By Tom Miles GENEVA (Reuters) - Biodiversity has decreased by an average of 28 percent globally since 1970 and the world would have to be 50 percent bigger to have enough land and forests to provide for current levels of consumption and carbon emissions, conservation group WWF said on Tuesday. Unless the world addresses the problem, by 2030 even two planet Earths would not be enough to sustain human activity, WWF said, launching its "Living Planet Report 2012", a biennial audit of the world's environment and biodiversity - the number of plant and animal species. Yet governments are not on track to reach an agreement at next month's sustainable development summit in Rio de Janeiro, WWF International's director general Jim Leape said
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Feed SubscriptionA drowned nesting colony of Late Cretaceous birds
Enantiornithine nesting colony, reconstruction by Julio Lacerda. [More]
Read More »Empowering the Body to Fix Its Parts
Over the past few months, we have been flooded with emails from distressed parents asking whether their deaf child will be able to hear one day. With each new email comes a poignant story about a child whose world is silent. It is estimated that hearing loss affects 11% of school age children and even mild loss may adversely influence school performance, cognitive development and language acquisition
Read More »Watching an electron being born
Atomic processes take place on extremely short time scales. Measurements at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) can now visualize these processes.
Read More »BaBar data preserved in ‘computational cocoon’ for future analysis
More than eight years worth of pristine particle physics data will remain available for analysis or re-analysis at least until 2018, now that BaBar's Long Term Data Access project is complete. The project preserves a complete set of BaBar data all 530-plus inverse femtobarns of it by, in a sense, stopping time for it, embedding it in a computational cocoon safe from upgrades, bug fixes and patches
Read More »This Is Your Brain on Drugs
In the 1954 foundational text of the Age of Aquarius, The Doors of Perception , Aldous Huxley describes his encounters with mescaline, a psychoactive substance derived from the peyote cactus and traditionally used by Native Americans for religious purposes.
Read More »Instant Egghead – What’s the Difference Between a Comet and an Asteroid?
If you answered "one of Santa's reindeer" and "a popular video game from the 80s" --this episode of Instant Egghead is for you. Scientific American editor John Matson explains how our favorite space rocks differ.
Read More »Beyond the high-speed hard drive: Topological insulators open a path to room-temperature spintronics
(Phys.org) -- Strange new materials experimentally identified just a few years ago are now driving research in condensed-matter physics around the world. First theorized and then discovered by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and their colleagues in other institutions, these strong 3-D topological insulators TIs for short are seemingly mundane semiconductors with startling properties. For starters, picture a good insulator on the inside thats a good conductor on its surface something like a copper-coated bowling ball.
Read More »Not-So-Quick Fix: ADHD Behavioral Therapy May Be More Effective Than Drugs in Long Run
Before stimulant drugs such as Ritalin, Concerta and Adderall began their rise to popularity in the 1970s, treatment for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) focused on behavioral therapy. But as concerns build over the mounting dosages and extended treatment periods that come with stimulant drugs, clinical researchers are revisiting behavioral therapy techniques. Whereas stimulant medications may help young patients focus and behave in the classroom, research now suggests that behaviorally based changes make more of a difference in the long-term.
Read More »French Oil Co. Starts Injecting Mud to Kill North Sea Gas Leak
LONDON (Reuters) - France's Total started pumping heavy mud down its leaking well in the North Sea on Tuesday to try to stop an escape of gas that has lasted nearly eight weeks and could deprive Britain of nearly 6 percent of its supply this summer. "The well intervention operation got underway at 4.20 a.m. [More]
Read More »Dots, Spots, and Pixels: What s In A Name?
This is a guest post by Jim Perkins, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s medical illustration program .
Read More »Hot Jupiters Smarten Search For Other Earths
Scientists are looking for Earth-like planets around other stars. But one way to limit the search can be to figure out where an Earth-like planet cannot exist and eliminate those types of systems. [More]
Read More »One More Year of School Found to Improve Longevity
By Alice Lighton of Nature magazine Shortly after the Second World War, the Swedish government conducted a vast social experiment to decide whether to implement educational reform. [More]
Read More »Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse Recorded In Octopus DNA
Map of current land and ice separating the Weddell and Ross seas, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Wutsje/CIA Octopuses have made themselves at home in most of the world’s oceans from the warmest of tropical seas to the deep, dark reaches around hydrothermal vents. Antarctic species , such as Turquet’s octopuses ( Pareledone turqueti ), even live slow, quiet lives near the South Pole . But these retiring creatures offer a rare opportunity to help understand how this extreme part of the Earth has changed in recent geologic times and what climate change might bring there in the near future.
Read More »How Neuroscientists and Magicians Are Conjuring Brain Insights
Apollo Robbins (right) in action removing the wristwatch of Mariette DiChristina. (Credit: Flip Phillips.) I see you have a watch with a buckle. Standing at my side, Apollo Robbins held my wrist lightly as he turned my hand over and back.
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