PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The severe damage and loss-of-life caused by the devastating January 2010 M7.0 earthquake in Haiti was exacerbated by amplification of shaking due to local geological conditions and landforms in Port-au-Prince, according to a study published online today in Nature Geoscience. (more…)
Evolutionary biologists at U of T have found that environment plays a key role in determining whether a species opts for sexual over asexual reproduction. (more…)
About the image: A now dry Colorado River delta branches into the Baja/Sonoran Desert near the Sea of Cortez. Image credit: Pete McBride
Rivers and streams supply the lifeblood to ecosystems across the globe, providing water for drinking and irrigation for humans as well as a wide array of life forms from single-celled organisms up to the fish humans eat.
But humans and nature itself are making it tough on rivers to continue in their central role to support fish species, according to new research by a team of scientists including John Sabo, a biologist at Arizona State University.
Globally, rivers and streams are being drained due to human use and climate change. These and other human impacts alter the natural variability of river flows.
Some affected rivers have dried and no longer run, while others have seen increases in the variability of flows due to storm floods. (more…)
COLUMBUS, Ohio — A giant star in a faraway galaxy recently ended its life with a dust-shrouded whimper instead of the more typical bang. (more…)
By examining the type of rock in which dinosaur fossils were embedded, an often unappreciated part of the remains,
Certain dinosaur species liked to live in different habitats, separated by only a few miles. Image credit: Nicholas Longrich
scientists have determined that different species of North American dinosaurs from the Late Cretaceous period 65 million years ago occupied different environments separated by just a few miles.
Hadrosaurs or duck-billed dinosaurs, along with the small ornithopod Thescelosaurus, preferred to live along the edge of rivers, according to the research. Ceratopsians, on the other hand, which include the well-known Triceratops, preferred to be several miles inland.
The findings, which appear in the online edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, give scientists a more complete picture of the distribution of different species and help explain how several large herbivores managed to coexist. (more…)
National Science Foundation awards more than $12.5M to study societal impacts of emerging technologies
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently renewed two important cooperative agreements totaling more than $12.5 million over five years. These awards leverage previous investments for studying the ethical, legal, economic and policy implications of the relatively new, nature-altering science called nanotechnology. (more…)
Palo Alto, CA — Researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science, with colleagues at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, observed for the first time a fundamental process of cellular organization in living plant cells: the birth of microtubules by studying recruitment and activity of individual protein complexes that create the cellular protein network known as the microtubule cytoskeleton—the scaffolding that provides structure and ultimately form and shape to the cell. These fundamental results could be important to agricultural research and are published in the October 10, 2010, early on-line edition of Nature Cell Biology. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—University of Michigan researchers have discovered a new method to prevent the immune-system attacks that often occur following bone marrow transplants.
Bone marrow transplantation can cure patients with leukemia and other cancers even when the disease is resistant to other treatments. The success of this procedure relies on killing cancer cells by using immune cells from a bone marrow donor while avoiding an immune attack against the patient’s organs, which causes a dangerous complication called graft-versus-host disease. (more…)
