Tag Archives: south america

Is War Really Disappearing? A New Analysis Suggests Not

Countries May Simply Have Less Ability to Fight

COLUMBUS, Ohio – While some researchers have claimed that war between nations is in decline, a new analysis suggests we shouldn’t be too quick to celebrate a more peaceful world.

The study finds that there is no clear trend indicating that nations are less eager to wage war, said Bear Braumoeller, author of the study and associate professor of political science at The Ohio State University.

Conflict does appear to be less common than it had been in the past, he said. But that’s due more to an inability to fight than to an unwillingness to do so. (more…)

Read More

Magma can survive in upper crust for hundreds of millennia

Reservoirs of silica-rich magma – the kind that causes the most explosive volcanic eruptions – can persist in Earth’s upper crust for hundreds of thousands of years without triggering an eruption, according to new University of Washington modeling research.

That means an area known to have experienced a massive volcanic eruption in the past, such as Yellowstone National Park, could have a large pool of magma festering beneath it and still not be close to going off as it did 600,000 years ago.

“You might expect to see a stewing magma chamber for a long period of time and it doesn’t necessarily mean an eruption is imminent,” said Sarah Gelman, a UW doctoral student in Earth and space sciences. (more…)

Read More

Spider Venom Reveals New Secret

Venom of the brown recluse spider causes a reaction in the body that is different from what researchers previously thought, a discovery that could lead to development of new treatments for spider bites.

University of Arizona researchers led a team that has discovered that venom of spiders in the genus Loxosceles, which contains about 100 spider species including the brown recluse, produces a different chemical product in the human body than scientists believed.

The finding has implications for understanding how these spider bites affect humans and for the development of possible treatments for the bites. (more…)

Read More

Ese’eja Nation

UD professor, scholar document culture of Peruvian community

As the elders of a small hunter-gatherer community told the story of how their people came to be, University of Delaware assistant professor of art Jonathan Cox and Summer Scholar Sarah Driver sat and listened, intrigued by the tale.

Over the course of seven days, they learned firsthand about the Ese’eja (ess-a-eha) Nation, a community of three distinct villages living in the remote areas of Infierno, Palma Real and Sonene, Peru.  (more…)

Read More

All for One: What Makes an Individual

Life as we know it has certain properties that are consistent regardless whether you’re looking at a bacterial colony in a petri dish or a primate colony in South America. Rick Michod, UA professor and department head of ecology and evolutionary biology, has received $1.3 million from NASA to investigate what properties of biology define an individual organism.

Many things in life are not fair. But some things are at least consistent.

For example, all life as we know it has certain universal properties, which presumably define how life would be organized anywhere it evolved in the universe, said Richard Michod, professor and head of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.  (more…)

Read More

Recent Antarctic climate, glacier changes at the ‘upper bound’ of normal

In the last few decades, glaciers at the edge of the icy continent of Antarctica have been thinning, and research has shown the rate of thinning has accelerated and contributed significantly to sea level rise.

New ice core research suggests that, while the changes are dramatic, they cannot be attributed with confidence to human-caused global warming, said Eric Steig, a University of Washington professor of Earth and space sciences. (more…)

Read More

Behaviour of seabirds during migration revealed

The behaviour of seabirds during migration – including patterns of foraging, rest and flight – has been revealed in new detail using novel computational analyses and tracking technologies.

Using a new method called ‘ethoinformatics’, described as the application of computational methods in the investigation of animal behaviour, scientists have been able to analyse three years of migration data gathered from miniature tracking devices attached to the small seabird the Manx Shearwater (Puffinus puffinus). (more…)

Read More