In a 1995-1997 survey of the OFR--a UNESCO World Heritage Site--WCS found that there were approximately 6800 forest elephants living in an area of almost 14000 km2 (8682 square miles.
Despite these hard realities OFR remains the most important site for the conservation of forest elephants and other large mammals in DRC.
and supports eco-guard patrols focusing their efforts through local intelligence networks and aerial surveillance and ensuring they get the backup they need from the police army and courts.
and Blood Institute under award number NHL097623 and HL073737 and grant P20 RR-016464 from the Idea Network of Biological Research Excellence Program of the National Center for Research Resources.
and in coprolites from ancient sites and dated with over 200 Carbon-14 dates. After years of study Haas and his colleagues have concluded that during the Late Archaic maize (Zea mays
Haas and his team focused on sites in the desert valleys of Pativilca and Fortaleza north of Lima where broad botanical evidence pointed to the extensive production processing
and consumption of maize between 3000 and 1800 B c. They studied a total of 13 sites.
The two most extensively studied sites were Caballete about six miles inland from the Pacific ocean
and the site of Huaricanga about 14 miles inland and consisting one very large mound and several much smaller mounds on either side.
The scientists targeted several areas at the sites including residences trash pits ceremonial rooms and campsites.
This is consistent with the percentage of maize pollen found in pollen analyses from sites in other parts of the world where maize is a major crop
and in multiple sites indicates this domesticated food crop was grown widely in the area and constituted a major portion of the local diet
In one project ARS microbiologist Lisa Durso used fecal samples from six beef cattle to identify a core set of bovine gastrointestinal bacterial groups common to both beef
although the researchers speculate that hairy bumblebees bristle up under the electrostatic force just like one's hair in front of an old television screen.
which relates to the core content of a sentence. His conclusion is based on earlier work by linguists including Noam Chomsky Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser.
These kinds of adaptations of existing structures are common in natural history notes Robert Berwick a co-author of the paper who is a professor of computational linguistics in MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems in the Department of Electrical engineering and Computer science.
since it involves the same core elements: the subject Todd the verb to see and the object condor.
For the new study the authors analyzed eight years'worth of data drawn from Houston's extensive network of air-quality monitors
However commercial crops--melons oranges pineapple and aloe--that were growing near the site were not as healthy.
The technology can be used in power plants paper mills ethanol processors and other manufacturing facilities. As a carbon-negative technology BECCS takes advantage of the innate ability of trees grasses
Using computer models Moreira found that from 1975 to 2007 ethanol production from sugar cane in Brazil resulted in a net-negative capture of 1. 5 metric tons of CO2 per cubic meter of ethanol produced.
and one month after the last rain depending on the site. They also found that the fires'rate of spread was greater
The new study showed that pinyon pine seed cone production declined by an average of about 40 percent at nine study sites in New mexico
The biggest declines in pinyon pine seed cone reproduction were at the higher elevation research sites experiencing more dramatic warming relative to lower elevations said Redmond of CU's ecology and evolutionary biology department.
We are finding significant declines in pinyon pine cone production at many of our study sites said Redmond.
Temperature and precipitation were recorded at official long-term weather stations located near each of the nine sites.
For the new study Redmond revisited nine pinyon pine study sites scattered throughout New mexico and Oklahoma that had been studied previously in 1978 by Forcella.
Vandermeer and colleague Ivette Perfecto of the U-M School of Natural resources and Environment study the complex web of interactions between resident organisms there including various insects fungi birds and bats.
The move to sun coffee results in a gradual breakdown of the complex ecological web found on shade plantations.
One element of that web is the white halo fungus which attacks insects and also helps keep coffee rust fungus in check.
which could indicate more tree die offs are in the pipeline for the near future. Story Source:
In 2008 Argentine ants had populations in 99 percent of the sites within the study area
while only 9 percent of the sites were home to Asian needle ant populations. By 2011 Argentine ants were found in only 67 percent of the sites
--while the Asian needle ants had expanded to occupy 32 percent of the sites. The two ant species shared 15 percent of the sites in common.
