Southern in Biological News

New Southern California beetle killing oaks

DAVIS, Calif. May 1, 2009U.S. Forest Service scientists have completed a study on a beetle that was first detected in California in 2004, but has now attacked 67 percent of the oak trees in an area 30 miles east of San Diego. Their report appears in the current issue of The Pan-Pacific Entomolo...

ORNL, Southern Cal set sights on preventing blindness

Blindness in millions of people with diseases that starve eye tissue and nerves of oxygen might be averted with a procedure being developed by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Southern California and the University of Tennessee. The technique uses a new class of s...

Missouri Botanical Garden publishes first catalogue of plants of the Southern Cone

(ST. LOUIS): The Missouri Botanical Garden Press (MBG Press) has published the first comprehensive database of the species of vascular plants for the Southern Cone region, the southernmost areas of South America. Catlogo de las Plantas Vasculares del Cono Sur (Catalogue of the Plants of the South...

15-state Southern obesity summit to focus on deadly epidemic

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. With Thanksgiving and end-of-the-year holidays coming soon, many Americans will eat, drink and get heavier. It is a challenging season for those working to control and reverse our nation's obesity epidemic. Luckily this is an opportune time to remind everyone of the problem an...

UC Riverside botanist to study role of plants in southern California's drought

RIVERSIDE, Calif. A UC Riverside botanist has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to study how Southern California's plants affect the region's drought. Louis Santiago , an assistant professor of physiological ecology in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences , wil...

Racing cane toads reveals they get cold feet on Southern Australia invasion

Cane toads weren't allowed to compete in the Olympics, but scientists have raced cane toads in the laboratory and calculated that they would not be able to invade Melbourne, Adelaide or Hobart and are unlikely to do well in Perth or Sydney, even with climate change. According to research by Dr ...

Unmanned aircraft to study Southern California smog and its consequences

Using sophisticated unmanned aircraft, research scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego hope to assess Southern Californias potential for climate change and better understand the sources of air pollution. Funded by the California Energy Commission, the California AUAV Ai...

UC Riverside to host conference on stricter air quality standards for Southern California

RIVERSIDE, Calif. How Southern California tackles the daunting task of meeting stricter federal and state emissions standards and reducing greenhouse gases is the focus of an all-day conference hosted by UC Riversides Edward J. Blakely Center for Sustainable Suburban Development and the Souther...

Ozone hole recovery may reshape southern hemisphere climate change

A full recovery of the stratospheric ozone hole could modify climate change in the Southern Hemisphere and even amplify Antarctic warming, according to scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. While Earth's average surf...

Soybean varieties viable in southern Indiana, resistant to root-knot nematode

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University researchers have identified several soybean varieties that grow well in areas of the Midwest like southern Indiana and are resistant to root-knot nematodes, a plant-destroying parasite with a recently confirmed presence in that part of the state. The res...

Voyage to Southern Ocean aims to study air-sea fluxes of greenhouse gases

Scientists will embark this week from Punta Arenas, Chile, on the tip of South America, to spend 42 days amid the high winds and waves of the Southern Ocean. Here they hope to make groundbreaking measurements to explain how huge fluxes of climate-affecting gases move between atmosphere and sea, an...

Antarctic expedition provides new insights into the role of the Southern Ocean for global climate

In the Southern Ocean, large quantities of surface-drifting plankton algae are able to significantly reduce the carbon dioxide content of the surface waters, which can affect the global carbon dioxide cycle. This is one of the results from an Antarctic expedition which has just drawn to a close in...

Climate change and life in the Southern Ocean

Bremerhaven, November 27, 2007. A ten-week expedition to the Lazarev Sea and the eastern part of the Weddell Sea opens this year's Antarctic research season of the German research vessel Polarstern. On the evening of November 28, just some two hours after an official ceremony at the Berlin Museum ...

