Earth

An odd songbird with a bald head living in a rugged region in Laos has been discovered by scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society and University of Melbourne, as part of a project funded and managed by the mining company MMG (Minerals and Metals Group) that operates the Sepon copper and gold project in the region..

"The perspective we usually take is how the ocean--by its currents, temperature, and chemistry--is affecting animals," says John Dabiri, a Caltech bioengineer who, along with graduate student Kakani Katija, discovered the new mechanism. "But there have been increasing suggestions that the inverse is also important, how the animals themselves, via swimming, might impact the ocean environment."

Dabiri's and Katija's findings show this inverse to be true, and are published in the journal Nature.

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Large trees have declined in Yosemite National Park during the 20th century, and warmer climate conditions may play a role.

The number of large-diameter trees in the park declined 24 percent between the 1930s and 1990s. U.S. Geological Survey and University of Washington scientists compared the earliest records of large-diameter trees densities from 1932� to the most recent records from 1988�.

LIVERPOOL, UK – 29 July 2009: Researchers at the University of Liverpool have discovered that the Amazon river, and its transcontinental drainage, is around 11 million years old and took its present shape about 2.4 million years ago.

University of Liverpool researchers, in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam and Petrobras, the national oil company of Brazil, analysed sedimentary material taken from two boreholes near the mouth of the river to calculate the age of the Amazon river and the Amazon deep sea fan.

Mounting evidence that human activity is changing the world's oceans in profound and damaging ways is outlined in a new scientific discussion paper released today.

Man-made carbon emissions "are affecting marine biological processes from genes to ecosystems over scales from rock pools to ocean basins, impacting ecosystem services and threatening human food security," the study by Professor Mike Kingsford of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University and colleague Dr Andrew Brierley of St Andrews University, Scotland, warns.

The Department of Energy-sponsored free air carbon dioxide enrichment experiment, known as FACE, has come to a close. The expiriment consisted of three plots of sweetgum trees that were the control sites and two plots of sweetgums that were exposed to increased carbon dioxide levels. The atmosphere were at 550 parts per million, the concentration that is projected to occur in about 2050 if current trends continue. This trend is due to the burning of fossil fuels and global land use change.

Atmospheric scientists at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and their colleagues expect the frequency of wildfires to increase in the future. The spike in the number of fires could adversely affect air quality, caused by the presence of more smoke.

The latest Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-14, provided its first visible full disk image of Earth on July 27, at 2:00 p.m. EDT. The prime instrument on GOES, called the Imager, is taking images of Earth with a 1 kilometer (km) or 0.62 mile resolution from an altitude of 36,000 km (22,240 miles) above Earth's surface, equivalent to taking a picture of a dime from a distance of seven football fields.

The area of forest burnt by wildfires in the United States is set to increase by over 50% by 2050, according to research by climate scientists.

The study predicts that the worst affected areas will be the forests in the Pacific Northwest and the Rocky Mountains, where the area of forest destroyed by wildfire is predicted to increase by 78% and 175% respectively.

The research is based on a conservative temperature increase of 1.6 degrees Celsius over the next 40 years.

Ovarian cancer kills approximately 15,000 women in the United States every year, and more than 140,000 women worldwide. Most deaths from ovarian cancer are caused by tumors of the serous histological type, which are rarely diagnosed before the cancer has spread.

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CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In the classic fairy tale, "The Emperor's New Clothes," Hans Christian Andersen uses the eyes of a child to challenge conventional wisdom and help others to see more clearly. In similar fashion, researchers at the University of Illinois have now revealed the naked truth about a classic bell-shaped curve used to describe the motion of a liquid as it diffuses through another material.

Temperature explains much of why cold-blooded organisms such as fish, amphibians, crustaceans, and lizards live longer at higher latitudes than at lower latitudes, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

A new analysis of jade discovered along the Motagua Fault that bisects Guatemala shows that this region has a more complex geologic history than previously thought. Because jade and other associated metamorphic rocks are found on both sides of the fault and the jade to the north is younger by about 60 million years, a team of geologists posits, in a new research paper, that the North American and Caribbean plates have done more than simply slide past each other. They have collided. Twice.