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Due to a breeding boom over the past few years, giant pandas are making a strong recovery. Some experts argue that the species should be removed from the critically endangered list — but is it too soon?

This comes as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature undertakes an official reassessment of the panda’s status. The Swiss-based organization uses a seven-point scale to gauge the risk facing animal populations.

Supported by funding from the European Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council, a large international team of scientists compared genetic data with existing archaeological evidence and show that man’s best friend may have emerged independently from two separate (possibly now extinct) wolf populations that lived on opposite sides of the Eurasian continent. This means that dogs may have been domesticated not once, as widely believed, but twice.

A major international research project on dog domestication, led by the University of Oxford, has reconstructed the evolutionary history of dogs by first sequencing the genome (at Trinity College Dublin) of a 4,800-year old medium-sized dog from bone excavated at the Neolithic Passage Tomb of Newgrange, Ireland. The team (including French researchers based in Lyon and at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris) also obtained mitochondrial DNA from 59 ancient dogs living between 14,000 to 3,000 years ago and then compared them with the genetic signatures of more than 2,500 previously studied modern dogs.

 

Nearly 15 percent of the contiguous United States is suffering from moderate to severe drought, which makes water conservation critical in certain parts of the country. How do we convince people to save more water, though?

That’s the question that professors at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences put to the test. They polled over 1,000 people in Florida to determine which types of people would respond best to conservation efforts, and the answer is a little counterintuitive: target people who are already saving some water.

La influencia de las empresas de combustibles fósiles fue fuertemente cuestionada por los países en desarrollo en la reunión, posterior a la de París, de las negociaciones sobre cambio climático en Bonn, la semana pasada. Los rastreadores climáticos Pavlos Georgiadis, Renee Karunungan y Anna Pérez Català, destacan los problemas fundamentales que se debatieron.

The Global Precipitation Measurement mission known as GPM passed over Tropical Depression Bonnie and found heavy rainfall from a few thunderstorms within.

Tropical Storm Bonnie weakened to a tropical depression on May 29, 2016. The circulation was labeled as "post-tropical" and has been moving very slowly to the northeast near the Carolinas coastline. Bonnie developed organized convection near the center and on June 2, 2016 the system was again labeled a tropical depression.