In contrast to domestic rabbits wild rabbits have a very strong flight response because they are hunted by eagles hawks foxes
and that the accumulation of many small changes led to the inhibition of the strong flight response--one of the most prominent phenotypic changes in the evolution of the domestic rabbitwe predict that a similar process has occurred in other domestic animals
#Study shows where on the planet new roads should and should not goresearchers have created a'large-scale zoning plan'that aims to limit the environmental costs of road expansion
More than 25 million kilometres of new roads will be built worldwide by 2050. Many of these roads will slice into Earth's last wildernesses where they bring an influx of destructive loggers hunters and illegal miners.
Now an ambitious study has created a'global roadmap'for prioritising road building across the planet to try to balance the competing demands of development and environmental protection.
and a'road-benefits'layer that estimates the potential for increased agriculture production via new or improved roads.
The authors of the new study recently published in the journal Nature write that by combining these layers they have identified areas where new roads have most potential benefit areas where road building should be avoided
but we think we've identified where in the world new roads would be most environmentally damaging said co-author Professor Andrew Balmford from the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology.
Roads often open a Pandora's box of environmental problems said Professor William Laurance of James Cook University in Australia the study's lead author.
But we also need roads for our societies and economies so the challenge is to decide where to put new roads
--and where to avoid them. Professors Laurance and Balmford worked with colleagues from Harvard Cambridge Melbourne Minnesota
After mapping out the priority areas for conservation the team then tried to decide where roads would have the greatest benefits for humanity.
In general areas that would benefit most from new roads are those that have converted largely to agriculture
and new or improved roads are vital for farmers said Dr Gopalasamy Reuben Clements from James Cook.
With better roads farmers can buy fertilisers to raise their yields and get their crops to markets with far less cost and waste.
Areas with carbon-rich ecosystems with key wilderness habitats such as tropical forests were identified as those where new roads would cause the most environmental damage with the lease human benefit particularly areas where few roads currently exist.
but a very rapidly growing human population that will need more food and more roads. The study's authors say that this new global road-mapping scheme can be used as a working model that can be adapted to for specific areas.
They say that proactive and strategic planning to reduce environmental damage should be central to any discussion about road expansion.
Given that the total length of new roads anticipated by mid-century would encircle the Earth more than 600 times the authors point out that there is little time to lose.
Typically found along roads and in forests it can survive in widely diverse ecosystems and has been found to impact native plant species invertebrate populations and soil nutrients.
Rather than typical interstellar dust these researchers appear to have detected vast streamers of gravel--essentially a long and winding road in space said NRAO astronomer Jay Lockman who was involved not in these observations.
Her project was under the supervision of Dr Will van Wettere who leads a number of research projects in improving pig fertility and life expectancy of piglets.
voyage of the Astrolabe (1826-1829. Initially described by French Professor of botany Achille Richard as Leptospermum ericoides this species
The paper Transport of boron by the tassel-less 1 aquaporin is critical for vegetative and reproductive development in maize was published in The Plant Cell.
The guidance was published in the association's journal Circulation. Based on the current evidence the association's position is that e-cigarettes that contain nicotine are tobacco products
In addition to federal oversight of e-cigarettes the association guidance also examines state smoke-free laws in relation to these products.
Just as people who travel to South america are told to be careful about drinking the water people who visit other areas like California the Pacific Northwest
Slowed down on replay their wings thrum like helicopter blades as they hover near food.
During the warm period faster currents cause more tropical water to travel to the North Atlantic warming both the surface and the deep water.
which was detected first on the North Island in 2001 and still had an active infestation expansion front traveling southward into Varroa-free areas of the country
Consistent with the observations in other countries Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) is the virus most strongly affected by the spread of Varroa throughout New zealand.
Last December online retailer Amazon announced plans to explore drone-based delivery suggesting that fleets of flying robots might serve as autonomous messengers that shuttle packages to customers within 30 minutes of an order.
and the condition of its propellers cameras and other sensors throughout a mission and take proactive measures--for example rerouting to a charging station--if needed.
