Species and ecosystem adaptation to climate change. Implications of biodiversity loss. Invasive species. Large scale climate change induced events. 275na6. Air pollution still at dangerous levels in Europe, report finds. Wash your mouth out with silver. Public release date: 7-Mar-2012 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Clare Doggettclare@sfam.org.uk 44-123-432-6661Wiley Yeasts which cause hard-to-treat mouth infections are killed using silver nanoparticles in the laboratory, scientists have found. These yeast infections, caused by Candida albicans and Candida glabrata target the young, old and immuno-compromised. Professor Mariana Henriques, University of Minho, and her colleagues hope to test silver nanoparticles in mouthwash and dentures as a potential preventative measure against these infections.
Professor Henriques and her team, who published their research in the Society for Applied Microbiology's journal Letters in Applied Microbiology today, looked at the use of different sizes of silver nanoparticles to determine their anti-fungal properties against Candida albicans and Candida glabrata.
The scientists used artificial biofilms in conditions which mimic those of saliva as closely as possible. . [ Print | E-mail. BBC Nature - Tiny lizards found in Madagascar. 15 February 2012Last updated at 07:56 By Ella Davies Reporter, BBC Nature Miniature juveniles can stand on the head of a match One of the world's tiniest lizards has been discovered by keen-eyed researchers in Madagascar. The miniature chameleon, Brookesia micra, reaches a maximum length of just 29mm.
German scientists also found a further three new species in the north of the island. The lizards were limited to very small ranges and scientists are concerned they could be at risk from habitat disturbance. Continue reading the main story The geckos Sphaerodactylus ariasae and S. parthenopion are considered to be the smallest lizards in the world with adults just 18mm long Mouse lemurs are the planet's smallest primates The pygmy parrot is so small it fits in a human hand Not to be underestimated, the tiny dart frog is one of the planet's most poisonous animals The discovery is reported in the journal PLoS ONE.
"They mostly live in the leaf litter in the day... Varied but vulnerable. Researchers assess effects of a world awash in nitrogen. Humans are having an effect on Earth’s ecosystems but it’s not just the depletion of resources and the warming of the planet we are causing. Now you can add an over-abundance of nitrogen as another “footprint” humans are leaving behind. The only question is how large of an impact will be felt. In a Perspectives piece in the current issue of Science (Dec. 16, 2011), Arizona State University researcher James Elser outlines some recent findings on the increasing abundance of available nitrogen on Earth.
In “A World Awash in Nitrogen,” Elser, a limnologist, comments on a new study showing that disruption to Earth’s nitrogen balance began at the dawn of the industrial era and was further amplified by the development of the Haber-Bosch process to produce nitrogen rich fertilizers. Until that time nitrogen, an essential building block to life on Earth and a major but inert component of its atmosphere, had cycled at low but balanced levels over millennia. That balance ended around 1895. UK's last wildlife recording course threatened with closure | Environment. The natural world is the litmus paper of the health of our environment. But the last course in the UK which teaches people how to identify plants and animals in the field, and so monitor their changes, is threatened with closure. The biological recording courses operated by Birmingham University have trained hundreds of ecologists who work for the UK's most famous organisations – the National Trust, the Wildlife Trusts, the Natural History Museum, among them – and many more obscure, but vital, charities and research bodies which focus on groups like bryophytes (mosses, liverworts, and hornworts) and conchology (molluscs).
Now the university has told staff and students that the courses do not fit its research strategy, even though both the certificate and masters level degrees are over-subscribed. A petition set up by the group has more than 1,000 signatures, including Sir Ghillean Prance, former head of the world-renowned Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.
China irrigation system responsible for rising emissions, research shows | Environment. The irrigation of Chinese farm fields with more water pumped from ever deeper underground is responsible for 33m tonnes of carbon dioxide per year – equivalent to the entire emissions of New Zealand – a new study revealed on Wednesday. The research, carried out by a team of UK and Chinese scientists, highlights the rising but often overlooked energy and climate costs of irrigating crops in drought-plagued northern China, where farmers have to mine aquifers because surface rivers and lakes are increasingly polluted and over-exploited by factories and cities. The authors found that groundwater used for crop irrigation in China has grown from 10bn cubic metres in 1950 to more than 100bn today.
