Peter Jackson’s JRR Tolkien-inspired film trilogy Lord of the Rings features enormous eagles swooping down to rescue Sam and Frodo from a desolate New Zealand landscape masquerading as Mordor. The image of giant eagles flying around New Zealand, while fanciful, is not so far-fetched as it might appear. New genetic data published in the freely-available online journal PLoS Biology this week from researchers at Oxford and Canterbury Universities shed new light on the evolution of the extinc

When Arizona State University’s Central Arizona-Phoenix Long Term Ecological Research Project (CAP LTER) was funded by the National Science Foundation in 1997, more than 50 scientists signed on to do the multidisciplinary research knowing that they were embarking on something unusual – the first ever long-term ecological study of “a human-dominated ecosystem,” aka, a city.

Seven years later, the first phase of the research has been completed and NSF has renewed the proje

Fossil records of the holes drilled in clam shells before and after a mass extinction two million years ago show patterns of predator-prey behavior indicating that although diversity recovered rapidly, the level of competition has not, according to an article in the journal Science.

The study emphasizes a new way of looking at the consequences of extinction and recovery, by closely observing how individual species interact with each other. “Our work shows that scientists have

The newest studies on the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the coast of the Pacific Northwest have identified a “clustering” of great earthquakes of the type that would cause a major tsunami, yielding a historical record with two distinct implications – one that’s good, the other not.

According to scientists at Oregon State University, this subduction zone has just experienced a cluster of four massive earthquakes during the past 1600 years, and if historical trends continue, this cl

Records show an equivalent event on the Oregon coast occurred in 1700

Earthquake-caused tsunamis as severe as those that swept southeast Asia on Sunday have happened in the past off the Oregon coast, according to a University of Oregon geoscientist.

In fact, a tsunami caused by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred on Jan. 26, 1700, wiping out Oregon tribal villages in low-lying coastal estuaries and causing damage as far away as Japan. Ray Weldon, who researches and teac

Common house dust may be an important source of a potentially dangerous class of chemicals called polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), according to an exploratory study* by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Recent studies by others have found that PBDEs have been accumulating in human blood, fat tissue and breast milk.

PBDEs have been widely used in consumer products for years because they

The type of devastating tsunami that struck the southern coast of Asia is entirely possible in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, but might not cause as much loss of life there because of better warning systems, according to experts at Oregon State University.

OSU is home to the Tsunami Wave Basin at the Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory, one of the world’s leading research facilities to study tsunamis and understand their behavior, catastrophic effects and possibl

A longstanding theory that provides much of the basis for our understanding of climate change – that the mile-thick ice sheet covering Antarctica developed because of a shift in ocean currents millions of years ago – has been challenged by Purdue University scientists.

Though climate scientists have theorized for decades that the circulation of warm ocean currents was responsible for keeping Antarctica largely ice-free during the Eocene epoch prior to 35 million years ago, a s

There is a desert in the heart of the South Pacific. Surrounding Easter Island is the purest and bluest seawater on Earth, almost empty of the microscopic phytoplankton at the base of the marine food web. French vessel L’Atalante recently completed a research cruise through this region, its day-to-day route guided by ocean colour satellites.

Viewed from orbit, the colour of the global ocean is not constant but varies considerably. Specially built satellite sensors perceive su

Give a marine snail an easy life, and it will take its time drilling into a clam. Put it under competitive stress, and it will look for a faster route. Those changes, scarred into fossils, show that an unknown catastrophe nearly two million years ago changed the competitive balance in the Western Atlantic and the ecosystem has yet to fully recover, according to research published this week in the journal Science.

In the seagrass meadows of the Gulf of Mexico, Chicoreus and Phyllono

A team led by University of Maine scientists has reported finding a potential link between changes in solar activity and the Earth’s climate. In a paper due to be published in an upcoming volume of the Annals of Glaciology, Paul Mayewski, director of UMaine’s Climate Change Institute, and 11 colleagues from China, Australia and UMaine describe evidence from ice cores pointing to an association between the waxing and waning of zonal wind strength around Antarctica and a chemical signal

Irrigation with wastewater from the canning industry is not harmful to the quality of agricultural soil and may even, in some cases, improve it. This is the conclusion of Iñigo Abdón Virto Quecedo in his PhD thesis defended at the Public University of Navarre.

Permanent and rotational crops

The vegetable canning industries, by the very nature of its processes, produce a considerable volume of low-contaminant effluents.

A research project began in 1996 to determin

Researchers at TU Delft have made progress in the theoretical foundation of a special subsoil imaging technique. This technique could be used to chart underground mineral resources, it is called “acoustic daylight imaging”. The method uses natural acoustic signals, already present in the earth, to create an image of the subsurface layers. This week, Professor Kees Wapenaar will publish an article in the renowned scientific magazine “Physical Review Letters”.

Usually, the compositi

The European Union will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by slightly more than required under the Kyoto Protocol provided that Member States implement all the policies, measures and third-country projects they are planning and several cut emissions by more than they have to.

Latest projections compiled by the European Environment Agency show that the 15 pre-2004 EU Member States (the EU-15) should cut their total emissions to 7.7% below 1990 levels by 2010 on the basis of exis

Hurricanes bring temporary relief to Florida reefs smothered by invasive seaweed

In August, Harbor Branch scientists began a new survey of Florida coral reefs expecting to document the devastating spread of harmful seaweed that has been progressing now for several years, but hurricane havoc has instead led the team to a surprising find. With their first survey nearly completed, it appears all reefs in the path of hurricanes Frances and Jeanne have been largely scoured free of

A new computer program for orchard planning, which can provide maximal profit in specific local conditions, is developed by a team from Krasnodar supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and Foundation for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises. Recommendations offered by the program are based on the data on environmental conditions and soil-climatic requirements of orchard trees, and primarily, stone fruit crops (apricot, peach, cherry).

Potential yields of vari