The method simplifies all potential routes a drone may take to reach a destination without colliding with obstacles.
which needs to be done persistently over hours you need to take into account the health of the system says Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi a postdoc in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Jonathan How the Richard Cockburn Maclaurin Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics; and John Vian of Boeing.
Tree of possibilitiesplanning an autonomous vehicle's course often involves an approach called Markov Decision Process (MDP) a sequential decision-making framework that resembles a tree of possible actions.
Each node along a tree can branch into several potential actions--each of which if taken may result in even more possibilities.
Planning a vehicle's route over any length of time therefore can result in an exponential growth of probable outcomes
vehicle-level planning such as a vehicle's location at any given time; and mission-level or health planning such as the condition of a vehicle's propellers cameras and fuel levels.
For vehicle-level planning he developed a computational approach to POMDP that essentially funnels multiple possible outcomes into a few most-likely outcomes.
Imagine a huge tree of possibilities and a large chunk of leaves collapses to one leaf and you end up with maybe 10 leaves instead of a million leaves Agha-mohammadi says.
He says that planning out a vehicle's possible positions ahead of time frees up a significant amount of computational energy
In this regard he and his colleagues used POMDP to generate a tree of possible health outcomes including fuel levels and the status of sensors and propellers.
This work was supported by Boeing. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Massachusetts institute of technology.
and Latin america The European space agency's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission measures soil moisture at a resolution of 31 miles (50 kilometers) but because soil moisture can vary on a much smaller scale its data
Enter NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite. The mission scheduled to launch this winter will collect the kind of local data agricultural and water managers worldwide need.
and sustainable withdrawals from groundwater said Forrest Melton a research scientist in the Ecological Forecasting Lab at NASA Ames Research center in Moffett Field California.
If farmers of rain-fed crops know soil moisture they can schedule their planting to maximize crop yield said Narendra Das a water and carbon cycle scientist on SMAP's science team at NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena California.
http://smap. jpl. nasa. gov/NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns.
NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records
For more information about NASA's Earth science activities in 2014 visit: http://www. nasa. gov/earthrightnowstory Source:
The above story is provided based on materials by NASA/Jet propulsion laboratory. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length h
#Signs of deforestation in Brazilmultiple fires are visible in in this image of the Para and Mato grosso states of Brazil.
follows the Brazialian national motorway BR 163 passing by cities such as Novo Progresso. The lower half of the image shows the state of Mato grosso.
The beginning of the forest loss coincides with a 1979 decision by Brazil's Program of National Integration to build roads across the forest
The above story is provided based on materials by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length n
This surge was correlated directly to a more than quadrupling of local black-market ivory prices paid to poachers and tripling in the volume and number of illegal ivory seizures through Kenyan ports of transit.
The data also show that the destination of the illegally trafficked ivory increasingly shifted to China.
This study helps make sense of the challenge faced by thousands of rangers working on the frontlines to protect elephants
and professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Dr. Mahalingam is studying how wildland fire propagates in an effort to be able to more accurately model such fires via physically based computational models.
With funding from the U s. Department of agriculture's U s. Forest Service Division Dr. Mahalingam and his collaborator UAH Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering faculty member Dr. Babak Shotorban are currently supervising four doctoral
Wildland fires involve complex interactions that include fuel distribution terrain topography chemical reactions energy transfer and the associated fluid dynamics that transport moisture gas-phase hydrocarbons air
The Sun is in the disk of the galaxy where the vast majority of the Milky way's young stars are located.
However what Hinkel found is that the nearby'solar salad'is comprised of lettuce at the bottom chunks of tomato in the middle (where the middle of the galactic plane is) then lettuce again on top.
Given all of the motion in the galaxy this was unexpected a very result. But it's also very exciting says Hinkel.
These findings and many others are viewable via the Land Cover Atlas program from the NOAA's Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP.
