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Tuesday, August 6, 2013

ScienceDaily: Top Environment News

ScienceDaily: Top Environment News


Seafood menus from Hawaii reflect long-term ocean changes

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 12:24 PM PDT

The colorful restaurant menus that thousands of tourists bring home as souvenirs from Hawaii hold more than happy memories of island vacations. They also contain valuable data that are helping a trio of researchers track long-term changes to important fisheries in the Aloha State.

Carbon emissions to impact climate beyond the day after tomorrow

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 12:24 PM PDT

Future warming from fossil fuel burning could be more intense and longer-lasting than previously thought. This prediction emerges from a new study that includes insights from episodes of climate change in the geologic past to inform projections of human-made future climate change.

Ozone-protection treaty had climate benefits, too

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 11:33 AM PDT

The global treaty that headed off destruction of Earth's protective ozone layer has also prevented major disruption of global rainfall patterns, even though that was not a motivation for the treaty, according to a new study.

Conservation efforts might encourage some to hunt lions

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 11:33 AM PDT

Some East African Maasai pastoralists may be hunting lions as a form of political protest, according to a new study.

How switch proteins are extracted from the membrane: Proteins hoist the anchor

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 10:36 AM PDT

Researchers have for the first time successfully reproduced the recycling process of proteins regulating cellular transport in a biophysical experiment. In doing so, they traced in detail the way the central switch protein Rab is being extracted from the lipid membrane.

Disappearance of coral reefs, drastically altered marine food web on the horizon

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 10:36 AM PDT

If history's closest analog is any indication, the look of the oceans will change drastically in the future as the coming greenhouse world alters marine food webs and gives certain species advantages over others.

Moss beats human: Simple moss plants outperform us by gene number

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 08:29 AM PDT

At the genetic level, mosses are more complex than humans: Scientists have now describe 32,275 protein-encoding genes from the moss Physcomitrella patens. This is about 10,000 genes more than the human genome contains. Mosses are tiny plants with a simple body plan: They have no roots, no flowers and do not produce seeds. Therefore, they were for a long time they were considered to be simple organisms also at the genetic level.

Looking to the past to predict the future of climate change

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 06:26 AM PDT

Climate changes how species interact with one another -- and not just today. Scientists are studying trends from fossil records to understand how climate change impacted the world in the ancient past and to identify ways to predict how things may change in the future, according to a new study.

Chronic harvesting threatens tropical tree

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 06:26 AM PDT

Chronic harvesting of a tropical tree that many local communities in Western Africa depend on can alter the tree's reproduction and drastically curtail fruit and seed yields over the tree's lifetime, according to a new study.

'Insect soup' holds DNA key for monitoring biodiversity

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 06:23 AM PDT

Scientists have shown that sequencing the DNA of crushed up creepy crawlies can accelerate the monitoring and cataloguing of biodiversity around the world. New research shows that a process known as 'metabarcoding' is much faster than and just as reliable as standard biodiversity datasets assembled with traditional labor-intensive methods. The breakthrough means that changing environments and endangered species can be monitored more easily than ever before. It could help researchers find endangered tree kangaroos in Papua New Guinea, discover which moths will be wiped out by climate change, and restore nature to heathlands in the UK, rubber plantations in China, and oil-palm plantations in Sumatra.

New research aids ability to predict solar storms, protect Earth

Posted: 05 Aug 2013 06:20 AM PDT

Three new solar modeling developments are bringing scientists closer to being able to predict the occurrence and timing of coronal mass ejections from the sun.

Researchers dismantle bacteria's war machinery

Posted: 04 Aug 2013 11:44 AM PDT

This is a veritable mechanics of aggression on the nanoscale. Certain bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus, have the ability to deploy tiny darts. This biological weapon kills the host cell by piercing the membrane. Researchers at EPFL have dismantled, piece by piece, this intriguing little machine. This discovery offers new insight into the fight against pathogens that are increasingly resistant to antibiotics.

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