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Tag: "polar" at biology news

One species, many genomes

...rences distinguish the genomes of strains from the polar circle or the subtropics, from America, Africa or Asia has been investigated for the first time by research teams from Tübingen, Germany, and California led by Detlef Weigel from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology. The results were s...

Dirty snow may warm Arctic as much as greenhouse gases

...they fall onto snow, the net effect is we warm the polar latitudes,” said Charlie Zender, associate profess...affects the thickness of the snow pack. In some polar areas, impurities in the snow have caused enough melting to expose underlying sea ice or soil that i...

Prey not hard-wired to fear predators

...ions where the top predators no longer exist. (the polar islands of Greenland and Svalbard, Norway) Locations where native predators have been re-established after once being extinguished. (Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks ) To test reactions of animals living without their tradi...

Antarctic icebergs -- Hotspots of ocean life

... west coast of the U.S. or ice-edge communities in polar oceans. As diatoms are the preferred food for krill, we expect the changes in phytoplankton community composition to favor grazing as a key biological process involved in carbon sequestration around free-floating icebergs,” said oceanographer Maria V...

Want to save polar bears? Follow the ice

...rnment’s watershed decision to propose listing the polar bear as "Threatened" under the Endangered Species ...curately predict where sea ice—a vital habitat for polar bears and seals that they prey on—will remain into the near future. "The polar bear could be at ...

Arctic ice retreating more quickly than computer models project

...ric and oceanic circulation that transport heat to polar regions. March ice Although the loss of ice for March is far less dramatic than the September loss, the models underestimate it by a wide margin as well. The study concludes that the actual rate of sea ice loss in March, which averaged about 1...

How fish species suffer as a result of warmer waters

...er thermal windows than, for instance, fishes from polar regions living at constant low temperatures. The latter are able to grow and reproduce only within a very limited thermal tolerance window. Investigations at the Alfred Wegener Institute show the key importance of oxygen uptake and distribution ?t...

Antarctic warming to reduce animals at base of ecosystem, shift some penguin populations southward

...t Ohio State University. Lyons was one of many polar researchers reporting this week on the global climate threat during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco . "Researchers are seeing the movement of penguin populations southward down the pe...

Computer scientists join in search for ivory-billed woodpecker

...e considered sites in Alaska and Rwanda to observe polar bears and gorillas, respectively. "Our goal is to use the emerging capabilities of computers and networks to better understand the natural world," Goldberg said. "It's very exciting to work with researchers in fields beyond engineering." The i...

Mosquito genes explain response to climate change

...ure anywhere in the world, from the tropics to the polar regions. The newly created map contains 900 million DNA base pairs. There are three billion base pairs in humans. As various genome maps are being completed, scientists now face the task of determining how genes interact and how they produce speci...

Satellites shed light on global warming

... solar radiation that will be absorbed by ice-free polar oceans rather than reflected by ice-covered oceans, increasing the ocean temperature. Average temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula have risen over the last 50 years by half a degree Celsius a decade and are having an impact on the ice shelves a...

Record ozone loss during 2006 over South Pole

... mid-latitude air by prevailing winds known as the polar vortex. This leads to very low temperatures, and i...n the cold and continuous darkness of this season, polar stratospheric clouds are formed that contain chlorine. As the polar spring arrives, the combinati...

Climate experts search for answers in the oceans

...onal Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) polar orbiters, the Japanese’s Space Agency-NASA Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and the AMSRE instrument onboard NASA's Aqua. "Over the last five years there has been a concerted effort by the world space agencies to share and develop satellite oc...

Scientists use an 'ice lolly' to find polar bacteria in their own backyard

...es and glaciers. Bacteria previously isolated from polar climates, and have properties which allow them to survive in extreme cold, have been isolated from soil in temperate environments. Professor Virginia Walker and her colleagues at Queen's University, Canada, have developed a technique to isolate bact...

Salk scientists get to the root of plant cell fate

...ant biology. Like animals, plants develop along a polar axis, but with a root on one end and a shoot on the other. A defective TOPLESS gene, however, causes plant embryos to develop into a seedling with two oppositely oriented root poles ?hence the gene's name. Long asked how mutations in TOPLESS can swit...

Large dinosaurs were extremely hot in their day, UF study finds

...uld nonetheless maintain high body temperatures in polar climates with freezing or near-freezing conditions. The advantages of being a 'warm' reptile are that no energy has to be expended to produce metabolic heat to keep warm; in other words, if we were warm reptile-like ectotherms, we would save a lot of...

Polynesia explorers created worldwide web of scientific knowledge

...Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Braving extremes of polar cold and equatorial heat, the scientific voyages that sailed around Cape Horn between 1750 and 1850 systematically surveyed and studied the terra incognitas of Australia, Hawaii, New Zealand and Tahiti. Some accounts became bestsellers that "powerful...

Creating a window on 'oceans in motion'

...ecies for tracking ?from salmon to whales and from polar bears to penguins ?and priority areas for ocean floor acoustic monitoring arrays. "These are key questions: which species do we want to track and exactly where do we wire up the world to create an effective global system of watching the oceans in mo...

Scientists find Antarctic ozone hole to recover later than expected

...ura satellite, temperature information from NOAA's polar orbiting series satellites, and data captured by NOAA ground stations and weather balloons to create the new prediction model. ...

Evolutionary scrap-heap challenge: Antifreeze fish make sense out of junk DNA

...of these antifreeze proteins is directly driven by polar glaciation, by studying their evolutionary history...nt the time of onset of freezing conditions in the polar and subpolar seas. Professor Cheng will present her latest results at the Annual Main Meeting of the...

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