This is the first time we've seen another ant species take territory from Argentine ants says Spicer Rice lead author of a paper on the research.
The researchers think that the Asian needle ant's ability to tolerate cooler temperatures may play a significant role in its ability to push out Argentine ants.
#Excavation set to shed new light on Londons Victorian pastfrom a clay smoking pipe to Neolithic flint a 19th century garden has been revealing some of its secrets to an archaeological team from London's Kingston University.
The former industrial site had not been excavated before and she was intrigued to see whether she could find traces of a garden marked out on early maps.
The Seething Wells site in Surbiton is of historic significance because the waterworks built there
A garden on a site like this might tell us more about the people who lived
The team studied 19th century maps from English Heritage archives comparing them with aerial photographs taken during WORLD WAR II by the Royal air force as well as more modern day Google earth images.
We could see that a path existed across the site and the parched grass visible on modern satellite images also suggested its presence Dr Wickstead said.
and Mabel Gower--perhaps they worked the allotments that were on the site during WORLD WAR II.
The above story is provided based on materials by Kingston University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length h
if there are effective and persuasive visual messages that we can convey through smartphone applications to let people know what it is about these products that might make them harmful
Visual reconstruction of the placental ancestor--a small insect-eating animal--was made possible with the help of a powerful cloud-based and publicly accessible database called Morphobank.
Researchers recorded observational traits for 86 placental mammal species including 40 fossil species. The resulting database contains more than 12000 images that correspond to more than 4500 traits detailing characteristics like the presence or absence
I think this database is amazing because it's being presented in such a way that it will be reproducible for the future generations Bloch said.
But scientists say these findings might also help explain why taking zinc tablets at the start of a common cold appears to help stem the effects of the illness.
We want a robust inflammatory response which is part of our natural programming to defend us against a bug.
Bing Shen postdoctoral research associate; Benjamin Slotnick graduate student; and Kelley Liao a graduate student who began work on the project as undergraduate.
Zimmerer designed this data collection and analysis to use with high-resolution satellite imagery and Geographic Information systems.
Women farmers food-preparers and small-scale commercial processors are vitally important as those responsible for a majority of the management
Mike Fay the WCS explorer who played a key role in convincing the late Gabonese President Omar Bongo Ondimba to create a network of 13 national parks in 2002 said:
More diverse sites resisted woody plant invasion. Diversity also affected fire itself. More diverse areas had less persistent ground litter making high-intensity fires less likely to recur than in single-species grasslands with more litter serving as fuel.
Macdougall has studied the Vancouver Island site since 2000. European settlers planted grasslands there in the mid-1800s.
The study included 160 ischemic stroke/TIA patients 18-55 years old who had urine screens upon admission to the hospital.
Sixteen percent of patients had positive drug screens mostly male who also smoked tobacco. Only 8. 1 percent of controls tested positive for cannabis in urine samples.
#Benefits of Bt corn go beyond rootworm resistanceengineered to produce the bacterial toxin Bt Bt corn resists attack by corn rootworm a pest that feeds on roots
But besides merely protecting against these losses the Bt trait has boosted also corn yields in some cases beyond normal expectations.
Fred Below and Jason Haegele of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign set out to answer that question by determining how Bt corn uses nitrogen in the soil.
and with better root systems it's possible that Bt corn uses nitrogen differently than non-resistant strains the scientists hypothesized in turn affecting corn production.
The study published February 6 in Crop science showed just that--Bt corn had higher yields and used nitrogen more efficiently than non-resistant corn.
With its resistance to corn rootworm Below explains Bt corn has healthier and more active roots than corn without the resistance trait.
Additionally Bt corn would fare better at current levels of nitrogen use in the United states. In 2010 the average nitrogen application rate for corn production was around 140 lb/acre say Haegele and Below.
The healthy roots and efficient nutrient use of Bt corn could lead to changes in management practices that would further increase production.
With the Bt corn though you can protect the root system and grow more plants.
In addition to its utility in crop production Below is hopeful that Bt corn will open up new avenues of research as scientists begin to better understand root systems.
and discovered that the pest could crawl between the plant's trichomes to reach its feeding sites said UOG Professor Thomas Marler.
