New water balance calculation for the Dead Sea
Tel Aviv, Israel (SPX) Jul 23, 2014 -
The drinking water resources on the eastern, Jordanian side of the Dead Sea could decline severe as a result of climate change than those on the western, Israeli and Palestinian side. This is the conclusion reached by an international team of researchers that calculated the water flows around the Dead Sea.
The natural replenishment rate of groundwater will reduce dramatically in the future ...
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China detains five in expired meat scandal: police
Shanghai (AFP) July 23, 2014 -
Chinese police on Wednesday detained five people from a unit of US food supplier OSI Group, a statement said, in a case involving expired meat sold to fast food giants including McDonald's and KFC.
The Shanghai Public Security Bureau said the five included the company officials responsible. It said a quality manager was among them but did not name the five.
Shanghai authorities on Sunday ...
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Iraq MPs stall presidential vote as violence rages
Baghdad (AFP) July 23, 2014 -
Iraqi lawmakers on Wednesday postponed choosing a new president for their ailing country while air strikes, suicide car bombs and summary executions yielded their daily grim crop of bodies.
Parliament adjourned without even broaching the issue and agreed to meet again on Thursday, their last chance to pick a new leader before the week-long Eid al-Fitr Muslim holiday.
A government air rai ...
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China censors squash giant inflatable toad reports
Beijing (AFP) July 23, 2014 -
Chinese reports about a giant inflatable toad have been deleted from the Internet after social media users compared the puffed-up animal to a former Communist Party chief.
The installation of a giant inflatable duck in Hong Kong's harbour last year sparked a national craze for oversized blow-up wildlife, with several Chinese cities launching their own imitations.
The latest, a 22-metre-h ...
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Chinese blogger given 6.5 years for 'rumour-mongering'
Beijing (AFP) July 23, 2014 -
A Chinese blogger known for criticising the ruling Communist Party was sentenced Wednesday to six-and-a-half years in jail, state media said, as authorities pursue a crackdown on online "rumours".
Dong Rubin - a businessman known to his 50,000 online followers by the alias "Bianmin", or frontier person - had long discomfited officials in the southwestern province of Yunnan on issues rangin ...
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Poland suffers first cases of African swine fever in pigs
Warsaw (AFP) July 23, 2014 -
Poland on Wednesday confirmed its first cases of deadly swine fever in domestic pigs, as the World Trade Organisation reviewed a Russian embargo on EU pork imports imposed over the disease.
"Test results showed the first outbreak of African swine fever on a farm with five pigs," in the eastern region of Bialystok bordering Belarus, Polish veterinary authorities said in a statement.
The ...
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South Africa targets screening whole population for AIDS
Cape Town (AFP) July 23, 2014 -
South Africa's government plans to extend AIDS tests to the country's entire population and speed up antiretroviral treatment of those who test positive for the virus, the health minister said Wednesday.
"We come from very far in the past five years," Aaron Motsoaledi told parliament.
"But a lot still needs to be done," the minister said while presenting his annual budget.
With 6.4 m ...
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Climate change ravaging Antarctic fur seals: study
Paris (AFP) July 23, 2014 -
A food shortage likely caused by climate change is shrinking a South Antarctic fur seal colony and changing the profile of its surviving members, researchers said Wednesday.
South Georgia island's Antarctic fur seal pups have a lower average birth weight, and there are fewer breeding adults - who hold out longer to reproduce than in the past, according to study results published in the jour ...
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One dead as hundreds flee false tsunami alert in Philippines
Manila (AFP) July 23, 2014 -
A false tsunami alarm left one person dead and prompted hundreds of others to flee their homes in the Philippines, where natural disasters are frequent, a civil defence official said Wednesday.
The cause of the sudden panic that hit Candelaria 88 kilometres (55 miles) south of Manila and other impoverished towns is still being investigated, said Henry Buzar, head of the area's disaster manag ...
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After MH17 tragedy, Australia assures search for MH370 goes on
Sydney (AFP) July 23, 2014 -
Australia said the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 continued uninterrupted Wednesday, even as the head of the search coordination agency was sent to Ukraine to help with the MH17 tragedy.
Australia leads the multinational search for MH370 which disappeared on March 8 carrying 239 people and is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.