The ability to mitigate the growing evidence of climate change along our coasts with rising sea levels already impacting coastlines in ways not imaged just a few years ago makes the data available through the Land Cover Atlas program critically important to coastal resilience planning said Margaret
The atlas's visuals help make NOAA environmental data available to end users enabling them to help the public better understand the importance of improving resilience.
Seeing changes over five 10 or even 15 years allows Land Cover Atlas users to focus on local hazard vulnerabilities
For instance the atlas has helped its users assess sea level rise hazards in Florida's Miami-Dade County high-risk areas for stormwater runoff in southern California and the best habitat restoration sites in two watersheds
and renewable substitutes for gasoline diesel and jet fuel on a gallon-for-gallon basis. Unlike ethanol drop in transportation fuels derived from biomass have the potential to be dropped directly into today's engines
The JBEI researchers tested the effectiveness of their bionic liquids as a pre-treatment for biomass deconstruction on switchgrass one of the leading potential crops for making liquid transportation fuels.
when he found that during this parasitic interaction there is a transport of RNA between the two species. RNA translates information passed down from DNA
One thing we do know is that there have been increased reports of quail flying into objects such as barns and houses.
of America (ESA) meeting. Perhaps not surprisingly Ward along with fellow doctoral students Ryan Rebozo and Kevin P. W. Smith from the Laboratory of Pinelands Research led by Walter Bien Phd in Drexel's College of Arts
While traveling across the country and passing through different types of environments we stopped every few hundred miles to evaluate the immediate roadside vegetation and comparing that to the plants in the natural environments 20 meters away from the road.
but their scientific work closer to home in the New jersey Pinelands also has a relationship to the road.
When Snakes Meet the New jersey Highwayroads are a challenge for northern pine snakes (Pituophis melanoleucus) in the New jersey Pine Barrens based on the findings that Ward will present at the ESA meeting on Aug 15.
At this meeting Ward will also become chair of the student section of ESA after serving as vice chair for the past year.
In New jersey the most densely populated state in the country the network of roads can dramatically shape the area of land that snake populations can occupy without facing significant risk of population loss during road crossings.
Roads reduce the number of snakes we can have by creating more small patches of usable habitat in many cases too small to support even a single pine snake Ward said.
and identified a total of 3872 habitat patches divided by roads and natural barriers. Of those only 156 patches were of a large enough size to support a small population of 3-5 adult snakes.
Ward said this work has helped inform ongoing efforts in the state to mitigate the impact of roads
Two years ago the New jersey Air National guard agreed to participate in a pilot study to test the feasibility of using culverts to guide snakes under roads as part of a larger study of northern pine snakes at Warren Grove Gunnery Range.
The New jersey State department of Transportation installed culverts under portions of the Atlantic city Expressway last year.
Newborn Snakes Finding Their Path Through Lifemost reptiles are said great mapmakers Smith a doctoral student in Drexel's Laboratory of Pinelands Research who will present research on northern pine snakes at the ESA
and trophic cascades in concert with other drivers affect coastal ecosystems. The ecological impacts of a changing climate are evident from terrestrial polar regions to tropical marine environments.
â#¢Approximately 74 percent of nests were located on natural substrates mostly juniper trees. â#¢Selected areas dominated by contiguous stands of sagebrush. â#¢Ferruginous Hawk nests were located farther from roads
In the long term the only sustainable solution is for the demand for ivory--the ultimate driver of the system--to be reduced.
Lora Holland of the University of North carolina-Asheville director of the Cetamura laboratory at Badia a Coltibuono who processed the items for transport and storage;
Honeybee flight muscles are strongly dependent on high levels of oxygen consumption and energy metabolism. Mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation drives ATP synthesis which is required to contract the muscles during flight.
If something goes wrong the energy production is impaired explains Nicodemo. Similar to a plane honeybees require clean fuel in order to fly.