MIT Holding, Georgia Southern University, and MEVLABS successfully test the PROVECTOR

SAVANNAH, Ga. October 9, 2007 MIT Holding, Inc. (OTCBB: MITD), in collaboration with MEVLABS and Georgia Southern University, have successfully tested prototype designs of the patent pending PROVECTOR. This small dispensable device is designed to stop the development of pathogens and parasites fo...

Massive herds of animals found to still exist in Southern Sudan

Aerial surveys by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society confirm the existence of more than 1.2 million white-eared kob, tiang antelope and Mongalla gazelle in Southern Sudan, where wildlife was thought to have vanished as a result of decades-long conflict. Despite the war, some species ...

High levels of blindness in southern Sudan following years of war

Surveys conducted in southern Sudan, after conflict there ended in 2004, found much higher levels of blindness than anticipated. The results, published in PLoS Medicine, have major implications for the provision of health services in the region. Sudan is the largest country in Africa and one of t...

Oldest dated evidence of cattle in southern Africa found

A team of researchers working with colleagues from the Botswana National Museum shed new light on the questions of when cattle were brought to southern Africa and from where. A domestic cow bone, dated to about 2000 years ago was excavated from a site at Toteng, located in the Kalahari Desert of no...

Genetically modified maize not found in southern Mexico

Contrary to what many scientists thought, genetically modified (GM) corn has not yet spread to native maize crops in southern Mexico. After analyzing tens of thousands of seeds from maize crops grown in 2003 and 2004, researchers from Mexico and the United States found no evidence of transgenes ...

High carbon dioxide levels spur Southern pines to grow more needles

A Duke University study has found that maturing stands of pines exposed to the higher levels of carbon dioxide expected by mid-century produce more needles than those absorbing today's levels of the gas, even under drought conditions. However, the study also found that lack of soil nutrients may im...

New Species of Coral Discovered Off Southern California

A working group of virologists headed by Professor Hans-Georg Kräusslich at Heidelberg University Hospitals, jointly with Professor Hanswalter Zentgraf, Division of Applied Tumor Virology of the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (German Cancer Research Center, DKFZ), have been the first to label Hum...

Scientists journey to southern Africa to unravel the secret world of elephant communication

It's a cloudless July afternoon in Etosha National Park in northern Namibia, and ecologist Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell is scanning the horizon for elephants. "It's so fantastic here," she says. "We're constantly seeing elephants, rhinos, zebras, ostriches--it's the Garden of Eden." A research asso...

The hepatitis healing power of blueberry leaves

...wide and can eventually lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer. Among the areas of especially high Hepatitis C incidence is the Miyazaki prefecture of southern Japan, a trend that led Hiroaki Kataoka and colleagues at the University of Miyazaki and elsewhere in Japan on a search for better treatment options. ...

Highest ever winter water temperatures recorded

...enomenon a significant extension of the Leeuwin Current curling around the southern tip of Tasmania and reaching as far north as St Helens. Remote sensing s... instruments and research vessels such as the Marine National Facility, RV southern Surveyor to track the currents but there are also other indicators such as...

AGU journal highlights -- Aug. 6, 2009

...zone depletion reduces ocean carbon uptake The southern Ocean plays an important role in mitigating climat...st current models predict that the strength of the southern Ocean carbon dioxide sink should increase as atmos...zone depletion produced a significant reduction in southern Ocean carbon uptake, in good agreement with observ...

'Green' energy from algae

...ems are required. Presently, algae are being produced in open ponds in southern countries of relatively small productivity. This is where Posten's new tech...logy and biology", explains Posten. The stop of his research area on the southern KIT campus marks the starting point of research conducted by the Institute ...

Venomous sea snakes play heads or tails with their predators

...ors into thinking their tail is a second head, complete with lethal venom. There are over 65 species of sea snakes in the tropical waters of the southern Hemisphere, ranging from Africa to the Gulf of Panama. Most spend their entire lives in the sea, inhabiting shallow water and are active predators, fe...

