As a result of fossil fuel emissions, many freshwater bodies in eastern North America have become acidified. When combusted, fossil fuels release sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, the precursors to acid precipitation, into the atmosphere. Persistent exposure to these pollutants, which return to Earth in rain, snow, sleet, hail and fog, can compromise the health of aquatic ecosystems.

In a recent Restoration Ecology paper, Institute of Ecosystem Studies President and Director Dr. Gen

A new method will detect club root far more efficiently than before. This implies less waste and higher profits in farming.

Club root disease is very harmful to cultivated crucifers, i.e. various forms of brassica, especially cabbage. In Norway and in the rest of the world, huge crops are infected by the disease each year. For the farmer, crop failure may be up to 100 percent.

“So far we have lacked a quick method of detecting club root infections in the soil. Now we are i

A new set of measurements has allowed a Florida State University geochemist to confirm what other scientists have only suspected about what lies deep below the Earth’s surface.

Professor Munir Humayun has found that there is a higher iron content in the Earth’s mantle beneath Hawaii compared to other regions of the mantle. Hotspot islands, such as Hawaii, arise from hot plumes of solid rock from deep within the mantle or the core-mantle boundary that ascend at rates of a

On October 3rd, the German research vessel “Polarstern” of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research will return to Bremerhaven from its 20th arctic expedition. During the last leg of the voyage, 44 scientists from Germany, Russia and South Korea, supported by crew members, helicopter pilots and technical staff, investigated the region north and west of Spitsbergen. Emphasis was placed on geophysical and geological studies of Fram Strait and Yermak Plateau. Of primary importance wer

Used plastic wrappings and containers make good fuel if incinerated, but are also dumped in huge quantities on landfill sites. Researchers are developing a compostable packaging tape that can be disposed of more cheaply, and ultimately creates less waste.

Companies often have to dig deep in their pockets to get rid of plastic packaging and the adhesive tape that holds it together. It costs about 100 euros to dispose of a metric ton of plastic waste by incineration and about 60 euros

Conservationists say six major breeding centres will be needed, for three species of vultures, if they are to be saved from extinction in the Indian subcontinent.

Numbers of three South Asian vulture species have plummeted since the early 1990s leading the IUCN – World Conservation Union to class them all as Critically Endangered, the highest risk status there is. If funds and government permission can be obtained, breeding centres will be established in India, Pakistan and Nepal.

A team of Texas A&M University and Louisiana State University scientists conducted a research cruise in late August to the “dead zone” – a region in the northern Gulf of Mexico that suffers from low oxygen and results in huge marine losses – and much to their surprise, the “dead zone” area had either moved or had disappeared completely.

Steven DiMarco, associate professor in the Department of Oceanography and leader of the team, found that some areas that were previously hypoxic – a

Scientists from the Sainsbury Laboratory (SL), Norwich report in the journal Nature that important plant diseases previously thought only to infect plants through their leaves may also enter through the plant’s roots. They report that the rice leaf blast fungus is able to use very different routes and means of attacking the rice plant by switching between two completely different programmes of developmental events; one programme is characteristic of leaf-infecting fungi and the other characteristic

Changes in forestry and agriculture affecting ozone pollution

Changes in U.S. forests caused by land use practices may have inadvertently worsened ozone pollution, according to a study led by Princeton University scientists. The study examined a class of chemicals that are emitted as unburned fuel from automobile tailpipes and as vapors from industrial chemicals, but also come naturally from tree leaves. These chemicals, known collectively as VOCs, react with other pollutants to form

New find in Israel shows that cereal production predates agricultural societies by millennia

Archaeologists have found strong evidence that wheat and barley were refined into cereals 23,000 years ago, suggesting that humans were processing grains long before hunter-gatherer societies developed agriculture. The findings, including the identification of the earliest known oven and hence the oldest evidence of baking, were described in a recent issue of the journal Nature. “This is an

While most of us watched this summer’s violent and destructive storms on TV from the comfort of our sofas, a team of researchers from across the UK, including University of Leeds scientists Alan Blyth, Barbara Brooks and Lindsay Bennett, took to the skies in specially equipped planes to study their origins.

The convective storm which caused flooding in Boscastle with 75mm of rain in two hours, is recognisable as bubbly cumulous cloud often seen in the UK. The research team from the

The intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO) met this week to agree important elements of a groundbreaking 10-year Plan that will pave the way toward building a global Earth Observation System. Over the next decade, this system will revolutionize our understanding of the Earth and how it works. With benefits as broad as the planet itself, this initiative promises to make peoples and economies around the globe healthier, safer and better equipped to manage basic daily needs. The aim is

A set of newly documented small-scale circulations embedded in thunderstorm squall lines not only spew destructive straight-line winds, but may spawn up to 20% of all U.S. tornadoes. And the remnant circulations from large thunderstorm clusters can survive for days, triggering new storm cells. Over warm oceans, similar remnant circulations provide seed for hurricane development. Scientists expect these and other findings to help improve forecasts of damaging winds and heavy rain.

T

Despite a long-standing international ban on ivory trade, African elephants continue to be killed in large numbers for their prized tusks. But a team headed by a University of Washington biologist has devised a new means of determining the geographic origin of ivory that could prove a potent tool in slowing elephant poaching and the illegal ivory trade by identifying hot spots where enforcement should be increased.

It is relatively easy to monitor elephant populations with flights

A new study on “waves (or fronts) of detachment” involved in the process of friction offers a new perspective on an old scientific puzzle and could provide a key to improving predictions of future earthquakes, say scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The work of the scientists, Prof Jay Fineberg, head of the Hebrew University’s Racah Institute of Physics, Dr Gil Cohen and graduate student Shmuel N Rubinstein, is described in an article in the journal Nature entitled “Det

Carbon loss from soils exceeds storage by plants

Institute of Arctic Biology (IAB) ecologists Donie Bret-Harte and Terry Chapin and colleagues working in northern Alaska discovered that tundra plants and soils respond in surprisingly opposite ways to conditions that simulate long-term climate warming.
Their findings are published in the September 23, 2004 edition of the leading science journal Nature and are featured in the journal’s News and Views section.

Bret-Harte