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April-June 2010
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Breathalyzer Test for Whales
Remote control helicopters sample bacteria from moving giants
Comments (0)Beetle Mania
A scientist, a pool hustler, and an avant-garde composer fight a fearsome insect invasion
Comments (0)Building On The Fly
Could the bizarre, decentralized logic of insect architecture provide a blueprint for revolutionary and sustainable human habitat?
Comments(1)The New Normal
As though working through the five stages of grief, more and more ecologists are reluctantly accepting that we live in a human-dominated world. And some are discovering that patchwork ecosystems might even rival their pristine counterparts.
Comments (0)Wounds That Can Heal
A pioneering study of nature’s recovery times delivers a startling conclusion: that some damaged ecosystems bounce back in decades, not millenia. The findings offer a ray of hope—and a respite from apocalyptic storylines.
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July 30, 2010
Dead Zone Entrée
Which foods contribute the most to eutrophying nitrogen pollution?
You already know your carbon footprint. How about your “nitrogen footprint”? Researchers have calculated how much nitrogen pollution is produced by the production of common foods. Ultimately, they hope the approach might help consumers curb nutrient pollution that is creating oxygen-poor “dead zones” in many coastal seas.
Over the last few decades, researchers have documented […] Read More »
July 29, 2010
Petro-cology
Scholars urge ecologists to start thinking about the end of cheap oil
If you thought the environmental problems associated with our dependence on oil were bad enough, just wait – the end of cheap oil could bring new and even more vexing ecological threats. That’s the message from three scholars making a provocative new call for ecologists to get more active in studying the implications of tightening […] Read More »
July 28, 2010
Plankton Doom?
Data back to 1899 suggest warming is eroding foundation of ocean food web
Climate change may be taking the bloom off the plankton. Researchers say they’ve found “unequivocal” evidence of long-term declines in the ocean’s teeming populations of microscropic algae, which form the base of the marine food web. Warming surface waters appear to be a main culprit, the researchers report in today’s Nature.
Scientists have long studied […] Read More »
July 27, 2010
Breathing Fire
Sparks fly over study of potential climate benefits of intentional forest fires
Call it a hot topic. A study suggesting that intentional forest blazes could significantly cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from wildfires in the Western United States has prompted a piquant scholarly disagreement. The exchange highlights the challenge forest managers may face in balancing plans to use fire to restore forest ecosystems with efforts to curb […] Read More »
July 23, 2010
Acid Test
How big a toll did acid rain take on lake life?
Twenty years after the United States moved to take the sting out of acid rain, researchers are getting a clearer picture of how the pollution affected life in sensitive waters. A detailed new survey of lakes in the Adirondack mountains of New York State finds that acidification has caused species losses in every link of […] Read More »
July 22, 2010
Chubbier Climate
Warming brings more, fatter marmots
Climate change is a good deal if you’re a marmot living on a mountainside in Colorado – so far, at least. Warmer temperatures are enabling the burrowing mammals to get fatter and have more babies, researchers report in today’s issue of Nature. The finding – drawn from a field study that’s run for nearly 50 […] Read More »
