Earth | Page 746 | Science Codex

America added 7.6 million acres of forests in 20 years - why that was a bad thing

The United States added about 7.6 million acres of forests between 1990 and 2010, which is a great environmental gain, but the real question is how the United States achieved that milestone, said Darla Munroe, associate professor of geography at The Ohio State University.

"Reforestation in the United States may have come at the expense of some other country's forest," Munroe said. "There isn't any environmental gain for the world if we are saving trees here by simply getting trees for our paper products from some other place."

Getting in non-spherical shape

New research from the Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) looks at how to create various non-spherical particles by releasing droplets of molten wax into a cool liquid bath. The physics behind this research shows how a range of non-spherical shapes can be produced and replicated with many possible industrial applications.

In the quantum world, the future affects the past

We're so used murder mysteries that we don't even notice how mystery authors play with time. Typically the murder occurs well before the midpoint of the book, but there is an information blackout at that point and the reader learns what happened then only on the last page.

If the last page were ripped out of the book, physicist Kater Murch, PhD, said, would the reader be better off guessing what happened by reading only up to the fatal incident or by reading the entire book?

Nonbrowning Arctic Apples Greenlighted For USDA Approval

Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has announced its decision to deregulate the first two nonbrowning apple varieties, Arctic Golden and Arctic Granny apples, in the United States. It is expected that APHIS' final published their final environmental assessment (EA) and a plant pest risk assessment (PPRA) will be published in the Federal Register soon.

Distant species produce love child after 60 million year breakup

A delicate woodland fern discovered in the mountains of France is the love child of two distantly-related groups of plants that haven't interbred in 60 million years, genetic analyses show.

For most plants and animals, reuniting after such a long hiatus is thought to be impossible due to genetic and other incompatibilities between species that develop over time.

Reproducing after such a long evolutionary breakup is akin to an elephant hybridizing with a manatee, or a human with a lemur, said co-author Kathleen Pryer, who directs the Duke University Herbarium.

Rivers can be a source antibiotic resistance

Rivers and streams could be a major source of antibiotic resistance in the environment.

The discovery comes following a study on the Thames river by scientists at the University of Warwick's School of Life Sciences and the University of Exeter Medical School.

The study found that greater numbers of resistant bacteria exist close to some waste water treatment works, and that these plants are likely to be responsible for at least half of the increase observed.

In the online dating game, your screen name is your first impression

Choosing a screen name with a letter starting in the top half of the alphabet is as important as an attractive photo and a fluent headline in the online dating game, reveals an analysis of the best ways of finding love in the digital world, ironically published in Evidence Based Medicine despite the fact that it has no evidence basis and is not medicine.

Urban pollinators get the job done

Having trouble getting those fruits and vegetables in your backyard to grow? Don't blame the bees, they are doing their jobs, according to a new study.

Native bees are able to provide adequate pollination service in San Francisco, despite the urban setting, and in what appears to be good news for farmers in space-starved cities, the amount of pollination a plant received was driven not by how large the garden was, but how densely it was populated with flowers.

Western US megadrought likely by end of century

Things look bleak for the Southwest and much of America's breadbasket, the Great Plains. A "megadrought" likely will occur late in this century, and it could last for three decades, according to a new report by Cornell University and NASA researchers in Science Advances.

160 million years old: Earliest arboreal and subterranean ancestral mammals discovered

The fossils of two interrelated ancestral mammals, newly discovered in China, suggest that the wide-ranging ecological diversity of modern mammals had a precedent more than 160 million years ago.

How much plastic debris moves from land to sea?

About 8 million tons of plastic waste wound up in the world's oceans in 2010, and researchers warn that the cumulative amount could increase more than tenfold in the next decade unless the international community improves its waste management practices.

High seas fishing ban could boost global catches and redistribute income

Closing the high seas to commercial fishing could be catch-neutral and distribute fisheries income more equitably among the world's maritime nations, according to research from the University of British Columbia (UBC).

The analysis of fisheries data indicates that if increased spillover of fish stocks from protected international waters were to boost coastal catches by 18 per cent, current global catches would be maintained. When the researchers modelled less conservative estimates of stock spillover, catches in coastal waters surpassed current global levels.

Gator blood contains natural germ fighters

Sophisticated germ fighters found in alligator blood may help future soldiers in the field fend off infection, according to new research by George Mason University.

The study, published Feb. 11 in the scientific journal PLOS One, is the result of a fundamental research project supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to find bacterial infection-defeating compounds in the blood of the crocodilian family of reptiles, which includes American alligators.

Monster hurricanes reached US Northeast during prehistoric periods of ocean warming

Intense hurricanes possibly more powerful than any storms New England has experienced in recorded history frequently pounded the region during the first millennium, from the peak of the Roman Empire into the height of the Middle Ages, according to a new study. The findings could have implications for the intensity and frequency of hurricanes that the U.S. East and Gulf coasts could experience as ocean temperatures increase as a result of climate change, according to the study's authors.

Happy Darwin Day: Evolution of Darwin's finches and their beaks

Darwin's finches, inhabiting the Galápagos archipelago and Cocos island, constitute an iconic model for studies of speciation and adaptive evolution. A team of scientists from Uppsala University and Princeton University has now shed light on the evolutionary history of these birds and identified a gene that explains variation in beak shape within and among species. The study is published today in Nature, on the day before the 206th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.