As Bear Population Grows, More States Look At Hunts

Wildlife officials don't usually base hunting policies on how the public feels about an animal. But the black bear seems to be different. The revered king of the forest has bounced back from near-extinction to being a nuisance in some areas. Some states are trying to figure out if residents can live at peace with bears, or if they'd rather have hunters keep numbers in check. In places like the Smoky Mountains, black bears have always been part of the landscape. But national parks are no longer the only places humans are running into black bears. Numbers from the Eastern seaboard to California have shot up in recent decades. Tennessee, for instance, now has an estimated population between 4-5,000, up from a few hundred in the 1970's. The relatively shy creatures have sauntered into areas where they're less welcome.

Mortality Rates Are Underestimated

Despite great medical advances that have lengthened human life spans, your chances of living a very long life may be lower than you'd hoped. That's the conclusion of a study by two longevity experts who reviewed the standard models that predict mortality rates and turned up a major error. Instead of confirming that death rates drop once people reach their 80s or 90s — as experts have assumed for many decades -- results showed that the risk of dying continues to increase each year, no matter how old people are. The findings, if confirmed, could affect calculations that determine Social Security payments, life insurance premiums, retirement savings strategies and more.

Costa Concordia disaster may get worse as ship appears unstable on the reef

The massive cruise liner is balancing on two rocks and has massive cracks. The stricken Costa Concordia cruise liner might soon collapse under its own weight. Although experts reassure that "no anomalies" are reported by the close monitoring of the hull and that the de-fueling operations run smoothly, with over 900 cubic meters of fuel pumped out so far, underwater images of the capsized ship appear to tell a different story. Three dimensional images realized by a sophisticated multi-beam sonar and laser technologies which can be used at depths of 1500 feet, revealed that the 950 foot-long, 116 foot-wide, 114,500-ton ship precariously sits on two pieces of rock.

Survival of Fish with Antifreeze in Antarctica

A unique group of fish that has evolved to live in Antarctic waters thanks to anti-freeze proteins in their blood and body fluids is threatened by rising temperatures in the Southern Ocean, according to a new study by Yale. The development of antifreeze glycoproteins by notothenioids, a fish family that adapted to newly formed polar conditions in the Antarctic millions of years ago, is an evolutionary success story. The three species of fish are an example of the diversity this lineage achieved when it expanded into niches left by fish decimated by cold water environment. Now the same fish are endangered by warming of the Antarctic seas.

Startup Develops Floating Solar Farm

While solar energy companies throughout the world are competing for the relatively few vast land areas required to house solar farms, Israeli startup Solaris Synergy has found a new terrain to use. Instead of a land-based solar system, the company decided to develop a water-based technology. In other words: a floating solar power plant.  According to the company, their solar-on-water solution dramatically lowers the cost of renewable energy production since the water surface is also used for cooling the solar panels. This cooling system keeps the silicon elements used as semiconductors at a low temperature and therfore increases their power generation efficiency and extends their lifespan.

High Productivity Farms may be Greener than Organic

While organic farms are great, new research finds that farms that aim for high food production using environmentally-friendly practices could be better for the environment than both organic and conventional farms. A new study, led by Oxford University scientists, compared the environmental impact of different farming systems. They found that 'integrated' farms that maximized crop yields while using environmentally-friendly techniques  such as crop rotation, organic fertilisers, over winter cover crops, and minimal use of pesticides  would use less energy and generate lower greenhouse gas emissions per unit of production than both organic and conventional farms.

Rising ocean acidity worst for Caribbean and Pacific

The current trend of increasing ocean acidification, which threatens fisheries around the world, is driven mainly by man-made changes and is higher even than that seen at the end of the last ice age, some 11,000 year ago, a study has said. Much of the carbon released by human activity ends up in the oceans, increasing their acidity and reducing the growth of corals and molluscs, which in turn may affect fisheries and aquaculture. Fisheries in the Pacific and the Caribbean may suffer the most in these regions, man-made acidification has already caused a 30 percent increase in the natural variation in ocean acidity.

Slash-and-burn 'improves tropical forest biodiversity'

A study suggests that slash-and-burn agricultural practices, banned by governments because of the risk of uncontrolled fires, provide better growing conditions for valuable new trees than more modern methods of forest clearance. Starting in 1996, researchers cleared 24 half-hectare areas of tropical forest in Quintana Roo state, in southern Mexico, using three methods: clear-felling, where most of the trees are cut down; bulldozing; and slash-and-burn, a practice common among smallholders, in which trees are felled, left to dry and then burned, to prepare the land for agriculture. Mahogany seeds and seedlings were then planted and, after 11 years, the researchers compared the sites and found that slash-and-burn techniques had provided the best growing conditions for mahogany.

Tree Rings and Volcanic Eruptions

 Counting the number of tree rings and observing the relative growth for each ting can give an age for when something happened. However, it may not be that simple. Some climate cooling caused by past volcanic eruptions may not be evident in tree-ring reconstructions of temperature change, because large enough temperature drops lead to greatly shortened or even absent growing seasons, according to climate researchers who compared tree-ring temperature reconstructions with model simulations of past temperature changes. Dendrochronology or tree-ring dating is the scientific method of dating based on the analysis of patterns of tree-rings.  By accounting for these various effects in the tree growth model, the researchers were able to reproduce the reduced and smeared cooling seen in the actual tree-ring temperature reconstruction, including the near absence and delay of cooling following a massive eruption in 1258

Satellite Study Reveals Critical Habitat and Corridors for World's Rarest Gorilla

Conservationists working in Central Africa to save the world's rarest gorilla have good news: the Cross River gorilla has more suitable habitat than previously thought, including vital corridors that, if protected, can help the great apes move between sites in search of mates, according to the North Carolina Zoo, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and other groups. The newly published habitat analysis, which used a combination of satellite imagery and on the ground survey work, will help guide future management decisions for Cross River gorillas living in the mountainous border region between Nigeria and Cameroon.

Atlantic Sturgeon Declared an Endangered Species

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association today designated the Atlantic sturgeon an endangered species, providing it greater legal protections, following a petition the Natural Resources Defense Council submitted in September 2009.NOAA's Fisheries Service today announced four subpopulations or distinct population segments of Atlantic sturgeon, which are treated as individual species under the law, will be listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. This marine animal is just one of the many animals that are being intruduced to the extinction list every couple of weeks.

Early Ice Ages

New research led by scientists from Oxford University and Exeter University has shown that the invasion of the land by plants in the Ordovician Period (488-443 million years ago) cooled the climate and may have triggered a series of ice ages. During this period sea levels are very high and at the end of the period there was a mass extinction event. At the beginning of the period, around 480 million years ago, the climate was very hot due to high levels of CO2, which gave a strong greenhouse effect. The marine waters are assumed to have been around 45°C, which restricted the diversification of complex multi-cellular organisms. But over time, the climate become cooler, and around 460 million years ago, the ocean temperatures became comparable to those of present day equatorial waters. The dramatic cooling of the planet between 300 and 200 million years ago was also the result of the evolution of large plants with large rooting systems that caused huge changes in both of these processes.