Global Warming New York | Search results for "species"

For all the magnificent diversity of on this planet, ranging from tiny bacteria to majestic blue whales, from sunshine-harv­­est­­ing plants to mineral-digesting endoliths miles underground, only one kind of “life as we know it” exists. All these organisms are based on nucleic acids--DNA and RNA--and proteins, working together more or less as described by the so-called central dogma of molecular biology: DNA stores information that is transcribed into RNA, which then serves as a template for producing a protein. The proteins, in turn, serve as important structural elements in tissues and, as enzymes, are the cell’s workhorses. Yet scientists dream of synthesizing life that is utterly alien to this world--both to better understand the minimum components required for life (as part of the quest to uncover the essence of life and how life originated on earth) and, frankly, to see if they can do it. That is, they hope to put together a novel combination of molecules that can self-organize, metabolize (make use of an energy source), grow, reproduce and evolve. [More] Galapagos Invaders Actually Native Species [The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.] Darwin's fabled isles, the Galapagos, are in need of a makeover. And removing invasive species of plants tops the to-do list for the islands’ restoration. But six species that were set to be exterminated have gotten a reprieve. Because a new study finds that they’re actually natives. [More]

Tags: life, protein, species, native, serve

Researchers assess the risk of species extinction with conservation models that combine factors that drive down populations--including habitat loss, hunting and overfishing--with the probability of chance disasters affecting the group. Even if human activities greatly affect a species, “all populations that go extinct [ultimately] suffer a string of unfortunate random events, such as a fire, that wipe out the last individuals,” says Brett Melbourne, a mathematical ecologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Until recently, mathematical models of extinction risk included only two types of randomness. The first--variability in the environment, such as rainfall or temperature changes--impacts birth and death rates across the entire population. The second involves random events affecting select individuals within a group. Siblings may have the same probability of dying in a given year, for example, but only one may be lost to, say, an accidental drowning or other chance event. [More] Life at the Poles: Eight Polar Animals That Face the Promise and Peril of Climate Change Polar bears and penguins get all the attention but there's more than large, fuzzy and feathered animals thriving at the frozen antipodes of our planet. Both of Earth's polar environments host rich webs of plants and animals--and all of these inhabitants face a changing clime. [More]

Tags: event, population, polar, animals, extinction

For the past three years, botanist Vicki Funk of the Smithsonian Institution has been trying, unsuccessfully, to transfer select leaf specimens from Brazil to the U.S. National Herbarium for identification. Comparing closely related plants “is the bread and butter of systematics,” she explains. “We need stuff from other places.” But as biodiversity becomes a valuable commodity, developing countries have complicated efforts to collect and analyze biological samples, Funk says: “It doesn’t matter if you’re an academic, not a drug company. You’re treated the same.” In 1992 the twin goals of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, signed by more than 150 countries, were to preserve biodiversity and to ensure tropical nations were compensated for any “genetic resources” leading to drug discoveries for developed nations. But even as those goals were reaffirmed at a conference held this past spring in Bonn, Germany, scientists continue to criticize policies stemming from the convention. The claim is that the international agreement, which gave countries ownership of plants and animals inside their borders, is hindering tropical research and conservation, not facilitating them. [More] Genetically Modified Hawaii Just beyond the defunct Koloa Sugar Mill on the Hawaiian island of Kauai's south shore are acres of cornfields that have sprouted over the past decade in a state made famous by its pineapples, bananas and sugarcane crops. Slightly out of place in the Aloha State, they otherwise look quite conventional, although in fact they are not: The crop is among a bounty of others in the state that are grown from seeds that have been genetically engineered or modified (GM) to produce sturdier plants able to withstand weather and disease as well as thrive in the face of insects and chemicals sprayed on them to kill destructive weeds. In front of one plot of corn stalks is a red and white sign warning, "Danger: pesticides. Keep out." Tacked to it is a list containing 15 chemicals that may have been applied to the crop. In this case, the chemicals circled are the herbicides pendimethalin (brand name: Prowl), dicamba (Banvel) and atrazine, the latter of which is banned in the European Union (E.U.) because of its link to birth defects in frogs that live in groundwater contaminated with it. [More]

