You have probably never seen a great crested newt. If you're in the UK, you'll usually only hear about them when construction work is halted because they are found at a building site. In the past month alone, relocating these ...
For nearly 50 years, researchers have been stumped as to why sea shells from warm tropical waters are comparatively larger than their cold water relatives. New research, led by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef ...
Researchers behind the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan (AIPP) this week unveiled new Farmland Guidelines to add another strand to a coordinated drive to help Ireland's pollinators survive and thrive. The guidelines were launched ...
Wild salmon, historically, are born in rivers, swim to sea to live out their adulthoods, and find their way back to their freshwater spawning grounds to reproduce before dying.
Small native mammals eat more plant seeds than had been realised, and their loss to predators such as foxes and feral cats has likely caused significant changes to vegetation in outback Australia.
Wildlife rangers are on the front lines protecting our most iconic species—tigers, elephants, gorillas and many others. But their challenges involve more than confrontations with wild animals and poachers.
The fight against poaching must be treated as a war, Africa's leading anti-poaching coalition said Thursday, as it called for the illicit wildlife trade to be monitored like global conflicts.
When ECU wildlife ecologist Dr Rob Davis describes surveying birdlife on the island of New Britain as the hardest field work he's ever done, he's not exaggerating.
Since the 19th century, Australian drovers have moved their livestock along networks of stock routes. Often following traditional Indigenous pathways, these corridors and stepping-stones of remnant vegetation cross the heavily ...
New research by a Florida State University scientist has examined how oil and other hydrocarbons in Antarctica affect miniature organisms called meiofauna that slip through the sediment widely unnoticed to the casual observer.
A partnership between QUT, the NSW Government and farmers could lead to the eventual eradication of the highly invasive African lovegrass which is threatening pastures and native grasslands Australia-wide.
Researchers at the University of Granada (UGR) have discovered that different types of seeds allow plants to adapt to environmental cycles as they evolve.
New Deakin University research is pointing to signs of recovery in global sea turtle populations thanks to long-term conservation efforts, contrasting with a trend that's seen most endangered vertebrates continue to decline ...
West Coast rockfish species in deep collapse only 20 years ago have multiplied rapidly in large marine protected areas off Southern California, likely seeding surrounding waters with enough offspring to offer promise of renewed ...
The duration of the vegetation period – i.e. the time that elapses between leafing out (the emergence of the first leaf) in spring and the initiation of leaf loss in autumn – is a highly significant ecological parameter ...
The calls of frogs on warm nights in the spring are a welcome sound, telling listeners that the seasons are changing and summer is coming. Today, however, ponds that once echoed with the chirps, chuckles and calls of frogs ...
A Perth researcher is using CSI-style paternity testing in the lab to track pollen and measure how much the urban sprawl is affecting plants ability to reproduce.
"It's devastating. I've been following them every day of my life for the last year," said Dedan Ngatia, a wild dog researcher in Kenya's central Laikipia region. "They're all dead."
With 72 species currently identified, Espeletia is a plant genus endemic to the paramo, a moist alpine biome unique to the northern Andes. This genus, which inhabits the world's most diverse high-altitude ecosystem, is an ...
Intensive fishing and climate change pose an unprecedented threat to biodiversity in the world's oceans, but reconstructing how the past 500 years of human activity on the seas has transformed marine life could help to reveal ...
In 2003, Northern California's Yurok Tribe initiated efforts to reintroduce California Condors on their lands. While wild condors have not existed in the region for more than a hundred years, a new study from The Condor: ...
A conservation group in Indonesia says it wants to create a 5-hectare "forest island" for the world's only known albino orangutan after rescuing it from villagers earlier this year.
NOAA Fisheries researchers and colleagues at the New England Aquarium have developed a new model to improve estimates of abundance and population trends of endangered North Atlantic right whales, which have declined in numbers ...
A deadly amphibian disease called severe Perkinsea infections, or SPI, is the cause of many large-scale frog die-offs in the United States, according to a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Thanks to the international pet trade, populations of exotic animals are popping up in unexpected places worldwide. One of these successful invaders is the monk parakeet: a small, green parrot native to South America that ...
Solitary weasel-like animals called tayra might look pretty harmless, but some may actually be incubators for a parasite that causes Chagas disease, a chronic, debilitating condition that is spread by insects called kissing ...
If you had been in northern Canada 45 million years ago, you might have encountered the distant ancestor of all of the oaks in the Americas. That single species gave rise to 220 more and two distinct lineages—red oaks and ...
The queen conch, a marine mollusk prized for its edible meat and its glossy shell, is one of the most economically and culturally important species in the Caribbean. In the past few decades, intense international fishing ...
On a recent morning that was chilly with the first nip of fall, Brenda Lee went looking for knocked-over trash cans. She drove her car slowly through alleyways on the west side of this Colorado city, close to where streets ...
Nine elephants were electrocuted in a freak accident in Botswana after one of them knocked into an electricity pole and the high-voltage power line fell on them, a local official said Tuesday.
Animals in the Goldilocks zone—neither too big, nor too small, but just the right size—face a lower risk of extinction than do those on both ends of the scale, according to an extensive global analysis.
