Investigators retrieve textbook-quality coral fossil sampling to document history of paleoclimatic change

An international team of scientists, supported by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, reunited at the University of Bremen to analyze a trove of coral fossil samples retrieved from Tahitian waters during October and November 2005. Two weeks ago, led by chief scientists from France and Japan, the science party started their year-long analysis of 632 meters of fossil materi

Mouthwatering Peruvian cuisine like causa (mashed yellow potatoes layered with avocado and seafood) and carapulcra (dried potatoes and pork/chicken in peanut sauce) combine food crops from Amazon basin rainforests and Andean highlands. Smithsonian archaeologists and colleagues presenting in the prestigious journal, Nature1, uncover the first definitive evidence for this culinary, cultural link: 3600-4000 year-old plant microfossils and starch grains.

Heading to the supermarket to pi

Archeology and genetics team up to put a much earlier date on South American agriculture

Research by UMaine researcher Dan Sandweiss places cornmeal on the menu for native Americans much earlier than previously believed.

Working with colleagues from Ithaca College and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Sandweiss discovered evidence of cultivated corn in the Cotahuasi Valley of southern Peru that dates back to nearly 4,000 years before the present, su

Alterations in irrigation schedules may be needed when wheat streak mosaic infection is suspected in winter wheat crops, according to a Texas Agricultural Experiment Station researcher in Amarillo.

Drought this winter has prompted more irrigation of wheat than normal; however, wheat streak mosaic is also being detected, said Jacob Price, a graduate student and diagnostic technician for the Experiment Station’s plant pathology department.

Wheat streak mosaic, the mos

The nation’s newest and most advanced research aircraft will participate in its first major mission March 1 through April 30, when it will study a severe type of atmospheric turbulence that forms near mountains and endangers airplanes. The $81.5 million HIAPER aircraft, owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), will fly over treacherous whirlwinds, known as rotors, as they form above California’s Sierra Nevada mountain rang

Solar rather than nuclear energy should be the UK government’s priority in planning future energy production, according to scientists writing today in the journal Nature Materials.

Challenging advocates of the nuclear option, researchers from Imperial College London argue in their Commentary article that photovoltaics, the direct conversion of sunlight to electricity, could match and exceed the nuclear industry’s current output before any new reactor could begin opera

Scientists from the universities of Leeds, Sheffield, East Anglia, Durham and Sussex are embarking on new science research projects worth over £1 million in the Peak District to understand what rural policy changes mean for the future of rural livelihoods and the countryside.

Much of Britain’s drinking water comes from uplands. They are important for tourism, farming and hunting, and are home to threatened plant and animal species. But the face of our uplands is changing. Fa

Ocean FOCUS began issuing forecasts on 16 February 2006 – just in time to warn oil production operators of a new warm eddy that has formed in the oil and gas-producing region of the Gulf of Mexico.

These eddies, similar to underwater hurricanes, spin off the Loop Current – an intrusion of warm surface water that flows northward from the Caribbean Sea through the Yucatan Strait – from the Gulf Stream and can cause extensive and costly damage to underwater equipment due to the extensive deep

Tools allow better management of the human–predator–livestock relationship

Effective management of predation on livestock is essential to the conservation of large carnivores, because conflicts with human interests can be fatal to individual predators and may lead to the decline of populations of wolves, lions, leopards, cheetahs, coyotes, and spotted hyenas. New tools allow better management of the edges where carnivores, people, and livestock intersect, according to an article

Filling mines with the residues of coal combustion is a viable way to dispose of these materials, provided they are placed so as to avoid adverse health and environmental effects, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies’ National Research Council. The residues left after coal is burned to generate power – often referred to as coal ash – consist of noncombustible coal matter and material trapped by pollution control devices. Enforceable federal standards are need

To evaluate the environmental effects of hedgerows on crops is the aim of the project being undertaken by researchers at the Public University of Navarre, within the framework of the Agenda Local 21 of Noáin municipal council in Navarre.

A hedgerow may be defined as a line of hedges, sometimes with trees, along the roadside or surrounding estates, farms or naturally-occurring enclosures.

Various studies agree that it is a good thing to have hedges surrounding crops and alongside

Since its launch in 2002, Envisat, the world’s largest and most sophisticated satellite ever built, has been providing scientists and operational users with invaluable data for global monitoring and forecasting – and the future looks even brighter.

“The Envisat mission has reached its full maturity with the services provided by the satellite now well established, and the scientific results based on its data being increasing published,” Envisat Mission Manager Henri Laur said. (For m

Scientists from NASA and Columbia University, New York, have used computer modeling to successfully reproduce an abrupt climate change that took place 8,200 years ago. At that time, the beginning of the current warm period, climate changes were caused by a massive flood of freshwater into the North Atlantic Ocean.

This work is the first to consistently recreate the event by computer modeling, and the first time that the model results have been confirmed by comparison to the climate rec

Aston University’s Bio-Energy Research Group is part of a European team that will help expand renewable energy, including electrification, to rural communities in Latin America.

The team will set up two training platforms that can deliver knowledge and skills in bioenergy technology to enable rural communities in Peru, Ecuador and Brazil to generate renewable energy from existing resources more efficiently.

Led by CIRAD in Montpellier, France, European partners will co-operat

A Purdue University researcher and his team have used improved satellite imaging and powerful computer modeling to more accurately forecast the likelihood and intensity of storms and tornados.

The key to the new weather prediction model is its more precise simulation of the amount of moisture surface vegetation is releasing into the upper atmosphere to affect the weather conditions, said Dev Niyogi (pronounced Dave Knee-yoo-gee), an assistant professor of agronomy and earth and at

Mangroves, the backbone of the tropical ocean coastlines, are far more important to the global ocean’s biosphere than previously thought. And while the foul-smelling muddy forests may not have the scientific allure of tropical reefs or rain forests, a team of researchers has noted that the woody coastline- dwelling plants provide more than 10 percent of essential dissolved organic carbon that is supplied to the global ocean from land, according to a report published 21 February in Global Biogeo