Scientists at the University of Liverpool have launched a large scale experiment to monitor the impact of climate change on freshwater systems.

Dr Heidrun Feuchtmayr and a team from the School of Biological Sciences are conducting a two year project in collaboration with scientists from Belgium, Germany, Norway, Iceland and Denmark, to assess whether a predicted rise in climate temperature for the UK and parts of Europe will increase the toxicity of algae in the country’s lake

Five international partnerships have recently been awarded funding through ESA’s TIGER Innovators project to develop new ways of applying Earth Observation data as a tool for water resource management in Africa.

-ESA launched the TIGER Initiative in 2002 following the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Focusing on the use of space technology in water resource management in Africa, the primary objective of TIGER is to help African countries overcome proble

An organism widely used for genetics-versus-environment studies has joined the panoply of mice, rats, dogs, humans and other species whose entire genomes have been sequenced.

At the Daphnia Genomics Consortium’s annual meeting in Bloomington this week, Indiana University and Joint Genome Institute scientists announced they’ve completed a “shotgun” sequence for Daphnia pulex, or the water flea, as it’s better known to high school biology students.

“Daphn

A team of scientists has just discovered a new species of mountain triton in the Montseny Nature Reserve. The species has been given the scientific name Calotriton arnoldi. It is the only endemic vertebrate species currently known to exist in Catalonia and a report of the discovery has been published in the December edition of the prestigious Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. The authors are Salvador Carranza, ‘Ramon y Cajal’ researcher from the Department of Animal Biology at the Univer

54% Of Public Vote For More Nuclear Power In Mori Poll

The British public sees the need to tackle climate change: but only reluctantly accepts nuclear power as a part of the solution, overwhelmingly preferring renewables and energy efficiency

As the Government next week begins its major review on the future of energy, an extensive survey published today (17th January) of the British public’s attitudes towards future energy options shows that just over 50% may be prepared

The British Ecological Society has set up an innovative new fund designed to build capacity in ecological science in Africa and Eastern Europe. The Building Capacity for Ecology Fund will make £500,000 available over five years to support the establishment and development of ecological societies in Africa and Eastern Europe.

Learned societies are a vital part of the scientific infrastructure. By setting professional standards and facilitating the exchange of scientific information

Although there were fewer deaths worldwide in 2005 due to earthquakes, more than 89,353 casualties were reported, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and confirmed by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Nearly all of the fatalities for the year, more than 87,000, occurred when a magnitude 7.6 hit Pakistan on Oct. 8.

In 2004, the third deadliest earthquake year on record, over 283,000 perished in the Dec. 26 magnitude 9.0 Sumatra quake a

Pristine Blue, the UK’s first practical non-chlorine water treatment for swimming pools and spas, is officially launched at the SPATEX exhibition on 6th Feb 2006 in Brighton.

Pristine Blue works using a natural copper sulphate solution used at levels safe enough to drink. Overnight, it can banish algae and bacteria, with no noxious odours, aggravated eyes or skin, and no damage to hair, costumes, pool liners or equipment.

Pristine Blue is already used in 600,000 US pools

Scientists in Sheffield working on the fundamental biological processes of plants could make significant difference to the lives of farmers in many parts of the world. Using model plant species, such as the tiny weed Arabidopsis, the researchers have uncovered one of the processes used by the plants to protect themselves from potentially lethal environmental conditions. Their discoveries are now being applied to improve the productivity of bean farmers in South America and rice producers in Asi

A flotilla of space-weather satellites – ESA’s Cluster and NASA’s ACE and Wind – observed for the first time steady large-scale jets of charged particles in the solar wind between the Sun and Earth.

When such huge jets of particles impact on Earth’s magnetic shield, they could cause powerful magnetic storms on our planet. Understanding the mechanism behind these phenomena – called ‘magnetic reconnection’ – is also fundamental to many explosive phenomena, such as solar flares, p

Following three months of around-the-clock work, the Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater Deep Drilling Project successfully completed its operations, extracting more than a mile-long segment of rocks and sediments from the Earth. On Dec. 4, the drill bit reached a final depth of 5,795 ft (1.1 miles, 1.77 kilometers) within the structure of the crater.

The impact crater was formed about 35 million years ago when a rock from space struck the Earth at hypersonic speed. Scientists have only recently

Swansea University ecologist Dr Patricia Lee has won a British Ecological Society (BES) grant to unlock the secrets of the millions of eggs held in museum collections worldwide.

The bird collection at London’s Natural History Museum alone includes more than a million skins and eggs, collected over the past 200 years and representing 95% of all known bird species. While the skins have proved a good source of DNA and have been widely used by scientists to study many aspects of b

Hit-and-run collisions between embryonic planets during a critical period in the early history of the Solar System may account for some previously unexplained properties of planets, asteroids, and meteorites, according to researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who describe their findings in a paper to appear in the January 12 issue of the journal Nature.

The four “terrestrial” or rocky planets (Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury) are the products of an initial

Why does it take so long for fish stocks to recover from over-fishing? This problem has been worrying both scientists and fishery managers who expect stocks to quickly rebound when fishing stops.

Now a research team from Stony Brook University believes they have an answer: continually harvesting the largest and oldest fish (as fishing regulations typically require) alters not only size but also numerous other genetic characteristics that are harmful to the overall population.

A new report that links global warming to the recent extinction of dozens of amphibian species in tropical America is more evidence of a large phenomena that may affect broad regions, many animal species and ultimately humans, according to researchers at Oregon State University.

A study being published Thursday in the journal Nature finds compelling evidence that global climate change created favorable conditions for a pathogenic fungus in Central and South America. That

A University of Alberta scientist is part of a research team offering the first evidence that global warming is behind an infectious disease epidemic wiping out entire frog populations and forcing many species to extinction. The work is published in the journal “Nature.”

“When we talk about climate change, there is so much focus on industrialized countries, but people are ignoring other ecosystems that may be extremely sensitive to climate change, such as dry and cloud forest e