Too good eyes for living below ground
... density of rods, the photoreceptors for low-light night vision, is much lower in the mole-rats than in nocturnal surface-dwelling rodents. These findings, published in the European Journal of Neuroscience in March 2004, call for a revision of our current views on the visual system of subterranean mammals....Envisat fishes up facts behind Chilean giant squid invasion
...ome in the open ocean, they rise to the surface at night to aggressively feed on small fish using barbed suckers. In the final days of February more than 200 of the squid were washed up on the beaches around Ancud, on the northern coast of the island of Chilo in southern Chile. Further incursions have sin...UN study shows environmental consequences from ongoing boom in personal computer sales
... machine. When using a computer, turning it off at night and making sure that standby modes are working go a long way to reducing electricity consumption. At the end-of-life, selling or donating the computer can often supply the right computing power to another user who doesn't need such a powerful machine...Human health, astronomy, and environmental concerns merge at Dark-Sky meeting
...il to erosion, or virgin lands to development, the night sky is 100% recoverable." Antarctica has months-l...ers will address many more dark sky topics such as night vision, protection of observatory environments, outdoor lighting codes, lighting fixtures and energy...Digging for truth in Guatemala
...y Foundation, will be among those honored Saturday night at the AAAS Science and Human Rights reception during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Seattle. Each year, the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program honors one or more scientists who, through action and example, have promoted human rights, usually at great...Scientists' findings may lead to better understanding of how that sleep develops, matures
...s any new mother knows, getting a baby to sleep at night is an art, and perhaps using snippets from Shakesp...sleep becomes predominant in the first part of the night beginning at about two months of age. In the last 30 years, researchers have increased their knowled...New findings bring mixed blessings to those looking to combat jet lag
...ments. Baseline data were obtained during the last night (N-1) and day (D-1). The flight was scheduled on Day 0 (D0) at 1500 (US time) for a seven-time-zone eastbound flight to France. Subjects were prohibited from sleeping during the flight so that they were awake 33 h from last awakening in Texas to firs...From neighborhoods to globe, NASA looks at land
...ree C warmer (0.9 to 1.8 degrees F) throughout the night and as much as 3 degrees C warmer (5 degrees F) around midday. Prior NASA studies have shown that built-on surfaces with few trees absorb heat and create urban heat islands, which in turn create updrafts of warm air, leading to more rain around and d...Beagle 2 team still hopes to repeat Mars landing success
...ens for 80 minutes during both the Martian day and night in an effort to establish contact with an available orbiter at Mars Odyssey overflight times. If no link is established by this method, 'communication search mode 2' should eventually be activated. The earliest date by which this mode could become op...Scientists await first call from Beagle
...e 2 has successfully landed and survived its first night on Mars will be between 10 pm and midnight (GMT) tonight, when its simple carrier signal (rather than the tune composed by Blur) may be picked up by Jodrell Bank radio observatory in Cheshire, UK. This has a much greater chance of success because the...Expedition will retrace legendary Steinbeck-Ricketts voyage to the Sea of Cortez
...gas will go out in the evening and return the same night with up to a ton of squid per boat. "You'd think with a primitive method like hand-lines you'd never fish out the resource," Gilly says, "but the fact is, no one knows the actual size of the squid population, so it's difficult to set limits on commer...OHSU researchers reveal relationship between weight gain and female hormones
...es to the long-held belief that food eaten late at night may lead to weight gain and to changes in metaboli...ainst the commonly held belief that food intake at night results in weight gain. "Time and time again we've been told that eating late at night should be av...Biological trick reveals key step in melatonin's regulation
...enzyme, no melatonin. Melatonin levels are high at night and low during the day. Even at night, melatonin disappears after exposure to bright light, a response that likely contributes to its normal daily cycle, but plagues shift workers and jet setters by leading to sleeplessness. To help understand melato...Pathways of emotion from cortex to peripheral organs
Walking down a dark alley late at night is enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies. Your heart starts racing, your palms get clammy and you get ready to run. Now researchers from Boston University have unravelled the neural pathways that transmit information about your surroundings to yo...Envisat observes resurgent ozone hole
...use the extreme low temperatures of the long polar night form ice clouds containing chlorine compounds. Then sunshine from the polar spring splits the chlorine into ultra-reactive radicals, which depletes the ozone. Small ozone holes have also been known to form over the Arctic, but meteorological conditi...Hormonal changes in satisfied and dissatisfied shift workers across a shift cycle
...There is ample evidence that shift work, including night work, increases the risk for developing both psych...tened, particularly in connection with morning and night shifts. Several laboratory studies confirm that such sleep disturbances alter the regulation of seve...Stem cells delivered into back of eye hold promise for people with retinitis pigmentosa
...ntual blindness. The disease starts as progressive night blindness and the gradual loss of peripheral vision, and it leads eventually to complete tunnel vision or in some cases total blindness. More than 100 different types of gene mutations have been documented that lead to this degeneration of the reti...Duke ecologist finds devastation, hope in Iraqi marshes
... border from Kuwait and continuing with his first night on the third floor of his hotel in Basra. "I was lying there hearing machine gun fire getting closer and closer, and wondering if we would ever get to see the marshes," he recalled in an interview The group traveled up to hundreds of miles daily, so...Envisat focuses on carbon-rich peat swamp forest fires
...ures surface temperature and so used during local night for maximum effectiveness - can identify fire hotspots, Siegert explained: "The smouldering peat fires burn on the surface, but their energy release is weaker than other fires, so detecting them represented a particular challenge. "Not all but mo...UC Berkeley museum biologists to repeat 85-year-old Yosemite National Park wildlife survey
...ern fence lizard, Western skink, sagebrush lizard, night snake and sharptailed snake. "We're learning there have been ecological changes within the park that until now we haven't been able to document adequately," said Leslie Chow, a UC Berkeley graduate now serving in Yosemite as a research wildlife biol...