Clearly there are things that you can do to reduce loss--you can put bed liners in trucks you can adjust your combine you can harvest more slowly
If you see soybeans bouncing off your windshield from the truck ahead of you and bands of soybeans along the berm why wouldn't you try to prevent it?
lack of truck regular maintenance; lack of adjustment to the combine at the platform; bad weather;
but truck conditions were mentioned by only 62 percent. These causes should be common knowledge so
I don't know why 100 percent of the responses didn't agree that for example poor road
and truck conditions contribute to loss. The lack of definitiveness about this may indicate that loss is not a front-of-mind issue for managers
which the app users'scores were in line with the national guidance. They gave the'eat more of'foods such as fruits
The scientists identified climate change as the main driver behind this increase: under assumed stable climatic conditions no substantial further increases in forest disturbances beyond the current levels were found in their simulations.
They rarely travel more than 3 miles from home. Codding says co-evolution is how two
But because the change happens so quickly it has been impossible to capture an image of the glycoprotein in transit.
And it's also shared by intercell transport in the nervous system Ma said. He noted the work could not have been done without CTBP
and barium atoms that are sandwiched between checkerboard planes of iron atoms. The nickel atoms are substituted then partially for iron to tune the material's physical properties.
This assumption would be in accordance with archaeological finds of wooden wheels wagons and a yoke from the Horgen culture.
It will add significant value to the guidance we can give to forest managers to ensure that their forests will be resilient and productive over the coming decades.
and bike into a different kind of forest than we do now. Petr's research was funded by the Forestclim project.
The research was carried out by Colette Heald an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering (CEE) at MIT former CEE postdoc Amos Tai and Maria van Martin at Colorado State university.
and a member of the Miwok people will co-lead the trip which will end with a visit to California State Indian Museum.
and travel and created sacred spaces. They were aware of the succession so they staggered burns by 5 to 10 years to create mosaics of forest in different stages
In order to study the effect of changes in agricultural practices on Midwest river discharge the researchers focused on Iowa's Raccoon River at Van Meter Iowa.
In order to make this possible Rianne van Binsbergen Phd researcher at the Animal breeding and Genomics Centre of Wageningen UR investigated
and indigenous peoples across the world have recognized government rights to forests containing 37.7 billion tonnes of carbon--equivalent to 29 times the annual emissions from all passenger vehicles in the world.
Urbanization reduces the amount of vegetation in a habitat and increases impervious surfaces such as roads and rooftops.
The researchers also found that temperatures were related to the amount of impervious surfaces in the area including streets sidewalks and parking lots.
Habitats also can become fragmented by roads or natural landscape features such as bodies of water.
and New hampshire cottontails to travel the large distances between fragmented habitats necessary to maintain gene flow among populations of cottontails Kovach said.
However certain landscape features such as power line rights-of-way railroad edges and roadsides may support rabbit dispersal as they provided the animal's preferred scrub habitat.
Occasionally underpasses and culverts also may be effective conduits for rabbit travel. The researchers hope that an improved understanding of how the cottontail moves through the landscape will assist wildlife and land managers in species recovery efforts.
We hope that soon we will be able to examine agricultural practices in even greater detail--with the launch of the European space agency's Sentinel satellites which will provide regular data at even higher spatial resolution.
Citizen scientist Paul Tenczar developed the technique for attaching RFID tags to bees and tracking their flight activity with monitors.
and there's some kind of colony-level regulation that has some of them working really really hard making many trips
while others make fewer trips. Perhaps the less-busy bees function as a kind of reserve force that can kick into high gear
Sows with the European gene have significantly fewer piglets than carriers of the Asian version.
It is released by vehicles industry and forest removal and comprises the greatest portion of greenhouse gas totals.
