Salmon farms in British Columbia may pose a threat to wild salmon stocks, a paper published today in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences claims. The paper presents evidence that native fish sampled near the farms are more heavily infected with parasitic sea lice. Lead author Alexandra Morton, a registered professional biologist and private researcher, believes the parasites multiply on the farms and are then transmitted to juvenile native salmon, causing recent drastic declines in

Surprisingly, the probability that an earthquake should reoccur in any part of the world is smaller, the longer the time since the last quake took place. This is one of the conclusions reached by the physicist Álvaro Corral, researcher at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Corral has been the first to observe that there is a relation between consecutive quake-to-quake time intervals that follows a universal distribution of probability. This in turn suggests the existence of a simple physica

Despite responses to wildfires as being disasters that require human care, these natural disturbances are important ecosystem processes that should be left alone-a move that will increase the area’s recovery chances, says a University of Alberta researcher.
Following a forest fire, there is typically an attempt to recoup economic losses by salvage harvesting large volumes of timber in the affected area, but this philosophy needs to be reexamined, said Dr. Fiona Schmiegelow, who co-authored

Locked in Arctic Soils Into the Ocean, Researchers Say The Arctic Ocean receives about ten percent of Earth’s river water and with it some 25 teragrams [28 million tons] per year of dissolved organic carbon that had been held in far northern bogs and other soils. Scientists had not known the age of the carbon that reaches the ocean: was it recently derived from contemporary plant material, or had it been locked in soils for hundreds or thousands of years and therefore not part of

Australia’s air pollution death toll is higher than fatalities from road accidents. So air quality scientists, medical researchers and Government agency representatives from around Australia are meeting in Melbourne this week to tackle the health problems associated with air pollution.

“Mortality due to air pollution in Australia is higher than the road toll,” says Dr Tom Beer from CSIRO Atmospheric Research, one of the organisers of the two-day course. “Each year on average, 2400 of th

A study published in the Vadose Zone Journal examines how different soil types affect Cryptosporidium parvum’s transport.

Groundwater is generally considered a safe source of drinking water because pathogens are presumably filtered out during their transport through unsaturated soils. Nevertheless, pathogen-contaminated groundwater has been the cause of many disease outbreaks in the last 10 years including cryptosporidiosis caused by the protozoan pathogen Cryptosporidium parvum.

Period was previously thought to be ice-free

Arlington, Va.-Scientists using cores drilled from the New Jersey coastal plain have found that ice sheets likely caused massive sea level change during the Late Cretaceous Period -an interval previously thought to be ice-free. The scientists, who will publish their results in the March-April issue of the Geological Society of America (GSA) Bulletin, assert that either ice sheets grew and decayed in that greenhouse world or our understandin

When a new mom gazes at her baby, it’s not just her mood that lights up – it’s also a brain region associated with emotion processing, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The study, published in the current issue of NeuroImage, explored what happens in the brain when mothers are shown pictures of their babies, as well as images of unfamiliar infants. While all the photos increased the amount of activity in a part of the brain associated with emotion, the imag

The Mediterranean Sea was a desert, millions of years ago. In contrast, the Sahara Desert was once a lush, green landscape dotted with lakes and ponds. Evidence of this past verdancy lies hidden beneath the sands of Egypt and Libya, in the form of a huge aquifer of fresh groundwater. An international team of geologists and physicists has found that this groundwater has been flowing slowly northward (at about the rate grass grows) for the past million years. Their findings have been accepted for March

The knowledge of local fishermen is just as important as that of scientists when it comes to assessing the health of the marine environment, according to a team of researchers from Newcastle University’s Dove Marine Laboratory, who have been studying the future of the North Sea.

The team has spent the past three months carrying out a survey among fishermen, yachtsmen and boat operators based at the Northumberland (UK) ports of Blyth and North Shields, as part of a project entitled: &#14

Rainfall but Ultimately Increases Its Intensity

Air pollution and smoke suppress rainfall, but cause the remaining rain amounts to fall in greater intensities, with lightning and hail, says a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The researcher, Prof. Daniel Rosenfeld, was one of a group of scientists that included also participants from Germany, Sweden and Brazil who conducted measurements of smoke and its impact on the development of clouds and precipitation i

Against incredible odds, researchers working in separate sites, thousands of miles apart in Antarctica have found what they believe are the fossilized remains of two species of dinosaurs previously unknown to science.

One of the two finds, which were made less than a week apart, is an early carnivore that would have lived many millions of years after the other, a plant-eating beast, roamed the Earth. One was found at the sea bottom, the other on a mountaintop.

Journey to the bo

For the first time, researchers have identified organic material in interplanetary dust particles (IDPs), gathered from the Earth’s stratosphere, that was made before the birth of our Solar System.

The material was identified on the basis of its carbon isotopic composition, which is different from the carbon found on Earth and in other parts of the Solar System. Isotopes are variations of elements that differ from each other in the number of neutrons they have, making them similar chem

Scientists from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society and other groups have developed a high-tech map that predicts where wolves will prey on livestock, which in turn may allow wildlife managers and ranchers to prevent attacks in the first place. The groups, which also included authors from the Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources and University of Wisconsin in Madison, published their results in the latest issue of the journal Conservation Biology.

Using geographic information sy

Scientists at international conference release strategy to save them

The leatherback turtle, a gentle giant weighing close to a ton (907 kg) and measuring eight feet (2.4 meters) in length, may be extinct within a decade in the Pacific Ocean.

The news was released at the 24th Annual Symposium on Sea Turtle Conservation and Biology, a weeklong conference in San Jose, Costa Rica attended by more than 1,000 experts from 70 countries.

Named for its smooth, leathery ski

One of the most damaging crop pests, the corn earworm, may be outwitting efforts to control it by making structural changes in a single metabolic protein, but new insights uncovered by molecular modeling could pave the way for more efficient insecticides, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In a study that compared the ability of corn earworms (Helicoverpa zea) and black swallowtail butterflies (Papilio polyxenes) to neutralize insecticides and plant defense a