ScienceDaily: Top Environment News

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• First forecast calls for mild Amazon fire season in 2012
• Push from Mississippi kept Deepwater Horizon oil slick off shore
• North Atlantic storm patterns throw light on England's 1987 gale
• Mural found on walls a first for a Maya dwelling; Painted numbers reflect calendar reaching well beyond 2012
• Logging of tropical forests needn't devastate environment
• Long-lived rodents have high levels of brain-protecting factor
• Chimpanzee cultures differ between neighbors: Neighboring chimpanzee groups use different hammers to crack nuts
• Archaeologists discover lost language
• Regenerative medicine: Could the ways animals regenerate hair and feathers help restore human fingers and toes?
• Five-limbed brittle stars move bilaterally, like people
• Chimpanzee uses innovative foresighted methods to fool humans
• Optimal planning of solar power plants
• Virtual reality allows researchers to measure fish brain activity during behavior at unprecedented resolution
• Bird color variations speed up evolution
• New weak point discovered in the Antarctic ice sheet

First forecast calls for mild Amazon fire season in 2012 Posted: 10 May 2012 07:50 PM PDT Forests in the Amazon Basin are expected to be less vulnerable to wildfires this year, according to the first forecast from a new fire severity model.

Push from Mississippi kept Deepwater Horizon oil slick off shore Posted: 10 May 2012 07:50 PM PDT Geoscientists offer an explanation for why the Deepwater Horizon oil spill didn't have the environmental impact that many had feared. Using publicly available datasets, their study reveals that the force of the Mississippi River emptying into the Gulf of Mexico created mounds of freshwater which pushed the oil slick off shore.

North Atlantic storm patterns throw light on England's 1987 gale Posted: 10 May 2012 07:46 PM PDT The cyclone that brought about the devastating winds that battered the UK in the great storm of October 1987 was exceptional in both its strength and path across the south of the country. This is the finding of a new study which has analyzed the places where sting jets – an area that develops in some cyclones and causes strong surface winds – appear in the North Atlantic and how often they do so.

Mural found on walls a first for a Maya dwelling; Painted numbers reflect calendar reaching well beyond 2012 Posted: 10 May 2012 11:19 AM PDT A vast city built by the ancient Maya and discovered nearly a century ago is finally starting to yield its secrets. Excavating for the first time in the sprawling complex of Xultún in Guatemala's Petén region, archaeologists have uncovered a structure that contains what appears to be a work space for the town's scribe, its walls adorned with unique paintings -- one depicting a lineup of men in black uniforms -- and hundreds of scrawled numbers. Many are calculations relating to the Maya calendar.

Logging of tropical forests needn't devastate environment Posted: 10 May 2012 10:27 AM PDT Harvesting tropical forests for timber may not be the arch-enemy of conservation that it was once assumed to be, according to a new study.

Long-lived rodents have high levels of brain-protecting factor Posted: 10 May 2012 10:27 AM PDT The naked mole rat, which lives 25 to 30 years, maintains large amounts of a neuroprotective protein called NRG-1 throughout life.

Chimpanzee cultures differ between neighbors: Neighboring chimpanzee groups use different hammers to crack nuts Posted: 10 May 2012 10:14 AM PDT Culture has long been proposed to be a distinguishing feature of the human species. However, an increasing amount of evidence from the field has shown that in several animals, differences in behaviors between populations actually reflect the presence of culture in these species. These studies have mainly come from populations that live far apart from each other which make it difficult to exclude ecological or genetic differences as being the underlying reasons for the observed behavioral differences.

Archaeologists discover lost language Posted: 10 May 2012 09:40 AM PDT Evidence for a forgotten ancient language which dates back more than 2,500 years, to the time of the Assyrian Empire, has been found by archaeologists working in Turkey. Researchers working at Ziyaret Tepe, the probable site of the ancient Assyrian city of Tušhan, believe that the language may have been spoken by deportees originally from the Zagros Mountains, on the border of modern-day Iran and Iraq.

Regenerative medicine: Could the ways animals regenerate hair and feathers help restore human fingers and toes? Posted: 10 May 2012 08:38 AM PDT A review article that examines what's known about regenerative biology and applies it to regenerative medicine. Perhaps this knowledge could one day be used to regrow lost body parts.

Five-limbed brittle stars move bilaterally, like people Posted: 10 May 2012 07:03 AM PDT Brittle stars and people have something in common: They move in fundamentally similar ways. Though not bilaterally symmetrical like humans and many other animals, brittle stars have come up with a mechanism to choose any of its five limbs to direct its movement on the seabed. It's as if each arm can be the creature's front, capable of locomotion and charting direction.

Chimpanzee uses innovative foresighted methods to fool humans Posted: 10 May 2012 07:02 AM PDT Chimpanzee Santino achieved international fame in 2009 for his habit of gathering stones and manufacturing concrete projectiles to throw at zoo visitors. A new study shows that Santino's innovativeness when he plans his stone-throwing is greater than researchers have previously observed. He not only gathers stones and manufactures projectiles in advance; he also finds innovative ways of fooling the visitors.

Optimal planning of solar power plants Posted: 10 May 2012 07:00 AM PDT The photovoltaics industry is booming, and the market for solar farms is growing quickly all over the world. Yet, the task of planning PV power plants to make them as effi cient as possible is far from trivial. Researchers have now developed software that simplifies conceptual design.

Virtual reality allows researchers to measure fish brain activity during behavior at unprecedented resolution Posted: 09 May 2012 10:59 AM PDT Researchers have developed a new technique which allows them to measure brain activity in large populations of nerve cells at the resolution of individual cells. The technique has been developed in zebrafish to represent a simplified model of how brain regions work together to flexibly control behavior.

Bird color variations speed up evolution Posted: 09 May 2012 10:59 AM PDT Researchers have found that bird species with multiple plumage color forms within in the same population, evolve into new species faster than those with only one color form, confirming a 60-year-old evolution theory.

New weak point discovered in the Antarctic ice sheet Posted: 09 May 2012 10:59 AM PDT The Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf fringing the Weddell Sea, Antarctica, may start to melt rapidly in this century and no longer act as a barrier for ice streams draining the Antarctic Ice Sheet, new research shows.

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