The plans for construction of the Eastern Siberia – Pacific Ocean oil-pipe line not only threaten the existence of the last population of the Far Eastern leopard but also Lake Baikal. According to the latest project, the oil-pipe line will go along the route of the Baikal-Amur trank line, less than a kilometer from the northern extremity of the Lake –the town of Severobaikalsk.

“According to the designers’ estimates, in case of an emergency in the pipe line, up to four thousand

A satellite surveillance zone within the southern Indian Ocean is helping protect the endangered Patagonian toothfish from pirate fishing vessels.

Perched between Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica, the windswept French territory of the Kerguelen Islands is one of the remotest places on Earth. Even so, fishing vessels are lured there by the prospect of catching one valuable species found in its surrounding waters – the Patagonian toothfish, also known as Chilean sea bass, or

A research centre at the University of York dedicated to realising the potential of plant-based renewable resources to make products needed by society, has been awarded one of The Queen’s Anniversary Prizes for Higher and Further Education.

The Royal accolade for CNAP (Centre for Novel Agricultural Products) announced at St James’s Palace on Thursday 17 November is the second to be conferred on the University in less than 10 years. It was previously awarded to the Universi

The air in Fallon, Nev. has significantly higher levels of tungsten and cobalt than does the air in neighboring towns, according to a new research report. The research suggests that the metals in the air come from a point source within Fallon, a community of about 8,000 located in Churchill County about 60 miles east of Reno, Nev.

The finding that Fallon’s air differs from nearby towns might have medical implications. Since 1997, 16 cases of childhood leukemia have been dia

More than 100 of Europes’s leading ocean researchers meet at Amsterdam, The Netherlands, during 22-24 November 2005 in order to assess the ocean’s role in taking up anthropogenic carbon dioxide – the major driving agent for a human induced climate change. This assessment is carried out through the largest European funded research project on marine carbon research ever: the Integrated Project CARBOOCEAN.

The ocean is considered as the major ultimate sink for the atmospheric greenho

USGS scientists have a clearer picture of global shifts in water availability after examining a century of streamflow measurements from 165 locations around the world. Simulations from an ensemble of 12 global climate models compared favorably with the historical streamflow data. The scientists discovered that climate models have significant relevance in simulating historical long-term trends in streamflow around the world. That finding lends credibility to the same models’ streamflow forec

The EU is currently adopting measures to recover hake and Norway lobster stocks to sustainable levels within a period of ten years. Many national and international initiatives are targeting a sustainable management of fish stocks all over the world. What is the state of fish production worldwide?

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has produced recently a scientific consensus report on the state of the world’s fishery resources. The report was drafted by hi

In London on Tuesday, the British National Space Centre (BNSC) formally became a Partner Agency of the International Charter ’Space and Major Disasters’ on behalf of the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) Consortium.

This means BNSC will participate in the Consortium’s adherence to the Charter by performing certain functions during an initial period of two years. BNSC has already provided Project Manager support to previous Charter activations in liaison with ESA, inc

The Tyrrhenian Sea is getting warmer and saltier and the patterns of sea bottom fauna are changing. These are just some preliminary findings our marine scientists have discovered from the CIESM SUB-1 cruise. CIESM is launching its second “multi-disciplinary” research cruise on December 5-22, from Messina, Italy. You could join scientists from nine different marine Institutes and Universities, to monitor these changes that are taking place. Scientists will be mapping deep-sea mounts, which are

The University of York is to lead a new group set up to explore the potential of products from the biosphere to reduce the global economy’s dependence on fossil reserves and oil.

Bioscience for Business, a Knowledge Transfer Network, chaired by Professor Dianna Bowles, Director of CNAP, is a combination of research expertise and commercial know-how, bringing together members with interests in micro-organisms, land plants and marine and freshwater organisms, and their industria

The Chemical Industries Association (CIA) today applauded the Environment Agency on their draft Chemical Sector Plan. The Plan – to be viewed as work in progress – aims to improve environmental management and performance within the chemical industry and its immediate supply chain. It goes beyond what is currently achieved through regulation, recognizing the significant contribution made by voluntary initiatives.

Ten environmental Indicators of Performance have been selected to monitor th

Scientists at the John Innes Centre (JIC) [1] in Norwich, UK, report today a breakthrough in understanding how crop plants use daylength to ensure they flower at the right time of year. In an article published in the international journal Science, they describe a gene that controls how barley reacts to the length of the day and thus controls when it flowers.

Most plants flower at a particular time of the year and researchers have known for a long time that plants use cues from their

Satellite images show that, after decades of stability, a major glacier draining the Greenland ice sheet has dramatically increased its speed and retreated nearly five miles in recent years. These changes could contribute to rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet and cause the global sea level to rise faster than expected, according to researchers studying the glacier.

A paper describing these findings will be published this month in Geophysical Research Letters. The study focused

Nematodes, such as the stem nematode, and fungi, such as white rot, are particularly harmful for onion crops in the Netherlands: they cause rot. Soil samples are investigated to detect this; a labour-intensive and expensive operation. Together with the Laboratory for Nematology (University of Wageningen) the company Blgg has developed a molecular technique to detect the stem nematode and white rot in soil samples.

Agricultural laboratory Blgg will start using the new system in N

High-tech in Earth System Science at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany

Record-breaking high-tech has been successfully employed in Earth System Science at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) in Hamburg, Germany.

– The largest database in the world under the free Linux operating system has been installed in Hamburg by the Wold Data Centre for Climate (WDCC) and the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ) . This is confirmed in the inter

Record database at the German Climate Computing Centre’s World Data Centre for Climate

The World Data Centre for Climate (WDCC) and the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ) in Hamburg run the largest database in the world under the free Linux operating system. This is confirmed in the international ranking list of the world’s largest databases published by the Winter Corporation in September. The WDCC database at the DKRZ has an inconceivable volume of almost 220 te