Using the latest satellite tracking technology, conservationists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the University of Exeter (UK), and the Government of Mexico have completed a ground-breaking study on a mysterious ocean giant: the manta ray.
Seaweeds are important foundational species that are vital both as food and habitat to many aquatic and terrestrial shore organisms. Yet seaweeds that cling to rocky shores are continually at risk of being broken or dislodged from their holds by crashing waves with large hydrodynamic forces. So how ...
Harvesting tropical forests for timber may not be the arch-enemy of conservation that it was once assumed to be, according to a new study led by a University of Florida researcher.
Singapore scientists from Bioprocessing Technology Institute (BTI) under the Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) have for the first time, identified the molecular 'switch' that directly triggers the body's first line of defence against pathogens, more accurately known as the body's "...
Big data is pretty popular at the moment. Systems such as MapReduce, Hadoop, Dryad, and DryadLINQ have made writing and executing ad hoc big-data analyses easy. Still, there are several programming patterns such systems don't support especially well.
More than a 150 years ago, before Neptune was ever sighted in the night sky, French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier predicted the planet's existence based on small deviations in the motion of Uranus. In a paper published today in the journal Science online, a group of researchers led by Dr. David Ne...
A research team involving Yale University and the University of Colorado Boulder has developed a first public demonstration version of its "Map of Life," an ambitious Web-based endeavor designed to show the distribution of all living plants and animals on the planet.
When this image was captured on May 2, 2012, dozens of fires-most likely management fires started by government authorities-were burning in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.
The first image shows the impact of the drought on plants throughout the country. The map was made with Normalized Vegetation Difference Index (NDVI) data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on the Terra satellite. It compares plant growth between April 6 and Ap...
NOAA scientists and their colleagues have discovered a biological marker in the blood of laboratory zebrafish and marine mammals that shows when they have been repeatedly exposed to low levels of domoic acid, which is potentially toxic at high levels.
Several warm periods across the contiguous U.S. during April brought the national average temperature to 55°F, 3.6°F above average, marking the third warmest April on record. These temperatures, when added with the first quarter and previous 11 months, calculate to the warmest year-to-date and...
Chaotic networks of dust and gas signpost the next generations of massive stars in this stunning new image of the Cygnus-X star-nursery captured by ESA's Herschel space observatory.
