If you are a fish eater, it's likely that the salmon you had for dinner was not caught in the wild, but was instead grown in a mesh cage submerged in the open water of oceans or bays. Fish farming, a relatively inexpensive way to provide cheap protein to a growing world population, now supplies, by some estimates, 30 percent of the fish consumed by humans.
Two hundred and twenty species of finfish and shellfish are now grown in farms.
Earth's unique, forbidding ice oceans of the Arctic and Antarctic have revealed a trove of secrets to Census of Marine Life explorers, who were especially surprised to find at least 235 species live in both polar seas despite a distance of more than 13,000-kilometer distance in between.
President Barack Obama's pursuit of energy independence promises to accelerate research and development for alternative energy sources -- solar, wind and geothermal power, biofuels, hydrogen and biomass, to name a few.
For the hydrogen economy, one of the roadblocks to success is the hydrogen itself. Hydrogen needs to be purified before it can be used as fuel for fuel cells, but current methods are not very clean or efficient.
CHICAGO — Deep-sea drilling into one of the most active earthquake zones on the planet is providing the first direct look at the geophysical fault properties underlying some of the world's largest earthquakes and tsunamis.
The Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiment (NanTroSEIZE) is the first geologic study of the underwater subduction zone faults that give rise to the massive earthquakes known to seismologists as mega-thrust earthquakes.
Farmers across the tropics might raze forests to plant biofuel crops, according to new research by Holly Gibbs, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment.
"If we run our cars on biofuels produced in the tropics, chances will be good that we are effectively burning rainforests in our gas tanks," she warned.
Alexandria, VA – The American Geological Institute (AGI) Workforce Program has completed the report "Status of the Geoscience Workforce 2009." The first chapter, "Trends in Geoscience Education from K-12 through Community College" of this comprehensive benchmark report is now available through AGI's website at http://www.agiweb.org/workforce.
Earthquakes, volcanoes and the African superplume are only some of the phenomena under investigation through AfricaArray, a program that establishes geophysical observatories, trains African and American students and examines geophysical phenomena on the African continent.
CHICAGO -- Field work and computer simulations in Michigan and Wisconsin are helping biofuels researchers understand the basics of getting home-grown energy from the field to consumers. Preliminary results presented today suggest that incorporating native, perennial plants during biofuels production reduces emissions of greenhouse gases, improves water quality and enhances biodiversity. The results are part of an experimental effort to make biofuels economically and environmentally sustainable.
CHICAGO – Putting a price tag on carbon dioxide emitted by different land use practices could dramatically change the way that land is used – forests become increasingly valuable for storing carbon and overall carbon emissions reductions become cheaper, according to research presented today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
GAITHERSBURG, Md.—Pushing the envelope of Albert Einstein's "spooky action at a distance," known as entanglement, researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) of the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland have demonstrated a "quantum buffer," a technique that could be used to control the data flow inside a quantum computer. Quantum computers could potentially speed up or expand present capabilities in decrypting data, searching large databases, and other tasks. The new research is published in the Feb.
CHICAGO – Imagine you live in the suburbs of Chicago and you must commute hundreds of miles to a job in Iowa just to put food on the table. Magellanic penguins living on the Atlantic coast of Argentina face a similar scenario, and it is taking a toll.
The penguins' survival is being challenged by wide variability in conditions and food availability, said Dee Boersma, a University of Washington biology professor and a leading authority on Magellanic penguins.
Scientists have for the first time calculated the likely impact of climate change on the distribution of more than 1,000 species of fish around the globe.
Published this week in the journal 'Fish and Fisheries', the research was carried out by scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA), the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Princeton University. The findings will also be presented at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago on Friday February 13 by the paper's lead author Dr William Cheung of UEA's School of Environmental Sciences.
A quarter-century of data reveals how changing weather patterns and land use, combined with overfishing and pollution, are taking a heavy toll on penguin numbers
Edmonton—Canada's inland waters, the countless lakes and reservoirs across the country, are important "sentinels" for climate change and Ottawa and the provinces are ignoring the warnings.
That's the message from University of Alberta biologist David Schindler and colleagues in a paper to be released Feb. 12, 2009, in the prestigious publication, Science.
Schindler is a co-author of Sentinels of Change, which reviewed papers addressing the effects of climate change revealed in numerous long-term studies presented at a conference last September.
The study, funded in part by the National Geographic Society, found that songbirds' overall migration rate was two to six times more rapid in spring than in fall. For example, one purple martin took 43 days to reach Brazil during fall migration, but in spring returned to its breeding colony in only 13 days. Rapid long-distance movement occurred in both species, said Stutchbury.