Natural Science and Public Health: Prescription for a Better Environment
...ence will bring together public health experts and earth scientists to discuss the emerging discipline of Medical Geology. The conference will feature welcoming remarks by Dr. Charles (Chip) Groat, Director, USGS; and a keynote address by Representative Ralph Regula, Chairman, Subcommittee on Labor, Healt...New species of earliest-known salamanders found in China
...t to Shubin and co-author Gao Ke-Qin, professor of earth and space science at Peking University, that these specimens provided compelling evidence that the salamander originated in Asia, which they detailed in a paper published two years ago in Nature. Salamanders, one of the three major groups of modern a...Dinosaur, crab fossils reveal ecosystem secrets
...ted by Joshua Smith, Ph.D., assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, have found a well-preserved fossil of a crab within inches of a tail vertebra from a massive plant-eating dinosaur. Necrocarcinidae (crab) meet titanosaurian sauropod (dinosaur). The fi...University of New Hampshire to help US gain $1.3 trillion in ocean resources
...enter for Coastal and Ocean Mapping (C-COM) and an earth sciences professor. Mayer and Martin Jakobsson, research scientist, have been gathering data to show where the U.S. might logically make its expanded claims--which would include access to oil, mineral, and fisheries resources. The stakes are huge, ac...Scientists at Scripps Research Institute address mysteries of ozone in the human body
...ted in a so-called ozone layer, protecting life on earth from solar radiation. Ozone is also a familiar component of air in industrial and urban settings where the gas is a hazardous component of smog. However, ozone has never before been detected in biology. Two years ago, Lerner and Wentworth demonstrat...Leatherback sea turtles careening towards extinction
...ving this effect is that leatherbacks have been on earth 25 times longer than humans but we're the cause of their decline. We've been here about 4 million years, they've been here 100 million," says Crowder. "Measured in evolutionary time leatherbacks are one of most successful organisms in the sea, but u......that is, imagine the ratio between the size of the earth and the size of a nucleus. The nucleus is a 100 trillion trillion times smaller than the earth. Now go down another 100 trillion trillion times: this is the Planck scale, where our understanding of space and time breaks down. Yes in spite of the a...New life discovered in deep ocean floor
...der if the microbes originated farther down in the earth where it's warmer, and then slowly migrated upwards," said Colwell. One thing is becoming clear, however. "The true rates of methane production in deep sediments are likely much lower than values obtained in the lab," said Colwell. "The team has dete...UCLA and NASA partner to form new institute for Cell Mimetic Space Exploration
...at could make research safer and more efficient on earth and in space. UCLA researchers coined the term "cell mimetics" because their work pointed to the need to fuse biotechnology, nanotechnology and informatics into a new field of study. Based on the adaptive capability of the biological cell, CMISE's fi...Purdue researchers connect life's blueprints with its energy source
...inced many scientists that RNA probably existed on earth before DNA or complex proteins, the two other ingr...olecules. RNA might be more significant to life on earth than we imagined a few years ago." Guo's group has discovered another way that RNA might be the keys...Walking sticks lost wings, then re-evolved them
...t for walking sticks, which often drop eggs to the earth from their treetop homes instead of burying them in the ground like similar insects do. Creating more eggs gives the wingless walking sticks a greater potential to pass their genes to the next generation. "At least 50 million years later, for some...Finding life away from Earth will be tough task, says noted paleontologist
...astrobiology. He also is an associate professor of earth and space sciences. "The earliest organisms were presumably very simple, both in their structure and their chemistry," he said. "The evidence we're used to seeing for modern life may not be a good guide for what to look for in earliest life." As a do...Newer methods added, scope expanded in new Methods of Soil Analysis Book
... standard item on the bookshelves of most soil and earth scientists," says John W. Doran, past president, SSSA, in the foreword. The largest book ever produced by SSSA, Methods 4 comprises nearly 1,700 pages of detailed descriptions of techniques for carrying out nearly all physical measurements on soils a...Rain will take greater toll on reindeer, climate change model shows
...Jaakko Putkonen, a research assistant professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington. Such an ice layer lasts until summer, when the snow and ice eventually melt. And it is not uncommon for several rain-on-snow events to happen in the same winter. "I have seen soil temperatures remai...'Binary' enzyme created by TSRI scientists demonstrates Darwinian evolution at its simplest
... theory in the field that an early form of life on earth may have been restricted to two bases. "Nobody wil...ssils, that show us what the very earliest life on earth looked like. The earliest fossils we have found are stromatolites--large clumps of single-celled bac...Antarctic ice seals life's fate
...archers led by Peter Doran, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, discovered an unusual and extreme aquatic ecosystem in Lake Vida -- among the largest of many lakes in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys located about 2,000 miles due south of New Ze...Scientists find new way to assess where cotton-killing pests develop
...tomology, and Dr. Neal Blair, professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences; representatives from the USDA's Southern Crops Research Lab in College Station, Texas, and the Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Station in Bossier City, La.; and two NC State students -used a novel technique called stable i...Envisats ASAR reveals extent of massive oil spill off Spanish coast
...an optical sensors. This enables it to observe the earth surface at night and through thick cloud cover. This unique capability allowed Envisat's ASAR to "see" the oil leaking from the tanker despite heavy rain and cloud cover in the region that hindered the coverage of optical instruments. The ASAR acqui...Ozone produced by antibodies during bacterial killing and in inflammation
...ted in a so-called ozone layer, protecting life on earth from damaging solar radiation. Ozone is also a familiar component of air in industrial and urban settings where the highly reactive gas is a hazardous component of smog in the summer months. Never before has ozone been detected in biology. "All ou...Six reporters named to receive 2002 AAAS Science Journalism Awards
...ng carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and baking the earth until vegetation shrivels and the land sinks," Revkin wrote in his expose on burning coal fires. The impact of gaps in climate models on efforts to predict global warming, and the U.S. Climate Action Report 2002 were the focus of his other entries, p...