Climate change and the future of air travel

Researchers are investigating how air travel can be adapted to ease its impact on the environment.

The investigation focuses on how aircraft can avoid creating vapour trails, also known as contrails. These spindly threads of condensation may not seem important but some persist for hours and behave in the same way as high altitude cirrus clouds, trapping warmth in the atmosphere and exacerbating global warming.

Air travel

The natural vegetation covering the globe looks like it does because of the climate, doesn’t it? Forests are found where water is abundant and it is not too cold, deserts are found where it is dry. This is what our intuition tells us – but it is not always true.

New research carried out by Bond, Woodward and Midgley from University of Cape Town, University of Sheffield and the South African National Biodiversity Institute of and published in the February 2005 issue of &#14

A model of the leak dynamics of the oil tanker, Prestige, that sunk off the coast of Spain in 2002, may help assess recovery and cleanup methods for future tanker accidents, according to an international team of researchers.

“We believe that 14,000 metric tons (15,400 British tons) of oil were recovered from the tanker using the shuttle-bag system, and that between 16,000 (17,600) and 23,000 (25,300) tons of oil are still in the ship,” says Dr. Bernd J. Haupt, senior research as

Females on top: Three Steps to Emancipation Classical polyandry occurs when a female breeds with several males who will raise their offspring alone. New research suggests that three evolutionary steps are crucial for this type of mating system with reversed sex roles to develop.

Firstly, males take on care of the eggs (the reasons why differ between fishes and birds).

Secondly, females become able to lay more eggs than a male can accommodate.

Thirdly, females compete

Many rivers and streams in the United States are believed to contain a toxic antimicrobial chemical whose environmental fate was never thoroughly scrutinized despite large-scale production and usage for almost half a century, according to an analysis conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The chemical, triclocarban, has been widely used for decades in hand soaps and other cleaning products, but rarely was monitored for or detected in the environment. The

The Institute of Food Science & Technology, through its Public Affairs and Technical & Legislative Committees, has authorised the following Information Statement, dated January 2005. This cancels and replaces that dated June 2000.

Summary

The term “phytosterols” covers plant sterols and plant stanols. Plant sterols are naturally occurring substances present in the diet principally as minor components of vegetable oils. Plant stanols, occurring in nature at a lower l

For the last three years evidence has been building that the impact of a comet or asteroid triggered the biggest mass extinction in Earth history, but new research from a team headed by a University of Washington scientist disputes that notion.

In a paper published Jan. 20 by Science Express, the online version of the journal Science, the researchers say they have found no evidence for an impact at the time of “the Great Dying” 250 million years ago. Instead, their research indi

Newly published North Carolina State University research into the evolution of birds shows the first definitive fossil proof linking close relatives of living birds to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Research by paleontologist Dr. Julia A. Clarke, an assistant professor in the marine, earth and atmospheric sciences department at NC State, and colleagues provides unprecedented fossil proof that some close cousins to living bird species coexisted with dinosaurs more than

Some massive earthquakes like the one that generated the recent tsunami in South Asia are preceded by slight sinking along nearby coastlines two to five years before the rupture, according to a new study by scientists from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys.

If coastal subsidence is common before subduction zone quakes, areas such as those ringing the Pacific Rim could be on th

Livermore researchers have determined the Karakorum fault in Tibet, a feature formed by the same tectonic “collision” that caused the recent tsunami, has slipped 10 millimeters per year during the last 140,000 years.

Earlier research by outside scientists using satellite radar interferometry (InSAR) conducted over a decadal time scale indicated that the Karakorum fault and the Karakax segment of the Altyn Tagh fault in western Tibet are essentially inactive.

But Live

What is the world coming to? An unsuspecting reef fish steps up to have its parasites removed by its favourite cleaner fish, the bluestreak cleaner wrasse, but instead of a thorough going over, it gets a nasty nip from the cleverly disguised bluestriped fangblenny, intent on a quick feed.

Mimics in nature have usually evolved to resemble foul-tasting animals, in a bid to protect themselves from predators, but the bluestriped fangblenny fish mimics a model -the bluestreak cleaner wras

Scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and seven other institutions have unearthed skeletal fossils of a human ancestor believed to have lived about 4.5 million years ago. The fossils, described in this week’s Nature (Jan. 20), will help scientists piece together the mysterious transformation of primitive chimp-like hominids into more human forms.

The fossils were retrieved from the Gona Study Area in northern Ethiopia, only one of two sites to yield fossil remains o

New research suggests that climate warming may be occurring even faster than previously recognised

A long standing puzzle that has haunted climate researchers looking at the fate of carbon stored in the world’s soils, has now been resolved. The research suggests that climate warming may be occurring even faster than previously recognised.

The international team of researchers, led by Bristol University and reporting in Nature [20 January 2005], show that an apparent

Some anticipated the ’collision of the century’: the vast, drifting B15-A iceberg was apparently on collision course with the floating pier of ice known as the Drygalski ice tongue. Whatever actually happens from here, Envisat’s radar vision will pierce through Antarctic clouds to give researchers a ringside seat.

A collision was predicted to have already occurred by now by some authorities, but B-15A’s drift appears to have slowed markedly in recent days,

Far northern rivers are discharging increasing amounts of freshwater into the Arctic Ocean, due to intensified precipitation caused by global warming, say researchers at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in the United Kingdom.

Water exchange between the ocean, atmosphere, and land is called the global hydrological cycle. As Earth’s climate warms, the rate of this exchange is expected to increase. As part of this process, high-latitude precipitation and, c

Using advanced remote-sensing techniques from a U-2 surveillance plane and field studies, scientists from the Carnegie Institution Department of Global Ecology have for the first time determined large-scale interactions between ecosystems and the climate during the process of desertification. The study, to be published in the January 2005 issue of Global Change Biology, is a milestone both for the new methods employed and for understanding what is happening as agricultural and grazing lands chan