Month: June 2013

  • What poses the greater risk, traffic accidents or air pollution?

    When a London anti-pollution organisation polled British lawmakers about the greatest risks to public health, most MPs were wrong, ranking traffic accidents or heavy drinking ahead of air pollution as a leading killer of Britons. “The vast majority of over 100 members of Parliament responding to our survey displayed a shocking level of ignorance about…

  • Ocean Denitrification

    Denitrification is a microbially facilitated process of nitrate reduction that may ultimately produce molecular nitrogen (N2) through a series of intermediate gaseous nitrogen oxide products. In general, it occurs where oxygen, a more energetically favorable electron acceptor, is depleted, and bacteria respire nitrate as a substitute terminal electron acceptor. Denitrification only takes place in anoxic…

  • Indigenous Knowledge

    It is time to stop discounting traditional expertise and make use of this vast and valuable resource, argues Indian scientist Suman Sahai. Science and technology have always been an important part of growth and development plans. But accepted ‘scientific expertise’ is Western, standardised and homogenous. From this viewpoint, the vast body of scientific expertise developed…

  • Frozen Dione

    Dione is the 15th largest moon in the Solar System, and is more massive than all known moons smaller than itself combined. It is composed primarily of water ice, but as the third densest of Saturn’s moons (after Enceladus and Titan, whose density is increased by gravitational compression) it must have a considerable fraction (~…

  • Data from NASA’s Landsat 8 now available in almost real time

    Data from NAA’s Landsat 8 is now freely available, enabling researchers and the general public to access images captured by the satellite within twelve hours of reception. The data is available to download at no charge from GloVis, EarthExplorer, or via the LandsatLook Viewer. Landsat 8 launched this February and has been capturing images since…

  • Rainforests will survive extreme global warming, argues study

    Rainforests in South America have survived three previous extreme global warming events in the past, suggesting that they will survive a projected 2-6 degree rise in temperatures over the coming century, reports a study published in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science. The research, published by Carlos Jaramillo and Andrés Cárdenas of the…