The elephants in the database are semi-captive animals working in the timber industry by pushing and dragging logs.
It was part of a research project that won the youths honors in the Intel Science competition.
and processes fingerprinted in tree-ring ice-core and speleothem records are needed to develop a more accurate history and understanding of the climate system.
I found its usefulness was limited by computing speed. Even using statistical shortcuts processing these images was still so intense that a supercomputer was required to reduce the time to a practical level.
Calculating an area of 50 pixels can take nearly a full day on a state-of-the-art desktop computer says Lippincott-Schwartz.
In their Nature Methods paper the researchers offer other scientists the tools they need to use an easier alternative-the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon Elastic EC2) a service that provides access to supercomputing via the Internet
allowing massive computing tasks to be distributed over banks of computers. To make PALM more practical for use in biomedical research the team wrote a computer script that allows any biologist to upload
and process PALM images using Amazon Cloud. As a demonstration Cang Lippincott-Schwartz and postdoctoral researcher Ying Hu reconstructed the images of podosomes
and the exact antibody docking site on the viral envelope was identified using certain chimeric rabies viruses.
and established a network of protected areas largely designed to preserve forests and their biodiversity.
The researchers used an algorithm to examine the relationship between daily weather patterns and the four wind patterns.
The research combines sediment core studies of the waxy molecules from plant leaves with pollen analysis yielding data of unprecedented scope and detail on what types of vegetation dominated the landscape surrounding the African
While earlier studies on vegetation change through this period relied on the analysis of individual sites throughout the Rift valley--offering narrow snapshots--Feakins took a look at the whole picture by using a sediment core taken in the Gulf of Aden where winds funnel
The combination of marine and terrestrial data enable us to link the environmental record at specific fossil sites to regional ecological
if laboratories striving to grow graphene from carbon atoms kept winding up with big pesky diamonds.
when it becomes graphene. And boron clumps aren't nearly as sparkly. Yakobson and his Rice colleagues have made progress toward 2-D boron through theoretical work that suggests the most practical ways to make the material
Earlier calculations by the group indicated 2-D born would conduct electricity better than graphene.
Yakobson's lab first reported in a Nano Letters paper last year that unlike graphene 2-D boron rolled into a nanotube would always be metallic.
Also unlike graphene the atomic arrangement can change without changing the nature of the material.
Instead of the steady rank-and-file of hexagons in a perfect graphene sheet 2-D boron consists of triangles.
Here we have conceived a material that resembles graphene but is always conductive no matter what form it takes.
or gold substrates in a process called chemical vapor deposition commonly used to make graphene.
Then like graphene these atom-thick boron sheets could be applied to other surfaces for testing and ultimately for use in applications.
For example 2-D boron is more conductive than graphene because of its unique electronic structure and atomic arrangement.
In fact comparing (boron) with graphene is very helpful he said. The state-of-art synthesis methods for graphene provide us good templates to explore 2-D boron synthesis. Yakobson is thinking a step beyond the current work.
There are many groups at Rice and elsewhere working on 2-D boron he said. To appreciate this work you have to stand back
and contrast it with graphene; in some sense the synthesis of graphene is trivial. Why?
Because graphene is given a God material he said. It forms at the global minimum (energy) for carbon atoms--they go there willingly.
But boron is a different story. It does not have a planar form as a global minimum
another new paper from Rice on a hybrid graphene-hexagonal boron nitride shows the need for a 2-D semiconductor to complement the material's conducting
Computations were performed on the National Science Foundation-funded Data analysis and Visualization Cyberinfrastructure at Rice along with resources at the National Institute for Computational Sciences and the DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
and their plant development environment adds the researcher. According to the author the discovery of this insect-plant relationship is especially important for establishing conservation methods both for these species and others that share the same development environment.
According to the entomologist hoverflies are present in practically all terrestrial ecosystems and they carry out very important biological functions such as pollination nutrient recycling
The research using Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite transmitters to track the movements of adolescent vultures is published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Such'restaurants'could be used in future to attract vultures to areas away from sites where they are at high risk of poisoning.
