An increased demand for meat in Afghanistan could play an important role in stemming the international flow of heroin, according to a new study led by the Macaulay Institute, Aberdeen.

The price of meat in urban markets is now high enough that livestock production could provide an alternative source of income if Afghani farmers are forced to give up growing opium poppies, says the report, which looked at meat, wool, skin and hide production.

Project leader Iain Wright, Ch

The 2005 soybean growing season provided researchers, growers, and industry representatives with valuable information for 2006, yet there is still a great deal of information needed to understand soybean rust development and management, say plant pathologists with The American Phytopathological Society (APS).

Questions remain on how destructive the disease will be and how it will affect soybean production areas of the Midwest.

“Although soybean rust developed slowly in th

An international team of scientists and technical staff under the leadership of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research has successfully completed the deep ice coring at the Alfred Wegener Institute’s Kohnen Station in Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica. Reaching a depth of 2774 metres, first on-site examinations of the ice core indicate that the ice cored at the deepest 200 metres is very old.

The investigations, carried out as part of the EPICA program (European

Scientists at the University of York have played a crucial role in developing a way of using plants to clean up land contaminated by explosives.

The research, by a team led by Professor Neil Bruce in CNAP (Centre for Novel Agricultural Products) in the University’s Department of Biology, uses micro-organisms found in soil to turn trees and plants into highly-effective pollution-busters. The research findings are published in Nature Biotechnology.

Decades of military activ

Commenting on the Government’s publication today on the formal terms of reference for the consultation stage of the energy review, the UK Chemical Industries Association (CIA) confirmed that it would be making a major contribution to the review.

Stephen Elliott, Director, Business Environment, said:

“This consultation stage is a real chance for all stakeholders to help set the scene for future British energy policy. CIA intends to grab that chance with both hands. We r

The development of a new dielectric model of tundra and forest-tundra for remote probing from space is being performed by Russian researchers from the L.V. Kirensky Institute of Physics, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences (Krasnoyarsk) jointly with the US colleagues from Michigan. The researches are sponsored by the U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation (CRDF) and the Federal Agency for Science and Innovation (Rosnauka). The new model will make basis for more accurate and t

Plans to build a road tunnel to ease congestion near Stonehenge could soon be scrapped threatening the government-backed recovery of one of Britain’s rarest birds.

Two over-ground alternatives to the tunnel – set to be detailed in consultation documents due today – would destroy nesting and roosting sites of the secretive stone-curlew. The bird has two UK strongholds, one of which is the area surrounding the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. The new road plans would also harm prosp

Loss of birds, bees and other pollinators places plants at risk

The decline of birds, bees and other pollinators in the world’s most diverse ecosystems may be putting plants in those areas at risk, according to new research. The finding raises concern that more may have to be done to protect Earth’s most biologically rich areas, scientists say in an article appearing in the Jan. 17 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The anal

UCR graduate student leads research showing how evolution slows recovery of fish population

The practice of harvesting the largest individuals from a fish population introduces genetic changes that harm the overall fish population, a UC Riverside graduate student and colleagues have determined. Removing the large fish over several generations of fish causes the remaining fish in the populations to become progressively smaller, have fewer and smaller eggs with lower survival and g

New Zealand ranks first in the world in environmental performance, according to the Pilot 2006 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) produced by a team of environmental experts at the environment school at Yale University and the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

The 2006 EPI, to be released Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum on January 26, ranks Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom two to five respectively. The top-ranked countries all commi

Women in Britain are happier with ‘non-traditional’ domestic arrangements, according to new Economic and Social Research Council funded research at City University. ‘Our findings contradict Neo-Conservative claims that women would be happier if they went back to being traditional housewives,’ says Professor Rosemary Crompton, who led the research. ‘The recipe for personal happiness, satisfaction with the family and lower stress at home seems to be a combination of liberal attitudes to work outsid

Manchester scientists studying global warming are predicting a much lower rise in sea levels than previously feared.

Researchers say melting glaciers and ice caps will cause just a 0.1m rise in global sea levels by 2100 – less than half the increase of several earlier predictions.

But they show that melting of glacial and mountain areas is accelerating fast leading to flooding and land slides in mountainous regions such as Nepal.

Dr Sarah Raper, a climatologist fro

New research published this week on the evolution of volcanoes sheds light on what lies deep beneath the Earth’s surface. The research, published in Nature, suggests that the plume of hot material that provides Hawaii’s volcanoes with its continuous supply of molten lava originates from a depth of almost 3000 km, at the border between the Earth’s core and its rocky mantle. This is far deeper than had been thought possible by many scientists.

Plumes are hot, narrow currents

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program is placing a new, portable atmospheric laboratory with sophisticated instruments and data systems in Niger, Africa, to gain a better understanding of the potential impacts of Saharan dust on global climate.

Dust from Africa’s Sahara desert–the largest source of dust on the planet–reaches halfway around the globe. Carried by winds and clouds, the dust travels through West African, Mediterranean,

New evidence that events in outer space affect the weather and climate of Earth has been revealed in a study by meteorologists at the University of Reading published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society on Wednesday 18 January.

In their paper ‘Empirical evidence for a non-linear effect of galactic cosmic rays on clouds’, Drs Giles Harrison and David Stephenson suggest that cosmic rays have a significant effect on the Earth’s lower atmosphere – particularly on levels of cloudi

The Sahara has not always been the arid, inhospitable place that it is today – it was once a savannah teeming with life, according to researchers at the Universities of Reading and Leicester.

Eight years of studies in the Libyan desert area of Fazzan, now one of the harshest, most inaccessible spots on Earth, have revealed swings in its climate that have caused considerably wetter periods, lasting for thousands of years, when the desert turned to savannah and lakes provided water f