While Thousands Gather in New Orleans for Mardi Gras Scientists and Students Working to Save Louisiana Wetlands
An impending crisis that could have a detrimental impact on the oil and gas infrastructure and fishing industry in the United States is leading scientists to investigate how to stop rapid deterioration and to start restoring marsh land in Louisiana’s southern coastal wetlands – which are losing a piece of land the size of a football field every 35 minutes. All of t
Finland ranks first in the world in environmental sustainability out of 146 countries according to the latest Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) produced by a team of environmental experts at Yale and Columbia Universities.
The 2005 ESI, to be released at the World Economic Forum January 27 in Davos, Switzerland, ranks Norway, Uruguay, Sweden and Iceland two to five respectively. Their high ESI scores are attributed to substantial natural resource endowments, low population
New evidence suggests that rarely studied upland birds may be as vulnerable as songbirds to climate change.
Scientists from the RSPB and Newcastle and Manchester universities have found that the golden plover, a typical upland bird found on the moors and peat bogs of the Pennines, Peak and Lake Districts and Highlands, is breeding significantly earlier than 20 years ago.
They say warmer springs have prompted the change and that the failure of the plover chick’s ma
EUREKA project E! 2507 EUROENVIRON COPAP has developed a new detection device that will aid research into global climate change, environmental studies, life-science research and environmental monitoring and improve understanding on aerosols.
“It is now recognised that aerosols play a central role in a range of environmental problems such as respiratory diseases, climate change and decreased visibility,” says Dr Vidmantas Ulevicius, Head of the Environmental Physics and Chemistry L
The single-celled organisms of the world’s oceans are immensely diverse. For the ‘International Census of Marine Microbes’ scientists are going to track down knowledge on the diversity and distribution of these micro-organisms and their viruses. The budget? 900,000 dollars of the Sloan Foundation in New York to start with. On February 7 and 8, the steering committee from America and the Netherlands will gather for the first time.
Goal of the International Census of Marine Microb
While Siberia may be one of the last expanses on Earth where human presence is relatively scarce, scientists are finding some surprising connections between humans and fires in these frigid, northern forests. Until now, most researchers assumed that lightning caused most of the fires that burned in Siberia. But a new study by NASA scientists and others used a NASA satellite to map where and when fires lit up over a three year period. The satellite showed that Siberian fires burned mostly ne
It is a premise in ecology that undisturbed ecosystems are relatively stable, and hence that sudden changes in ecosystem are likely to result from external, mostly human influences. Johan van de Koppel, Daphne van der Wal, Jan P. Bakker, and Peter M. J. Herman present a combined theoretical and empirical study indicating that natural processes within salt-marsh ecosystems can lead to ecosystem destruction. They model salt-marsh development based on the mutually enforcing interaction between plant
An advanced radar technique to image forests in three dimensions has undergone an ESA-backed test campaign in Indonesia. A future space-based version could measure global biomass to sharpen the accuracy of climate change models.
The campaign, called the Second Indonesian Airborne Radar Experiment (INDREX-II), involved flying a test instrument called the Experimental Synthetic Aperture Radar (E-SAR), built by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), in a Dornier-228 aircraft over eight tes
Transport research must focus on the challenges of the future, such as keeping people and products mobile, improving road safety and energy efficiency, and making the sector more competitive. This is the clear message of the European Road Transport Research Advisory Council (ERTRAC) which will tomorrow unveil its Strategic Research Agenda for the sector. ERTRAC brings together all players of the sector – automotive industry, road infrastructures, local and national governments, NGOs, universit
Evidence is mounting that climate change is adversely affecting wildlife, an international scientific conference on climate change will hear today.
John Lanchbery, Head of Climate Change at the RSPB, Europe’s largest wildlife conservation group, will present a paper to the conference warning that failure to cut levels of the greenhouse gases responsible for air and sea temperature rises, could cause the loss of thousands of species.
“There is substantial and compelling evide
CSIRO Minerals has found a way to reduce waste from car recycling, recycle materials that are currently thrown away, and make the end waste less harmful for disposal.
In the age of environmental responsibility, old cars no longer rust away disgracefully, overgrown by weeds in remote country paddocks. Today they disappear into the jaws of huge shredding machines in metal recycling plants, along with broken washing machines, refrigerators and other metal wastes.
The recycl
Oil-coated birds turning up on southern California beaches in recent weeks have raised concern about potential oil sources. The Coal Oil Point seep field, located offshore and adjacent to the University of California, Santa Barbara, is one of the biggest natural marine oil and gas seeps in the world and is the predominant source of oil to southern California waters. Extensive oil slicks have been observed near Coal Oil Point since the recent severe storms pummeled the region in January. These
Research offers new opportunities in the fields of renewable energy, pollution control and in the chemical industry.
On January 28th 2005 Science features a paper by researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Haldor Topsøe A/S. The paper demonstrates that by applying the quantum theory you can calculate the performance of catalysts to be used in everything from cars to the future production of hydrogen.
So far the development of new catalysts have been b
Noise is usually nothing more than a disturbance, but sometimes it can be useful. Researchers have discovered that noise could bring order to chaotic systems, protect and maintain entire marine ecosystems, and even make the chemical industry greener. This research is reported today in a special Einstein Year issue of the New Journal of Physics (www.njp.org) published jointly by the Institute of Physics and the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft).
Changso
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory set to launch million-dollar mobile atmospheric-measuring station on worldwide tour to fill data gaps in global climate models
Balloon-borne sounding system. Check. Micropulse lidar. Check. Infrared thermometer. Check. Eddy correlation flux measurement system. Eddy correlation flux measurement system?! Check already.
These and a dozen other instruments and computer- and maintenance-shop-jammed cargo containers make up the ARM M
Ocean sanctuaries are unlikely to fully protect whales, say three independent scientists charged by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) with reviewing their sanctuary program to manage whale populations.
In a Policy Forum article forthcoming in the January 28 issue of the journal Science, Arizona State University marine biologist Leah Gerber, Duke University marine biologist K. David Hyrenbach, and University of Victoria geographer Mark Zacharias argue that the current san
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