With its snow-white plumage and elegant posture, mute swans are exalted in European ballets and fairy tales as symbols of love and beauty. But to many wildlife biologists, they are aggressive and destructive invaders in U.S. ...
Predicting how climate change will affect the incidence of infectious diseases would have great public health benefits. But the relationship between climate and disease is extraordinarily complex, making such predictions ...
The mass of warm water known as "the blob" that heated up the North Pacific Ocean has dissipated, but scientists are still seeing the lingering effects of those unusually warm sea surface temperatures on Pacific Northwest ...
By 2040, a hundred people will live on the Moon, melting ice for water, 3D-printing homes and tools, eating plants grown in lunar soil, and competing in low-gravity, "flying" sports.
If you drop an aluminum spoon in a sink full of water, the spoon will sink to the bottom. That's because aluminum, in its conventional form, is denser than water says Utah State University chemist Alexander Boldyrev.
The Earth's history is written in its elements, but as the tectonic plates slip and slide over and under each other over time, they muddy that evidence—and with it the secrets of why Earth can sustain life.
A new IUPUI study funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture answers a long-debated agricultural question: whether no-tillage alone is sufficient to prevent water pollution from nitrate. The answer is no.
Many extreme events—from a rogue wave that rises up from calm waters, to an instability inside a gas turbine, to the sudden extinction of a previously hardy wildlife species—seem to occur without warning. It's often impossible ...
After an election year marked by heated exchanges and the distribution of fake news, Twitter bots earned a bad reputation—but not all bots are bad, suggests a new study co-authored by Emilio Ferrara, a USC Information Sciences ...
If the U.S. wants to start using wood pellets to produce energy, either the government or power customers will have to pay an extra cost, a new University of Georgia study has found.
Yale scientists have created a simple-to-produce device that uses sound waves to store quantum information and convert it from one form to another, all inside a single, integrated chip.
Pure diamond consists of carbon atoms in a perfect crystal lattice. But remove a few carbons and swap some others for nitrogen, and you get a diamond with special quantum-sensing properties. These properties are useful for ...
Textiles represent one of the earliest human craft technologies and applied arts, and their production would have been one of the most important time, resource and labour consuming activities in the ancient past.
An international collaboration involving the Earlham Institute, Norwich, UK, and the Iwate Biotechnology Research Centre, Japan, has for the first time provided a genome sequence for the white Guinea yam, a staple crop with ...
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the University of Vienna in Austria and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has developed a technique using photons for controlling and measuring phonons. In their paper ...
What if we could turn carbon dioxide, CO2, into a valuable resource? Using CO2 as a feedstock to create fuels or other chemicals would offer economic and environmental benefits. The challenge is designing effective processes ...
(Phys.org)—Piece by piece, the circuit diagram for electron transport in the mitochondria has come closer to completion. Each new structure obtained for any of the five respiratory complexes further constrains the assembled ...
Mathematicians have opened a new chapter in the theory of moonshine, one which begins to harness the power of the pariahs - sporadic simple groups that previously had no known application.
Diamonds may be 'forever,' but some may have formed more recently than geologists thought. A study of 26 diamonds, formed under extreme melting conditions in the Earth's mantle, found two populations, one of which has geologically ...
The mummified remains of a 7-month-old baby boy and pieces of skull from two teenage Triceratops underwent computed tomography (CT) scans Saturday, Sept. 16, at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, in hopes ...
(Phys.org)—A trio of researchers with the California Institute of Technology has found evidence that suggests it might be possible to calculate a minimum peak quake size during the onset of an earthquake. In their paper ...
Dominant female meerkats use aggression to keep subordinates from breeding, but a new study finds this negative behavior also can result in the latter becoming less willing to help within the group.
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a potential new tactic for rapidly determining whether an antibiotic combats a given infection, thus hastening effective medical treatment ...
The diet of some animals is not what the shape of their teeth would have you think. That's the conclusion from a recent study on the jaw of a wedgefish by a team headed by Mason Dean, scientist at the Max Planck Institute ...
(Phys.org)—Using data from the first-ever gravitational waves detected last year, along with a theoretical analysis, physicists have shown that gravitational waves may oscillate between two different forms called "g" and ...
The first analysis of a Neanderthal boy's skull uncovered in Spain suggests that he grew much like a modern boy would, in another sign that our extinct ancestors were similar to us, researchers said Thursday.
Researchers at The University of Manchester have developed the world's first handheld SORS device that can detect fake spirits, such as vodka and whisky, whilst still in their bottles.
The search for biology on neighbor planet Mars won't play out like a Hollywood movie starring little green men. Rather, many scientists agree if there was life on the Red Planet, it probably will present itself as fossilized ...
The first large-scale study of ancient human DNA from sub-Saharan Africa opens a long-awaited window into the identity of prehistoric populations in the region and how they moved around and replaced one another over the past ...
In the centenary year of the publication of a seminal treatise on the physical and mathematical principles underpinning nature - On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson - a Cambridge physicist has led a study describing ...
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