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Evidence from benchmark sites across the tropics is proving that an integrated, multifunctional approach that allows for land-use sharing in agriculture, forests and other functions can achieve good results in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and raising food production levels. It provides more realistic solutions than the popular view on sparing land for forests through agricultural intensification.
A legendary La Jolla surfing beach adjacent to Scripps Institution of Oceanography has significantly less water-borne pollution, due to the completion this year of an innovative project by UC San Diego.
GOES-13 satellite imagery on June 9 shows that the pesky low pressure area in the north Caribbean Sea is stretching out and bringing soaking rains to Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.
Scientists from Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) are joining colleagues from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, several other U.S. academic institutions and laboratories in Japan and Spain on the first international, multidisciplinary assessment of the levels and dispersion of radioactive substances in the Pacific Ocean off the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan. The research effort is funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Australia is considering awarding carbon credits for killing feral camels as a way to tackle climate change.
A government-backed study of pollution reduction policies among Australia's major trade partners Thursday backed "price-based schemes" as most effective, boosting Canberra's carbon tax plan.
War may kill thousands of civilians a year in Afghanistan, but choking air pollution in the capital Kabul is more deadly, experts say.
Boston University astronomer Merav Opher will feature prominently in a NASA teleconference this week to discuss the latest findings about the nature of the solar system.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The launch of the international Aquarius/SAC-D mission is postponed 24 hours until Friday, June 10, from NASA's Space Launch Complex-2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The 5-minute launch window opens at 7:20 a.m. PDT (10:20 a.m. EDT).
(PhysOrg.com) -- In anticipation of the upcoming lunar eclipse later this month, NASA has released a new video that shows how lunar eclipses work.
The low pressure system that has been bringing rainfall to the northwestern Philippines has strengthened into the fifth tropical depression of the Northwest Pacific Ocean's hurricane season.
Strong thunderstorms are the life's blood of tropical cyclones, and infrared and radar satellite data from NASA today confirms that the eastern Pacific Ocean's first hurricane has plenty of them and they're over 9 miles high. Adrian exploded in growth overnight from a tropical storm on June 8 to a major hurricane today.
Wetlands around the city of New Orleans are disappearing at such an alarming rate that a University of South Carolina coastal marine scientist predicts there will be little of the marshland left by the end of the century.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Starting today, armchair explorers will be able to view parts of the deep ocean floors in far greater detail than ever before, thanks to a new synthesis of seafloor topography released through Google Earth. Developed by oceanographers at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory from scientific data collected on research cruises, the new feature tightens resolution in covered areas from the former 1-kilometer grids to just 100 meters.
NASA's Aqua satellite and the GOES-13 satellite both captured their own unique views of the eruption of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano in Chile this week. One satellite provided a high-resolution image of the ash plume while the other provided a video showing the plumes movement over several days.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Across the universe, galaxies band together in clusters so huge it can take 10 million years for light to travel from one end of a galaxy cluster to the other. Probing these metropolises is no easy task. But Assistant Professor of Astronomy Andisheh Mahdavi has found a centuries-old math formula that could help scientists map the shape and size of galaxy clusters.
(PhysOrg.com) -- When NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity reaches the rim of a large crater it is approaching, its arrival will come with an inspiring reminder.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The researchers evaluated the recent declines using snowpack reconstructions from 66 tree-ring chronologies, looking back 500 to more than 1,000 years.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Carbonaceous chondrites are a type of organic-rich meteorite that contain samples of the materials that took part in the creation of our planets nearly 4.6 billion years ago, including materials that were likely formed before our solar system was created and may have been crucial to the formation of life on Earth. The complex suite of organic materials found in carbonaceous chondrites can vary substantially from meteorite to meteorite. New research from Carnegie's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and Geophysical Laboratory, published June 10 in Science, shows that most of these variations are the result of hydrothermal activity that took place within a few million years of the formation of the solar system, when the meteorites were still part of larger parent bodies, likely asteroids.
(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Voyager probes are truly going where no one has gone before. Gliding silently toward the stars, 9 billion miles from Earth, they are beaming back news from the most distant, unexplored reaches of the solar system.
The majority of countries participating in a major global effort to reduce greenhouse emissions caused by forest destruction cite agriculture as the main cause of deforestation, but very few provide details on how they would address the link between agriculture and forestry, according to a new analysis by experts probing the effect of climate change on food security.
A vast cloud of ash spewing from a Chilean volcano disrupted air travel across much of South America, while heavy rains around the eruption site prompted fears of mudslides.
Greenpeace on Wednesday accused Mattel, the US maker of Barbie dolls, of contributing to the wanton destruction of carbon-rich Indonesian forests and habitats of endangered species like Sumatran tigers.
