Despite fat in meat being frequently associated with negative connotations for the consumer, it is an indispensable component in order to obtain quality meat. To better understand the metabolism of the fat in calf meat and to enable its possible modulation in future, Martín Alzón Aldave has presented his PhD thesis on the Development and metabolism of veal fat tissue in seven Spanish autochthonous breeds of meat-yielding calves.

Seven autochthonous breeds

Martín Alzón had tw

When Miss Pearl finally returned to the Pearl Cays in Nicaragua last month after a three-year hiatus, it was cause for celebration. Best of all, her transmitter was still attached.

Named by local Nicaraguan participants and scientists from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Miss Pearl is a female hawksbill sea turtle, one of the most endangered of this ancient tribe of sea-going reptiles. In 2000, she had already distinguished herself by traveling farther than any other

Hundreds of species with small ranges seen vulnerable

The Caribbean Sea has the greatest concentration of marine life in the entire Atlantic and is home to hundreds of species that live only in precariously small areas, making life there far richer and more delicate than previously thought, according to a new study.

An analysis of the ranges of 1,172 marine species revealed that some 253, or 22 percent, are endemic to the Caribbean region, meaning they are found nowhere else

New use for seismic reflection data: revealing the most dangerous fault lines on Earth

Researchers have found an important new application for seismic reflection data, commonly used to image geological structures and explore for oil and gas. Recently published in the journal Nature, new use of reflection data may prove crucial to understanding the potential for mega earthquakes.

Mladen Nedimovic, the lead author and a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a membe

Global warming will not be helped much by efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emission into the atmosphere, say two scientists who have studied the matter.

Dr. Nir Shaviv, an astrophysicist from the Racah Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Prof. Jan Veiser a geochemist at the University of Ottawa in Canada and Ruhr University in Germany, say that temperature variations are due more to cosmic forces than to the actions of man.

In a recent article publishe

Scientists in sunny, hot Florida are thinking cold thoughts since they added ozone measurements from a NASA satellite into computer weather forecast models and improved several factors in a forecast of a major winter snowstorm that hit the United States in 2000.

When scientists added ozone measurements, predictions of snowstorm intensity, snowfall amounts and the storm track all improved for a storm that hit Washington, D.C. As such, they may be able to do the same for future storms,

A new application of a decades-old technique to study Earth´s interior is allowing scientists “see” the layers in the ocean, providing new insight on the structure of ocean currents, eddies and mixing processes. The findings, reported in this week´s Science by a team from the University of Wyoming and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), could be a major step forward in the ability to remotely survey the interior of the ocean.

The study reports on a new adaptation of seismic

It´s tricky, this weather business — predicting drought, floods, rain or snow, especially months in advance. But NASA scientists at the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala., are working to take the guesswork out of long-term prediction.

“We´re researching methods to predict precipitation a season or more in advance,” said Dr. Bob Oglesby, a senior atmospheric scientist at the research center. The key, he said, is understanding how the atmosphere interacts with th

Multiple sensors on ESA’s Envisat environmental satellite have been used to peer beneath a vast pall of smoke above tropical Borneo and detect fire hotspots – known to add millions of tons of harmful greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Fires occur often during the dry season on the South East Asian island of Borneo, but it isn’t only the forests that burn. Lowland tropical peat swamps are formed from layers of woody debris too waterlogged to fully decompose. Slowly deposited over thousands

On Wednesday, July 30, as scientists all over the country looked intently on, a synthetic earthquake shook a half-real building.

Part of the structure was conventional steel: full-sized structural support columns sitting in laboratories at the University of Colorado and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

But a third support column and the building floor that rested on them, forming a typical 1-story, 2-bay component of a modern steel frame building, exist

Researchers of the Bochvara All-Russian Scientific Research Institute for Inorganic Materials, supported by the International Scientific and Technical Center have developed new tilth technology, which allows to get rid of radioactive or poisonous dust, to transform dust-forming slag-heaps into green lawn and even to grow forest in the desert.

The technology is based on the polyelectrolytes developed by chemists of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. The polyelectrolytes are polymers, the

Water churns through diversion holes in the world’s largest dam – China’s Three Gorges project on the Yangtze River, imaged here by ESA’s Proba satellite this week. Seen to the left, the waters behind the dam have risen to a level of 135 metres since the sluice gates were first closed in early June, and in August Three Gorges is due to generate its first commercial hydroelectricity.

The Three Gorges project is set to create a new 600-km-long body of water on the face of the 21st century Ea

The rate at which ozone is being destroyed in the upper stratosphere is slowing, and the levels of ozone-destroying chlorine in that layer of the atmosphere have peaked and are going down — the first clear evidence that a worldwide reduction in chlorofluorocarbon pollution is having the desired effect, according to a new study.

“This is the beginning of a recovery of the ozone layer,” said Professor Michael Newchurch of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), the scientist wh

At over three thousand metres down in the north-west Indian Ocean, the Carlsberg Ridge is “probably the best ridge in the world”. So say excited scientists from Southampton Oceanography Centre who have just found the first evidence of hydrothermal activity in this previously unexplored area of a volcanic mid-ocean ridge.

The team aboard the research ship RRS Charles Darwin made the discovery on Wednesday 23 July 2003 when they detected a huge plume of smoky water. The plume is at lea

Earth’s youngest desert is shown in this July MERIS satellite image of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, over the last 40 years the Aral Sea has evaporated back to half its original surface area and a quarter its initial volume, leaving a 40,000 square kilometre zone of dry white-coloured salt terrain now called the Aralkum Desert.

As its water level has dropped 13 metres since the 1960s the Sea has actually split into two – the larger horseshoe-shaped

Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit photosynthesis in U.S. corn crops in the future by relieving drought stress, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

According to preliminary findings of a new study — being released this week in Hawaii during Plant Biology 2003, the annual meeting of the American Society of Plant Biologists — photosynthesis of maize on average increased by 10 percent under projected carbon dioxide conditions in the