Tag: "ponds" at biology news

NASA probe could reveal comet life, scientists claim

..., so it is daring again to predict that subsurface ponds or lakes form transiently due to heat penetrating the exterior crust. We can thus expect biology on comets to have similarities with antarctic biology," added Professor Wickramasinghe. ...

Crisis in African fish supplies looms, experts warn Africa leaders

...he effectiveness of retroviral drugs. "Small fish ponds are a valuable addition to farms without substantially adding to the labour burden," says Daniel Jamu, the WorldFish Center's program director for southern Africa, adding that HIV and AIDS affected families in Malawi, including many headed by widows ...

Leptin-signaling Protein Maintains Normal Body Weight And Energy Balance In Mice

...he effectiveness of retroviral drugs. "Small fish ponds are a valuable addition to farms without substantially adding to the labour burden," says Daniel Jamu, the WorldFish Center's program director for southern Africa, adding that HIV and AIDS affected families in Malawi, including many headed by widows ...

Industrial contaminants spread by seabirds in High Arctic, new Canadian study shows

...cliffs, which are ringed by a series of freshwater ponds at their base. Although environmental monitoring i...zed contaminants from the sediments of the shallow ponds that ringed the base of the cliffs, as monitors of past contaminant inputs. Noting that Canada has ...

Pollution-eating bacteria produce electricity

...ution-eating bacteria commonly found in freshwater ponds can generate electricity. They present their findings today at the 105th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. "The bacteria are capable of continuously generating electricity at levels that could be used to operate small electro...

Disappearing arctic lakes linked to climate change

...an, who has also compared satellite data of tundra ponds on the Seward Peninsula near Council, Alaska and found that the surface pond area there had decreased over the last 50 years. In this latest study, comparing data from 1973 with findings from 1997-98, the total number of large lakes decreased by aro...

Elusive salamanders have role in developing new sampling models

...-consuming sampling." Of more than 1,000 seasonal ponds at the 280,000-acre military facility in southeast...ted because of a 100-year drought event that dried ponds and halted reproduction from 1999 through 2002. Since the first salamander was found six weeks ago, ...

A salty tale: New bacterial genome sequenced from ancient salterns

... first isolated S. ruber from saltern crystallizer ponds in Alicante and Mallorca, Spain. Although extreme-... pursuing studies of Spain's salterns, testing the ponds to find out what other microbes call the briny waters home. "How much diversity is there?" Mongodin ...

Genome sequencing is for ecologists, too

...sm's genetics. The animals are common in lakes and ponds and have been used to monitor the health of aquatic environments. Members of the species can reproduce both with and without sex, which has important implications in evolutionary biology and ecology. Species whose genomes have been sequenced are gen...

Beaver dams create healthy downstream ecosystems

...ecosystems downstream. Researchers have found that ponds created by beaver dams raised downstream groundwat...am ponds," Westbrook said. "We found that upstream ponds were not the main hydrologic effect of the dams in the Colorado River valley. Instead, the beaver da...

Common carp sheds new light on surviving in extreme environments

...ause the fish has evolved in small-to-medium sized ponds in a harsh continental-type climate in Asia where the winters are very cold and the summers are hot and steamy. "Its ability to cope with such extreme conditions of temperature, lack of oxygen and dirty, sediment-laden water makes it a particularl...

Researchers reveal mystery of bacterial magnetism

...ound in a variety of aquatic environments, such as ponds and lakes. The strain of bacterium the research team studied, Magnetospirillum magneticum, was originally found in a pond in Tokyo, Japan. Magnetic bacteria typically live far below the surface, where oxygen is scarce. (They do not grow well where...

'Nymph of the sea' reveals remarkable brood

...s known from thousands of living species in garden ponds to oceans and from countless fossil shells up to 500 million years old; however, their fossilized soft-parts are exceedingly rare. "Supposed examples of fossil invertebrate eggs are also few. The fossil we have found contains soft-part anatomy suc...

Shrinking ponds signal warmer, dryer Alaska

...duction in the size and number of more than 10,000 ponds in Alaska. The analysis, by University of Alaska F...cates that these landscape-level changes in arctic ponds are associated with recent climate warming in Alaska and may have profound effects on climate and wi...

Satellites shed light on global warming

...d the formation of extended melt water streams and ponds on the ice shelf surfaces," Rott said. The sections of Larsen-A, which disintegrated almost completely in January 1995, and Larsen-B that broke away were 200 to 350 metres thick. According to Rott, only 1403 square kilometres of Larsen-B remain a...

Shedding new light on proteorhodopsin

...bacteriorhodopsin, that's used by bacteria in salt ponds to supplement respiration. However, in experiments in which marine bacteria endowed with proteorhodopsin were exposed to light, there was no response. This begged the question: What does proteorhodopsin actually do? A recent study out of the Univ...

Rapid, Low-Cost DNA Testing

...ed to help forensics labs identify criminals, test ponds and pools before children swim in them, and identify harmful genetic sequences in medical research, to name only a few applications. Rothberg's innovative procedure quickly and inexpensively identifies genetic sequences in any sample of DNA. he tech...

Leeches ferry infection among newts

...ey of 16 red-spotted newt populations in lakes and ponds near Centre County, Pa. They found the disease in 12 of the 16 newt populations. A strong correlation between infection prevalence and numbers of bloodsucking leeches, plus the finding that the infection is more likely to appear on commonly bitten...

Amphibians in losing race with environmental change

...lean. But increased "eutrophication" of freshwater ponds due to use of modern fertilizers and waste from grazing animals has led to higher rates of parasite infections, and chemical contamination of aquatic systems is also more common. Many animal species lay their eggs communally or congregate social...

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