It has also been drawn ...
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Heatstroke kills three in Japan, thousands hospitalised
Tokyo (AFP) July 23, 2014 -
Sweltering temperatures across Japan have left at least three people dead and 3,000 others taken to hospital with heatstroke in the course of a week, officials said Wednesday.
The state weather agency said temperatures topped 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) in several places Wednesday, warning that similarly hot weather would "raise the danger of heatstroke" the next day.
The ...
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Brazil to release millions of GM-mosquitos to fight dengue
Campinas, Brazil (UPI) Jul 23, 2013 -
Next week, the biotech company Oxitec, based in Abingdon, England, will begin raising millions of genetically modified mosquitos at a new factory in Campinas, Brazil. The objective: curb the spread of dengue fever.
These new GM-mosquitos won't target dengue specifically, only other mosquitos - the main vehicle by which the virus travels. These Franken-bugs will mate with females; but t ...
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Urban heat boosts some pest populations 200-fold, killing red maples
Raleigh NC (SPX) Jul 24, 2014 -
New research from North Carolina State University shows that urban "heat islands" are slowly killing red maples in the southeastern United States. One factor is that researchers have found warmer temperatures increase the number of young produced by the gloomy scale insect - a significant tree pest - by 300 percent, which in turn leads to 200 times more adult gloomy scales on urban trees.
...
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Ecological impact of microbial respiration in oxygen-starved oceans
Vancouver, Canada (SPX) Jul 24, 2014 -
A sulfur-oxidizing bacterial group called SUP05 will play an increasingly important role in carbon and nutrient cycling in the world's oceans as oxygen minimum zones expand, according to research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
University of British Columbia researchers plumbed the depth of a seasonally anoxic fjord, Canada's Saanich Inlet, to ch ...
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Radio frequency ID tags on honey bees reveal hive dynamics
Champaign IL (SPX) Jul 24, 2014 -
Scientists attached radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to hundreds of individual honey bees and tracked them for several weeks. The effort yielded two discoveries: Some foraging bees are much busier than others; and if those busy bees disappear, others will take their place.
The findings are reported in the journal Animal Behaviour.
Tagging the bees revealed that about 20 per ...
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Meat turns up the heat
Stanford CA (SPX) Jul 24, 2014 -
Eating meat contributes to climate change, due to greenhouse gasses emitted by livestock. New research finds that livestock emissions are on the rise and that beef cattle are responsible for far more greenhouse gas emissions than other types of animals. It is published by Climactic Change.
Carbon dioxide is the most-prevalent gas when it comes to climate change. It is released by vehicles, ...
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15-year analysis of blue whales off California finds conflict with shipping lanes
Newport OR (SPX) Jul 24, 2014 -
A comprehensive 15-year analysis of the movements of satellite-tagged blue whales off the West Coast of the United States found that their favored feeding areas are bisected by heavily used shipping lanes, increasing the threat of injury and mortality.
The researchers note that moving the shipping lanes off Los Angeles and San Francisco to slightly different areas - at least, during summer ...
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Seals forage at offshore wind farms
St Andrews, UK (SPX) Jul 24, 2014 -
By using sophisticated GPS tracking to monitor seals' every movement, researchers have shown for the first time that some individuals are repeatedly drawn to offshore wind farms and pipelines.
Those man-made structures probably serve as artificial reefs and attractive hunting grounds, according to a study published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.
"I was shocked when I firs ...
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How honey bees stay cool
Somerville MA (SPX) Jul 24, 2014 -
Honey bees, especially the young, are highly sensitive to temperature and to protect developing bees, adults work together to maintain temperatures within a narrow range. Recently published research led by Philip T. Starks, a biologist at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences, is the first to show that worker bees dissipate excess heat within a hive in process similar to how humans and ...
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K computer runs largest ever ensemble simulation of global weather
Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Jul 24, 2014 -
Ensemble forecasting is a key part of weather forecasting today. Computers typically run multiple simulations, called ensembles, using slightly different initial conditions or assumptions, and then analyze them together to try to improve forecasts.
Now, using Japan's flagship 10-petaFLOPS K computer, researchers from the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) have succee ...
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