ScienceDaily: Top Environment News |
- Large-scale biodiversity is vital to maintain ecosystem health
- Amazon forest fire risk to increase in 2013
- Climate conditions determine Amazon fire risk
- Magpies make decisions faster when humans look at them
- Stranded orcas hold critical clues for scientists
- Oh brother, where art thou? Sticklebacks prefer to be with relatives
- Very berry study aims to improve wine quality
- 2011 Draconid meteor shower deposited a ton of meteoritic material on Earth
- Studies showing how bird flu viruses could adapt to humans offer surveillance and vaccine strategies
- Superb lyrebirds move to the music
- How birds lost their penises
- Wolbachia bacteria evolved to infect stem cell niches through successive generations of their hosts
- Bone tumor in 120,000-year-old Neandertal discovered
| Large-scale biodiversity is vital to maintain ecosystem health Posted: 07 Jun 2013 01:03 PM PDT Over the years ecologists have shown how biological diversity benefits the health of small, natural communities. New analysis by ecologists demonstrates that even higher levels of biological diversity are necessary to maintain ecosystem health in larger landscapes over long periods of time.  |
| Amazon forest fire risk to increase in 2013 Posted: 07 Jun 2013 12:39 PM PDT University and NASA researchers predict that the severity of the 2013 fire season will be considerably higher than in 2011 and 2012 for many Amazon forests in the Southern Hemisphere. The outlook is based on a fire severity model that produced a successful first forecast in 2012.  |
| Climate conditions determine Amazon fire risk Posted: 07 Jun 2013 12:35 PM PDT Using an innovative satellite technique, NASA scientists have determined that a previously unmapped type of wildfire in the Amazon rainforest is responsible for destroying several times more forest than has been lost through deforestation in recent years.  |
| Magpies make decisions faster when humans look at them Posted: 07 Jun 2013 10:10 AM PDT Researchers have found that wild birds appear to "think faster" when humans, and possibly predators in general, are directly looking at them.  |
| Stranded orcas hold critical clues for scientists Posted: 07 Jun 2013 10:10 AM PDT The development of a standardized killer-whale necropsy system has boosted the complete data from killer-whale strandings from two percent to about 33 percent, according to a recent study.  |
| Oh brother, where art thou? Sticklebacks prefer to be with relatives Posted: 07 Jun 2013 05:52 AM PDT Many animals are able to discriminate between related and unrelated individuals but how they do so has proven remarkably difficult to understand. Researchers in Austria have investigated the issue using the three-spined stickleback and its shoaling preferences as a model system. It turns out that the fish prefer kin to unrelated conspecifics, regardless of how familiar they are with individual shoal members. The results indicate that level of familiarity does not affect the stickleback's ability to recognize kin. Recognition based on phenotype matching or innate recognition thus seems to be the overruling mechanism when it comes to choosing members of a peer group.  |
| Very berry study aims to improve wine quality Posted: 06 Jun 2013 07:32 PM PDT A gene expression study of grapevine berries grown in different Italian vineyards has highlighted genes that help buffer the plants against environmental change and may explain the different quality performances of grapevine when grown in different "terroirs." The research could be used to help identify and breed grapevine varieties better suited to climate change and improve berry and wine quality.  |
| 2011 Draconid meteor shower deposited a ton of meteoritic material on Earth Posted: 06 Jun 2013 11:10 AM PDT About a ton of material coming from comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner was deposited in the Earth's atmosphere on October 8th and 9th, 2011 during one of the most intense showers of shooting starts in the last decade, which registered an activity of more than 400 meteors per hour.  |
| Studies showing how bird flu viruses could adapt to humans offer surveillance and vaccine strategies Posted: 06 Jun 2013 11:06 AM PDT Bird flu viruses are potentially highly lethal and pose a global threat, but relatively little is known about why certain strains spread more easily to humans than others. Two studies identify mutations that increase the infectivity of H5N1 and H7N9 viruses through improved binding to receptors in the human respiratory tract. The findings offer much-needed strategies for monitoring the emergence of dangerous bird flu strains capable of infecting humans and for developing more effective vaccines.  |
| Superb lyrebirds move to the music Posted: 06 Jun 2013 11:06 AM PDT When male superb lyrebirds sing, they often move their bodies to the music in a choreographed way, say researchers. The findings add to evidence from human cultures around the world that music and dance are deeply intertwined activities.  |
| Posted: 06 Jun 2013 11:06 AM PDT In animals that reproduce by internal fertilization, as humans do, you'd think a penis would be an organ you couldn't really do without, evolutionarily speaking. Surprisingly, though, most birds do exactly that, and now researchers have figured out where, developmentally speaking, birds' penises have gone.  |
| Wolbachia bacteria evolved to infect stem cell niches through successive generations of their hosts Posted: 06 Jun 2013 08:00 AM PDT A new study provides evidence that Wolbachia target the ovarian stem cell niches of its hosts -- a strategy previously overlooked to explain how Wolbachia thrive in nature.  |
| Bone tumor in 120,000-year-old Neandertal discovered Posted: 05 Jun 2013 04:01 PM PDT The first-known definitive case of a benign bone tumor has been discovered in the rib of a young Neandertal who lived about 120,000 years ago in what is now present-day Croatia. The bone fragment, which comes from the famous archaeological cave site of Krapina, contains by far the earliest bone tumor ever identified in the archaeological record.  |
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