By PHUONG LE16 November 2014 POULSBO, Washington (Associated Press) – Just hours into the experiment, the prognosis was grim for salmon that had been submerged in rain runoff collected from one of Seattle’s busiest highways. One by one, the fish were removed from a tank filled with coffee-colored water and inspected: They were rigid. Their […]
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer17 November 2014 WASHINGTON (Associated Press) – A key polar bear population fell nearly by half in the past decade, a new U.S.-Canada study [pdf] found, with scientists seeing a dramatic increase in young cubs starving and dying. Researchers chiefly blame shrinking sea ice from global warming. Scientists from the […]
By Katie Campbell17 November 2014 SEATTLE (KCTS9) – After months of research, scientists have identified the pathogen at the heart of the starfish wasting disease that’s been killing starfish by the millions along the Pacific shores of North America, according to research published Monday. They said it’s a virus that’s different from all other known […]
By Terrie M. Williams6 November 2014 (Los Angeles Times) — As I rubbed the frostbite out of my hands on returning from a seal survey on Antarctic ice recently, I was informed that I had the dubious distinction of making the Top 5 in the 2014 list of wasteful scientists compiled by Sen. Tom Coburn […]
4 November 2014 (SSCS) – For more than four decades, environmentalist, Dr. Roger Payne, famous in the scientific world for discovering that humpback whales sing and communicate across the world’s oceans, has known a thing or two about the plight of the great whales and the oceans. He contends that while it is crucial to […]
(NASA) – Satellite view of river delta changes in China. China’s Huang He (Yellow) River is the most sediment-filled river on Earth. Each year, it transports millions of tons of soil from a plateau it crosses to a delta it has built in the Bohai Sea. These images show the delta’s growth from 1985 to […]
By Richard Inger, et al.2 November 2014 (Ecology Letters) – Totaled abundance estimates of 144 European bird species from 1980 to 2009, separated into quartiles. (I) Quartiles based on abundance on a yearly basis hence quartiles have a variable species composition. (II) Quartiles based on abundance in year 1 of the study (1980) hence quartiles […]
By Mary Catherine O’Connor27 October 2014 (The Guardian) – Ecologist Mark Browne knew he’d found something big when, after months of tediously examining sediment along shorelines around the world, he noticed something no one had predicted: fibers. Everywhere. They were tiny and synthetic and he was finding them in the greatest concentration near sewage outflows. […]
By Jonathan Watts31 October 2014 (Rio de Janeiro) – The Amazon rainforest has degraded to the point where it is losing its ability to benignly regulate weather systems, according to a stark new warning from one of Brazil’s leading scientists. In a new report, Antonio Nobre, researcher in the government’s space institute, Earth System Science […]
By Laura Parker 15 July 2014 (National Geographic) – When marine ecologist Andres Cozar Cabañas and a team of researchers completed the first ever map of ocean trash, something didn’t quite add up. Their work, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, did find millions of pieces of plastic debris […]