Tags: crop, countries, chemicals, nations, state

Bats are the only mammals that can fly. Scientists have therefore been eager to learn how they evolved from their terrestrial ancestors. Until recently, however, even the oldest fossil bats still looked essentially like modern bats. New fossils have revealed a species that is helping to connect the dots between bats and their nonflying forebears. Findings from genetics and developmental biology have further illuminated bat origins, elucidating their place in the mammal family tree and the process by which the bat wing may have evolved. [More] 100 Years Ago: Engineering a City--New York City's Bridges DECEMBER 1958EVOLUTION OF BEHAVIOR-- “But is it not possible that beneath all the variations of individual behavior there lies an inner structure of inherited behavior which characterizes all the members of a given species, genus or larger taxonomic group--just as the skeleton of a primordial ancestor characterizes the form and structure of all mammals today? Yes, it is possible! Let me give an example which, while seemingly trivial, has a bearing on this question. Anyone who has watched a dog scratch its jaw or a bird preen its head feathers can attest to the fact that they do so in the same way. A bird also scratches with a hind limb (that is, its claw), and in doing so it lowers its wing and reaches its claw forward in front of its shoulder. One might think that it would be simpler for the bird to move its claw directly to its head without moving its wing, which lies folded out of the way on its back. I do not see how to explain this clumsy action unless we admit that it is inborn. --Konrad Z. Lorenz” [More]

Tags: bat, behavior, wing, claw, bird

Bats are the only mammals that can fly. Scientists have therefore been eager to learn how they evolved from their terrestrial ancestors. Until recently, however, even the oldest fossil bats still looked essentially like modern bats. New fossils have revealed a species that is helping to connect the dots between bats and their nonflying forebears. Findings from genetics and developmental biology have further illuminated bat origins, elucidating their place in the mammal family tree and the process by which the bat wing may have evolved. [More] 100 Years Ago: Engineering a City--New York City's Bridges DECEMBER 1958EVOLUTION OF BEHAVIOR-- “But is it not possible that beneath all the variations of individual behavior there lies an inner structure of inherited behavior which characterizes all the members of a given species, genus or larger taxonomic group--just as the skeleton of a primordial ancestor characterizes the form and structure of all mammals today? Yes, it is possible! Let me give an example which, while seemingly trivial, has a bearing on this question. Anyone who has watched a dog scratch its jaw or a bird preen its head feathers can attest to the fact that they do so in the same way. A bird also scratches with a hind limb (that is, its claw), and in doing so it lowers its wing and reaches its claw forward in front of its shoulder. One might think that it would be simpler for the bird to move its claw directly to its head without moving its wing, which lies folded out of the way on its back. I do not see how to explain this clumsy action unless we admit that it is inborn. --Konrad Z. Lorenz” [More]

Tags: bat, behavior, wing, claw, bird

Researchers assess the risk of species extinction with conservation models that combine factors that drive down populations--including habitat loss, hunting and overfishing--with the probability of chance disasters affecting the group. Even if human activities greatly affect a species, “all populations that go extinct [ultimately] suffer a string of unfortunate random events, such as a fire, that wipe out the last individuals,” says Brett Melbourne, a mathematical ecologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Until recently, mathematical models of extinction risk included only two types of randomness. The first--variability in the environment, such as rainfall or temperature changes--impacts birth and death rates across the entire population. The second involves random events affecting select individuals within a group. Siblings may have the same probability of dying in a given year, for example, but only one may be lost to, say, an accidental drowning or other chance event. [More] Life at the Poles: Eight Polar Animals That Face the Promise and Peril of Climate Change Polar bears and penguins get all the attention but there's more than large, fuzzy and feathered animals thriving at the frozen antipodes of our planet. Both of Earth's polar environments host rich webs of plants and animals--and all of these inhabitants face a changing clime. [More]

Tags: event, population, polar, animals, extinction

Researchers assess the risk of species extinction with conservation models that combine factors that drive down populations--including habitat loss, hunting and overfishing--with the probability of chance disasters affecting the group. Even if human activities greatly affect a species, “all populations that go extinct [ultimately] suffer a string of unfortunate random events, such as a fire, that wipe out the last individuals,” says Brett Melbourne, a mathematical ecologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Until recently, mathematical models of extinction risk included only two types of randomness. The first--variability in the environment, such as rainfall or temperature changes--impacts birth and death rates across the entire population. The second involves random events affecting select individuals within a group. Siblings may have the same probability of dying in a given year, for example, but only one may be lost to, say, an accidental drowning or other chance event. [More] Life at the Poles: Eight Polar Animals That Face the Promise and Peril of Climate Change Polar bears and penguins get all the attention but there's more than large, fuzzy and feathered animals thriving at the frozen antipodes of our planet. Both of Earth's polar environments host rich webs of plants and animals--and all of these inhabitants face a changing clime. [More]

