The idea of ecosystem services is a promising conservation concept but has been rarely put into practice. In Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, researchers have created a tool they say can report some of the first quantifiable results that place values on nature's services to humans.
Some of the best-described ecosystem services include pollination of crops, flood and storm protection, water filtration and recreation. The challenging part is translating these services into something with a measurable value. Economic valuation methods take changes in the supply of ecosystem services and translate these into changes in human welfare.
If you care about the environment, you probably have become familiar with the phrase 'food miles' - along with production methods, it has become a key factor in what environmentally conscious people do to get quality food with less impact on the ecosystem.
But they may be negating it, according to new research by the University of Exeter (UK) p ublished in the journal Food Policy. Shopping locally may not be as good for the environment as having food delivered - on average, lower carbon emissions result even from having food delivered right to your house than driving to a local farm.
Most animals, like humans, have separate sexes. We are born, live out our lives and reproduce as one sex or the other, but some animals live as one sex in part of their lifetime and then switch to the other sex, a phenomenon called sequential hermaphroditism. Yale scientists believe the bigger puzzle is why the phenomenon is so rare, since their analysis shows the biological “costs” of changing sexes rarely outweigh the advantages.
This process is even evolutionarily favored, they say, so its rarity cannot be explained by an analysis of the biological costs vs benefits.
Sliced light is how we communicate now. Millions of phone calls and cable television shows per second are dispatched through fibers in the form of digital zeros and ones formed by chopping laser pulses into bits. This slicing and dicing is generally done with an electro-optic modulator, a device for allowing an electric signal to switch a laser beam on and off at high speeds (the equivalent of putting your hand in front of a flashlight). Reading that fast data stream with a compact and reliable receiver is another matter. A new error-free speed-reading record using a compact ultra-fast component—640 Gbits/second (Gbps, or billion bits per second)—has now been established by a collaboration of scientists from Denmark and Australia.
Whenever humans create a new antibiotic, deadly bacteria can counter it by turning into new, indestructible super-bugs. That's why bacterial infection is the number one killer in hospitals today. But new research from Tel Aviv University may give drug developers the upper hand in outsmarting bacteria once and for all.
The secret weapon against a colony of bacteria may be to stress it with its own protection system, which forces it to reduce its population through ... cannibalism.
If you're a female science teacher, male students tend to underrate you. Even worse, if you are a female science teacher in physics, both male and female students underrate you, according to a study of 18,000 biology, chemistry and physics students.
Are female science teachers just worse than males and instead got the jobs because of social engineering? No, male and female teachers are equally effective at preparing their students for college, say researchers at Clemson University, the University of Virginia and Harvard University, it's instead gender bias. Their findings appear in Science Education online in the research paper, "Unraveling Bias from Student Evaluations of their High School Science Teachers."
Picture a tree in the forest. The tree "inhales" carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, transforming that greenhouse gas into the building materials and energy it needs to grow its branches and leaves.
By removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the tree serves as an indispensable "sink," or warehouse, for carbon that, in tandem with Earth's other trees, plants and the ocean, helps reduce rising levels of carbon dioxide in the air that contribute to global warming.
Some stars go ballistic, racing through interstellar space like bullets and tearing through clouds of gas. Images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, taken by Raghvendra Sahai of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and colleagues reveal 14 of these young, runaway stars.
The stars are plowing through regions of dense interstellar gas, creating brilliant arrowhead structures and trailing tails of glowing gas. These arrowheads, or bow shocks, form when the stars' powerful stellar winds, streams of matter flowing from the stars, slam into surrounding dense gas. The phenomenon is similar to that seen when a speeding boat pushes through water on a lake.
Scientists today announced the discovery of 10 amphibians believed to be new to science, including a spiky-skinned, orange-legged rain frog, three poison dart frogs and three glass frogs, so called because their transparent skin can reveal internal organs.
The species were discovered during a recent Rapid Assessment Program (RAP) expedition in Colombia's mountainous Tacarcuna area of the Darien, near the border with Panama. The expedition was led by herpetologists from Conservation International (CI) in Colombia and ornithologists from the Ecotrópico Foundation, with the support of the local Emberá community of Eyakera.
Adolescents and young adults who are heavy users of marijuana are more likely than non-users to have disrupted brain development, according to a new study. Pediatric researchers found abnormalities in areas of the brain that interconnect brain regions involved in memory, attention, decision-making, language and executive functioning skills. The findings are of particular concern because adolescence is a crucial period for brain development and maturation.
