A whooping crane that was shot earlier this month in Kansas is showing signs of recovery, although Dr. Glenn Olsen, the veterinarian treating the bird at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md., says it’s too soon to know whether it will be able to return to the wild. The injured crane, part of the last remaining wild flock of an endangered species that migrates annually from northern Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, had been shot as it traveled through Kansas on its way south. Th

Two researchers at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah have offered an explanation for the recent decline in Georgia’s blue crab population that has devastated one of the state’s most important coastal fisheries.

In an article in the November/December issue of the American Scientist, Richard F. Lee and Marc E. Frischer, working on a grant from the Georgia Sea Grant Program at the University of Georgia, say their research shows that Georgia’s recent

GAIKER Technological Centre is taking part in a European project under the auspices of the VI Framework Programme involving the reuse and recycling of liquid crystal display screens (ReLCD) employed in the manufacture of devices such as laptops, electronic agendas, calculators, mobile telephones, electronic video-games, audio equipment, televisions and computer screens.

One of the main objectives of this project is to study methodology in order to check the operation of obsolete LCDs, as w

Shipworm has spread to the Baltic Sea. If it continues to spread, it threatens to destroy still well-preserved and irreplaceable shipwrecks and other marine archeological remains along the coast of Sweden, according to Carl Olof Cederlund, professor of marine archeology at Södertörn University College in Stockholm and the Swedish representative in the EU project that has now determined the spread of shipworm to the Baltic for the first time.

“Up till now the Baltic has been regar

An academic from the University of Sheffield has produced the first glacial map of Britain, which could allow us to better predict climate change in the future. The map is published in the latest edition of the journal Boreas.

Dr Chris Clark, of the University’s Department of Geography, along with colleagues, has compiled over 150 years of scientific discovery to create the Glacial Map, which itself is the result of over ten years’ work. The map identifies over 20,000 geographical

Oilfields usually represent extreme environments, where physicochemical conditions appear at first sight to be generally unsuitable for living organisms to develop. However, these environments, usually poor in nitrates and oxygen, harbour a rich diverse community of microorganisms. The most widely represented and best-known types are sulfate-reducing, methanogenic and fermentative bacteria.

Nitrate-reducing bacteria, on the other hand, have received little research attention rega

More than one-third of the greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere stem from agriculture and forestry. One of the current concerns is to find ways of managing agriculture differently in order to increase the level of carbon storage in soils and limit emission of gases that contribute to global atmospheric warming.

Photosynthesis ensures that plants assimilate carbon dioxide, in the form of plant carbon, part of which (in roots and crop residues) is returned to the soil and s

It’s a match made in heaven. Or at least in the Texas Panhandle.

Three young bison bulls were donated by media tycoon Ted Turner from his New Mexico herd. They will be introduced into the Texas Bison Herd at the Caprock Canyon State Park next summer, in hopes they will provide much needed genetic diversity.

The Texas Bison Herd originated in the late 1800s with five bison calves captured by famed cattleman Charles Goodnight. The herd was donated to the state in 1997

It was not that cold in subarctic areas of Russia during the epoch of the latest glaciation. This has been proved by the remains of animals found there – not only remains of such frost-resisting animals as mammoths and reindeers, but also those of horses.

During the latest ice age, i.e. 25-15,000 years ago, it was not that cold in the subarctic part of the trans-Ural region as it had been considered earlier. The territory was not covered by glacial wilderness, but by dry and low-sn

The invasive sea squirt that federal and university researchers discovered on Georges Bank a year ago is flourishing in U.S. waters near the U.S.-Canada boundary, a joint research team announced today following a research cruise that concluded last week.

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the University of Rhode Island estimate that mats made of thousands of individual squirts infest a 40 square mi

As the political temperature rises over climate change and global warming, Manchester Metropolitan University is leading the scientific way forward on our understanding of the environmental impact of pollution and emissions.

This week’s Greenpeace claim that the British Government could not longer be trusted to reduce global warming, underlines the imperative of tackling carbon emissions caused by road, rail, sea and air transport. The Government maintains that climate chang

With the confirmation that soybean rust has been detected in the U.S., plant pathologists with The American Phytopathological Society (APS) are offering insight into the management and identification of this disease.

According to Doug Jardine, director of the APS Office of Public Affairs and Education and plant pathology professor at Kansas State University, plant pathologists from government agencies, industry, and universities have been working together to prepare for the appear

A place so barren that NASA uses it as a model for the Martian environment, Chile’s Atacama desert gets rain maybe once a decade. In 2003, scientists reported that the driest Atacama soils were sterile.

Not so, reports a team of Arizona scientists. Bleak though it may be, microbial life lurks beneath the arid surface of the Atacama’s absolute desert. “We found life, we can culture it, and we can extract and look at its DNA,” said Raina Maier, a professor of soil, water a

Scientists funded by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), used Landsat 5 satellite data to look at changes in wetlands areas in south Florida, particularly south and west of Lake Okeechobee.

Using satellite data, land-cover change history, computer models, and weather records, the researchers found a link between the losses of wetlands and more severe freezes in some agricultural areas of south Florida. In other areas of the state, changes in land use resulted in slightl

Drifting buoys & floats weather hurricanes for better storm prediction

While some are still cleaning up from the series of hurricanes that plowed through the Caribbean and southern United States this season, scientists supported by the Office of Naval Research are busily cleaning up valuable data collected during the storms. The rapid-fire hurricanes barely gave researchers time to rest between flights that took them into the hearts of Hurricanes Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne. As pa

The severe droughts and forest fires of recent years underline Mediterranean Europe’s continuing vulnerability to desertification – 300 000 square kilometres of territory are currently affected, threatening the livelihoods of 16.5 million Europeans. A new satellite-based service is set to provide a continuous monitoring of regions most at risk.

ESA’s DesertWatch project involves the development of a desertification monitoring system for the northern shores of the Medit