The relationship between rocks and our health, and new methods for farming and countryside management to both encourage wildlife and make a profit, are just two of the exciting research projects highlighted in the latest issue of Planet Earth, the quarterly journal of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

The rock diet

Rocks are a vital source of the essential elements and minerals people need to stay healthy. The British Geological Survey (BGS) together with part

Sometimes getting too much of a good thing may create more problems than not getting enough – especially when it comes to the weather. Just ask Texas A&M University atmospheric scientist Fuqing Zhang, whose ensemble weather forecasting research is burdened with trillions of bytes of real-time data.

Zhang’s quest, funded by a National Science Foundation grant of $295,500, is to find the best way to assimilate the most recent weather observation data for input into the latest computer fo

The ozone layer is thinning and we do not yet know to what extent future ozone losses will be affected by climate change, or what impact this will have on human health.

For this reason, the European Research Commissioner Philippe Busquin today welcomed the start of the first phase of the VINTERSOL (Validation of International Satellites and Study of Ozone Loss) campaign, composed of national and EU projects. VINTERSOL will be closely co-ordinated with the SAGE III Ozone Loss and Valid

PhD student Rüdiger Lang has developed a method to obtain information about water vapour from satellite data not specifically measuring this. The research is part of a project from the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF), the Space Research Organisation Netherlands (SRON) and the Free University of Amsterdam.

Water vapour has a greenhouse effect three times stronger than that of carbon dioxide. Therefore a good picture as to the presence, distribution and influence of wate

But scientists say human effects can be a positive, not negative, factor for life on earth

Human beings now directly influence more than three quarters of the earth’s landmass, according to a state-of-the-art map of the world produced by a team of scientists from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN). Published in the latest issue of the scientific journal BioScienc

During the second century B.C., a mummy-maker took a scroll of poetry and used it as stuffing for a corpse. The roll of papyrus remained hidden inside the mummy’s chest cavity until its rediscovery in the early 1990s. Today, what was once treated like trash survives as the oldest surviving example of a Greek poetry book, as well as an important source of information about the past.

To glean as many clues from this ancient scroll as possible, the University of Cincinnati Department of Class

Advances in detection devices and methods of analysis have allowed seismologists to identify virtually all events that might be nuclear explosions of possible military significance under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), according to Prof. Lynn R. Sykes of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Writing in the 29 October issue of Eos, published by the American Geophysical Union, Sykes analyzes 72 questionable events since 1960.

Verification was a major issue in

A cheap, harmless chemical and sunlight could provide an environmentally friendly way of destroying micro-pollutants in the environment.

UK researchers are developing a new type of reactor to destroy persistent contaminants such as pesticides and pharmaceutical residues.

The technology, which breaks down the polluting molecules into carbon dioxide and water, could provide a breakthrough for a sustainable way of cleaning up fresh water supplies and industrial wastewater.

Th

In unprecedented space research, DuPont scientists have attained a significant scientific accomplishment regarding the future development of soybeans – one of the most consumed crops in the world today.

During a research mission that concluded with the return of Space Shuttle Atlantis Friday, soybean seeds planted and nurtured by DuPont scientists germinated, developed into plants, flowered, and produced new seedpods in space. The 97-day growth research initiative is the first-ever to compl

A new giant was born recently in the coastal waters of Antarctica. A series of images captured from May through the beginning of this month by ESA`s Envisat satellite shows the subsequent duel between the new iceberg and another as it breaks free of the Ross Ice Shelf and tries to move north.

Christened C-19 by the US National Ice Centre in Maryland, the new iceberg measured 200 x 32 km, and about 200 m thick.

As seen in the accompanying animation of images acquired by Envi

UCSF-led researchers have developed a highly sensitive, automated test for detecting prions (PREE-on) that they report significantly improves the accuracy and speed of detecting the various forms of the infectious agent, which causes a set of neurodegenerative diseases, in cattle, sheep, deer and elk.

Because the test is automated, the researchers say, it could be used for high-throughput testing of brain samples of cattle with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or “mad cow” disease, a

Laws that favor the use of diesel, rather than gasoline, engines in cars may actually encourage global warming, according to a new study. Although diesel cars obtain 25 to 35 percent better mileage and emit less carbon dioxide than similar gasoline cars, they can emit 25 to 400 times more mass of particulate black carbon and associated organic matter (“soot”) per kilometer [mile]. The warming due to soot may more than offset the cooling due to reduced carbon dioxide emissions over several decades, ac

Two population studies in this week’s issue of THE LANCET highlight how poor air quality is directly related to increased risk of death from respiratory and cardiovascular disease.

Luke Clancy from St James Hospital, Dublin, and colleagues from Trinity College and Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland, and Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA, examined the effect of the 1990 coal ban in Dublin on population death-rates in the six years before and after the ban was i

New Report Discovers Carbon Trading to Be Win-Win Proposition for Poor Villagers, Big Business, and for Slowing Climate Change

As the next major meeting on global climate change opens in New Delhi next week, a potentially controversial report concludes that deals to counteract the carbon emissions of the smokestack industry could benefit more than the environment. It reveals that carbon-trading deals in forestry could sharply reduce poverty among the rural poor, while also providing

Are European forests, soil and grass part of the solution for dealing with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions? Today the European Commission presented the CarboEurope research initiative in Valencia (Spain). It is a cluster of 15 research projects supported by the European Commission with a budget of €25 million. The project brings together around 160 research institutions from over 20 countries. It looks at whether the biosphere, and above all forests, can reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide i

New results from experiments at a unique ecology facility show that plant communities are dramatically altered by changes to the type of animal species living among their roots, but that key ecosystem measurements such as overall agricultural yield or the amount of soil carbon stored are unaffected.

According to the results of a three year study into the processes of experimental grassland ecosystems published in the journal Science today, changes to the makeup of soil communities from small