The country is now second only to India in tapping largely unreplenishable aquifers. As a result, water tables in some of the worst affected areas are falling at the rate of more than two metres a year. "Farmers are drilling more boreholes and pumping from every deeper depths. Bioengineer humans to tackle climate change, say philosophers | Leo Hickman | Environment. Earlier this week, The Atlantic ran an eye-catching, disturbing interview with a professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University called S. Matthew Liao. He was invited to discuss a forthcoming paper he has co-authored which will soon be published in the journal Ethics, Policy & Environment.
But within just a few hours of the interview going live a torrent of outrage and abuse was being directed towards him online. As I tweeted at the time, the interview was indeed "unsettling". Liao explained how his paper – entitled, "Human Engineering and Climate Change" – explored the so-far-ignored subject of how "biomedical modifications of humans" could be used to "mitigate and/or adapt to climate change". Both the interview and the paper itself include a prominent disclaimer. To be clear, we shall not argue that human engineering ought to be adopted; such a claim would require far more exposition and argument than we have space for here.
Liao was the first to respond: Roache: Yes. Google imagines environment-aware mobile adverts. Integrating ecosystem-service tradeoffs into land-use decisions. Author Affiliations Contributed by Gretchen C. Daily, February 17, 2012 (sent for review September 15, 2011) Abstract Recent high-profile efforts have called for integrating ecosystem-service values into important societal decisions, but there are few demonstrations of this approach in practice. We quantified ecosystem-service values to help the largest private landowner in Hawaii, Kamehameha Schools, design a land-use development plan that balances multiple private and public values on its North Shore land holdings (Island of O’ahu) of ∼10,600 ha.
Footnotes Author contributions: J.H.G., G.C., T.K.D., D.E., N.H., G.M., S.P., S.W., and G.C.D. designed research; J.H.G., G.C., T.K.D., D.E., N.H., G.M., S.W., and G.C.D. performed research; J.H.G., G.C., T.K.D., D.E., N.H., G.M., S.W., and G.C.D. analyzed data; and J.H.G., G.C., T.K.D., D.E., N.H., G.M., S.P., S.W., and G.C.D. wrote the paper. Shipping causes 'chronic stress' to whales. Shipping noise causes chronic stress to whales, scientists have shown for the first time, after using the halt in marine traffic after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to conduct a unique experiment. The effect on whales of propeller noise, military sonar and explosions set off in the search for oil and gas is highly controversial. Environmental campaigners claim the noise interferes with the singing of whales, or even kills the animals, and are currently suing the US government over the navy's use of sonar.
The research, published on Wednesday, provides the first evidence of physical harm, according to Rosalind Rolland, a researcher at the New England Aquarium, in Boston, US. "We showed whales occupying oceans with high levels of ship noise have a chronic stress response," said Rolland, who led the study. "We knew whales changed the frequency of their calls to adapt to the ship noise, but this work shows it is not merely an annoyance – it is having a physical effect. " Wind-churned plastics litter deep ocean. U. WASHINGTON (US) — By skimming only the surface, decades of research into how much plastic litters the ocean may vastly underestimate the true amount of debris in some cases, new findings show. While working on a research sailboat gliding over glassy seas in the Pacific Ocean, oceanographer Giora Proskurowski, a researcher at the University of Washington, noticed something new: The water was littered with confetti-size pieces of plastic debris, until the moment the wind picked up and most of the particles disappeared.
After taking samples of water at a depth of 16 feet (5 meters), Proskurowski discovered that wind was pushing the lightweight plastic particles below the surface. Proskurowski gathered data on a 2010 North Atlantic expedition where he and his team collected samples at the surface, plus an additional three or four depths down as far as 100 feet. In high winds the volume of plastic could be underestimated by a factor of 27. In Hawaii, 40-square-miles and many tough choices. STANFORD (US) — After a two-year effort, researchers and Hawaii’s largest landholder have mapped the ecological future of a large chunk of Oahu. In the end, the environmental value of the land—not just the commercial value—was considered.
