ANN ARBOR — Underwater archaeologists have discovered evidence of prehistoric caribou hunts that provide unprecedented insight into the social and seasonal organization of early peoples in the Great Lakes region.
An article detailing the discovery of a 9,000-year-old caribou hunting drive lane under Lake Huron appears in today’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (more…)
A tiny bat found in the Netherlands is believed to provide the first direct evidence that British bats migrate over the sea between the UK and mainland Europe.
The bat, a Nathusius’ pipistrelle, flew from Blagdon near Bristol across the country and over the North Sea before settling in a farm building near the coast in Friesland – a direct journey of 596 kilometres (370 miles).
Bat experts in both countries are working together to learn more about this remarkable journey and its implications for bat conservation and offshore windfarms. (more…)
Researchers working with data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have discovered one way the bubble of charged particles around Saturn — known as the magnetosphere — changes with the planet’s seasons. The finding provides an important clue for solving a riddle about the planet’s naturally occurring radio signal. The results might also help scientists better understand variations in Earth’s magnetosphere and Van Allen radiation belts, which affect a variety of activities at Earth, ranging from space flight safety to satellite and cell phone communications.
The paper, just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, is led by Tim Kennelly, an undergraduate physics and astronomy major at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, who is working with Cassini’s radio and plasma wave science team. (more…)
Arctic sea ice volume has declined by 36 per cent in the autumn and 9 per cent in the winter between 2003 and 2012, a UK-led team of scientists has discovered.
Researchers from the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at UCL used new data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite spanning 2010 to 2012, and data from NASA’s ICESat satellite from 2003 to 2008 to estimate the volume of sea ice in the Arctic. (more…)
For Devin Naar, the Sephardic Studies Initiative is not just a valuable historical archive; it has also been a personal journey revealing an untold family story from the years of the Third Reich.
Naar’s part of the story began about 10 years ago, when as an undergraduate at Washington University he grew interested in the history of Turkey and Greece, which for centuries until World War I was part of the Ottoman Empire. His family comes from Salonica, a port city in Northern Greece. (more…)
Warmer waters flowed to shelfbreak south of New England
At a meeting with New England commercial fishermen last December, physical oceanographers Glen Gawarkiewicz and Al Plueddemann from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) were alerted by three fishermen about unusually high surface water temperatures and strong currents on the outer continental shelf south of New England.
“I promised them I would look into why that was happening,” Gawarkiewicz says. (more…)
Michelle Bayefsky hopes that London’s future will be filled with elm trees.
The Yale junior spent part of her summer in that city helping to ensure that will be the case.
An International Bulldogs Internship allowed Bayefsky the opportunity to work for an environmental charity called The Conservation Foundation, which among other initiatives is engaged in a project to re-establish elm tree populations in the United Kingdom (U.K.). For Bayefsky, the experience was not only an introduction to environmental work, but also confirmed that small actions can sometimes have a big impact. (more…)
So you’re planning a trip to the ‘city of lights’, Europe’s most romantic city! Although the prospect of seeing famous sights such as the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and Sacré Coeur is an exciting one, here are a few tips to keep in mind both before setting off and during your stay in Paris. (more…)