Tags: event, population, polar, animals, extinction

Editor's Note: This story will be published in the December 2008 issue of Scientific American. Survey the sky at twilight on a summer’s eve, and you just might glimpse one of evolution’s most spectacular success stories: bats. With representatives on every continent except Antarctica, they are extraordinarily diverse, accounting for one in every five species of mammal alive today. The key to bats’ rise to prominence is, of course, their ability to fly, which permits them to exploit resources that other mammals cannot reach. But their ascension was hardly a foregone conclusion: no other mammal has conquered the air. Indeed, exactly how these rulers of the night sky arose from terrestrial ancestors is a question that has captivated biologists for decades. [More] Is Focusing on "Hot Spots" the Key to Preserving Biodiversity? In the field of conservation, success stories about saving individual species abound. Bald eagles have recovered from their bout with the pesticide DDT; from fewer than 500 breeding pairs in 1963, the population in the lower 48 states has grown to nearly 10,000 breeding pairs, such that they are no longer listed even as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Gray wolves have returned to Yellowstone National Park, as well as to the Italian and French Alps. The California condor has been brought back from the absolute brink of extinction, after the last surviving birds were rounded up and bred in the San Diego and Los Angeles zoos. And so on. When human ingenuity and resources are trained on a particular species, usually a charismatic one, it makes a difference--but it does not change the global pattern, which is a steady drumbeat of extinction and of the permanent loss of biodiversity that goes with it. In a recent global assessment, Stuart Butchart and his colleagues at BirdLife International in England concluded that between 1994 and 2004 conservation efforts had saved 16 species of bird from extinction, at least temporarily. During that same decade, however, another 164 bird species listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) had slipped a notch closer to extinction. [More]

Tags: species, extinction, bird, conservation, bats

For all the magnificent diversity of life on this planet, ranging from tiny bacteria to majestic blue whales, from sunshine-harv­­est­­ing plants to mineral-digesting endoliths miles underground, only one kind of “life as we know it” exists. All these organisms are based on nucleic acids--DNA and RNA--and proteins, working together more or less as described by the so-called central dogma of molecular biology: DNA stores information that is transcribed into RNA, which then serves as a template for producing a protein. The proteins, in turn, serve as important structural elements in tissues and, as enzymes, are the cell’s workhorses. Yet scientists dream of synthesizing life that is utterly alien to this world--both to better understand the minimum components required for life (as part of the quest to uncover the essence of life and how life originated on earth) and, frankly, to see if they can do it. That is, they hope to put together a novel combination of molecules that can self-organize, metabolize (make use of an energy source), grow, reproduce and evolve. [More] Galapagos Invaders Actually Native Species [The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.] Darwin's fabled isles, the Galapagos, are in need of a makeover. And removing invasive species of plants tops the to-do list for the islands’ restoration. But six species that were set to be exterminated have gotten a reprieve. Because a new study finds that they’re actually natives. [More]

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Researchers assess the risk of species extinction with conservation models that combine factors that drive down populations--including habitat loss, hunting and overfishing--with the probability of chance disasters affecting the group. Even if human activities greatly affect a species, “all populations that go extinct [ultimately] suffer a string of unfortunate random events, such as a fire, that wipe out the last individuals,” says Brett Melbourne, a mathematical ecologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Until recently, mathematical models of extinction risk included only two types of randomness. The first--variability in the environment, such as rainfall or temperature changes--impacts birth and death rates across the entire population. The second involves random events affecting select individuals within a group. Siblings may have the same probability of dying in a given year, for example, but only one may be lost to, say, an accidental drowning or other chance event. [More] Life at the Poles: Eight Polar Animals That Face the Promise and Peril of Climate Change Polar bears and penguins get all the attention but there's more than large, fuzzy and feathered animals thriving at the frozen antipodes of our planet. Both of Earth's environments host rich webs of plants and animals--and all of these inhabitants face a changing clime. [More]

