It was a once-in-a-career moment.” Money’s team painstakingly searched their footage for some preciously brief events. All the action was concentrated in just a few millionths of a second within sequences four seconds long, Money explains.

Sep 16, 2008 - Scientists have discovered that certain fish are capable of glowing red. Research published today in BMC Ecology includes striking images of fish fluorescing vivid red light. Due to absorption of ‘red’ wavelengths of sunlight by sea-water, objects which look red under normal conditions appear grey or black at depths below 10m. This has contributed to the belief among marine biologists that red colours are of no importance to fish.

Nico Michiels, from the University of Tübingen, Germany, led a team of researchers who captured the striking images in the article which, as he describes, “Shows that red fluorescence is widespread among marine fish. Our findings challenge the notion that red light is of no importance to marine fish, calling for a reassessment of its role in fish visual ecology”.

Sep 15, 2008 -A new species of blind, subterranean, predatory ant discovered in the Amazon rainforest by University of Texas at Austin evolutionary biologist Christian Rabeling is likely a descendant of the very first ants to evolve.

The new ant is named Martialis heureka, which translates roughly to "ant from Mars," because the ant has a combination of characteristics never before recorded. It is adapted for dwelling in the soil, is two to three millimeters long, pale, and has no eyes and large mandibles, which Rabeling and colleagues suspect it uses to capture prey. The ant also belongs to its own new subfamily, one of 21 subfamilies in ants. This is the first time that a new subfamily of ants with living species has been discovered since 1923 (other new subfamilies have been discovered from fossil ants).

Sep 15, 2008 - Elephants, gorillas and other large forest mammals may become extinct in central Africa within 50 years if hunting meat to feed starving populations continues at the current pace. Each year, rural peoples consume some 2.2 billion pounds (one million metric tons) of so-called bushmeat from wildlife, the equivalent of four million cattle; the flesh accounts for 80 percent of the protein and fat in their diet. "If current levels of hunting persist in central Africa, the most vulnerable species will become extinct in the near future," cautions Nathalie Van Vliet, a researcher at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) based in Indonesia. The problem is, she adds, that "if the people that currently rely on bushmeat as a source of protein in central Africa had to rely on livestock, we would see the same catastrophe that is destroying the Amazon Basin: deforestation for pasture land and livestock raising."

Sep 12, 2008 - We all know that people can be influenced in complex ways by their peers. But two new studies in the September 11th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, reveal that the same can also be said of fruit flies.

The researchers found that group composition affects individual flies in several ways, including changes in gene activity and sexual behavior, all mediated by chemical communication. "Many take for granted that communication among insects is hard-wired," said Joel Levine of the University of Toronto Mississauga.

"We have observed that communication may be influenced by relationships even in insects like fruit flies, which have not been traditionally considered to be social insects.

Sep 11, 2008 - Call it a global positioning system for elephants. Their powerful rumbles – mostly too low in pitch for humans to hear – keep family members from wandering too far, new research suggests. African elephants form tightly knit families centred around dominant females. Family members spread out while looking for food but always reunite, says Katherine Leighty, a behavioural ecologist at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, who led the new study.

Research on the elephants in the wild has hinted that their low-frequency calls, which can travel more than 2 kilometres, work like GPS, she says. But proving that in the wild requires tracking the movements and subsonic calls of multiple elephants – all relative to one another.

Sep 11, 2008 - Reporting in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, palaeontologist Mark D. Uhen of the Alabama Museum of Natural History describes new fossils from Alabama and Mississippi that pinpoint where tail flukes developed in the evolution of whales.The crashing of the enormous fluked tail on the surface of the ocean is a “calling card” of modern whales. Living whales have no back legs, and their front legs take the form of flippers that allow them to steer.

Their special tails provide the powerful thrust necessary to move their huge bulk. Yet this has not always been the case. Reporting in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, paleontologist Mark D. Uhen of the Alabama Museum of Natural History describes new fossils from Alabama and Mississippi that pinpoint where tail flukes developed in the evolution of whales.

Sep 11, 2008 - The old adage that bigger is better could be about to go out of fashion. Ecologists say climate change will shrink species. But don't look out for hot shrinking animals just yet – the effects are likely not to be seen for many more years. Yet Kaustuv Roy, a biologist at the University of California in San Diego, believes we need to think now about how we are going to preserve large species.

"Our collective actions are negatively affecting body sizes of many living species," says Roy. It is well-known that humans tend to hunt or fish larger animals, creating a selective pressure that favours the smaller ones that can reproduce while they are still small. Several species of cod are smaller as a result of pressures of the fishing industry.

Sep 11, 2008 - The dinosaurs got lucky. Before they finally came to dominate Earth life in the Jurassic period, they were perpetual also-rans to their crocodilian cousins. But then the climate gave them a helping hand. Near the start of the Triassic period, 250 million years ago, the archosaurs, or "ruling reptiles", split into two major groups: the dinosaurs and a group called crurotarsans, whose only living descendants are the crocodiles.

Palaeontologists had long thought that the more successful dinosaurs dominated the last 30 million years of the Triassic, but in recent years they have found that many of the fossils originally thought to be dinosaurs were actually similar-looking crurotarsans.

Sep 11, 2008 - Researchers analyzing the May 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China's Sichuan province have found that geological stress has significantly increased on three major fault systems in the region. The magnitude 7.9 quake on May 12 has brought several nearby faults closer to failure and could trigger another major earthquake in the region.

Geophysicists used computer models to calculate the changes in stress along the Xianshuihe, Kunlun, and Min Jiang faults—strike-slip faults like the San Andreas—which lie about 150 to 450 kilometers (90 to 280 miles) from the Longmen Shan rupture that caused the devastating quake.