Some orchids mimic the scent of a female insect in order to attract males for pollination. Researchers writing in BMC Evolutionary Biology found that breeding two of these orchid species to generate a novel hybrid resulted in a new scent. This new odor had no effect on normal solitary bees from the area but was highly attractive to another species of wild bee that never visited any of the parent orchid species.
Earth
The world is no longer our oyster.
As we prepare to celebrate Earth Day on April 22, we can add another species, one of widespread ecological and economic importance, to the list of the beleaguered.
From East Coast to West and around the world, global warming and its effects have descended upon shellfish reefs, particularly those formed by the Olympia oyster.
The U.S. Geological Survey has awarded $2.7 million in cooperative agreements under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to the University of California, Berkeley; Central Washington University; University of California, San Diego; and UNAVCO, Inc., to improve networks that detect minute changes in the earth's crust caused by faulting in earthquake-prone regions.
An international team of scientists led by the paleontologist Steffen Kiel at the University of Kiel, Germany, found the first fossil boreholes of the worm Osedax that consumes whale bones on the deep-sea floor. They conclude that "boneworms" are at least 30 Million years old. This result was published in the current issue of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS, April 19, 2010).
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A University at Buffalo volcanologist, an expert in volcanic ash cloud transport, published a paper recently showing how the jet stream, the area in the atmosphere that pilots prefer to fly in, also seems to be the area most likely to be impacted by plumes from volcanic ash, like in the recent Eyjafjallajökull eruption.
In this image taken just under two hours ago (14:45 CET) by ESA's Envisat satellite, a heavy plume of ash from the Eyjafjallajoekull Volcano is seen travelling in a roughly southeasterly direction.
If history is any indication, the erupting volcano from the Eyjafjallajökull-Fimmvörduháls glacier in Iceland and its immense ash plume could intensify, says a Texas A&M University researcher who has explored Icelandic volcanoes for the past 25 years.
Jay Miller, a research scientist in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program who has made numerous trips to the region and studied there under a Fulbright grant, says the ash produced from Icelandic volcanoes can be a real killer, which is why hundreds of flights from Europe have been cancelled for fear of engine trouble.
Evidence that the world's water cycle has already intensified is contained in new research to be published in the American Journal of Climate.
The stronger water cycle means arid regions have become drier and high rainfall regions wetter as atmospheric temperature increases.
The eruption of the Icelandic volcano in the Eyjafjallajökull-Fimmvörduháls glacier that sent a huge plume of ash into the atmosphere and caused sweeping disruptions of air traffic over Great Britain and Scandinavia today will likely dissipate in the next several days, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder atmospheric scientist.
This image, acquired today by ESA's Envisat satellite, shows the vast cloud of Eyjafjallajoekull volcanic ash sweeping across the UK from the eruption in Iceland, more than 1000 km away.
Carbon fixation by phytoplankton in the open ocean plays a key role in the global carbon cycle but is not fully understood. Until now researchers believed that cyanobacteria overwhelmingly accounted for phytoplankton's role in carbon fixation in the open ocean. But now scientists at the University of Warwick and the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton have opened 'the black box' of eukaryotic phytoplankton and discovered that they actually account for almost half the ocean's carbon fixation by phytoplankton.
A link between low solar activity and jet streams over the Atlantic could explain why, despite global warming trends, people in regions North East of the Atlantic Ocean might need to brace themselves for more frequent cold winters in years to come.
A new report published today, Thursday 15 April, in IOP Publishing's Environmental Research Letters describes how we are moving into an era of lower solar activity which is likely to result in UK winter temperatures more like those seen at the end of the seventeenth century.
A researcher at North Carolina State University has helped to develop a new method for describing the binding of protons and neutrons within nuclei. This method may improve scientists' ability to predict and understand astrophysical reactions within stars.
When protons and neutrons bind, the process releases energy. This fusion energy is how stars burn. If scientists can determine where these particles are, what they are doing, and how they are binding, they will then be able to more accurately predict and understand the life cycles of stars.
Researchers have devised a new kind of random number generator, for encrypted communications and other uses, that is cryptographically secure, inherently private and – most importantly – certified random by laws of physics.
That is important because randomness is surprisingly rare. Although the welter of events that transpire in the course of daily life can certainly seem haphazard and arbitrary, none of them is genuinely random in the sense that they could not be predicted given sufficient knowledge. Indeed, true randomness is almost impossible to come by.
In just two centuries, humans have wrought such vast and unprecedented changes to our world that we actually might be ushering in a new geological time period that could alter the planet for millions of years, according to a group of prominent scientists that includes a Nobel Laureate. They say the dawning of this new epoch could lead to the sixth largest mass extinction in the Earth's history. Their commentary appears in ACS' bi-weekly journal Environmental Science & Technology.