Mechanically-isolated wood fibres show several different properties in comparison to chemically-isolated fibres. This is one of the most recent results of a project funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna. The project yields significant findings on the structural changes in wood fibres after exposure to moisture and tension. The current results are important for both the structural analysis of wood as well as for the invest

Beach management research based on the Angus, Scotland, coastline is causing ripples in California, thanks to the work of an Abertay postgraduate.

Andrew Staines, (age 26), researching beach management systems for his PhD, has forged a link with Pepperdine University in Malibu. The link could prove important not only for Scottish-Californian links, but also for bathing water quality in the North Sea and the Pacific in years to come.

Andrew’s research, currently funded by Ca

Broken sewers, flooded industrial plants and dead bodies are all likely to blame for poisoning the waters being drained from New Orleans.

But the water – and the muck it is leaving behind — also owes its contamination to a source as mundane as it is unexpected: Toxins common in most urban environments that made their way en masse into the water as it stagnated atop the city.

So says a University of Florida professor who has spent years studying the harmful contaminants

Scientists at the University of York have been awarded nearly £500,000 to help to establish a centre in the Atlantic Ocean to monitor gases in the atmosphere.

Dr Lucy Carpenter and Dr Alastair Lewis, of the University’s Department of Chemistry, have been awarded £487,070 by the National Environment Research Council (NERC) to set up an atmospheric observatory on the Cape Verde Islands.

The York chemists, who have been awarded the money under the NERC’s Surfa

Marine organisms hidden in caves, such as sponges, play an extremely important role in the nutrient cycle of coral reefs. Indeed they probably play the most important role of all, says Dutch biologist Sander Scheffers. And that is valuable information for nature conservationists who want to preserve the coral reefs.

In order to protect coral reefs it is important to understand how both the reefs and their environment function. Researchers often concentrate on subjects such as p

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina — probably the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history — a leading ecologist says that one of the best things that could happen to New Orleans and the rest of southern Louisiana and Mississippi would be more rain.

“People might think I’m kidding, but I’m not,” said Dr. Seth R. Reice, associate professor of biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences.

“The floodwater still covering much

How long does paper last?

A young Sydney researcher has been digging up landfill sites, and has shown that burying wood products, such as floor boards and furniture, can effectively prevent them from contributing to global warming.

The work shows that timber can be a greenhouse friendly material, if the products are properly disposed of at the end of their life.

For the past five years, Fabiano Ximenes and colleagues from the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenh

The Australian lungfish—one of the world’s oldest fishes and related to our ancient ancestors—may have been viewing rivers in technicolour long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Recent work by postgraduate student Helena Bailes at the University of Queensland Australia, has found these unusual fish have genes for five different forms of visual pigment in their eyes. Humans only have three.

Helena is one of 13 early-career researchers who have presented their work to the

Weeding is a major problem for ecological growers since it is both expensive and time-consuming. New robot technology may have the solution. In a new dissertation, Björn Åstrand, from Halmstad University in Sweden, presents how weeds can be removed mechanically -with the fully automated robot Lukas.

In ecological cultivation, weeding is performed manually, entailing not only economic burdens for many growers but also logistic ones -it’s hard to find people willing to do this wor

The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has nearly doubled over the past 35 years, even though the total number of hurricanes has dropped since the 1990s, according to a study by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The shift occurred as global sea surface temperatures have increased over the same period. The research will appear in the September 16 issue of the journal Science, published by the AAAS, the science

Scientists using satellite imagery found that at least 23 percent of the water released from the mouth of the Mississippi River from July through September 2004 traveled quite a distance – into the Gulf of Mexico, around the Florida Keys, and into the Atlantic Ocean.

The researchers combined data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites with information collected from ships to study the water discharge, appearing

She went to investigate the local ecology. Yet during her field work on East Java, Dutch biologist Ansje Löhr became increasingly involved with the local residents, whose harvests failed and whose health was deteriorating due to extremely acidified and polluted river water. Löhr has recently received a second grant to help the Javanese population.

Löhr’s Ph.D. study was part of a larger project on the Ijen Crater Lake on East Java, Indonesia. This crater lake is the large

Marine organisms hidden in caves, such as sponges, play an extremely important role in the nutrient cycle of coral reefs. Indeed they probably play the most important role of all, says Dutch biologist Sander Scheffers. And that is valuable information for nature conservationists who want to preserve the coral reefs.

In order to protect coral reefs it is important to understand how both the reefs and their environment function. Researchers often concentrate on subjects such as p

Category 4 hurricane could cause a storm surge of as much as 25 feet in Tampa Bay, according to a University of Central Florida researcher who is looking at the risks Florida cities face from tidal surges and flooding.

Scott Hagen, an associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and his team of graduate students have started analyzing the potential effects of a Category 4 hurricane striking the Tampa Bay region. They ran their storm surge model with wind and pressure

Researchers have uncovered new evidence of a sudden, fatal dose of global warming 180 million years ago during the time of the dinosaurs. The scientists’ findings, published in Nature, 14 September, could provide vital clues about the climate change we are experiencing today.

PhD student Dave Kemp, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, and supervisors Drs. Angela Coe and Anthony Cohen from the Open University Department of Earth Sciences, along with Dr. Lorenz Sc

The notion of sharing your grandmother’s new sexual partner might seem unappealing to us, but a study of wild greater horseshoe bats reveals that female relatives regularly share male mates, yet nearly always avoid their blood relatives.

The study, published in this week’s Nature, was led by Dr Stephen Rossiter as part of a long-term collaboration between scientists at Queen Mary, University of London, and the University of Bristol. The study used genetic analysis to look at bre