Hundreds of studies over two decades from sites around the world suggest that the Stress Gradient Hypothesis can be employed as a rule of thumb.
Using computer model simulations the scientists led by Jian Liu (Chinese Academy of Sciences) and Bin Wang (International Pacific Research center University of Hawaii at Manoa) showed that global rainfall has increased less over the present-day warming period than during the Medieval Warm Period
However those measurements do not consider the soil properties of individual fields or sites.##oeatmospheric variables do not take into account soil moisture#explains Tyson Ochsner lead author of the study.#
The threshold was determined for each study site since available water a factor used to calculate threshold is affected by specific soil characteristics.#
#oethe soil water contents differ across sites and depths depending on the sand silt and clay contents#says Ochsner.#
#oereadily available water is a site-and depth-specific parameter.##Upon calculating soil water deficits and stress thresholds for the study sites the research team compared their assessment of drought probability to assessments made using atmospheric data.
We tried to provide a zoomable view like Google maps so you can look at the system from various perspectives Abraham said.
Aizenberg is also Director of the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology at Harvard and a Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.
which is part of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network supported by the U s. National Science Foundation.
By linking data from Landsat satellite images over a 20-year period with observations on the ground they found that 9. 1 to 16.9 percent of tree mortality was missing from more conventional plot-based analyses of forests.
That's the point of the study--and the beauty of using computer models. You can isolate the phenomenon that you wish to explore in this case irrigation versus no irrigation.
#Researchers break million-core supercomputer barrierstanford Engineering's Center for Turbulence Research (CTR) has set a new record in computational science by successfully using a supercomputer with more than one million computing cores to solve a complex fluid
Joseph Nichols a research associate in the center worked on the newly installed Sequoia IBM Bluegene/Q system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) funded by the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program of the National
Sequoia once topped list of the world's most powerful supercomputers boasting 1572864 compute cores (processors)
Because of Sequoia's impressive numbers of cores Nichols was able to show for the first time that million-core fluid dynamics simulations are possible
Predictive simulations--advanced computer models--aid in such designs. These complex simulations allow scientists to peer inside
More cores more challengescomputational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations like the one Nichols solved are incredibly complex.
Only recently with the advent of massive supercomputers boasting hundreds of thousands of computing cores have engineers been able to model jet engines
The more cores you have the faster and more complex the calculations can be. And yet despite the additional computing horsepower the difficulty of the calculations only becomes more challenging with more cores.
At the one million-core level previously innocuous parts of the computer code can suddenly become bottlenecks.
Ironing out the wrinklesover the past few weeks Stanford researchers and LLNL computing staff have been working closely to iron out these last few wrinkles.
and beyond the all-important one million-core threshold and as the time-to-solution declined dramatically.
when he attended a two-week summer program at Lawrence Livermore computing facility in 1994 sponsored by the Department of energy.
Back then he worked on the Cray Y-MP one of the fastest supercomputers of its time.
The computer code used in this study is named Charles and was developed by former Stanford senior research associate Frank Ham.
This code utilizes unstructured meshes to simulate turbulent flow in the presence of complicated geometry. In addition to jet noise simulations Stanford researchers in the Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP) sponsored by the Department of energy are using the Charles code to investigate advanced-concept scramjet propulsion systems used in hypersonic flight
and pet owner perceptions of dog foods and treats the research team developed a 20-question Web-based survey.
The materials at play--graphene and hexagonal boron nitride--have been merged into sheets and built into a variety of patterns at nanoscale dimensions.
Graphene has been touted as a wonder material since its discovery in the last decade. Even at one atom thick the hexagonal array of carbon atoms has proven its potential as a fascinating electronic material.
Graphene-based electronics require similar compatible 2-D materials for other components and researchers have found hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) works nicely as an insulator.
H-BN looks like graphene with the same chicken-wire atomic array. The earlier work at Rice showed that merging graphene
and h-BN via chemical vapor deposition (CVD) created sheets with pools of the two that afforded some control of the material's electronic properties.
