Cuvier’s beaked whales (Ziphius cavirostris) are an unusual sighting in most parts of the World, but are seen regularly in the Bay of Biscay. On a recent crossing of the Bay, a pod of 8 Cuvier’s beaked whales were observed to be displaying very unusual behaviour.

Cuvier’s beaked whales are amongst the more unusual and rare cetacean sightings globally. Like many species of beaked whale, they are known to inhabit deep-water canyons and slope waters, which tend to be found far from

The intense mechanical testing period is finally over for the CryoSat satellite, and with launch just a couple of months away – the very last checks are being made before the spacecraft is packed up and shipped to the launch site in Plesetsk, Russia.

During the last 12 months the satellite has been undergoing stringent mechanical and environmental tests at the Space Test Centre at IABG (Industrieanlagen-Betriebsgesellschaft mbH) in Ottobrunn, Germany. Unfortunately, some concerns w

NASA satellites improve understanding of urban effects on climate and weather

Just how does society’s desire to live in densely populated areas have the potential to change our Earth’s climate? According to a new paper, satellites can help us answer that question.

“More and more people live in cities. This means that cities will grow rapidly over the next several decades. Evidence continues to mount that cities affect the climate,” said J. Marshall Shepherd, Deputy

The UK Chemical Industries Association (CIA) announced today that the chemical sector has achieved and exceeded its 2004 Climate Change Agreement (CCA) target.

The chemical sector has improved its energy efficiency by 19.5% since 1998, this is equivalent to an annual saving of around 3.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

After adjustment for members’ emissions trading, the target increased from 12.1% to 18.9%. The sector has therefore exceeded its target by a

Basking sharks are much more canny predators than previously thought, ecologists have discovered. According to new research published online by the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Animal Ecology, basking sharks are able to reverse their normal pattern of diving at dawn and surfacing at dusk in order to foil the attempts of zooplankton trying to evade capture. As well as shedding new light on basking behaviour, the results have important implications for the conservation of shark speci

Scientists at the University of Bath will be taking part in an international £4.2 million ($7.5 million) research project that could help millions of people avoid starvation.

The BioCassava Plus project will improve the nutritional and storage properties of cassava (Manihot esculenta), the primary food source for more than 250 million Africans and a substantial portion of the diet of nearly 600 million people worldwide.

The research is funded by the Bill and Melinda Ga

The AZTI-Tecnalia laboratories have launched new methodologies for analysing parameters that, up to now, have not usually been analysed for wines – ocratoxine A and histamine. The design of these new analysis methodologies arose from the need for adaptation to new market demands in the wine-producing world.

To make an analytical determination of Ocratoxine A, AZTI has launched a HPLC technique based on fluorescence detection for wines. Ocratoxine A (a mycotoxin produced by various

Researchers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and several other government and academic institutions have created four new supercomputer simulations that for the first time combine their mathematical computer models of the atmosphere, ocean, land surface and sea ice. These simulations are the first field tests of the new Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF), an innovative software system that promises to improve and accelerate U.S. predictive capability ranging from short-ter

Once common wading birds in south-east England look set to be amongst the casualties of this year’s drought.

Numbers of successful breeding lapwing, redshank and snipe have dropped by up to 80 per cent at five RSPB reserves in Sussex and Kent. At Brading Marshes, an RSPB reserve on the Isle of Wight, low spring and summer rainfall has left land parched. Redshanks have gone completely while just one pair of lapwing remains.

The news comes just a week after Southern Wat

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific and technical decisions in assessing risks to human health from pollution at a Superfund site in the Coeur d’Alene River Basin have been generally sound, says a new report from the National Academies’ National Research Council. And the agency’s remediation plans for residential areas should adequately protect residents against the most serious health threats, provided floods do not recontaminate cleaned-up areas. However,

A new study conducted in the Hawaiian Islands has revealed that landscape and erosion play crucial roles in determining soil fertility in tropical ecosystems.

“This study is the first to accurately predict the distribution of nutrients across a complex tropical forest landscape, and then to detect these shifts in nutrient status using airborne sensors,” says Stanford University graduate student Stephen Porder, lead author of the study, which will be published in this week’s onli

Fire is an important agent of transformation in the Amazon landscape. Every year, low intensity fires burn thousands of square miles of Amazon forest. To study the effects of these fires on the forest, and the forests’ ability to recover from repeated burning, Woods Hole Research Center scientists will burn two and a half square kilometers of forest in the transition forest of northern Mato Grosso state, at Fazenda Tanguro in Querencia, from late August into early September.

The chance discovery of a vast ecosystem beneath the collapsed Larsen Ice Shelf will allow scientists to explore the uncharted life below Antarctica’s floating ice shelves and further probe the origins of life in extreme environments. Researchers discovered the sunless habitat after a recent underwater video study examining a deep glacial trough in the northwestern Weddell Sea following the sudden Larsen B shelf collapse in 2002.

“This is definitely the biggest thing I’

A futuristic design by Faber Maunsell and Hugh Broughton Architects has won the competition for the new British Antarctic Survey (BAS) Halley Research Station. In a very close-run contest, three finalists presented their ideas to a Jury Panel, technical advisory panel and BAS scientists.

Director of BAS, Professor Chris Rapley, CBE said, ‘This was an incredibly tough choice for the Jury Panel to make. We were presented with three outstanding schemes – each one of them creating

An extremely rare “royal” turtle narrowly escaped a trip to a Chinese soup-pot, thanks to a tiny microchip implanted in its skin, according to experts from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), who rediscovered the species four years ago in Cambodia.

Wildlife inspectors discovered the 33-pound (15 kg) turtle in a crate of confiscated wildlife in Vietnam, where smugglers planned to send the shipment on to China. The inspectors used a special reading device to de

Changing environmental conditions in the Canadian Rockies are stifling the mating choices of butterflies in the region, say University of Alberta researchers.

Smaller and less abundant alpine meadows–largely the result of human activities–are diminishing the alpine butterfly gene pool, creating a pattern that could lead to the butterflies being less able to survive, said Dr. Jens Roland, a biological scientist at the University of Alberta and an author of a paper on the subject