Tags: event, population, polar, animals, extinction

Pioneering ecologist Joseph Grinnell in 1914 began a seven year survey of the animals living in Yosemite National Park in California. Even then, human impacts such as the transformation of the Central Valley into an agricultural oasis were changing the landscape and the animals who lived there. [More] Bad Biodiversity Ups West Nile Odds [The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.] If you're worried about news reports of West Nile virus, you might want to go take a census of the birds in your backyard. Because certain species of birds actually help the virus thrive. And they're not exactly exotic jungle fowl. In fact, they’re our more familiar feathered friends. [More]

Tags: virus, nile, west, birds, animals

Wandering the aisles of a supermarket several years ago, one of us (Hebert) marveled at how the store could keep track of the array of merchandise simply by examining the varying order of thick and thin lines that make up a product’s barcode. Why, he mused, couldn’t the unique ordering of the four nucleic acids in a short strand of DNA be mined in a similar way to identify the legions of species on earth? Ever since Carl Linnaeus began systematically classifying all living things 250 years ago, biologists have looked at various features--color, shape, even behavior--to identify animals and plants. In the past few decades, researchers have begun to apply the genetic information in DNA to the task. But both classical and modern genetic methods demand great expertise and eat up huge amounts of time. Using just a small section of the DNA--something more akin to the 12-digit barcode on products--would require far less time and skill. [More] The X Chromosome and the Case against Monogamy Researchers report genetic evidence bolstering the socially contentious idea that polygyny--the mating practice where some males dominate reproduction by fathering children with several women--was the norm for sexual behavior throughout human history and prehistory. Because polygyny means other men father few or no children, the study, published today in PLoS Genetics, also shows that, on average, women bequeath more genes to their offspring than men do.  [More]

Tags: dna, genetic, behavior, identify, barcode

Climate change is warming the tropics, too. Average temperatures have increased by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.78 degree Celsius) in the last 30 years, making them as warm as at any point in the past 2 million years. That increased warmth, however, is not good news for tropical plants and insects, according to a new study in Science. [More] Using Math to Explain How Life on Earth Began Back in March the press went crazy for Martin A. Nowak’s study on the value of punishment. A Harvard University mathematician and biologist, Nowak had signed up some 100 students to play a computer game in which they used dimes to punish and reward one another. The popular belief was that costly punishment would promote cooperation between two equals, but Nowak and his colleagues proved the theory wrong. Instead they found that punishment often triggers a spiral of retaliation, making it detrimental and destructive rather than beneficial. Far from gaining, people who punish tend to escalate conflict, worsen their fortunes and eventually lose out. “Nice guys finish first,” headlines cheered. It wasn’t the first time Nowak’s computer simulations and mathematics forced a rethinking of a complex phenomenon. In 2002 he worked out equations that can predict the way cancer evolves and spreads, such as when mutations emerge in a metastasis and chromosomes become unstable. And in the early 1990s his model of disease progression demonstrated that HIV develops into AIDS only when the virus replicates fast enough so that the diversity of strains reaches a critical level, one that overwhelms the immune system. Immunologists later found out he had the mechanism right [see “How HIV Defeats the Immune System,” by Martin A. Nowak and Andrew J. McMichael; Scientific American, August 1995]. Now Nowak is out to do it again, this time by modeling the origin of life. Specifically, he is trying to capture “the transition from no life to life,” he says. [More]

Tags: nowak, life, punishment, increased, time

In the field of conservation, success stories about saving individual species abound. Bald eagles have recovered from their bout with the pesticide DDT; from fewer than 500 breeding pairs in 1963, the population in the lower 48 states has grown to nearly 10,000 breeding pairs, such that they are no longer listed even as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Gray wolves have returned to Yellowstone National Park, as well as to the Italian and French Alps. The California condor has been brought back from the absolute brink of extinction, after the last surviving birds were rounded up and bred in the San Diego and Los Angeles zoos. And so on. When human ingenuity and resources are trained on a particular species, usually a charismatic one, it makes a difference--but it does not change the global pattern, which is a steady drumbeat of extinction and of the permanent loss of biodiversity that goes with it. In a recent global assessment, Stuart Butchart and his colleagues at BirdLife International in England concluded that between 1994 and 2004 conservation efforts had saved 16 species of bird from extinction, at least temporarily. During that same decade, however, another 164 bird species listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) had slipped a notch closer to extinction. [More] Energy versus Water: Solving Both Crises Together In June the state of Florida made an unusual announcement: it would sue the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the corps’s plan to reduce water flow from reservoirs in Georgia into the Apalachicola River, which runs through Florida from the Georgia-Alabama border. Florida was concerned that the restricted flow would threaten certain endangered species. Alabama also objected, worried about another species: nuclear power plants, which use enormous quantities of water, usually drawn from rivers and lakes, to cool their big reactors. The reduced flow raised the specter that the Farley Nuclear Plant near Dothan, Ala., would need to shut down. Georgia wanted to keep its water for good reason: a year earlier various rivers dropped so low that the drought-stricken state was within a few weeks of shutting down its own nuclear plants. Conditions had become so dire that by this past January one of the state’s legislators suggested that Georgia move its upper border a mile farther north to annex freshwater resources in Tennessee, pointing to an allegedly faulty border survey from 1818. Throughout 2008 Georgia, Alabama and Florida have continued to battle; the corps, which is tasked by Congress to manage water resources, has been caught in the middle. Drought is only one cause. A rapidly growing population, especially in Atlanta, as well as overdevelopment and a notorious lack of water planning, is running the region’s rivers dry. [More]

