A U.S. start-up has turned to nature to help bring water to arid areas by drawing moisture from the air. NBD Nano aims to mimic the way a beetle survives in an African desert to create a self-filling water bottle capable of storing up to three litres every hour. The insect harvests moisture from the…
One of the great scientific tasks of the day is to understand how and why trees die. It may seem like a question that would have been answered many decades ago, but it was not — at least not at a detailed physiological level. Now, amid growing signs worldwide that forests are at risk as…
Wild turkeys and buffalo have more in common than you might guess. Both were important as food for Native Americans and European settlers. And both were nearly obliterated. There were a couple of reasons for the turkey’s decline. In the early years of the U.S., there was no regulation, so people could shoot as many…
As many as two thirds of the species living in our oceans may still be unknown to science, say researchers, despite the fact that their calculations indicate that there are many fewer species than previously thought. The University of Auckland researchers reckon there are actually fewer than a million marine species, of which around 226,000…
From Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog at the New York Times: President Obama’s first long discussion of human-driven global warming in recent memory came near the end of a recent news conference. The president actually said quite a bit. Among other things, he offered a sobering reality check in the face of a big, and…
In May, Dr Juan Abella and colleagues from the Spain’s National Museum of Natural Sciences and the Catalan Institute of Paleontology announced the discovery of a new fossil species of bear that roamed what is now Spain in the Miocene period. On the basis of fossil teeth found at the Nombrevilla 2 site in the…
When a killer seaweed touches a kind of spiky coral, the coral pushes a chemical panic button that brings small resident fish to the rescue. Unchecked, seaweed algae can overrun a coral reef, as the community dwindles in “a descent into slime,” says marine ecologist Mark Hay of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta….
Massive declines in coral reefs, mangrove swamps and wetlands.
The expansion of European settlement in Australia triggered a massive coral collapse at the Great Barrier Reef more than 50 years ago, according to a new study. The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that runoff from farms clouded the pristine waters off the Queensland coast and killed the natural…
The spade-toothed beaked whale is so rare that nobody has seen one alive, but scientists have proof the species still exists. Two skeletons were identified as belonging to the species after a 17-foot whale and her calf beached themselves in New Zealand in 2010. Scientists hope the discovery will provide insights into the species and…