Two hundred and fifty million years ago, ninety percent of marine species disappeared and life on land suffered greatly during the world’s largest mass extinction. The cause of this great dying has baffled scientists for decades, and recent speculations invoke asteroid impacts as a kill mechanism. Yet a new study published in the December issue of Geology provides strong indications that the extinction cause did not come from the heavens but from Earth itself.

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As millions of holidaymakers will testify, the Mediterranean is uniquely clear – and blue – unlike the cloudy grey of many coastal waters. But how many of its grateful bathers realise that the Med is so crystal clear because it’s the ocean equivalent of the Sahara desert?

A Leeds-led team of international scientists studying the fragile marine ecosystem of the Eastern Mediterranean has found that the reason the waters are so transparent is an acute shortage of phosphates – vital el

While millions of people across the world enjoyed the tale of a father fish in search of his lost son in the film Finding Nemo, a research project at the University of Leicester has delved into the reality of how fish find and recognise one another.

In a case of life imitating art, the scientists at Leicester have discovered that there are techniques that ’friendly fish’ use to find one another.

The study by Dr Paul Hart and Dr Ashley Ward, of the Department of Biology

Deep-woods bird species that manage to hang on in remaining patches of a deforested area of Brazil gain no real advantage in avoiding extinction, Duke University ecologists have found. The researchers studied the coastal region harboring the greatest number of threatened birds in the Americas.

“We found that species that also tolerate secondary habitats are not deforestation’s survivors,” said Grant Harris, the first author of a paper on the subject published in the Decem

Massive undertaking will involve hundreds of biologists, hunters and trackers combing wilderness of Russian Far East

A team of conservationists led by the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) announced the first range-wide count in nine years of Siberian (Amur) tigers, one of the world’s most threatened big cats. The survey will involve hundreds of biologists hunters and trackers combing a variety of landscapes to find out how many Siberian tigers still exist in

A new interpretation for temperature data from satellites, published earlier this year, raised controversy when its authors claimed it eliminated doubt that, on average, the lower atmosphere is getting warmer as fast as the Earth’s surface.

Now, in another study headed by the same researcher to be published Dec. 15 in the Journal of Climate, direct temperature data from other scientists has validated the satellite interpretation. A team headed by Qiang Fu, a University of Washing

Researchers at the University of Warwick’s Warwick Manufacturing Group, in conjunction with PVAXX Research & Development Ltd, have devised a novel way to recycle discarded mobile telephones – bury them and watch them transform into the flower of your choice.

Mobile telephones are one of the most quickly discarded items of consumer electronics. Rapid changes in technology and taste means customers constantly upgrade their phones leaving behind more and more discarded phones. How

Holy Grail of geology found: Measuring elevation over geological eras

A Field Museum scientist has developed a novel way to determine land elevation as continents moved around the Earth through geological ages. Knowing how high mountains and plateaus were in the past will help scientists to study how our climate system evolved. “Understanding the past elevation of land surfaces, also known as paleoelevation, has been one of geology’s Holy Grails,” said Jennifer McElwain, Ph

Urban planners must recognise that green spaces are not produced by professional designers alone, but by ordinary residents and all manner of plants and insects, animals and birds making themselves at home in our cities and towns, says new research sponsored by the ESRC.

What makes urban green spaces green is that they are ‘living’ – and it is this ‘more-than-human’ interactivity that is key to understanding what makes cities habitable, argues the study led by Professor Sarah Wha

University of Arizona scientists have discovered why Eros, the largest near-Earth asteroid, has so few small craters. When the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission orbited Eros from February 2000 to February 2001, it revealed an asteroid covered with regolith — a loose layer of rocks, gravel and dust — and embedded with numerous large boulders. The spacecraft also found places where the regolith apparently had slumped, or flowed downhill, exposing fresh surface underneat

Today, the first ever Conference on Control with Remote Sensing (CwRS) of Area-based Subsidies held in a New Member State takes place in Budapest, Hungary. Marking the 10th anniversary of the founding of the system and the 10th such Conference, it brings together a record number of 300 representatives from government and industry working within information technology, imaging instrumentation and support of farmers. The central issue of the conference is the fundamental reform of the Common A

A paper published in today’s Nature suggests that global warming could rapidly accelerate due to a positive feedback mechanism caused by water vapour or rainfall. The paper, which examines a period of rapid climate change 55 million years ago, during the Paleocene and Eocene, offers a clear indication of how gradual global warming can rapidly speed up, causing catastrophic effects.

Until recently, the prevailing view was that the temperature rise during the Paleocene/Eocene,

The meadows of eelgrass found in lagoons along the Atlantic seacoast have a long history of providing a habitat for fish and invertebrates of many species. Despite this long history, it has proven difficult to document and quantify the relationships between eelgrass cover and the abundance of fish and crabs on a larger scale.

An article in the current issue of the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series describes experiments by URI Graduate School of Oceanography (GSO) biological o

A new study undertaken by researchers at UCLA, Uppsala University and National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution and published in the journal Molecular Ecology, suggests that plans to reintroduce American gray wolves to the Western US will not restore the population to the near same extent of genetic diversity it originally boasted.

As a result of the most extensive and systematic predator elimination program ever practiced by a government, the gray wolf was eradicated f

Research cruise provides new information on tsunami during survey of remote area

A summer voyage to investigate the causes of one of the most devastating tsunamis in United States history has uncovered new mysteries about biological and geological processes off Alaska. Probing the depths below one of the world’s most important fisheries, scientists with Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, as well as Indiana State University and their

Burgeoning marine life database tops 5 million records, 38,000 species
Scientists add over 4 million new records, 13,000 species in 2004;
Exponential growth of “information seaway” tops Census highlights

Even in Europe and the best studied seas, the rapid ongoing discovery of new marine species shows no end in sight, according to the world’s first Census of Marine Life, a massive collaboration to catalog and map marine species worldwide involving hundreds of scientists in