Latest news about Entertainment And Music and Environment and more

Monitoring changes to water levels in the sea, in rivers and lakes, in ice sheets and even under the ground, with the help of observations from satellites, has revealed that since the start of 1993, sea level has been rising by 3.3 mm a year, almost double the rate of the previous 50 years.

Sea level rise in one of the major consequences of global warming, but it is much more difficult to model and predict than temperature.

Since the 1990s, a number of altimeter satellites have been measuring the height of the ocean surface and this has dramatically improved our understanding of sea level rise.

Currently, three altimeter satellites cover the entire globe every 10 to 35 days, and can measure the height of the sea surface to a precision of 1 to 2 cm.

These measurements show that since the start of 1993, sea level has been rising by 3.3 mm a year, almost double the rate of the previous 50 years.

“For several years now, the rate of rise has not changed significantly,” said Anny Cazenave, from the Laboratoire d’Etudes en Geophysique et Oceanographie Spatiale (LEGOS) in Toulouse.

Cazenave’s team, and other groups, calculate that for 1993-2003, about half of the sea level rise was due to the oceans expanding as they became warmer, and the other half was due to shrinking land ice.

Since 2003, ocean warming has had a temporary break but sea level has continued to rise.

Now, about 80 percent of the annual sea level rise can be attributed to accelerated land ice loss from glaciers, Greenland and Antarctica.

This has been revealed by a brand new satellite technique, called space gravimetry.

The method has shown that the Greenland ice sheet is losing about 150 gigatonnes of ice each year, two thirds of which is large chunks of ice flowing rapidly into the sea.

Using GRACE, Cazenave and others have also looked at changes in water storage in river basins. In the period from 2002-2006, they found that some basins, including the Congo and the Mississippi, have been losing water, but river systems in the boreal regions are gaining water.

Meanwhile, scientists at the European Space Agency, collaborating with DeMontfort University in the UK, have begun to use data from the satellites that measure sea level, to assess lake and river levels on land.

Brown clouds of pollution are hanging over Asia, making “cities from Beijing to New Delhi” darker, melting glaciers in ranges like the Himalayas faster and turning weather systems more extreme, the UN said on Thursday.

Formed as a result of burning of fossil fuels and biomass, the Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs), made of soot and other manmade particles, are more than three km-thick, said a new report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

The layer that stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to China and the western Pacific Ocean, are in some cases and regions aggravating the impacts of greenhouse gas-induced climate change, a team of experts drawn from research centres in Asia, including China and India, said.

Globally, however, brown clouds may be countering or “masking” the effects of climate change by between 20 and up to 80 per cent, said the report.

The cloud is having impacts on air quality and agriculture in Asia increasing risks to human health and food production for three billion people.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director, UNEP, said: “I expect the Atmospheric Brown Cloud to be now firmly on the international community’s radar as a result of today’s report”.

The five regional hotspots for ABCs identified in the report includes the Indo-Gangetic plains in South Asia from the northwest and northeast regions of eastern Pakistan across India to Bangladesh and Myanmar, the UNEP said in a press statement.

New Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai feature in the list of 13 megacities where ABCs are reducing the sunlight hitting the Earth’s surface, making the cities “darker or dimmer”.

A scientist has claimed the discovery of America’s smallest dinosaur, based on the analysis of bones found during the excavation of an ancient bone bed near Red Deer, Alberta, US.

Called Albertonykus borealis, the slender bird-like creature is a new member of the family Alvarezsauridae and is one of only a few such fossils found outside of South America and Asia.

The analysis indicates that the unusual breed of dinosaur, which was the size of a chicken, ran on two legs and scoured the ancient forest floor for termites.

“These are bizarre animals. They have long and slender legs, stumpy arms with huge claws and tweezer-like jaws. They look like an animal created by Dr. Seuss,” said Nick Longrich, a paleontology research associate in the Department of Biological Sciences.

“This appears to be the smallest dinosaur yet discovered in North America,” he added.

In a paper published in the current issue of the journal Cretaceous Research, Longrich and University of Alberta paleontologist Philip Currie describe the specimen and explain how it likely specialized in consuming termites by using its small but powerful forelimbs to tear into logs.

“Proportionately, the forelimbs are shorter than in a Tyrannosaurus but they are powerfully-built, so they seem to have served a purpose,” Longrich said. “They are built for digging but too short to burrow, so we think they may have been used to rip open log in search of insects,” he added.

Longrich studied 70 million-year-old bones that were collected on a dig led by Currie at Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park in 2002 where the remains of more than 20 Albertosaurus sarcophagus individuals were found.

Albertosaurs are a type of tyrannosaur.

The bones were placed in storage at the Royal Tyrrell Museum and Longrich came across them while trying to compare Albertosaurus claws to another dinosaur species.