A former sugar plantation, the abandoned farmland is owned by the Kamehameha Schools trust. The land needed to be repurposed after a century in sugar cultivation. In 2006 the trust partnered with Stanford University environmental researchers at the Natural Capital Project and embarked on a two-year process to determine the effects of various land use alternatives. Some of Hawaii’s remaining prime farmland, under intense development pressure on the north shore of Oahu, is a prime example of forces at play worldwide. Kamehameha Schools is a philanthropic trust established by Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop (the last living descendent of King Kamehameha I) with the mission of ensuring an education for all youth of Hawaiian descent. Fate of the farm. BBC Nature - Man-made noise affects growth of plants and trees.
21 March 2012Last updated at 11:19 By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature The Pinon pine could suffer from high levels of artificial noise It alters birdsong and can make it difficult for some predators to hunt, and now it seems that man-made noise also affects plants. A US team found that industrial noise disrupted the behaviour of animals that pollinate plants and disperse seeds.
This, they suggest, could be slowly transforming our landscape, especially by changing the dispersal of slow-growing trees. The study is published in the Royal Society Proceedings B. The team, led by Clinton Francis from the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in North Carolina, tested the effects of industrial noise on wildlife in Rattlesnake Canyon Habitat Management Area (RCHMA), New Mexico.
In the first of two experiments, the team focused on birds, which, they explained, "are considered to be especially sensitive to noise pollution owing to their reliance on acoustic communication". Openness: A Heartland-warming tale. 15 February 2012Last updated at 21:45 The institute wants to find new funders for its climate work among US fossil fuel companies It's been a while, but at last another climate-related "gate" has opened... and this time, it's in the edifice constructed by those who would have you think climate "scepticism" was rooted purely in science, with never a hint of politics involved.
While Europe was asleep, someone mailed a bunch of internal Heartland Institute documents to a number of bloggers including desmogblog and ThinkProgress - these two and others have since posted the documents online. "Denier-gate" is the label being applied in the blogosphere, in case you're interested. For anyone who doesn't spend every week up to their waists in the ordure of climate politics, the Heartland Institute is a US-based organisation with an overtly libertarian bent to its work. It's probably most notable (or notorious) for holding an annual "climate-sceptic" conference in Washington DC. Having the right blend of "personalities" can impact the survival of the animal group. Leak exposes how Heartland Institute works to undermine climate science | Environment. The inner workings of a libertarian thinktank working to discredit the established science on climate change have been exposed by a leak of confidential documents detailing its strategy and fundraising networks.
DeSmogBlog, which broke the story, said it had received the confidential documents from an "insider" at the Heartland Institute, which is based in Chicago. The blog monitors industry efforts to discredit climate science. The scheme includes spending $100,000 for spreading the message in K-12 schools that "the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain - two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science", the documents said.
It was not possible to immediately verify the authenticity of the documents, although Heartland issued a statement on Wednesday claiming at least one document was fake, and that it was the victim of theft and forgery. Heartland operates on a range of issues besides the environment. Op cuts emissions by 35% | Environment. The Co-op has cut greenhouse gas emissions 35% on 2006 levels. Photograph: Newscast The Co-operative has cut greenhouse gas emissions from its operations by more than a third as part of its "radical" ethical plan, it said today.
A year ago the group pledged to undertake a series of environmental and social measures, including selling more Fairtrade products, cutting carbon emissions, investing £1bn in renewables and taking on thousands of apprentices. The Co-operative, which employs more than 120,000 staff in the UK, said it had now cut emissions by 35% on 2006 levels, for example by energy-saving measures in stores such as fridge doors, and had committed £700m to renewable energy. By the end of March, 70% of products from poor countries that can be Fairtrade in its stores will be sold under the label, which aims to promote a fair deal for developing world producers. It has signed up 1 million new members in the past 12 months. 1 in 8 chance of catastrophic solar megastorm by 2020. Solar flares (credit: SOHO/NASA/ESA) The Earth has a roughly 12 percent chance of experiencing an enormous megaflare erupting from the sun in the next decade, according to space physicist Pete Riley, senior scientist at Predictive Science in San Diego, California, writing n Space Weather on Feb. 23.
This event could potentially cause trillions of dollars’ worth of damage and take up to a decade to recover from, according to a 2008 report from the National Research Council. The last gigantic solar storm, known as the Carrington Event, occurred more than 150 years ago and was the most powerful such event in recorded history.