By JUSTIN GILLIS4 June 2011 CIUDAD OBREGÓN, Mexico — The dun wheat field spreading out at Ravi P. Singh’s feet offered a possible clue to human destiny. Baked by a desert sun and deliberately starved of water, the plants were parched and nearly dead. Dr. Singh, a wheat breeder, grabbed seed heads that should have […]
By FELICITY BARRINGER30 May 2011 IRVINE, Calif. — Scientists have been using small variations in the Earth’s gravity to identify trouble spots around the globe where people are making unsustainable demands on groundwater, one of the planet’s main sources of fresh water. They found problems in places as disparate as North Africa, northern India, northeastern […]
June 2 (Maplecroft) – New research that evaluates worldwide energy security, has identified the G7 economies of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and USA as being at ‘high risk’ in the short-term, whilst China and countries from the oil producing MENA region are highlighted as facing increasing challenges in the future. Risk analysis and mapping […]
Map showing loss of headwater streams to mountaintop mines and valley fills (MTM-VF). This diagram depicts the loss of stream miles and channel complexity that can result from extensive mountaintop mining and valley filling. Solid blue lines inside valley fill areas represent buried streams. Note that some headwaters above filled areas are disconnected from the […]
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer30 May 2011 WASHINGTON — A growing shortage of medications for a host of illnesses – from cancer to cystic fibrosis to cardiac arrest – has hospitals scrambling for substitutes to avoid patient harm, and sometimes even delaying treatment. “It’s just a matter of time now before we call for […]
Growth of tuna fisheries halted in 2008 as catches of this species group decreased by 2.6 percent after the 2007 global record of almost 6.5 million tonnes. While maximum tuna catches in the Pacific Ocean (which represents about 70 percent of the global catches) and in the Indian Ocean were reached in 2007 and 2006, […]
By Wang Qian (China Daily)28 May 2011 BEIJING – The Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydropower project, might lose the battle against the worst drought to hit Central China in 50 years if no rains fall by mid-June. “If the drought continues and there is no rainfall before June 10, the dam will lose […]
View Map of Radiation Measurements by Greenpeace team in a larger map By arevamirpal::laprimavera27 May 2011 Radioactive materials in concentration that was up to several hundreds of times the normal level were detected from the soil on the ocean floor in the 300-kilometer strip along the coast from Kesennuma City in Miyagi Prefecture to Choshi […]
By Tamino25 May 2011 Shortly after it became clear that April 2011 broke the U.S. record for the most April tornados, the Washington Post reported that it was not a “legitimate” record … yet. That’s because earlier years’ counts are adjusted upward in an attempt to compensate for our increasing ability to detect tornados in […]
A nitrophilous index was calculated using over 750,000 occurrence records of plants that had been indexed at GBIF for the Iberian Peninsula by March, 2009. To construct this index, the annual number of records of nitrophilous taxa was obtained for the period 1900-2008. Next, the obtained value was divided by the total number of plant […]