“This is the oldest and most complete dinosaur of its kind known from North America and it provides evidence that these dinosaurs migrated to Asia through North America,” said Longrich.

According to Longrich, “You can really find amazing things if you just keep looking at fossils we already have sitting in museum collections.”

“The number of dinosaur discoveries is actually accelerating because we just keep digging up more material to work with,” he added.

The female of a tiny frog species, a little more than an inch long, mates with eight males sequentially - the highest recorded of any vertebrate, for the sake of healthier offsprings.

Phillip Byrne, of Monash University’s School of Biological Sciences, made the startling discovery after six years of researching Bibron’s toadlet.

“This level of promiscuity is a new record among vertebrates and certainly supports the old adage of not putting all your eggs in one basket,” Byrne added.

“Our study advances our understanding of female promiscuity by being the first to show that promiscuous females can safeguard against choosing fathers that provide poor homes for their offspring.

“It is becoming increasingly apparent that females in many animal species choose to mate with multiple partners as a safeguard against choosing a genetically inferior sire, but insurance against a father who provides a lousy home is a novel and potentially widespread explanation for the evolution of female promiscuity,” Byrne said.

“Our study revealed that females made the active decision to distribute their eggs between the nests of up to eight different males,” Byrne said.

Byrne led the study with colleague Scott Keogh from Australian National University, in Jervis Bay National Park. They worked from 6 pm to 6 am seven days a week for over four months and kept track of almost 100 frogs, reports a science journal

Using DNA markers, Byrne found females that distributed their available eggs between the nests of more males, as opposed to leaving them in one nest, had elevated offspring survival, presumably by insuring against nest failure.

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

A new study has determined that the full moon can dramatically increase the activity of a particular marine bird.

According to a report, the finding adds to a growing body of evidence that lunar phases affect the behavior of insects, birds, fish and mammals - including humans.

The study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Animal Behavior, is among the first to provide direct evidence for the “full moon effect,” since many other claims have been based on indirect observations and even folklore, such as werewolf tales.

In the case of streaked shearwaters, the focus of the study, this marine bird flew for longer periods and landed on water more frequently on nights with a full moon.

But because sharks and other bird predators also appear to be more energized on such nights, the shearwaters didn’t stay on the water for long.

“Pelagic seabirds, including shearwaters, are known to be preyed upon by sharks or seals at sea, so birds are attacked from under the sea, not from the air,” lead author Takashi Yamamoto explained to discovery news.

“When birds are sitting on the water’s surface at night with a full moon, it shades moonlight passing through into the sea, so predators might be able to detect seabirds using such shades,” added Yamamoto, a researcher at Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research.

He and his colleagues captured 48 streaked shearwaters at Sangan Island in Japan. They attached global location sensors to the birds.

These devices recorded time, light levels, immersion in seawater and water temperature. Geographical locations were estimated using the light data.

At the end of the study, the researchers recaptured the birds and removed the sensors.

Since the birds are in the middle of the food chain, they not only move more to escape full moon-stimulated predators, but they also seem to take advantage of the improved light situation by feeding at night on squid and fish, especially their favorite: anchovies.

The scientists believe other marine birds, such as albatrosses, receive a comparable caffeine-like behavior jolt from a full moon.

Yamamoto further pointed out that prior research found that lunar cycles change insect and bird hormones.

They also help to influence fish reproduction. In rodents, they even appear to affect the way food tastes to rats.

Future studies, on both birds and other animals, will help to better identify exactly how lunar phases change behavior and the biophysical processes that underlie these changes.

A biologist has discovered a new species of blind, subterranean, predatory ant in the Amazon rainforest, which is most likely a descendant of the very first ants to evolve.

The biologist in question is University of Texas at Austin evolutionary biologist Christian Rabeling.

The new ant is named Martialis heureka, which translates roughly to “ant from Mars,” because the ant has a combination of characteristics never before recorded.

It is adapted for dwelling in the soil, is two to three millimeters long, pale, and has no eyes and large mandibles, which Rabeling and colleagues suspect it uses to capture prey.

The ant also belongs to its own new subfamily, one of 21 subfamilies in ants. This is the first time that a new subfamily of ants with living species has been discovered since 1923.

According to Rabeling, his discovery will help biologists better understand the biodiversity and evolution of ants, which are abundant and ecologically important insects.

“This discovery hints at a wealth of species, possibly of great evolutionary importance, still hidden in the soils of the remaining rainforests,” said Rabeling and his co-authors.

Rabeling collected the only known specimen of the new ant species in 2003 from leaf-litter at the Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária in Manaus, Brazil.

He and his colleagues found that the ant was a new species, genus and subfamily after morphological and genetic analysis.

Analysis of DNA from the ant’s legs confirmed its phylogenetic position at the very base of the ant evolutionary tree.

“This discovery lends support to the idea that blind subterranean predator ants arose at the dawn of ant evolution,” said Rabeling.