Tags: species, water, georgia, state, river

The baiji dolphin is functionally extinct, orangutans are disappearing and even some species of bats--the most numerous of mammals--are dying out. A new survey of the world's 5,487 mammal species--from rodents to humans--reveals that one in four are facing imminent extinction. [More] Climate change may be sparking new and bigger "dead zones" “Wasteland” conjures up visions of dusty desolation where life is fleeting and harsh--if it exists at all. Oceans, too, have their inhospitable pockets. Scientists are discovering that climate change--and not just fertilizer from farm use--may be spurring the emergence of barren underwater landscapes in coastal waters. Expanding dead zones not only spell trouble for biodiversity, but they also threaten the commercial fisheries of many nations. Dead zones are not new; they form seasonally in economically vital ecoystems worldwide, including the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay. Agricultural runoff sparks many of these die-offs; increased use of nitrogen fertilizers has doubled the number of lifeless pockets every decade since the 1960s, resulting in 405 dead zones now dotting coastlines globally. [More]

Tags: dead, zones, mammal, climate, fertilizer

Not long after the virus that causes AIDS was identified, Margaret Heckler, then the U.S. secretary of health and human services, told a group of reporters that the discovery would enable scientists to develop a vaccine to prevent AIDS. “We hope to have such a vaccine ready for testing in approximately two years,” she declared proudly. It was 1984. Government officials have certainly been spectacularly wrong on other occasions but rarely has a large portion of the scientific community been so overly optimistic as well. Twenty-five years after isolating HIV, we still have no effective vaccine. One year ago a major clinical trial of a candidate made by Merck was shut down because it became obvious that the vaccine was not working and might even be doing harm. This past summer another vaccine hopeful was shelved and its trial canceled before it could begin because there was no reason to believe its results would be any better. [More] Taking Wing: Uncovering the Evolutionary Origins of Bats Editor's Note: This story will be published in the December 2008 issue of Scientific American. Survey the sky at twilight on a summer’s eve, and you just might glimpse one of evolution’s most spectacular success stories: bats. With representatives on every continent except Antarctica, they are extraordinarily diverse, accounting for one in every five species of mammal alive today. The key to bats’ rise to prominence is, of course, their ability to fly, which permits them to exploit resources that other mammals cannot reach. But their ascension was hardly a foregone conclusion: no other mammal has conquered the air. Indeed, exactly how these rulers of the night sky arose from terrestrial ancestors is a question that has captivated biologists for decades. [More]

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The Internet search giant is increasingly looking to the energy sector as a potential business opportunity. Speed-Reading at Interior The public’s input counts for little at the Interior Department, especially on the endangered species law.

Tags: interior, public, reading, speed, input

The Internet search giant is increasingly looking to the energy sector as a potential business opportunity. Speed-Reading at Interior The public’s input counts for little at the Interior Department, especially on the endangered species law.

Tags: interior, public, reading, speed, input

The Internet search giant is increasingly looking to the energy sector as a potential business opportunity. Speed-Reading at Interior The public’s input counts for little at the Interior Department, especially on the endangered species law.

Tags: interior, public, reading, speed, input

The Internet search giant is increasingly looking to the energy sector as a potential business opportunity. Speed-Reading at Interior The public’s input counts for little at the Interior Department, especially on the endangered species law.

Tags: interior, public, reading, speed, input