All around the world - from the deep gold mines of South Africa to the far-seeing telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert, from the frigid glaciers of Antarctica to the halls of the world's best universities and research institutions - scientists are on a quest unlike anything we've seen before. Tens of thousands of researchers are involved in the effort, one which three years of reporting has convinced me will be - or certainly could be - the big idea of our era.
As millions of acres of farmland in the U.S. Midwest and South recover from Mississippi River flooding, scientists report that river flooding can increase levels of potentially harmful flame retardants in farm soils. But the higher levels apparently do not find their way into the milk produced by cows that graze on these lands, according to a study in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology.
A new study from biology researchers at Baylor University and the University of Maryland-Baltimore has found that there are consistent and widespread declines in stream biodiversity at lower levels of urban development more damaging than what was previously believed.
(AP) -- A new report says significant challenges remain before NASA can launch its next rover to Mars later this year.
(PhysOrg.com) -- When NASA's Aquarius mission launches this week, its radiometer instruments will take a "skin" reading of the oceans' salt content at the surface. From these data of salinity in the top 0.4 inch (1 centimeter) of the ocean surface, Aquarius will create weekly and monthly maps of ocean surface salinity all over the globe for at least three years. To better understand what's driving changes and fluctuations in salinity -- and how those changes relate to an acceleration of the global water cycle and climate change -- scientists will go deeper.
A new University of Colorado Boulder study indicates the infestation of trees by mountain pine beetles in the high country across the West could potentially trigger earlier snowmelt and increase water yields from snowpack that accumulates beneath affected trees.
A billion-euro (1.47-billion-dollar) space probe was placed in hibernation on Wednesday until 2014, when it will be woken for a deep-space rendezvous with a comet, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.
Three years before its arrival the camera system on board the space probe Rosetta renders the first images of its destination.
Although adding gravel to a river to replace lost sediments won't likely cool the whole river channel, it can create cool water refuges that protect fish from thermal pollution, according to a U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station study.
Ernest Fawbush and Robert Miller made the first ever tornado forecast in March of 1948 using only paper, pencil, and a World War II-era radar -- but tornado forecasting has changed dramatically since that initial forecast 63 years ago.
The first tropical depression in the Eastern Pacific Ocean is now the first tropical storm, and two satellites are providing NASA insights into its thunderstorms, rainfall, and intensity. NASA satellite data on newly born Tropical Storm Adrian shows high cloud tops and moderate rainfall, indications that the storm is getting stronger, triggering a tropical storm watch in Mexico.
System 98A has been bringing rains, gusty winds and churning up the surf along the Arabian Seacoast of west-central India for days, and NASA satellite imagery confirms that it is getting organized now that it has moved into open waters.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The VLT Survey Telescope (VST), the latest addition to ESO’s Paranal Observatory, has made its first release of impressive images of the southern sky. The VST is a state-of-the-art 2.6-meter telescope, with the huge 268-megapixel camera OmegaCAM at its heart, which is designed to map the sky both quickly and with very fine image quality. It is a visible-light telescope that perfectly complements ESO’s VISTA infrared survey telescope. New images of the Omega Nebula and the globular cluster Omega Centauri demonstrate the VST’s power.
(PhysOrg.com) -- ESA's Mars Express celebrates eight years in space with a new view of ice in the southern polar region of Mars. The poles are closely linked to the planet’s climate and constantly change with the seasons. Their study is an important scientific objective of the mission.
The planet's soils are under greater threat than ever before, at a time when we need to draw on their vital role to support life more than ever, warns an expert from the University of Sheffield today in the journal Nature.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In 1987, light from an exploding star in a neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, reached Earth. Named Supernova 1987A, it was the closest supernova explosion witnessed in almost 400 years, allowing astronomers to study it in unprecedented detail as it evolves.
(AP) -- NASA's next-generation rover to the surface of Mars, which is already overbudget and behind schedule, faces significant hurdles as it races to the launch pad for a November liftoff, an internal audit released Wednesday found.
We often think of rainforests and coral reefs as hotspots for biodiversity, but mountains are treasure troves for species too -- especially in the tropics, scientists say. But what drives montane biodiversity? The diversity of plants and animals in tropical mountain ranges may have something to do with the stable seasonal temperatures found in the tropics relative to higher latitudes, says a new study by scientists working at the US National Evolutionary Synthesis Center.
They're bright and blue-and a bit strange. They're a new type of stellar explosion that was recently discovered by a team of astronomers led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Among the most luminous in the cosmos, these new kinds of supernovae could help researchers better understand star formation, distant galaxies, and what the early universe might have been like.
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