Facts 2014). 3. 79 percent of pet owners said the quality of their pets'food is as important as their own (Mintel 2013). 4. Top drivers of sales in pet foods included adding excitement
NASAS Aura and climate changenitrogen and oxygen make up nearly 99 percent of Earth's atmosphere.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary this week NASA's Aura satellite and its four onboard instruments measure some of the climate agents in the atmosphere including greenhouse gases clouds
and managed by NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory Pasadena California delivers global maps showing annual averages of the heat absorbed by ozone in particular in the mid troposphere.
and how they change over time said Bryan Duncan an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland.
and managed by JPL made the first global measurements of cloud ice content in the upper troposphere providing new data input for climate models.
http://aura. gsfc. nasa. gov/For more on TES visit: http://tes. jpl. nasa. gov/For more on MLS visit:
http://mls. jpl. nasa. gov/index-eos-mls. phpnasa monitors Earth's vital signs from land air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne
and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records
and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community
For more information about NASA's Earth science activities in 2014 visit: http://www. nasa. gov/earthrightnowstory Source:
The above story is provided based on materials by NASA/Jet propulsion laboratory. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length
#Big data used to guide conservation effortsdespite a deluge of new information about the diversity and distribution of plants and animals around the globe big data has yet to make a mark on conservation efforts to preserve the planet's biodiversity.
The work was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through the priority program Mass transport and Mass distribution in the System Earth.
The authors also analyzed images of over 270000 km of logging roads built from 1973 to 2010 and estimated that over 266000 km2 of forest cover has been logged with logging reaching increasingly more remote and high-elevation forests over time.
and tools washing vehicles --and doing our best to stay clear of the areas where we have found the worms.
and surfaces and also enter homes via airborne transport of cigarette smoke. The researchers examined exposure to carcinogen N-nitrosamines and tobacco specific nitrosamines (TSNAS) in the dust samples.
and only considers the most important drivers it reflects the consequences of the dramatic change in land use patterns in arid regions says Prof.
The study incorporated research findings from field studies conducted in Morocco's Atlas Mountains and Oriental region and in the highlands of Tibet as part of two interdisciplinary projects.
and land use change on natural resources in the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Their data on rainfall fluctuations and on the productivity and regenerative capacity of pasture vegetation formed the basis for the ecological part of the model.
Guus van Muijlwijk of the Department of Medical Microbiology at Radboud University is a final year medical student who contributed to the research during an exchange visit to Manchester.
The information is travelling through these rooms in token form and ending up inscribed onto cuneiform tablets further down the line.
Lyuba's full-body CT scan which used an industrial scanner at a Ford testing facility in Michigan was the first of its kind for any mammoth.
They finally succeeded in October 2010 at Ford motor Co.'s Nondestructive Evaluation Laboratory in Livonia Mich. using a scanner designed for finding flaws in vehicle transmissions.
and parking lots have lowered the amount of recharge thus contributing to the decline in water levels. There is a brighter note Ale said.
and their previous germplasm re-sequencing data the team discovered a novel ion transporter gene Gmchx1
Produced by the Forum of International Respiratory Societies (FIRS) the position statement will be presented on July 9th 2014 at a meeting hosted by FIRS and the NCD Noncommunicable Disease Alliance Shared Drivers Shared Solutions:
#New recreational travel model to help states stop firewood assisted insect travelthe spread of damaging invasive forest pests is powered only partially by the insects'own wings.
The study Using a Network Model to Assess Risk of Forest Pest Spread via Recreational Travel was published July 9 in the journal PLOS ONE
or dying trees that may be infested the dispersal of invasive insects via recreational travel has not been studied well.
and destination locations for a camper-transported pest. Summary maps for the 48 contiguous U s. states and seven Canadian provinces showed the most likely origins of campers traveling from outside the target state or province.
In the eastern United states the most common and thus potentially riskiest out-of-state origin locations were usually found in nearby or adjacent states.
The fossil of the Scansoriopteryx (which means climbing wing) was found in Inner Mongolia and is part of an ongoing cooperative study with the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences.
It has numerous unambiguous birdlike features such as elongated forelimbs wing and hind limb feathers wing membranes in front of its elbow half-moon shaped wrist-like bones bird-like perching feet a tail with short anterior vertebrae
and claws that make tree climbing possible. The researchers specifically note the primitive elongated feathers on the forelimbs and hind limbs.
and NASA among others followed the explosion right from the start and the following 2â years and analysed the light from the very bright supernova.
They are so large that they can survive their onward journey out into the galaxy explains Christa Gall.
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