Culture

Avignon/Halle(Saale). INRA and CNRS French scientists and a UFZ German scientist found that the worldwide economic value of the pollination service provided by insect pollinators, bees mainly, was €153 billion in 2005 for the main crops that feed the world. This figure amounted to 9.5% of the total value of the world agricultural food production. The study also determined that pollinator disappearance would translate into a consumer surplus loss estimated between €190 to €310 billion.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A researcher at Oregon State University has used a new method of combining multiple sources of data to identify counties in Oregon with high numbers of methamphetamine-related problems per capita, giving officials a new tool in fighting the illegal drug.

The study, presented today at a toxicology conference in Canada, examined statistics from four sources then identified five counties with the most meth-linked incidents per capita, such as deaths, poisonings and places where meth is made.

The site known as Miami Fort is no fort at all, and it is also much larger than previously believed – so large, in fact, that its berms stretch to almost six kilometers in length, making it twice as large as any other Native American earthworks in Ohio, and one of the largest in the nation.

We all know about the event at CERN, but what else is happening to markthis event?

That is where LHC First Beam Events <http://www.uslhc.us/first_beam>comes in.

It has information about what several U.S. institutions, involved in theconstruction and startup of the LHC, are doing. Probably the mostentertaining is the First Beam Pajama Party, held in Illinois atFermilab's Remote Operations Center, where it was around 2:00 am CentralStandard Time at the moment of the first beam in Geneva, Switzerland.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – An international collaboration of scientists today sent the first beam of protons zooming at nearly the speed of light around the 17-mile-long underground circular path of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator, located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

Is it always good to respond maximally when pathogens or disease strike, or should individuals vary their immune response to balance immediate and future costs? This is the question evolutionary physiologists Oliver Love, Katrina Salvante, James Dale, and Tony Williams asked when they examined how a simple immune response varied at different life stages across the life-span of individual zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata), in a study published in the September issue of the American Naturalist.

The war against malaria in tropical countries was fought and lost in the 20th Century on the basis of faulty intelligence, a 'dodgy dossier' which argued that the same methods used to tackle the disease in temperate countries would also work in the tropics.

Eradication failed in almost every tropical and sub-tropical country, because tactics that had been proven to work in countries such as the USA, Greece and Italy were also deployed in tropical countries, despite the existence of evidence that they would they not work, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.