articles

Rather than slowing down, ants speed up in response to a higher density of traffic on their trails, according to new research published in Springer's journal The Science of Nature - Naturwissenschaften. When the researchers increased the supply of food by leaving food next to the trail, ants accelerated their speed by 50 percent. This was despite more than double the density of traffic.

The United States currently leads the world in the number of plug-in electric vehicles on the road, capturing 41% of the global market. Though the market can be traced back to the early-to-mid 1990s with the release of the Chrysler TEVan and the General Motors EV1, it wasn’t until the second wave of vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf and the Chevrolet Volt, both introduced in 2010, that plug-in electric cars started to become a success in the US.

It was Tesla Motors with its Roadster series which first entered production in 2008 that reignited this interest in the market though. The small company was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003 before current CEO Elon Musk joined the company the following year and led the business to new heights with links to new battery technologies that made plug-in electrical vehicles a more viable option for everyday journeys.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today abandoned its plan to give Endangered Species Act protection to Mono Basin sage grouse, a small and isolated population of prairie birds in Nevada and California that remain under threat from grazing, habitat loss and mining development. The agency’s decision ignores scientific recommendations for reversing the birds’ steep decline and relies on unproven conservation agreements with state and local communities.

The Mono Basin greater sage grouse population, located in eastern California and western Nevada and also known as the “bi-state” population, is fragmented and geographically isolated from all other greater sage grouse populations. 

New research shows that fishing is having a significant impact on the make-up of fish populations of the Great Barrier Reef. It’s long been known that environmental impacts such as climate change and pollution are amongst the drivers of change on the Great Barrier Reef. Now researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University have found that removing predator fish such as coral trout and snapper, through fishing, causes significant changes to the make-up of the reef’s fish populations.

Francia está liderando la revolución del vehículo eléctrico en Europa al ser la nación que ahora representa más de una cuarta parte de las ventas de vehículos eléctricos en toda la Unión Europea, según revelan las nuevas cifras.

Los datos publicados por la Agencia Europea de Medio Ambiente muestra que alrededor de 38 000 vehículos eléctricos se vendieron en 2014, un aumento del 57% en comparación con 2013.