ANN ARBOR — A single U.S. shale oil field is responsible for much of the past decade’s increase in global atmospheric levels of ethane, a gas that can damage air quality and impact climate, according to new study led by the University of Michigan. (more…)
The impact decimated slow-growing evergreens and made way for fast-growing, deciduous plants, UA researchers say, and that provides an explanation for those fall colors.
The meteorite impact that spelled doom for the dinosaurs 66 million years ago decimated the evergreens among the flowering plants to a much greater extent than their deciduous peers, according to a study led by UA researchers. The results are published in the journal PLoS Biology. (more…)
Sequencing the barley genome will sow many benefits
Some 10,000 years ago, people found they didn’t have to live as nomads, hunting and gathering all their food. In the Fertile Crescent, they started planting crops.
The Fertile Crescent extended from the Nile Valley and along the eastern Mediterranean Coast, through the Tigris and Euphrates valleys of Mesopotamia and down to the Persian Gulf. There, the foundation crops of the Western World were first domesticated. (more…)
What did you have for lunch yesterday? How many times a month do you eat nuts? How about your kids — how many servings of vegetables did they consume today?
It’s no secret that it is hard to recall the details of our meals, and that frustrating fact lies at the heart of nutrition research, complicating the task of linking foods to health outcomes like diabetes and heart disease. Some researchers look instead for telltale substances, or biomarkers, in the body that give information about how much of a certain type of food a person has eaten recently. But that solution isn’t ideal, as measuring biomarkers often requires blood, urine or even skin samples. The process can be costly, painful and cumbersome. (more…)
*Researchers study heat delivered by ocean currents to bottom side of glacier that releases more than 19 cubic miles of ice each year*
An international team of researchers, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA, will helicopter onto the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf, one of Antarctica’s most active, remote and harsh spots, in mid-December 2011–weather permitting.
The project’s mission is to determine how much heat ocean currents deliver to the underside of the Pine Island Glacier as it discharges into the sea. Quantifying this heat and understanding how much melting it causes is key to developing reliable models to predict glacier acceleration and therefore predict how much ice will be delivered from land into the ocean thus contributing to sea level rise. (more…)
