Category Archives: Environment
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Spaced out: As rents rise, cool shared work spaces boom
Hong Kong (CNN) – Starting a company can feel like a lonely business. But for a little more than $100 a month, Hong Kong resident Ken Chan can develop his start-up, network with like-minded people and relax with a game of ping-pong, all under the same roof.He is one of a growing number of go-it-alone entrepreneurs and freelancers in…
Hungry Hungry Microbes: Oil Eating Bacteria Help to Clean Up Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
The Deepwater Horizon, an ultra-deepwater, dynamically positioned, semi-submersible off-shore drilling rig was an engineering marvel that set the record for drilling the world’s deepest oil well in September 2009. The roughly 7-mile-deep well is now infamous for being the site of the single largest off-shore oil spill in history, a…
Red Swamp Crayfish Plays Host To Diminutive Crustaceans
The small ostracod, or seed shrimp, Ankylocythere sinuosa, lives on other crayfish and measures just half a millimeter in length. For the first time, Spanish scientists have found the ostracod in Europe.It is possible Ankylocythere arrived 30 years ago with the invader crayfish Procambarus clarkii, but it is unknown whether it can…
Female Pit Vipers Give Birth Without Mating
In what could be the ultimate act of feminism, wild female North American pit vipers have been shown to give birth without mating, according to a new report published in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters.A phenomenon, known as facultative parthenogenesis (FP), has been observed in captivity before and the report asserts that it…
NYC Cleans Up From Two Twisters After Eastern Storms
RAMIN TALAIE / GETTY IMAGESLifeguards and maintenance crew clean up debris from a tornado that touched down on September 8, 2012 in the Breezy Point neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York City.(NEW YORK) — Damaging storms that spawned tornadoes in New York City, darkened tens of thousands of homes in the Washington, D.C., area…
Shackleton Crater May Hold Small Patches Of Ice
Somewhere between five to ten percent of the walls of Shackleton crater could contain small patches of ice, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters.Shackleton Crater is an impact crater at the south pole of the Moon. The peaks of the crater’s rim are almost continually in sunlight, while the interior is…
Mustard Evolved To Give Predators An Unpleasantly Spicy Meal
Many plants have developed spicy mechanisms that deter pests from munching on them. Mustard plants, in particular, have evolved their pungent flavor to effectively target and deter specific predators, according to a new study published this week in the journal Science.Researchers from Duke University, the Max Planck Institute for…
One-Fifth Of World’s Invertebrate Species Face Extinction
Close-up of a large red damselfly (Pyrrhosoma nymphula).Twenty percent of the invertebrate species across the globe — spineless creatures ranging from earthworms to bees to butterflies to lobsters and beyond — are facing the possible risk of extinction unless more is done to protect them, say researchers from the Zoological Society of…
Biophysicists Unravel Secrets of Genetic Switch
Emory University biophysicists have experimentally demonstrated, for the fist time, how the nonspecific binding of a protein known as the lambda repressor, or C1 protein, bends DNA and helps it close a loop that switches off virulence. The researchers also captured the first measurements of that compaction.Their results, published…
No-Till Farming Helps Capture Snow and Soil Water
Agricultural Research Service (ARS) soil scientist David Huggins conducted studies to determine how standing crop residues affect snow accumulation and soil water levels across entire fields. ARS is USDA’s chief intramural scientific research agency, and this work supports the USDA priority of responding to climate change.Huggins, who…
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