With the antennae to the ground, the female shore crab hunts for prince charming. The olfactory organs are contained within the antennae of crabs. To the shore crab, odours and tastes form the letters of the language of love. The role of chemical communication in the love life of shore crabs has been charted in a new dissertation from Lund University in Sweden.

Mattias Ekerholm at the department of Cell and Organism Biology, Lund University in Sweden has studied the role of odou

Joint press release: Natural Environment Research Council and Queen’s University Belfast

Research from Queen’s University Belfast, published today in the journal Science, has given new meaning to the ‘north-south divide’. It has shown that one breed of European songbird is bucking the trend to travel south for the winter and is opting to migrate to the chillier climes of Britain and Ireland instead. The research also indicates that birds over-wintering in the British Isl

Extent of forest degradation may be twice as high as previously estimated

Human activities are degrading the Amazonian forest at twice the rate previously estimated, suggests a new study that adds the effects of logging to those of clear-cutting. The research appears in the 21 October issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

Until now, satellite-based methods for measuring deforestation across large areas have only been capable of

It sounds like science fiction, but New Mexico State University researchers are testing advanced eye-scanning technology on cattle as part of a national tracking system for animal health.

“Retinal scans are part of a growing technological trend in cattle identification,” said Manny Encinias, livestock specialist at NMSU’s Clayton Livestock Research Center. “It painlessly flashes a beam of light into the eyeball and records the pattern of veins in the eye.”

Each reti

Finnish farm income in 2005 will the lowest in years, according to provisional figures from MTT Agrifood Research Finland. Total income for the farming industry is down by 8% compared with 2004 mainly due to higher input costs.

Farm income for this year is provisionally forecast at €980 million, compared with €1.07 billion in 2004, and an average of €1.10 billion for the period 2000-2004. The farm income figure calculated by MTT indicates compensation for the labour input and capital investe

The deadly landslide that killed 10 people and destroyed approximately 30 homes in La Conchita, California last January is but a tiny part of a much larger slide, called the Rincon Mountain slide, discovered by Larry D. Gurrola, geologist and graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The slide started many thousands of years ago and will continue generating slides in the future, reported Gurrola at the national meeting of the Geological Society of America today in Salt Lake

The tracks of a previously unknown, two-legged swimming dinosaur have been identified along the shoreline of an ancient inland sea that covered Wyoming 165 million years ago, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder graduate student.

Debra Mickelson of CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department said the research team identified the tracks of the six-foot-tall, bipedal dinosaur at a number of sites in northern Wyoming, including the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation

Rapidly fluctuating wind gusts blowing over mountains and hills can create “hotspots” high in the atmosphere and significantly affect regional air temperatures. A research paper to be published this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Space Physics reports that the actions of such winds can create high-frequency acoustic waves and could stimulate a 1000-Kelvin [1,000-degree Celsius; 2,000-degree Fahrenheit]spike in a short period of time in the thermosphere, at an altitude of 200-300 k

Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory’s Marine Meteorology Division in Monterey, CA, (NRL-Monterey), working with researchers from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and the National Geophysical Data Center, presented the first satellite detection of a phenomenon known as the “milky sea.” The satellite observations were corroborated by a ship-based account. This research was published in the October 4, 2005, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Climate warming brought on in part by human activities is producing major ecological changes in remote arctic lakes at an alarming rate, according to new University of Alberta research–the first study to show a whole lake biological response to warming in these waters. Even in the most remote, pristine parts of the earth–far from the direct influence of human activities–changes are occurring in entire ecosystems, says Dr. Neal Michelutti, a post-doctoral fellow in the U of A’s Faculty

Green lanes(1) are significantly more attractive to birds than your average hedgerow, according to the findings of new research from Staffordshire University.

The study was conducted by PhD student Mike Walker who carried out the research in Cheshire over three years.

Mike found green lanes had almost treble the number of bird species as hedgerows. As green lanes are made of two parallel hedges he compared the abundance of birds in 50 metres of green lane with 100 metres o

A new study of wild chimpanzees shows that the biggest predictor of territorial boundary patrols is the number of males in the group. The more males in the group, the more often they will patrol their territory.

Chimpanzees will sometimes attack and kill their neighbors during the rarely observed boundary patrols, said John Mitani, professor of anthropology at University of Michigan and co-author of the paper “Correlates of Territorial Boundary Patrol Behavior in Wild Chimpanze

Virginia Tech Geoscientists Patricia Dove and Nizhou Han have demonstrated that crystals dissolve and grow by the same set of analogous ’reversed’ mechanisms. Previously, the scientific community had long-maintained that growth and dissolution could not be unified into a single framework of understanding. The new evidence is certain to overturn that perception.

Dove, Han, and James J. De Yoreo of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report their research in the Oct.

New high-resolution images of mid-latitude Mars are revealing glacier-formed landscapes far from the Martian poles, says a leading Mars researcher.

Conspicuous trains of debris in valleys, arcs of debris on steep slopes and other features far from the polar ice caps bear striking similarities to glacial landscapes of Earth, says Brown University’s James Head III. When combined with the latest climate models and orbital calculation for Mars, the geological features make a comp

Something remarkable happened on the island closest to the epicenter of the great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake last December: Only seven of the island’s 78,000 inhabitants died. This is despite the fact tsunamis hit the island only eight minutes after the quake, despite the destruction of many Simuelue villages, and despite the lack of an official tsunami warning system and little in the way of telecommunications.

Why were the lives of Simuelue islanders spared when all around the I

Here’s one way to win a debate: Start an argument with folks who aren’t particularly talented debaters. Then keep them on the defensive with complicated, highly philosophical spurious attacks and baffling red herring arguments. Finally, before they have finished responding, pull the rug out from under them with a well-planned political end-run that trumps the whole debate.

That basically sums up the strategy being employed by the Intelligent Design (ID) movement as it con