One killed in fresh Serbia, Croatia floods
Belgrade (AFP) Sept 15, 2014 -
One woman was killed on Monday after heavy rains brought renewed flooding to Serbia, four months after record floods killed almost 80 in the Balkans, local media reported.
The eastern village of Tekija, on the right bank of the Danube, was among the worst affected. More than 300 of the village's roughly 1,000 residents had to be evacuated, police said in a statement.
The surging waters c ...
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Australian PM Abbott to skip UN climate summit
Sydney (AFP) Sept 16, 2014 -
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who recently abolished a carbon tax on greenhouse gas emissions, said Tuesday he would skip a United Nations climate change summit attended by 125 other world leaders.
Abbott will be in New York soon after the September 23 talks but has decided to miss the one-day meeting to attend parliament in Canberra.
"My first duty in a sense is to the Australi ...
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Obama sends 3,000 troops to W.Africa to 'turn tide' on Ebola
Washington (AFP) Sept 16, 2014 -
US President Barack Obama will try to "turn the tide" on the Ebola epidemic Tuesday by ordering 3,000 US military personnel to west Africa to curtail its spread as China also dispatched more experts to the region.
The White House said Obama will travel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta - where US Ebola victims were treated - to make the announcement, meant to spu ...
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Tornadoes occurring earlier in "Tornado Alley"
Washington DC (SPX) Sep 17, 2014 -
Peak tornado activity in the central and southern Great Plains of the United States is occurring up to two weeks earlier than it did half a century ago, according to a new study whose findings could help states in "Tornado Alley" better prepare for these violent storms.
Tornado records from Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and northern Texas - an area of high tornado activity dubbed "Tornado Al ...
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Global carbon cycle may require reappraisal of historical climate events
Miami FL (SPX) Sep 17, 2014 -
A recent study of the global carbon cycle offers a new perspective of Earth's climate records through time. Scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science suggest that one of the current methods for interpreting ancient changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans may need to be re-evaluated.
The UM Rosenstiel S ...
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Creation of Vuoksi River preceded significant cultural shift
Helsinki, Finland (SPX) Sep 17, 2014 -
The creation of the Vuoksi River and the subsequent rapid decrease in the water level of Lake Saimaa approximately 6,000 years ago revealed thousands of square kilometres of new, fertile land in eastern Finland. A multidisciplinary research project organised by University of Helsinki researchers has studied the role that the decrease in water levels has played in the interaction between nature a ...
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How learning to talk is in the genes
Bristol, UK (SPX) Sep 17, 2014 -
Researchers have found evidence that genetic factors may contribute to the development of language during infancy.
Scientists from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol worked with colleagues around the world to discover a significant link between genetic changes near the ROBO2 gene and the number of words spoken by children in the ea ...
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Meteorite that doomed the dinosaurs helped the forests bloom
Tucson AZ (SPX) Sep 17, 2014 -
66 million years ago, a 10-km diameter chunk of rock hit the Yukatan peninsula near the site of the small town of Chicxulub with the force of 100 teratons of TNT. It left a crater more than 150 km across, and the resulting megatsunami, wildfires, global earthquakes and volcanism are widely accepted to have wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for the rise of the mammals. But what happened to the ...
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Early Earth less hellish than previously thought
Nashville TN (SPX) Sep 17, 2014 -
Conditions on Earth for the first 500 million years after it formed may have been surprisingly similar to the present day, complete with oceans, continents and active crustal plates.
This alternate view of Earth's first geologic eon, called the Hadean, has gained substantial new support from the first detailed comparison of zircon crystals that formed more than 4 billion years ago with tho ...
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