A new UK project could help detect evidence for life on Mars, as well as improve our understanding of how it evolved on Earth.

The aim is to develop a technique that can identify biomolecules in water that have been trapped in rocks for millions to billions of years.

As well as analysing samples from Earth, the proposed technique could be used to obtain important information from water sealed within rock samples brought back from Mars, for example. The team will also consider how

NASA satellite data was used for the first time to analyze the biology of hot spots along the coast of Antarctica. The biological oases are open waters, called polynyas, where blooming plankton support the local food chain.

The research found a strong association between the well being of Adelie Penguin populations in the Antarctic and the productivity of plankton in the polynyas. Polynyas are areas of open water or reduced ice cover, where one might expect sea ice. They are usually created

NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) has resumed measurements of the Earth’s polar ice sheets, clouds, mountains and forests with the second of its three lasers. Crisscrossing the globe at nearly 17,000 miles per hour, this new space mission is providing data with unprecedented accuracy on the critical third dimension of the Earth, its vertical characteristics.

“The first set of laser measurements is revealing features of the polar ice sheets with details never seen befor

Some seed gene banks contain more higher plant species per square meter than anywhere else on the planet’, write Simon Linington and colleagues of the Millenium Seed Bank, Kew, in the October issue of Biologist. This helps to ‘ensure plant diversity is available long term for use in development or habitat restoration’, they explain.

Although genetically uniform crop varieties can produce good yields, the plants may be more vulnerable to new diseases than traditional varieties. Seed banks un

The building industry could significantly reduce materials-related CO2 emissions, through greater innovation within the industry itself together with action by governments to further stimulate existing processes towards environmentally friendly construction. This is the main thrust of Tessa Goverse’s dissertation, entitled “Building a Climate for Change – Reducing CO2 emissions through materials innovation in the European building industry”, which she will defend on Thursday 9 October at the Vri

Wetlands are nature’s water filters. They collect water around river mouths and marshes, and whole communities of plants and micro-organisms feed off detritus in these murky depths.

Conventional chemical treatments of industrial waters consume cash, energy and time. Wetlands, by contrast, grow and clean themselves while they act as super-efficient absorbers of phosphates, nitrates and other environmental hazards.

The INDCONWET project applies these natural abilities to industrial w

A team of Purdue University researchers has recently uncovered the genetic mechanism that prevents certain crop plants from growing tall – a finding that has future crop production applications since some grains produce greater yields if plants are kept short.

Guri Johal, assistant professor of botany and plant pathology, and his colleagues have identified the process that generates dwarfed corn and sorghum plants, which grow to roughly half the height of their normal counterparts. This disc

NASA researchers and other scientists used a satellite combined with aircraft video to create a new technique for detecting ponds of water on top of Arctic sea ice. Until now, it was not possible to accurately monitor these ponds on ice from space.

Water that forms on sea ice during the summer, called a melt pond, absorbs the Sun’s energy rather than reflecting it back to space the way ice does. The balance between reflected and absorbed energy has a large effect on Arctic and global c

For the second time in 26 months, a massive iceberg has clogged a large portion of Antarctica’s Ross Sea, causing what could turn out to be a devastating loss of penguins and other marine life, according to a NASA-funded study by Stanford scientists.

Using satellite data, geophysicists Kevin Arrigo and Gert L. van Dijken monitored the movements of a giant iceberg named “C-19,” which calved off the western face of the Ross Ice Shelf in May 2002. C-19 is one of the largest icebergs ever

Conventional wisdom says a river’s flood plain builds bit by bit, flood after flood, whenever the stream overflows its banks and deposits new sediment on the flood plain. But for some vast waterways in South America’s Amazon River basin, that wisdom doesn’t hold water, according to scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Results of their research are published in the October 2nd issue of the journal Nature. Seasonal rains wash billions of tons of rock and s

NASA satellites observed the calving, or breaking off, of one of the largest icebergs ever recorded, named “C-19.”

C-19 separated from the western face of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica in May 2002, splashed into the Ross Sea, and virtually eliminated a valuable food source for marine life. The event was unusual, because it was the second-largest iceberg to calve in the region in 26 months.

Over the last year, the path of C-19 inhibited the growth of minute, free-floating aquati

The first results from British and Japanese researchers working with the world’s largest computer, the gigantic Earth Simulator supercomputer in Japan, are being showcased at a climate workshop which starts today at Cambridge University.

Professor Julia Slingo, the Director of the NCAS Centre for Global Atmospheric Modelling said: “These results are very exciting. They show that, for the first time, our climate models can be run at resolutions capable of capturing severe weather events such

Exploit Plant Defenses, Build Local Drug Discovery Industry

Misty-eyed idealism alone will not save Earth’s dwindling tropical rainforests. But a five-year, $3 million study in Panama indicates rainforests can be protected if the pharmaceutical industry establishes Third World laboratories and hires local researchers to look for new medicines extracted from plants that evolved defenses against insects.

“Until now, efforts to find drugs in the rainforest haven’t really led to

IBISCA’s push to understand insect habitats in the tropical forest

Of the 10 million plus species thought to exist on this planet, a mere 2 million are known to science. Others dwell in inaccessible locations–deep sea vents or hard-to-reach tropical treetops. To collect the best information available to date on tropical forest insects and their habitats, thirty researchers will use state-of-the-art canopy access techniques to sample nine 400m2 patches of Panamanian rainforest fr

Millions of animals could be needlessly slaughtered and billions of dollars lost from economies, unless the world backs an international science team to develop new tools to fight foot-and-mouth disease (FMD).

A group of world-leading researchers aims to develop a more effective FMD vaccine and better diagnostic tests that would enable livestock disease control agencies to isolate and eventually eliminate the disease. The team of scientists from the United Kingdom, Canada, United States, and

A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist, in collaboration with an international team of colleagues, has reported that noticeable changes in the sub-polar climate and ecosystems appear to be linked to variations in the sun’s intensity during the past 12,000 years.

The research, titled “Cyclic Variation and Solar Forcing of Holocene Climate in the Alaskan Subarctic,” is reported in today’s (Sept. 26) issue of Science.

Using core sediment samples from Arolik Lake