Ecology Global Network

News and Information for Planet Earth

[ecologyglobal-blog]

How many faces do you show the world? Happy, sad, surprised, scared, mad, excited? Yes, all those and more. Facial expressions are the way our brains move the muscles in our faces to  express the way we feel. We raise our eyebrows in surprise, we lower our eyelids in shyness, and we smile with happiness. That last facial expression is the one we most like to experience ourselves as well as to see in others.

We know what a happy smile looks like on the faces of our friends and families, but do our animals smile? And if they do, does the control of the facial muscles that create that smile come from some kind of emotion?

[ecologyglobal-blog]

Predictions that global climate change will lead to more extreme weather patterns have not been lost on the arid, landlocked nation of Mongolia, and beginning this month, this sparsely populated country of 3.1 million is embarking on a unique experiment address the effects of a warming climate.

With its legendary harsh dry winters and short, hot summers, Mongolia is already a land of temperature extremes.

[ecologyglobal-blog]

Some recycled goods or projects are just plain weird! While others are simply wonderful. As They say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

All recycling is good, don’t get me wrong! Whatever we can do to promote keeping junk and garbage out of our overloaded landfills is worth it.

[ecologyglobal-blog]

Rice University engineering researchers have unveiled a new method for rapidly converting simple glucose into biofuels and petrochemical substitutes. In a paper published online in Nature, Rice’s team described how it reversed one of the most efficient of all metabolic pathways — the beta oxidation cycle — to engineer bacteria that produce biofuel at a breakneck pace.

[ecologyglobal-blog]

Antarctica’s glaciers are melting more rapidly than previously thought because of climate change, according to new information from US Geological Survey (USGS) through collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

One ice shelf, the Wordie Ice Shelf along the western coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, has completely disappeared.  Another, the Larsen Ice Shelf extending along the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, has lost a chunk three times the size of Rhode Island.

[ecologyglobal-blog]

You have “geo,” meaning earth, and “thermal” meaning heat. Together, you have “geothermal,” another word for super hot earth. Where and how does earth get so darn hot?

[ecologyglobal-blog]

Plastic bags made of corn are “popping” up in all kids of places: Restaurants, sporting events, and even concerts. Corn plastic is also being substituted for oil-based plastic in the production of everyday objects like cups, clothes, and containers.

[ecologyglobal-blog]

Birds are great to have around. They eat harmful bugs and are fun to listen to and watch. If you want to attract more birds to your home, garden or school, try building them a nestbox. Birds can have a hard time finding a good place to build a home, especially in cities. With a nestbox, they can move in without much fuss or muss.

[ecologyglobal-blog]

Today, the stereotypical image of eastern Africa features immense stretches of grasslands, dotted by herds of huge herbivores, chewing their way across the plains. It seems like a timeless scene, the world’s last glimpse of what it was like when megafauna spanned the globe.

In actuality, these wide grasslands are an extremely recent feature in the region’s history. There isn’t solid evidence of animals consuming C4 plants until a scanty 10 million years ago (mya), and grasslands did not become widespread until the late Pliocene and Pleistocene. This recent birth of what is now a dominant feature of the landscape brings to mind many important questions. Specifically, after C4 plants started to become a food source in the Oligocene, how long did it take different herbivore species to adapt to eating this new type of greenery? Which species were early adopters, and which made the most complete shift from C3 to C4 plants? The process of adapting to a new resource–the relatively young C4 plants–had profound effects on community ecology of eastern Africa, as it provided new ways for large herd animals to both exploit new food sources and partition resources in order to facilitate coexistence and/or higher densities.

[ecologyglobal-blog]

Siberian cranes are critically endangered. Whooping cranes and red-crowned cranes are endangered. Sandhill cranes are making a comeback, but many are relocating to Pennsylvania.

Florida cranes nonchalantly wander neighborhoods and golf courses, while Demoiselles are dying out in Turkey — but number in the hundreds of thousands elsewhere.

From Germany to Japan, India to Uganda, and Florida to Bhutan, cranes and their traditional, threatened habitats are making news.

[ecologyglobal-blog]

Instruments at Japan’s stricken Fukushima power plant on Wednesday detected radioactive xenon in the plant’s #2 reactor, suggesting that a recent burst of nuclear activity had occurred inside the reactor’s mangled core. Although the chance that a small burst would become a self-sustaining nuclear reaction was remote, workers nevertheless scrambled to “extinguish” the activity with boric acid in order to prevent further damage to the fuel rods or what remains of the reactor vessel — and to prevent any additional release of radioactivity into the environment.

[ecologyglobal-blog]

Whales are remarkably diverse, with 84 living species of dramatically different sizes and more than 400 other species that have gone extinct, including some that lived partly on land. Why are there so many whale species, with so much diversity in body size?

To answer that, UCLA evolutionary biologists and a colleague used molecular and computational techniques to look back 35 million years, when the ancestor of all living whales appeared, to analyze the evolutionary tempo of modern whale species and probe how fast whales changed their shape and body size. They have provided the first test of an old idea about why whales show such rich diversity.

[ecologyglobal-blog]

In what may be the first Federal court case seeking rights for members of the animal species, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in San Diego charging SeaWorld with violating the 13th Amendment by capturing and enslaving killer whales. The animal rights group bases the complaint against the aquatic theme parks on the fact that the 13th Amendment prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude contains no language indicating that it applies solely to human beings.

[ecologyglobal-blog]

Energy has evolved from wood, to whale oil, to coal, to petroleum and to nuclear, and now the global economy desperately needs to move towards the vast promise of continuous renewable energy.  There are many who believe that wind and solar, in particular, are the next step in the evolution of energy.

[ecologyglobal-blog]

I found myself dumpster diving the other day and realized my interest in trash is turning into obsession. And any interest in trash was itself already a bit overzealous.

Read the full article on my Trash Obsession.

[ecologyglobal-blog]

You know those shopper club savings cards that grocery stores use to track your purchases and construct a profile of your shopping habits? The ones you fumble through your wallet or purse to find, while people in line behind you sigh and roll their eyes?

Well, it turns out they may serve a useful purpose after all.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is currently tracking an outbreak of Salmonella Enteritidis that so far has affected 42 individuals across 5 states. And, thanks in part to those privacy-invading shopping cards, the outbreak has been linked to Turkish pine nuts, sold in bulk and used in prepared foods at Wegmans grocery stores.

[ecologyglobal-blog]

A child born in 2011 enters an environment vastly different than that of his grandparents, who might have been born 50-60 years ago when the color television was a new-fangled invention and the planet had less than half the occupants it does at present. He might live to be 80 – if he survives the first five years (depending on where he is born) — and if so, could see the populace increase by another 2-billion in that time.