news 2012

Living close to an active landfill site reduces house prices by 2.6% and the cost to home owners can still be counted two decades after the facility has shut, new research shows. Experts at the University of Birmingham have found that houses situated within 3 kilometres of an active site, or within 1 kilometre of a historic site, suffer a significant price drop.

AUSTIN, Texas — Landscapes with large amounts of paved roads and impervious construction have lower numbers of ground-nesting bumblebees, which are important native pollinators, a study from The University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Berkeley shows. The study suggests that management strategies that reduce the local use of pavement and increase natural habitat within the landscape could improve nesting opportunities for wild bees and help protect food supplies around the word.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. A series of rapid environmental changes in East Africa roughly 2 million years ago may be responsible for driving human evolution, according to researchers at Penn State and Rutgers University. "The landscape early humans were inhabiting transitioned rapidly back and forth between a closed woodland and an open grassland about five to six times during a period of 200,000 years," said Clayton Magill, graduate student in geosciences at Penn State.

A new study of the brain anatomy of therizinosaurs, plant-eating dinosaurs that lived during the Cretaceous Period, has revealed interesting links with their notorious meat-eating 'cousins' Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor . An international team of scientists, including PhD student Stephan Lautenschlager and Emily Rayfield of the University of Bristol, found that the senses of smell, hearing and balance were well developed in therizinosaurs and might have affected or benefited from an enlarged forebrain.

When the hairs of the plant are wet, the ants' adhesive pads essentially aquaplane on the surface, making the insects lose grip and slip into the bowl of the pitcher. This is the first time that we have observed hairs being used by plants in this way, as they are typically used to make leaves water repellent." —Dr Ulrike Bauer An insect-trapping pitcher plant in Venezuela uses its downward pointing hairs to create a 'water slide' on which insects slip to their death, new research reveals.

Dr Gemma Catney is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of Geography and Planning A study of the 2011 Census by the University of Liverpool has found that the population of England and Wales is more diverse than ever yet is more integrated. The study of the data found that the proportion of people who report themselves as being from an ethnic group other than `White' has increased to 14 per cent, an increase of five percentage points since 2001.

CHAMPAIGN, lll. In the early 1900s, an archaeologist, William Mills, dug up a treasure-trove of carved stone pipes that had been buried almost 2,000 years earlier. Mills was the first to dig the Native American site, called Tremper Mound, in southern Ohio. And when he inspected the pipes, he made a reasonable - but untested - assumption.

New research by Yale University scientists suggests an explanation for the amount of iron in the Earth's largest interior layer, the mantle: migrating "iron-rich blobs" generated by chemical interactions in the zone between the planet's core and mantle. Scientists have long known of the core's rich iron content, but they have struggled to explain how the rocky mantle acquires iron in any abundance.

An analysis of sulfide ore deposits from one of the world's richest base-metal mines confirms that oxygen levels were extremely low on Earth 2.7 billion years ago, but also shows that microbes were actively feeding on sulfate in the ocean and influencing seawater chemistry during that geological time period.

Researchers have found parts of our coral reefs are more resistant to ocean acidification than first thought, casting a ray of hope on the future of our reefs. The study, published today, details their analyses of the mineral structure of coralline algae, which form a hard ridge around the reef, protecting delicate corals from harsh waves and holding the structure together.

The same medical imaging technology that doctors use to noninvasively image the heart and brain is now giving scientists a close-up view of the subsurface world. Berkeley Lab scientists are developing a way to use Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography, or SPECT, to map 3-D changes in sediment samples without disturbing them.

The first findings of the most detailed study yet by two British archaeologists into the Nazca Lines - enigmatic drawings created between 2,100 and 1,300 years ago in the Peruvian desert - have been published in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity. As part of a five-year investigation, Nicholas Saunders of the University of Bristol's Department of Archaeology and Anthropology and Clive Ruggles of the University of Leicester walked 1,500 km of desert in southern Peru, tracing the lines and geometric figures created by the Nasca people between 100 BC and AD 700.

The locations of where the world's largest earthquakes are most likely to take place have been pinpointed with greater accuracy than ever before, by researchers from the University of Sydney. "Subduction zones, where one plate slips under another, have long been known to harbour very powerful earthquakes but our research suggests that regions where fracture zones on the seafloor meet subduction zones are at much higher risk," said Dietmar Müller , from the University's School of Geosciences.

Twin spacecraft create a highly detailed gravity map of the moon, finding an interior pulverized by early impacts. Beneath its heavily pockmarked surface, the moon's interior bears remnants of the very early solar system. Unlike Earth, where plate tectonics has essentially erased any trace of the planet's earliest composition, the moon's interior has remained relatively undisturbed over billions of years, preserving a record in its rocks of processes that occurred in the solar system's earliest days.

Researchers find a common angle and tipping point of branching valley networks. Over the course of decades or even centuries, Earth's landscape can appear relatively static, with mountains and valleys seemingly anchored firmly in place. Viewed over a longer timescale, however - on the order of hundreds of thousands of years - the Earth's topography becomes a rippling, shifting, changing tableau.

Three papers by researchers from the University of Bristol's Faculty of Science are published in this week's edition of Nature, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals. Gary Barker, Alexandra Allen and Keith Edwards of the School of Biological Sciences are co-authors of research which has unlocked key components of the genetic code of one of the world's most important crops: bread wheat.

For over 150 years, geologists have debated how and when one of the most dramatic features on our planet-the Grand Canyon-was formed. New data unearthed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) builds support for the idea that conventional models, which say the enormous ravine is 5 to 6 million years old, are way off.

A new approach for evaluating past climate sensitivity data has been developed by scientists to help improve comparison with estimates of long-term climate projections developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The sensitivity of global temperature to changes in the Earth's radiation balance (climate sensitivity) is a key parameter for understanding past natural climate changes as well as potential future climate change.

In a reversal of the centuries-old tradition of explorers undertaking ocean voyages of discovery with the hope of finding new land, a scientific party has done the complete opposite. A team of Australian and international scientists led by the University of Sydney has solved a mystery regarding the existence of a supposed island in the Southwest Pacific.

Along with being a beautiful tourist destination, Tahiti is also a good place to discover unknown insects. A Cornell entomologist has known these facts since the early 1990s, when he began traveling to Pacific islands for research. Now James Liebherr, professor and curator of the Cornell University Insect Collection, has discovered 14 new beetle species in the Society Islands, all within the genus Mecyclothorax .