Month: October 2015

  • Yellowstone Grizzly Bear population studied by USGS

    Genetic data show the grizzly bear population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has grown since the 1980s with no loss in genetic diversity, according to a report by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team.Results indicate that the effective population size of Yellowstone grizzly bears, or the number of individuals that contribute offspring to the next…

  • Some Ice Sheets in Greenland slowing their movement

    In the face of decades of increasing temperatures and surface melting, the movement of the southwest portion of the Greenland Ice Sheet that terminates on land has been slowing down, according to a new study being published by the journal Nature on Oct. 29.Researchers derived their results by tracking ice sheet movement through Landsat satellite images taken…

  • The northern snakehead fish

    The invasive northern snakehead fish found in the mid-Atlantic area is now cause for more concern, potentially bringing diseases into the region that may spread to native fish and wildlife, according to a team of U.S. Geological Survey scientists.The team found that a group of adult northern snakehead collected from Virginia waters of the Potomac…

  • 2015 Antarctic Ozone Hole larger and formed later than previous holes

    The 2015 Antarctic ozone hole area was larger and formed later than in recent years, said scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

  • Assessing the health and economic consequences of Dieselgate

    Volkswagen’s use of software to evade emissions standards in more than 482,000 diesel vehicles sold in the U.S. will directly contribute to 60 premature deaths across the country, a new MIT-led study finds.In September, the Environmental Protection Agency discovered that the German automaker had developed and installed “defeat devices” (actually software) in light-duty diesel vehicles…

  • Historic Nitrate Levels Still Plague U.S. Rivers

    During 1945 to 1980, nitrate levels in large U.S. rivers increased up to fivefold in intensively managed agricultural areas of the Midwest, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study. In recent decades, nitrate changes have been smaller and levels have remained high in most of the rivers studied. 

  • VW Dieselgate and EV priorities in Europe

    The pollution-cheating scandal that has engulfed auto giant Volkswagen is turning up the heat on the German government to make more determined headway in its self-declared "electromobility" goals, analysts say.The "bitter irony" of the scam that has rocked the automobile sector around the world and plunged the once-respected carmaker into a major crisis, is that the…

  • Dancing makes you feel good and help bond with others

    Dancing in time with others raises your pain threshold, Oxford University researchers have found.A team from the University's Experimental Psychology and Anthropology Departments wanted to see whether our feelings of social closeness when dancing with others might be linked to endorphins – the body’s 'feel good' chemicals.Endorphins are neurotransmitters that form part of the brain’s…

  • Black Holes and their flares studied by NASA missions

    The baffling and strange behaviors of black holes have become somewhat less mysterious recently, with new observations from NASA's Explorer missions Swift and the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. The two space telescopes caught a supermassive black hole in the midst of a giant eruption of X-ray light, helping astronomers address an ongoing puzzle:…

  • New report addresses how we can slow climate change

    Top environmental researchers from UCLA joined a team of 50 University of California experts in issuing a new report today with solutions to stabilize Earth’s climate this century. The report, Bending the Curve, was released Tuesday at the UC Climate Neutrality Initiative Summit in San Diego, and provides 10 scalable solutions to reduce global greenhouse emissions.