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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
Sixty-nine pharmaceutical compounds have been detected in stream insects, some at concentrations that may threaten animals that feed on them, such as trout and platypus. When these insects emerge as flying adults, they can pass drugs to spiders, birds, bats, and other streamside foragers. These findings by an international team of researchers were published today in Nature Communications.
A lumpy disc of dark-gray steel covers a bench in the lab space of Boston Metal, an MIT spinout located a half-hour north of its namesake city.
Although long life tends to run in families, genetics has far less influence on life span than previously estimated, according to a new analysis published in GENETICS. Ruby et al. used a data set of over 400 million historical persons obtained from public pedigrees on Ancestry.com to estimate the heritability of life span, finding it to be well below 10%.
In an article in Current Biology, Dr Richard Unsworth from the University’s College of Science, has revealed that people are relying on coral reefs less for their livelihoods as the reefs are increasingly under threat and facing an uncertain future due to increasing rates of climate change and rising global temperatures.
During the last week of September, Inuit residents in the community of Arviat on the northwest coast of Hudson Bay were surprised to see a mysterious whale following a small boat heading back to the village. The whale was at least twice the size of the 15- to 20-foot-long beluga whales that are traditionally seen in this part of the world.
Sign languages can help reveal hidden aspects of the logical structure of spoken language, but they also highlight its limitations because speech lacks the rich iconic resources that sign language uses on top of its sophisticated grammar.
