Search Results for: ocean

Hundreds of species with small ranges seen vulnerable

The Caribbean Sea has the greatest concentration of marine life in the entire Atlantic and is home to hundreds of species that live only in precariously small areas, making life there far richer and more delicate than previously thought, according to a new study.

An analysis of the ranges of 1,172 marine species revealed that some 253, or 22 percent, are endemic to the Caribbean region, meaning they are found nowhere else

A new application of a decades-old technique to study Earth´s interior is allowing scientists “see” the layers in the ocean, providing new insight on the structure of ocean currents, eddies and mixing processes. The findings, reported in this week´s Science by a team from the University of Wyoming and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), could be a major step forward in the ability to remotely survey the interior of the ocean.

The study reports on a new adaptation of seismic

It´s tricky, this weather business — predicting drought, floods, rain or snow, especially months in advance. But NASA scientists at the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala., are working to take the guesswork out of long-term prediction.

“We´re researching methods to predict precipitation a season or more in advance,” said Dr. Bob Oglesby, a senior atmospheric scientist at the research center. The key, he said, is understanding how the atmosphere interacts with th

High-level delegates from 30 countries and 22 international organisations agreed at the Earth Observation Summit held last Thursday in Washington to improve cooperation on Earth observation and to remove barriers to the exchange of information between countries and organisations.

ESA already carries out its Earth observation programmes in cooperation with other agencies or countries through mechanisms such as CEOS, the Committee of Earth Observation Satellites and IGOS-P, the Integrated Glo

How did life begin? What chemical combination launched the first organism with self-contained metabolism? And then what happened? Researchers in Robert H. White’s group at Virginia Tech are tracing the family tree of life on earth by tracing the biochemical mechanisms within the cell – specifically those that are used in the formation of peptide bonds.

The building blocks of enzymatic and functional structures in living organisms are proteins created by linking amino acids into pepti

Which design principles unify the diversity of life on earth? To understand how biological designs emerged by natural selection, biomechanics studies organisms by applying engineering science and mechanics. Biomechanics studies life from molecules to ecosystems. Questions range ‘how do cells form tissue’, over ‘what shapes a muscle’ to ‘how do animals fly’ and ‘which mechanical constraints govern body shape and -dynamics when animals increase in size’. Biomechanics is applied not only to extant b