Biological_systems. Octopus. DNA. Clima. Ecology. Timbuktu's ancient salt caravans under threat. The salt trade is seen as a necessary part of tradition in parts of Mali With a long, gurgling groan, Lakhmar fell awkwardly to his knees in the roasting hot sand outside the town of Timbuktu. For the past six years he has been making the same gruelling trek across the Sahara desert to the salt mines of Taoudenni in northern Mali. But each journey is becoming more of a struggle. Lakhmar, a 10-year-old male camel with a metal ring in his flaring right nostril, left it to his owner, Boujima Handak, to explain their predicament. "It's getting more difficult because the rains aren't coming, the oases are drying up and the camels get tired and thirsty and can't continue," he said, unloading a grey-brown, 50kg slab of crystallised salt, the size of an ironing board, from Lakhmar's back. Camel caravans have been plying their trade between Taoudenni and Timbuktu for centuries.
It is a rite of passage for young, blue-turbaned nomads from the local Tuareg community. Ancient lake Unfair competition? Battling Siberia's devastating illegal logging trade. Wagons brimming with logs accumulate in the Siberian railway station of Dalnerechensk, more than 8,000km (4,971 miles) east of Moscow. They are waiting to cross the nearby Chinese border. Once in China, they will be processed and used for construction or turned into garden furniture and other products to be sold in European and US shops.
More than a third of all Russian logs are smuggled by mafias, a practice that doubled between 2005 and 2007, according to official figures. It is a huge business. China imports nearly six out of 10 logs produced in the world, after banning logging in its own territory following devastating floods a decade ago. In total, 10m cubic metres of wood, equivalent to nearly a third of all logging in the Amazon, is harvested every year from Russian soil. This fuels a massive illegal business that threatens to destroy the largest forest on the planet in 20 to 30 years, according to Forest Trends, an international consortium of industry and conservation groups.
BBC - Earth News - Clever ravens cooperatively hunt. Planning the next attack? Brown-necked ravens team up to hunt lizards, revealing an unexpected level of intelligence, say scientists. Ornithologists observed a number of birds acting together to trap and kill their prey in Israel's Arava Valley. Two of the ravens would fly to the ground to block the lizard's escape route, while the others attacked it.
The behaviour suggests the birds must know what each other and the lizard are thinking, known as a 'theory of mind', say the scientists. Details of the behaviour are published in the Journal of Ethology. Professor Reuven Yosef of the International Birding and Research Centre in Eilat, Israel and his daughter Ms Nufar Yosef, a doctoral student at Tel Aviv University in Ramit Aviv, observed brown-necked ravens (Corvus rufficollis) hunting a large species of lizard called an Egyptian Mastigure (Uromastyx aegyptius). During more than 60 hours observing the birds, they watched nine separate hunts take place at two locations.
Outwitting prey.
Canibalismo de aves qdo nao encontram peixe. Adult pelicans swallow the young gannets whole In a bizarre reaction to changing food supplies, great white pelicans have turned to eating live gannet chicks. This adaptive behaviour, first revealed by biologist Marta de Ponte Machado, has now been captured on film by a BBC natural history camera crew. On the island of Malgas in South Africa, the pelicans attack any gannet chick that is left undefended by its parents and is small enough to swallow. As a result, entire gannet colonies are in danger of being destroyed.
The predatory behaviour is captured for the BBC natural history series Life. Cape gannets and pelicans are members of the same bird order. Cape gannets (Morus capensis) have a wingpsan of up to 1.8m when fully grown and can live for up to 25 years. The species breeds in just six places, of which one is Malgas island in South Africa. Due to people overfishing sardine and anchovies off the coast of Southern Africa, the population of gannets has dwindled.
Officials dismiss claims Bhopal site is leaking toxin. Many locals believe their birth defects were caused by the gas leak Indian officials have dismissed claims that the former Union Carbide pesticide plant at Bhopal is still leaking dangerous toxins into drinking water. The chief minister of Madhya Pradesh state was speaking 25 years after the world's worst industrial disaster. Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan told the BBC the plant was safe, contradicting claims in a new report. Thousands died after 40 tons of deadly methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the US-owned plant on 3 December 1984. Half a million people were exposed to the gas. '100% clean' Mr Chouhan said that neighbouring communities near the site had been supplied with clean drinking water. Shivraj Singh Chouhan: 'There was nothing hazardous for human lives there' "It took some time," he said in a BBC interview ahead of the 25th anniversary of the disaster on 3 December.
"But we managed this quickly, and we can say that we are providing 100% clean water. " Toxins 'never cleaned up' Science untarnished by 'Climategate,' U.N. says | Green Tech - C. LONDON--The head of the U.N.'s panel of climate experts rejected accusations of bias on Thursday, saying a "Climategate" row in no way undermined evidence that humans are to blame for global warming. Climate change skeptics have seized on a series of e-mails written by specialists in the field, accusing them of colluding to suppress data which might have undermined their arguments. The e-mails, some written as long as 13 years ago, were stolen from a British university by unknown hackers and spread rapidly across the Internet.
But Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stood by his panel's 2007 findings, called the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). "This private communication in no way damages the credibility of the AR4 findings," he told Reuters in an e-mail exchange. In one e-mail, confirmed by the university as genuine, a scientist jokingly referred to ways of ensuring papers which doubted established climate science did not appear in the AR4.