Though Rabeling does not suggest that the ancestor to all ants was blind and subterranean, these adaptations arose early and have persisted over the years.

“Based on our data and the fossil record, we assume that the ancestor of this ant was somewhat wasp-like, perhaps similar to the Cretaceous amber fossil Sphecomyrma, which is widely known as the evolutionary missing link between wasps and ants,” he said.

Rabeling speculates that the new ant species evolved adaptations over time to its subterranean habitat (for example, loss of eyes and pale body color), while retaining some of its ancestor’s physical characteristics.

“The new ant species is hidden in environmentally stable tropical soils with potentially less competition from other ants and in a relatively stable microclimate,” he said. “It could represent a ‘relict’ species that retained some ancestral morphological characteristics,” he added.

<!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {color:purple; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –>

The elephant birds (Aepyornis), were massive birds native to Madagascar, they have been extinct since around the 16th century.
Read about them on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aepyornis

<!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {color:purple; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –>

WHY! is there not a car available to us… WTF government! :-/
its a fact that they are out there…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jivb7lupD…
Water (H2O) Car Inventor was Murdered in 1998

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZCP99tjQ…

Water can be used to fuel a car when used as a supplement to gasoline. In fact, very little water is needed! only one quart of water provides over 1800 gallons of HHO gas which can literally last for months and significantly increase your vehicle’s fuel efficiently, improve emissions quality, and save you money.
Thousands of successful water-conversions around the world are proof that this technology works and will soon catch on! Some industry insiders say its just a matter of time before this water-burning technology will be standard in new automobiles. One expert estimates most cars will be using this technology by 2012.

More info here http://home.people.net.au/~pagey/Fuel.ht…

——

H2O might not be the best fuel for a car; however, liquid hydrogen that has been removed from the atmosphere and condensed into liquid form is an excellent source of fuel for cars. In fact, GM, Honda, and BMW have created purely hydrogen-fueled cars. The only disadvantage is the fact that hydrogen fueling stations are only found is the L.A. and San Francisco Bay areas. Liquid hydrogen is perfect because it’s only exhaust is water vapor and the price to produce liquid hydrogen will continuously drop thanks to new technologies.
Hydrogen(H2) is the most abundant gas in the atmosphere. However, water(H2O) may become scarce in years to come. So, maybe water pure water that could otherwise be used for drinking may not be best suited to fuel a car.

BMW Hydrogen 7
http://www.bmwusa.com/Standard/Content/U…
Honda FCX Clarity
http://automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity…
Chevy Equinox Fuel Cell
http://www.gm.com/experience/fuel_econom…

With the growing demands in the trendy modern world, people have started making huge purchase to meet their requirements. While making a grand purchase, either to you or your family, you will be carrying loads of goods along with you. Say bye-bye to the old style of plastic or paper bags. Organic tote bags are the absolute choice to store any of your goods and moreover Organic tote bags are completely safe, as it gives you the best protection and safeness to your belongings. The organic tote bags will be made with authorized organic cotton that is completely pure with no pesticide, chemicals, bleaches and several other phosphates.

Recycled Sports Bottles generally has wide mouth and they are made out of reprocessed or recycled HDPE, which is a kind of plastic material featuring unique leak proof with 63mm pull and push TM or DuoFlow Cap. The broad extensive mouth and the neck will greatly prevent the jamming of ice and they facilitate you to fill easily from the ice machines. Green promotional products will be described certainly to be eco-friendly and they are not distinctive via real colors. Though they are not exactly distinctive, they are classified as “Green” in their inclusive compositions.

<!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –>

Like whats the cut off?

It’s not a matter of numbers, more of trends. An endangered species (animal or plant) is one that is in immanent danger of extinction. The numbers could be huge but scattered over so wide an area that reproduction is unlikely. Conversely, I know of a plant that is not considered endangered, although the entire range is about the size of my living room. Some farmer with a plow could (theoretically) wipe it out in a day.

———–

There’s no cut-off, it varies from species to species. There are some animals, particularly large predators and species whose requirements are very specific, that simply never were that common. Some of these might have numbers in the hundreds or thousands on a good year, yet if the population is healthy and unstressed, it still wouldn’t be considered endangered. However, as soon as the population becomes stressed, it might plummet very quickly and catastrophically, and then it’s likely to be in much more serious trouble than a more common species, even if the common species is also suffering.

On the other hand, if a once common animal has become severely reduced in numbers due to overharvesting, habitat destruction, or similar, it might be considered endangered even though it still has ten times the numbers a rarer species has when it’s still considered a viable population. And if the populations of the more common species have become fragmented across a large area, so there’s very little genetic intermingling, it might be considered endangered with a hundred times the population of some little finch happily eating seeds on its 25 square miles of Caribbean island habitat.