Swansea University ecologist Dr Patricia Lee has won a British Ecological Society (BES) grant to unlock the secrets of the millions of eggs held in museum collections worldwide.
The bird collection at London’s Natural History Museum alone includes more than a million skins and eggs, collected over the past 200 years and representing 95% of all known bird species. While the skins have proved a good source of DNA and have been widely used by scientists to study many aspects of b
Why does it take so long for fish stocks to recover from over-fishing? This problem has been worrying both scientists and fishery managers who expect stocks to quickly rebound when fishing stops.
Now a research team from Stony Brook University believes they have an answer: continually harvesting the largest and oldest fish (as fishing regulations typically require) alters not only size but also numerous other genetic characteristics that are harmful to the overall population.
A new report that links global warming to the recent extinction of dozens of amphibian species in tropical America is more evidence of a large phenomena that may affect broad regions, many animal species and ultimately humans, according to researchers at Oregon State University.
A study being published Thursday in the journal Nature finds compelling evidence that global climate change created favorable conditions for a pathogenic fungus in Central and South America. That
A University of Alberta scientist is part of a research team offering the first evidence that global warming is behind an infectious disease epidemic wiping out entire frog populations and forcing many species to extinction. The work is published in the journal “Nature.”
“When we talk about climate change, there is so much focus on industrialized countries, but people are ignoring other ecosystems that may be extremely sensitive to climate change, such as dry and cloud forest e
Trees, particularly those with deep roots, contribute to the Earth’s climate much more than scientists thought, according to a new study by biologists and climatologists from the University of California, Berkeley.
While scientists studying global climate change recognize the importance of vegetation in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and in local cooling through transpiration, they have assumed a simple model of plants sucking water out of the soil and spewi
Researchers have discovered that your level of exposure to pollution can vary according to what method of transport you use, with travelling by taxis resulting in the highest levels of exposure and walking the least.
Research published in the journal Atmospheric Environment, describes how the team from Imperial College London and the Health and Safety Laboratory, Buxton, measured and visualised exposure to pollution levels, while using a variety of different transport methods
New research shows that global climate processes are affecting southern right whales (Eubalaena australis) in the South Atlantic. A thirty-year study by an international team of scientists found a strong relationship between breeding success of whales in the South Atlantic and El Nino in the western Pacific. The results are published this week in the On-line journal Biology Letters.
Southern right whales migrate from the South Atlantic to the Southern Ocean to feed. Scientists
Scientists at the University of Liverpool are working with leading oil companies to further understanding of the nature of oil and gas reservoirs within deeply buried submarine channels.
Professor Stephen Flint and Dr David Hodgson, from the Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, have been awarded £1 million by a global consortium of 11 of the world’s leading oil companies to study how sand is transported through and deposited in deep-sea submarine channels. Scientists will study a
Scientists at the University of Manchester have invented a new device which remotely monitors bad odours and methane gases at waste landfill and water treatment sites.
The device, which works like an electronic nose, could be the solution many communities and waste management companies, who regularly encounter problems with bad odours and air pollution, are searching for.
20.9m tonnes (72%) of household of waste produced in Britain is disposed of in landfill sites. There
Sediment cores collected from the seafloor off Southern California reveal that plankton populations in the Northeastern Pacific changed significantly in response to a general warming trend that started in the early 1900s. As ocean temperatures increased, subtropical and tropical species of small marine organisms called foraminifera (forams) became more abundant. Forams that live in cooler waters decreased, especially after the mid-1970s. These changes are unlike anything seen during the previous 1,4
It may be no surprise that marine reserves protect the fish that live in them, but now scientists from the University of Exeter have shown for the first time that they could also help improve the health of coral reefs.
In a paper in the prestigious journal Science, Dr Peter Mumby and colleagues looked at how a marine park in the Bahamas was affected by the return of the reef’s top predator, the Nassau Grouper. Researchers were concerned that an increase in groupers could
Even in the largest American cities, a historically maligned beast is thriving, despite scientists’ belief that these mammals intently avoid urban human populations.
This animal’s amazing ability to thrive in metropolitan areas has greatly surprised scientists, says Stanley Gehrt, an assistant professor of environmental and natural resources at Ohio State University. Gehrt is in the sixth year of a multi-year study of coyote behavior in urban Chicago.
Since the study be
Scientists use deep ocean historical records to find an abrupt ocean circulation reversal caused by greenhouse gas warming
New research produced by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, helps illustrate how global warming caused by greenhouse gases can quickly disrupt ocean processes and lead to drastic climatological, biological and other important changes around the world. Although the events described in the research unfol
The use of composite materials in the aeronautic industry has been increasing since (in the 70s in the North American market and the 80s in Europe) they started to be used in commercial aviation as a substitute for classic materials such as metals. The reason for their use was largely because of their capacity to reinforce in preferential directions, their high rigidity, specific resistance and their enhanced fatigue and corrosion behaviour. Currently, the main reasons to justify their use in this
Researchers have developed a new tool to help them study endangered whales – autonomous hydrophones that can be deployed in the ocean to record the unique clicks, pulses and calls of different whale species.
Those efforts are leading to some surprising findings, including the discovery by a team of researchers of rare right whales swimming in the Gulf of Alaska.
“There has been only one confirmed sighting of a right whale in the Gulf of Alaska since 1980, so discovering
Raw starch replaces mineral raw materials
VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland has developed natural materials from raw starch, which helps to make very high-quality paper that is fully recyclable. Due to the materials used for filling, adhesive and coating purposes, paper developed from starch is 20 to 30 per cent lighter, which means a reduction in transport costs too. The new raw materials of starch paper and their manufacturing methods are expected to be a success.
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