Archive for the ‘Environment’ Category
A Russian team is drilling a few meters to get a historical fact: to reach the hidden body of freshwater in Lake Vostok, more than 3,650 meters beneath the ice of Antarctica, according to an article in Nature.
The ambitious project, launched 20 years ago, has suffered several delays due to technical problems and funding. The Russian researchers, who resumed on January 2 drilling at a depth of 3,650 meters, believe they are less than 40 meters from the accumulation of frozen lake water.
Weather plays against them. The bit can go about three meters a day, but the team must stop on February 6, when the last plane of the summer season reaches the Vostok station, about 1,300 kilometers from the South Pole. If they have not reached their goal then they have to wait until December to continue. Valery Lukin, head of the Russian program for Antarctica, believed to be achieved. Read the rest of this entry »
The first plant that came all the living species is a group of algae green whose closest living relatives (bryophytes) are proliferating today in aqueous environments.
A team of researchers from University of Wisconsin, Madison (USA) has analyzed how the transition occurred in the aquatic environment to the new environment “hostile”. The work has been published in an article in the American Journal of Botany.
According to scientists, led by Linda Graham, moved to the mainland required substantial changes in their lifestyle, which contributed in turn to global climate change and atmospheric conditions, leading the world in which human beings emerged. Read the rest of this entry »
Scientists have discovered more than 1,200 species in the Amazon in the past ten years, one every three days. So says the report Amazonia Viva!: 1999-2009 A decade of discovery of the conservation organization WWF.
In particular, found 637 plants, 257 fish, 216 amphibians, 55 reptiles, 16 birds and 39 mammals, some of which are as spectacular as the parrot bald frog with the head color of fire, or a new anaconda.
Some of them may be a relic of Earth’s past, as Martialis Heureka, located in Brazil in 2008 and nicknamed the ‘ant from Mars’ by its unusual characteristics. Read the rest of this entry »
Electric cars that recharge in seconds and travel hundreds of miles without passing through the plug. Solar and wind systems that offer the right amount of power at any time. Electronics with energy independence of weeks. The batteries, some kind of battery, could fulfill this wish in the near future. Believe so many international research teams who base their work on various systems, such as nanotechnology.
In search of the ideal battery
The renewable energy and electric vehicles have a common weakness: the lack of reliable energy storage systems, high-capacity and cheap. The solar technologies or wind in theory could cover all energy needs of humanity, but they are very irregular. Sometimes generate so much energy that can not be exploited, while others produce nothing because there is no wind or sun. For its popularity would take extra energy conservation in large quantities and used at the time and time. Today this is not possible.
Electric vehicles have a similar problem. Its batteries can not compete on price or output with conventional fuel engines, but especially for their autonomy and recharge time, these cars need to hook up several hours to travel short distances before running out of energy. Read the rest of this entry »
Eating insects could help reduce global warming, according to an article published in the journal PLoS ONE. Meat consumption is a major environmental problem: the cows or pigs are a good source of protein but also large emitters of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, two of the major greenhouse gases (GHG) involved in the climate change.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), livestock accounts for nearly one-fifth of GHG emissions caused by humans.
The article in PLoS ONE shows that insects can also be an important source of protein and pollute far less. This is due among other causes to grow faster and generate less waste.
In reaching this conclusion, its officers, a team of researchers led by Dennis Oonincx, an entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, studied the three main greenhouse gases emissions (CO2, methane and nitrous oxide) of five species of insects, including the aforementioned beetle Mealworm and house crickets (Acheta domesticus). Read the rest of this entry »
What are common in climate change and a broken glass? More than it seems, as evidenced by an article published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The study, by Jasper Kok The National Center for Atmospheric Research U.S., explains that microscopic particles of dust emitted into the atmosphere and fragments of broken glass and other fragile objects follow similar patterns of transmission. Also indicates that there are several times more dust particles in the atmosphere than previously thought. The reason is that in desert areas would be an unexpectedly high number of large pieces of dust.
Airborne dust and its spread is an important aspect when it comes to better understand the evolution of climate change. Some dust particles reflect solar energy and cool the planet, while others trap energy as heat, depending on their size and other characteristics. Read the rest of this entry »
If you enjoy strawberry ice cream and chocolate, or based on food and stock both, this is your news. Two separate research teams have deciphered the genome sequence of the cacao tree and wild strawberry. This work may allow further improve its quality, performance or resistance.
On the one hand, a team backed by the multinational Mars released a draft sequence of the tree of cacao, Theobroma cacao. Soon after, a team supported in part by rival chocolatier Hershey Company, has been the first to sequence the genome of the plant, a work published in an article in the journal Nature Genetics. Read the rest of this entry »
The polar bears, seals and other endangered animals living in the arctic still hope, says an article in the journal Nature. The good news is that it is likely that the next century is still a bit of summer sea ice, thereby providing a last refuge for these animals.
The bad news is the threats that facing these animals are very powerful, such as oil spills and other pollutants, climate change and extinction through interbreeding between populations of different animals as protagonists researchers explain article, which offered their data at the recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California.
Specifically, the team of Stephanie Pfirman, environmental scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, notes that climate models that predict the evolution of sea ice suggest that are accumulating in the northern Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Greenland, where the sea ice thicker today. Part of this ice is formed locally, and part comes from Siberia by the currents of wind and sea. Read the rest of this entry »
The global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels decreased by 1.3% between 2008 and 2009 following the financial crisis, concludes a study.
However, the decrease is only half that predicted by data from another report published in the magazine in relation to 2009, according to the investigators, led by Pierre Friedlingstein, UK University of Exeter. The explanation is partly due to reductions in carbon intensity (the amount of fossil fuel emissions per unit of gross domestic product) were lower than expected.
Friedlingstein team analyzed the statistics on energy consumption at the country level, and resulted in CO2 emissions. Among the findings, noted that the change in CO2 emissions between 2008 and 2009 varies significantly by country, with reductions of between 7% and 12% in Europe, Japan and North America, and a significant increase in economies like China. Read the rest of this entry »
A new marine species of squid than 70 inches long was discovered on seamounts of the southern Indian Ocean. The finding is part of an expedition led by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to that sea area in which we have analyzed 7,000 samples collected.
The new species, identified by Vladimir Laptikhovsky, scientist in the Department of Fisheries of the Falkland Islands, is part of the chiroteuthid family. The squid in this group are long and thin and have light-producing organs that act as decoys to lure their prey. So far, more than 70 species of squid have been identified in expeditions to undersea mountains, which represents over 20% of global biodiversity squid. Read the rest of this entry »