He has concluded since that the area of two-dimensional materials beyond graphene has grown significantly and will play out as one of the key exciting materials in the near future.
His prediction bears fruit in the new work in which finely detailed patterns of graphene are laced into gaps created in sheets of h-BN.
The interface between elements seen clearly in scanning transmission electron microscope images taken at Oak ridge National Laboratories shows a razor-sharp transition from graphene to h-BN along a subnanometer line.
After the masks were washed away graphene was grown via CVD in the open spaces where it bonded edge-to-edge with the h-BN.
While there's much work ahead to characterize the atomic bonds where graphene and h-BN domains meet and to analyze potential defects along the boundaries Liu's electrical measurements proved the components'qualities remain intact.
And the graphene still looks very good. That's important because we want to be sure
and juice processors address the threat posed by Huanglongbing (HLB) a disease that is costing the citrus industry millions of dollars each year.
Highly advanced calculations based on Bayesian statistics were carried out by statisticians at the Norwegian Computing Center. 2000 figures make the differencewhen the researchers at CICERO
and the Norwegian Computing Center applied their model and statistics to analyse temperature readings from the air
D. formerly from the Department of Nutrition Harvard School of Public health and currently at the Channing Division of Network Medicine Brigham and Women's Hospital and colleagues analyzed data from 20 cohort studies of women
A total of 281 young adults (with a mean age of 20 years) completed an internet-based daily food diary for 21 consecutive days.
and dried fruit) vegetables (excluding juices) and several categories of unhealthy foods like biscuits/cookies potato crisps and cakes/muffins.
and develop highly intricate branched networks that enable them to explore the soil. The branching roots grow horizontally off the main root
#Greenland ice cores reveal warm climate of the pastin the period between 130000 and 115000 years ago Earth's climate was warmer than today.
The ice cores are examined in laboratories with a series of analyses that reveal past climate.
The content of the heavy oxygen isotope O18 in the ice cores tells us about the temperature in clouds
which they combed large public databases to compare people with or without high blood-glucose levels--a defining marker of type-2 diabetes--in pursuit of differences between the two groups'exposures to myriad environmental substances.
The satellite data were collected by the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer instrument on NASA's Aura spacecraft. When it comes to reducing ozone levels emission reductions in one part of the world may drive greenhouse warming more than a similar level of emission reductions elsewhere said Bowman lead author of the study published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
and grassland-dwelling herbivore with the trunk-like snout--living in a network of remote national parks spanning the Peru-Bolivia border.
Camera trap data revealed that lowland tapir abundance was higher at sites under protection than sites outside protected areas.
At one site sampled over time the Tuichi River camera trapping has revealed that lowland tapir populations have been recovering following the creation of Madidi National park in 1995.
A new study finds a complex web of factors increases perceived risk of tiger attack in the Sundarbans of Bangladesh.
and have produced a climate change guidebook and Web portal for climate science information. The main objective is to get science in the hands of managers
Previous studies using conventional optical satellite data produced contradictory results likely due to the difficulty of correcting the optical data for interference by clouds and other atmospheric conditions.
The invaded sites can catch up with uninvaded ones Knight adds because the number of species does not increase indefinitely.
At any site if you sample larger and larger areas the number of species will eventually plateau.
At an invaded site you reach that plateau later but you do reach it eventually.
LTER Site to characterize the comparative productivity and greenhouse gas impacts of different crops including corn poplar alfalfa and old field vegetation.
Satellite data are available only for the last 20 years and show that since 1992 the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers have experienced significant thinning (melting) flow acceleration
Co-author Dr Gerhard Kuhn from AWI explains It was important to get a better understanding of the rapid retreat that we see in the satellite data.
Co-author Dr James Smith also from BAS adds First we determined the distance between the core locations
Then by dating the type of sediment material deposited at a core site in the open ocean (after the grounding line had moved further landward) we were able to calculate the average rate of glacier retreat over time.
This new research will be used to improve the accuracy of computer models that are essential to predict future ice loss in the Amundsen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its likely contribution to global sea-level rise.
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