Earth

What a person says is not necessarily an indication of what that person knows because speech is motivated by social circumstances and the desire to influence the listener. Two researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia have applied this principle to local environmental knowledge by indigenous peoples and are urging other scientists to incorporate more observation and skepticism into their studies.

US and Mexican conservation efforts may have boosted the number of marine turtles visiting UK waters, according to University of Exeter biologists.

New research by the University of Exeter and Marine Environmental Monitoring, published this week in Marine Biology (3 May 2007), analyses 100 years of data. It shows an increase in the number of loggerhead and Kemp’s ridley turtles in UK and French waters in the last twenty years. The research team believes this is most likely the result of protective measures put in place in the United States and Mexico.

With gold nanoparticles, DNA and some smart chemistry as their tools, scientists at Northwestern University have developed a simple "litmus test" for mercury that eventually could be used for on-the-spot environmental monitoring of bodies of water, such as rivers, streams, lakes and oceans, to evaluate their safety as food and drinking water sources.

An article detailing the colorimetric screening technology and its success detecting mercury will be published online April 27 by Angewandte Chemie, the prestigious European journal of applied chemistry.

A major study has shed new light on the dim layer of the ocean called the "twilight zone"—where mysterious processes affect the ocean's ability to absorb and store carbon dioxide accumulating in our atmosphere.

The characteristics of the vegetation that inhabited Earth 21 million years ago can be vital to get to know climatic evolution in the last million years and the causes for these changes.

Samples of the sedimentary bowls of the geographic section from the south of Spain to Turkey give researchers cause to theorize that 14 million years ago there were glaciations in the south pole that changed the ruling subtropical climate into warm and transformed the characteristic vegetation of this area.

A Georgia Tech research team has discovered that water exhibits very different properties when it is confined to channels less than two nanometers wide – behaving much like a viscous fluid with a viscosity approaching that of molasses. Determining the properties of water on the nanoscale may prove important for biological and pharmaceutical research as well as nanotechnology.

University of Colorado at Boulder researchers are forecasting a one in three chance that the 2007 minimum extent of sea ice across the Arctic region will set an all-time record low.