Tag Archives: canada

North American Waterways are Becoming Saltier and More Alkaline

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Across North America, streams and rivers are becoming saltier, thanks to road deicers, fertilizers and other salty compounds that humans indirectly release into waterways. At the same time, freshwater supplies are also becoming more alkaline. (more…)

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Lack of oxygen delayed the appearance of animals on Earth

Geologists are letting the air out of a nagging mystery about the development of animal life on Earth.

Scientists have long speculated as to why animal species didn’t flourish sooner, once sufficient oxygen covered the Earth’s surface. Animals began to prosper at the end of the Proterozoic period, about 800 million years ago — but what about the billion-year stretch before that, when most researchers think there also was plenty of oxygen? (more…)

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Duck Migration Study Reveals Importance of Conserving Wetlands, MU Researchers Find

COLUMBIA, Mo. – During the 2011 and 2012 migration seasons, University of Missouri researchers monitored mallard ducks with new remote satellite tracking technology, marking the first time ducks have been tracked closely during the entirety of their migration from Canada to the American Midwest and back.  The research revealed that mallards use public and private wetland conservation areas extensively as they travel hundreds of miles across the continent. Dylan Kesler, an assistant professor of fisheries and wildlife in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at MU, says these findings illustrate the importance of maintaining protected wetland areas. (more…)

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Thick-skinned dinosaur gets the last laugh

In life, Tyrannosaurus rex usually got the best of the less fearsome duck-billed dinosaurs, or hadrosaurs: T. rex ate them.

But in death, the plant-eating hadrosaurs have proved more resilient than their carnivorous predators — and apparently all other dinosaurs — at least by the measure of their skin. (more…)

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Ten-Year Endeavor: NASA’s Aura Tracks Pollutants

NASA’s Aura satellite, celebrating its 10th anniversary on July 15, has provided vital data about the cause, concentrations and impact of major air pollutants. With instruments providing key measurements of various gases – including two built and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory: the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) and Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) — Aura gives a comprehensive view of one of the most important parts of Earth — the atmosphere. (more…)

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No Ocean-Borne Radiation from Fukushima Detected on West Coast Shoreline, According to Analysis of 1st Samples from ‘Kelp Watch 2014’

LONG BEACH, Calif.—Scientists working together on Kelp Watch 2014 announced today that the West Coast shoreline shows no signs of ocean-borne radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, following their analysis of the first collection of kelp samples along the western U.S. coastline.

Kelp Watch 2014 is a project that uses coastal kelp beds as detectors of radioactive seawater arriving from Fukushima via the North Pacific Current. It is a collaborative effort led by Steven Manley, marine biology professor at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), and Kai Vetter, head of applied nuclear physics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and a nuclear engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley. (more…)

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Monitoring surgical quality

Distinguished statistician discusses probability and statistics in health care

William H. Woodall, a distinguished professor and statistician at Virginia Tech, spoke to a large audience on “Monitoring and Improving Surgical Quality” at the fourth annual W.L. Gore Lecture Series in Management Science last week on the University of Delaware’s Laird Campus. 

The series, hosted by the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics and sponsored by an endowment from the Gore family, annually recognizes the role that probability, statistics and experimental design have played in the success of W.L. Gore and Associates Inc. (more…)

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