Understanding how weeds are resistant to herbicides

...rn Illinois and a year later you see the same resistance in a population in southern Illinois, one of the things you want to know in managing resistance is, did...tance got down here? Or did resistance occur here and independently down in southern Illinois?" Understanding how the resistance occurred has implications fo...

Restoring a natural root signal helps to fight a major corn pest

...tation and transgenic Bt maize lines that are not yet approved in Europe. After first invading the Balkans, the pest has since 2007 also been found in southern Germany. The corn rootworm larvae feed on root hairs and bore themselves into the maize roots. The results are devastating: The plants take up less wa...

August 2009 Geology and GSA Today media highlights

...riations in summer insolation cannot be applied to southern Africa. The implications of this in terms of under...namic climatic fluctuation, a time period in which southern Pangea saw the waxing and waning of massive contin...40;34SCAS) in the terminal Proterozoic Nama Group, southern Namibia: A consequence of low seawater sulfate at ...

Global curbs on overfishing are beginning to work

... Dr Fulton used the ecosystem models Atlantis and Ecosim to analyse ecosystem recovery in 31 fisheries worldwide, 10 in detail, including Australia's southern and Eastern Scalefish and Shark Fishery. She says a combination of management measures has been adopted in Australia's commonwealth fisheries in th...

Iron isotopes as a tool in oceanography

...ring iron isotopes in pore fluids from both the Eel River shelf on the northern California margin (120 m water depth), and deep-sea sediments from the southern Ocean around the Crozet Island Plateau (3000� m water depth), about 1400 miles southeast of South Africa. "We are excited by our findings n...

Biologists rediscover endangered frog population

...ore frog habitat renews hope of survival for this southern California amphibian. Globally, amphibians are ...or toads on the federal Endangered Species List in southern California. Prior to this recent discovery, USGS r...ole in the re-establishment of this species across southern California," said Adam Backlin, a USGS scientist w...

DOE-funded research projects win 46 R&D 100 Awards for 2009

...ry, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, University of southern California (Doheny Eye Institute), California Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, the University of California at Santa Cruz and...

Parasitic worms make sex worthwhile

...ntipodarum , a common freshwater snail, in Lake Alexandrina and Lake Kaniere on New Zealand's South Island. The two lakes are on opposite sides of the southern Alps mountain range, so the researchers assume that neither the worms nor the snails exchange genetic material between the lakes. The snail's paras...

Scripps-led study shows ocean health plays vital role in coral reef recovery

...rine biological reserve off the northern coast of Honduras. Those that took longer to recover to pre-1998 conditions were from the Sapodilla Cayes in southern Belize and Utila in Honduras. The Sapodilla Cayes are a marine protected area, but experience significant runoff impacts; meanwhile Utila is quite hea...

$2 million grant aids study of lung cancer in people who never smoked

...ts at the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, University of southern California and at the British Columbia Cancer Agency in Vancouver will undertake a coordinated approach to biomarker discovery, using their expertise ...

Study explains potential failure of oral contraceptives with obese women

...tists from OSU, Oregon Health and Science University, University of Colorado at Denver, Oregon National Primate Research Center, and the University of southern California. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health. The underlying problem, Cherala said, is that oral contraceptives, lik...

Down Under dinosaur burrow discovery provides climate change clues

...are about 110 million years old, around the time that Australia split with Antarctica, and dinosaurs roamed in prolonged polar darkness along forested southern Australia river plains. It was one of the last times the Earth experienced global warming, with an average temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit about...

Seals quickly respond to gain and loss of habitat under climate change

... southern Elephant seals responded rapidly to climate and habitat change and established a new breeding site thousands of kilometres from existing breeding grou...

Arctic climate under greenhouse conditions in the Late Cretaceous

...r of diatoms found in the Late Cretaceous sediment cores indicates exceptional abundances equalling modern values for the most productive areas of the southern Ocean. "This Cretaceous production, dominated by diatoms adapted to stratified conditions of the polar summer may also be a pointer to future trends i...