The Prince of Wales and record-breaking sailor, Ellen MacArthur, are together to trumpet global efforts to save one of the world’s most endangered yet iconic birds.

Nineteen of the 21 species of albatross are facing extinction because of a fishing method that kills 300,000 seabirds and hundreds of thousands of sharks and turtles each year.

Longline fishing, much of it by illegal pirates, has also caused massive declines in the much-prized Patagonian toothfish and several

The “dead zone” area of the Gulf of Mexico – a region that annually suffers from low oxygen which can result in huge marine life losses – has appeared much earlier this year, meaning it could be potentially larger in 2005 and affect marine life more adversely than normal, researchers are reporting.

A team of scientists from Texas A&M University, Texas A&M at Galveston, Louisiana State University and NASA recently surveyed the dead zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico and their fi

The European Union, with the aim of conserving resources, protecting the environment and overseeing the health and welfare of their citizens, has been opting for some years now for sustainable development as one of its top priorities. The reduction of energy consumption has been identified as one of the aspects that can contribute most in this respect. This is why the EU has financed the Vacuum Insulating Panels (VIP) project, one in which GAIKER has participated in and the object of which is

The ability to observe the health of a field from images taken remotely by satellites or aircraft may have a positive economic and environmental impact on plant disease management, say plant pathologists with The American Phytopathological Society (APS).

According to Karl Steddom, associate research scientist at the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station in Amarillo, Texas, “remote sensing” in plant disease management is the practice of gathering information about a crop’s he

It’s ‘plastic please’ when it comes to scientists’ choice of pesticide-water sampling devices in field crops.

Wide acceptance has been building for the compact plastic disks over glass containers which are used to collect water samples and determine threatening levels of pesticide runoff. Experts say the glass containers were prone to break during transit from field to the laboratory, and have allowed chemicals to degrade prior to being analyzed.

The disks

A Johns Hopkins University graduate student may have figured out why rates of extinction were so low for many of the major groups of marine life during one of the greatest ice ages of them all, which occurred from about 330 million to 290 million years ago, late in the Paleozoic Era.

The likely answer: because those aquatic life forms that did survive during this era were singularly equipped to endure severe fluctuations in temperature and sea levels. Those that were not died i

A new ESA study predicts that the devastating Sumatran earthquake, which resulted in the tragic tsunami of 28 December 2004, will have left a ‘scar’ on Earth’s gravity that could be detected by a sensitive new satellite, due for launch next year.

The Sumatran earthquake measured 9 on the Richter scale and caused widespread devastation and death when it struck unexpectedly late last year. Thankfully, earthquakes of this magnitude are rare events, taking place perhaps once every tw

Exposure to air pollutants increases the risk of fatal myocardial infarction (MI), particularly pollutants caused by motor traffic. This is the conclusion of a new thesis published by Karolinska Institutet.

Cardiovascular diseases are the most common cause of death in Sweden and other Western European countries. Known risk factors include age, gender, hereditariness, smoking, hypertension and high blood lipid levels. However, the part played by the external environment still remain

Tensions between fishing communities and marine scientists over research into fisheries conservation have been overcome in a unique project sponsored by the ESRC in the islands of the Orkney archipelago.

The study was led by Professor Jonathan Side of the Heriot Watt University’s Orkney- based International Centre for Island Technology, and focussed on an inshore creel fishery for lobsters and crabs. It brought unprecedented participation from all sides of the debate while in

Instead of sequencing the genome of one organism, why not sequence a drop of sea water, a gram of farm soil or even a sunken whale skeleton? Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and their US collaborators have done just that, and the result is a new appreciation for the rich diversity of life that exists in the most unlikely places (Science, April 22, 2005).

Bacteria make up the greatest mass of life on earth by far and play a crucial role

The first comprehensive study of glaciers around the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula reveals the real impact of recent climate change.

Results from the study by researchers at British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) published this week in the journal Science, show that over the last 50 years 87% of 244 glaciers studied have retreated, and that average retreat rates have accelerated.

BAS and USGS analysed more than 2000 aerial photographs dating fr

Global warming link remains elusive

The first comprehensive study of glaciers on Antarctic Peninsula has uncovered widespread glacier retreat and suggests that recent climate change on the peninsula is responsible. Eighty-seven percent of the 244 marine glaciers have retreated over the last 50 years, a new study says. The widespread glacier retreat began at the northern, warmer tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. As atmospheric temperatures rose along the peninsula — more than 2.5 de

Uranium-series dating shows cave engravings oldest in Britain

A team of scientists from Bristol, The Open and Sheffield Universities have proved the engravings at Creswell Crags to be greater than 12,800 years old, making them Britain’s oldest rock art.

Creswell Crags which straddles the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border is riddled with caves which have preserved evidence of human activity during the last Ice Age. Recently, engravings on the walls and ceiling wer

When Kathryn Bard reached through the small hole that opened in a hillside along Egypt’s Red Sea coast, her hand touched nearly 4,000 years of history.

The opening that Bard, an associate professor of archaeology at Boston University, and her team’s co-leader Rodolfo Fattovich, a professor of archaeology at Italy’s University of Naples “L’Orientale,” discovered was the entrance to a large, man-made cave. Two days later at a site about 30 meters beyond this cav

The strength of hurricane activity striking the United States during the main hurricane season can now be predicted with significant accuracy thanks to a new computer model developed by scientists at University College London (UCL).

The model, unveiled in a paper in the 21 April issue of the journal Nature, will enable government, public, emergency planning bodies and insurers with US interests to receive warning in early August of the likelihood of either high or low hurrica

Potentially links climate with mountain building

A Dartmouth researcher is part of a team that has discovered a new active “thrust fault” at the base of the Himalaya in Nepal. This new fault likely accommodates some of the subterranean pressure caused by the continuing collision of the Indian subcontinent with Asia.

The study, titled “Active out-of-sequence thrust faulting in the central Nepalese Himalaya,” will be published in the April 21 issue of the journal Nature.